Category Archives: Politics
Not About Him
Well, it’s finally not about him. That was President Obama’s reaction to the Republican wave that swept Democratic governors and senators out to sea.
He said the voters’ message is that they want to “get stuff done” and “make Washington work”.
Daniel Henninger sees it differently. He thinks the “labor force participation rate” killed the Dems:
Read between the lines of this paragraph in the federal government’s October employment report, on the eve of the election:
“In September, 2.2 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, essentially unchanged from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months.”
Henninger says the average economic growth rate since WWII is 3.3%:
Here are the growth rates for each year of the Obama presidency (World Bank data):
2009: -2.8%; 2010: 2.5%; 2011: 1.8%; 2012: 2.8%; 2013: 1.9%
You preside over that performance, you lose. The 2014 growth uptick arrived too late to save the Democrats.
About Him
Before the election Obama said it would be about him, his policies, actually. Now he says it was about Republicans working with him. My friend Steve Kelly nailed the Obamian Attitude with this cartoon. Click the thumbnail.
Obama Policies Lose Senate
Hog-castrator, and Taylor Swift-look-alike, Joni Earnst put Republicans in control of the U.S. Senate with her victory in Iowa last night.
Six years ago first term senator Barack Obama accepted his party’s presidential nomination in front of fake Greek columns and 70,000 true believers in Denver. Two weeks ago he said that he’s not on the ballot in this election but his policies are. And so they were.
Obama Policies
The Washington Post said yesterday this election was all about Obama.
Even the president’s Illinois home state governor, Pat Quinn, went down in flames. (By the way that’s Valerie Jarrett in the picture, not Joni Ernst.)
Russian Bombers
NATO fighter jets scrambled last week as Russian bombers probed European airspace. US officials think President Putin is making a “show of force”:
“It’s concerning because it’s moving in the wrong direction,” said one U.S. defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the air activity publicly. “It’s not helping to de-escalate the situation in Ukraine. It’s not helping to improve relations between NATO and Russia. It’s not helping anybody.”
Also last week a NASA resupply rocket for the International Space Station suffered a “catastrophic anomaly“. Normal people say it blew up. The rocket used a 40 year old Russian engine. The U.S. relies on Russia.com for all manned space travel needs.
Update: It was a bad week for private sector space flight says, National Post. The Russian engine powered an Antares rocket designed by Orbital Sciences. NASA hopes to outsource payload flights to private companies like Orbital Sciences.
A Virgin Galactic rocket also blew up last week killing the co-pilot. Virgin is planning to offer sub-orbital flights to private paying customers.
Chickenshit
An article in the Atlantic reveals that an anonymous White House staffer wanted it known he thinks Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “chickenshit“. Seemed like a chickenshit thing to do.
The White House is making no effort to identify the chicken.
According to Politico staffers have also said Secretary of State John Kerry is tumbling untethered through space like Sandra Bullock in the movie “Gravity”. Meanwhile, President Obama has become so untethered from popular support chances are he’ll lose the Senate on Tuesday.
Another Politico story says that the administration is so worried about the midterms it sent forth cabinet members like flying monkeys to scare up votes. Alas:
Their efforts do not appear to have done any good. Obama’s numbers, if anything, have gone down, and the only question Democrats are going into Tuesday with is how many losses they’re going to suffer.
Could be his cabinet secretaries were unenthusiastic after losing influence to the White House staff. (From the first Politico piece)
Earlier, Obama’s first two secretaries of defense, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, published books criticizing his decisions on national security. Specifically, they complained that Obama has brought so much responsibility into the executive office of the president that it has paralyzed the White House’s ability to think strategically.
The National Security Council itself has grown from about 50 people under President George W. Bush to just under 400 people under Obama, Reuters reported.
Chickenshit
Many of whom are young and inexperienced.
Ebola Workers
President Obama was all kisses and hugs for civilian Ebola workers returning from West Africa. As for the military he’s all 21-day quarantine.
The rest of us got the usual stern Professor Obama lecture about “The Science”, complete with docs in white coats as props. Obama says “The Science” tells us we don’t need to quarantine Ebola workers because they’re doing “God’s work”. And, like the mayor of Toledo drinking a glass of Lake Erie, he shook hands and hugged his doc props to prove his point.
So why are the apparently Godless troops he sent into Ebola harms way going to be quarantined? Joe Scarborough calls this “Obama’s Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker moment”:
…for the president on the Ebola front. I know there are people that like to feel superior to others and say the American people are just hucksters or idiots.
James Taranto in the WSJ (Doctors Without Scrupples) notes that 80% of respondents in a CBS poll want to quarantine everyone coming into America from Ebola Land. So why opposite policies for civilians and military?:
What is at issue, then, is the administration’s purely discretionary decisions to order quarantines for servicemen and lean on states not to order them for civilians—a contradiction with no obvious basis, and no basis the World’s Greatest Orator and his spokesman have managed to articulate, in philosophy, law or science.
Either servicemen are being subjected to burdens with no basis in “science or best practices,” or the administration is risking public health by prioritizing the personal comfort of civilian medical workers. Why in the world are they doing this?
Ebola Workers and God’s Work
Taranto answers his own question with two possibilities: 1.) He didn’t want to make a decision to overrule his Joint Chief of Staff. 2.) The Scarborough analysis – he’s a snob:
The second is snobbery. Recall that quote from Nurse Hickox’s lawyer: “She’s a very good person.” She and others like her, according to the president, are doing God’s work, and—in pointed if inaccurate contrast to military servicemen—are “experts.” The logic would go something like this: You can’t quarantine her. She’s one of us.
