Category Archives: Politics
Obama Phone Prank
Vladimir Putin’s answering machine explained he couldn’t come to the phone because he was digesting Crimea, python style. President Obama left a long message explaining “might doesn’t make right“. He promised not to send troops, not that anyone was asking.
Phone Prank
After he hung up, the president slapped sanctions on a few cronies (Putin’s not Obama’s). This gambit drew laughter. The Russians farted in our general direction, calling the sanctions a “prank“.
President Obama thinks our biggest geopolitical foe is income inequality. No – wait – climate change. Mitt Romney thinks it’s Russia.
Supine Senate Spying
Senators are no different from you and me, and Angela Merkel. They get spied on too.
Senate Spying
The supine Senate hasn’t done much to protect its turf from an overreaching executive. The president has taken one bone after another from the legislative watch dog while rewriting the Afordable Care Act.
The CIA finally got Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Diane Feinstein into a lather when documents she was using to investigate the agency turned up missing – from a supposedly secure computer in the basement of CIA headquarters.
Dem Hopes Sink
With the defeat of Alex Sink in a Florida special Congressional election, some Democrats’ hopes may be sunk.
Hopes Sink
Sink was a capable moderate Democrat running in a district that supported Obama twice for president. She couldn’t be blamed for ObamaCare because she wasn’t in Congress when it passed. But rather than run away from the ACA she let it stick to her by promising to mend it, not end it. She ended up losing to David Jolly, a former lobbyist who promised to repeal the thing.
Between the Ferns
In an attempt to reach his target audience of young customers for ObamaCare, the president appeared on the Zack Galifianakis show, Between Two Ferns.
The president took some flak for being unpresidential – but so what – he’s unpresidential most of the time. Here he was funny. And Galifiankis was really funny. Plus Zack is a way better pitchman for ObamaCare than Pajama Boy. Actually, he didn’t even make a pitch for the ACA. He mocked it.
Not Between any Ferns
Well, it’s all fun and games until we come to Megan McCardle’s Bloomberg analysis of the McKinsey survey of who’s actually buying ObamaCare. It’s not the previously uninsured “young invincibles”:
If the McKinsey numbers turn out to be correct, I think we should expect that the individual mandate will simply not be enforced. Otherwise, we would be “helping” the uninsured by raising the cost of the insurance available to them, and then fining them hundreds or thousands of dollars for not buying it. I believe the technical term for this is “political suicide.”
Says Jonah Goldberg, “Obamacare, was designed from the outset to screw young people, overcharging them for products they don’t need in order to subsidize older Americans.”
Reset to the 19th Century
Secretary of State Kerry feels President Putin’s “19th century” behavior is not up to G-8 elite standards.
This isn’t Putin’s first rodeo when it comes to dropping in uninvited on his neighbors. He invaded Georgia on President Bush’s watch in August 2008. Like the current Crimea crises, Bush didn’t do much to stop it.
Then came Hillary’s “Reset”, or Overcharge.
Reset
Michael Gerson in the Washington Post thinks the reset may have contributed to Putins feelings of grandeur:
President Obama’s “reset” with Russia was designed to end the economic, political and military isolation of Putin’s Russia after the invasion of Georgia in 2008. The Kremlin did not keep the terms of the cease-fire ending that conflict. But Obama was determined to unfreeze the post-Georgia relationship, particularly since cooperation was needed on issues of mutual concern such as Iran and Syria.
