This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden

  • The veil slips

    So all of this talk about how Obama was going to get us the respect that the world lost for us during those eight dark Bush years seems to have waned and reality is gob-smacking the media. Newsbuster’s Noel Sheppard marvels at Chris Matthews comparisons of Obama to Jimmy Carter (where ya been Chris – we were making the comparison in 2007).

    Laura W. at Ace of Spades takes a look at the awakening in Maureen Dowd who seems less enthusiastic about Obama these days. Also at Ace of Spades, Uncle Jimbo brings up the Saturday Night Live video from last weekend. Suddenly Obama can be the butt of jokes.

    Der Speigel Online’s Gabor Stiengart writes that “Obama’s Nice Guy Act Gets Him Nowhere on the World Stage” – so much for impressing Europe. I guess Obama now realizes that those Germans weren’t cheering for him in Berlin, they were panhandling.

    Claymore wrote to remind us that it’s been 86 days since General McCrystal asked the President for more troops – not to worry, Mr. Decisive is planning to meet more advisors on the subject later today;

    The White House said Obama would meet with Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other officials at an 8 p.m. EST/0100 GMT Tuesday meeting in the Situation Room.

    It will be the ninth such meeting as Obama nears a decision on whether to add as many as 40,000 troops to an eight-year-old war that was started after the September 11 attacks and that has begun to try the patience of the American people.

    Wow! Nine whole meeting! That’s almost one meeting every ten days – focused like a laser on our national security. Like a laser.

    Can you imagine what would happen if something requiring immediate attention would happen? Well, by immediate attention, I mean that dithering would cost the lives of Am…, oh.

    Well, we can always investigate those milbloggers for something to distract everybody.

  • Army keeps media from Palin book signing at Bragg

    Um, huh?

    Fort Bragg spokesman Tom McCollum told The Associated Press that Bragg’s garrison commander and other Army officials had decided to keep media away from Palin’s book promotion. He said the Army did not want the Monday event to become a platform to express political opinions “directed against the commander in chief.”

    “The main reason is to stop this from turning into a political platform,” he said. “There are Army regulations that basically prohibit military reservations from becoming political platforms by politicians.”

    He said only one politician can use that platform, “and that person does it as our commander in chief.”

    I seem to remember;

    obama-in-afghanistan

    The military seems to be overcompensating these days in order to overcome the perception that they dislike Obama (whether that perception is true or not, I’ll leave for another discussion).

  • Dionne: moderates are bad except when they’re good

    Remember the good old days of the Bush Administration when moderate Republicans were praised by the media for holding the line against Bush extremism and a rubberstamp Congress? It seems like only yesterday, doesn’t it? Well, suddenly, Democrat moderates are blocking a rubberstamp Congress and Washington Post’s EJ Dionne doesn’t like it one bit;

    Last year, the voters gave [President Obama] the largest popular-vote margin won by a presidential candidate in 20 years. They gave Democrats their largest Senate majority since 1976 and their largest House majority since 1992.

    Obama didn’t just offer bromides about hope and change. He made specific pledges. You’d think that the newly empowered Democrats would want to deliver quickly.

    But what do real Americans see? On health care, they read about this or that Democratic senator prepared to bring action to a screeching halt out of displeasure with some aspect of the proposal. They first hear that a bill will pass by Thanksgiving and then learn it might not get a final vote until after the new year.

    Imagine that! Democrats who don’t want to rubberstamp Obama’s agenda. I’ve used the word “rubberstamp” three times because I listened to that term every-damn-day from some stupid media source in regards to the Republican Congress – oddly enough, I don’t hear it these days, so I thought I’d bring the usage back.

    But, anyway, remember how praiseworthy it was for Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins to stand against the Republican steamroller in those dark days of Darth Cheney and Tom The Hammer Delay? Well, it’s not so praiseworthy these days;

    The rules have changed. The extra-constitutional filibuster is being used by the minority, with extraordinary success, to make the majority look foolish, ineffectual and incompetent. By using Republican obstructionism as a vehicle for forcing through their own narrow agendas, supposedly moderate Democratic senators will only make themselves complicit in this humiliation.

    Um, EJ…the rules have stayed the same – it’s the parties that changed. I wonder if lisping EJ Dionne detects the irony in those last few lines.

  • Then why have a trial?

    Now I’ve been told for years that actually trying the terrorists we’re holding in Guantanamo will improve the world’s perception of our justice system. That the world now thinks we’re a cruel nation and unless we have a fair trial, the world thinks we’re hypocrites.

    How does our national leader declaring a defendant guilty and predicting his death penalty conviction improve the perception of our justice system?

    ksm-conviction

    Don’t get me wrong, I think KSM is guilty and deserves the death penalty – but I’m a lowly blogger, not a Harvard-trained, uber-smart lawyer who leads the country.

  • Smartest VP ever explains why Congress can’t do anything

    Joe Biden, that smartest Vice President in the history of our country explains to Jon Stewart why Democrats can’t get anything done in Congress – the question comes at about 4:15.
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  • New OFA propaganda video coming to your living room

    A few weeks back, I showed you the ten finalists for the Organizing for America video contest. Well, they’ve made their choice and they went with the typical liberal “For the Children” message;
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  • Hungry, hungry hippos

    The Washington Post has an article in today’s paper entitled “Report: More Americans going hungry” – it’s a headline right out of the battle for Lyndon Johnson’s war against poverty;

    In 2008, the report found, nearly 17 million children — more than one in five across the United States — were living in households in which food at times ran short, up from slightly more than 12 million children the year before. And the number of children who sometimes were outright hungry rose from nearly 700,000 to almost 1.1 million.

    Among people of of all ages, nearly 15 percent last year did not consistently have adequate food, compared with about 11 percent in 2007, the greatest deterioration in access to food during a single year in the history of the report.

    Taken together, the findings provide the latest glimpse into the toll that the weak economy has taken on the well-being of the nation’s residents.

    Yeah, a weak economy did it. I wonder if they also surveyed the same households which didn’t have “adequate food” for the presence of an X-box, cable and a big screen TV.

    Poverty and food shortages are linked but not the same thing, according to the report. Just half the households in which food is scarce have incomes at or below the official poverty level, the data show, while most of the rest have slightly less than twice the poverty level.

    In other words, it’s not that people are too poor to buy food – they’re too stupid to buy food. So what’s the President going to do? Send us some groceries and cooks to prepare our food for us? There are so many government programs and not-for-profit organizations in this country that are set up for feeding people, how can anyone be hungry?

    I’ll tell you who the hungry families are – the same people that are waiting for you to buy their healthcare. Waiting on their sofas, game controller in their greasy oversized paw.

  • Voting “present” on climate treaty

    Can you imagine the furor in the media if you substituted “President Obama” with “President [insert any Republican name in this space]” in this paragraph from the New York Times?

    President Obama and other world leaders have decided to put off the difficult task of reaching a climate change agreement at a global climate conference scheduled for next month, agreeing instead to make it the mission of the Copenhagen conference to reach a less specific “politically binding” agreement that would punt the most difficult issues into the future.

    At a hastily arranged breakfast on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting on Sunday morning, the leaders, including Lars Lokke Rasmussen, the prime minister of Denmark and the chairman of the climate conference, agreed that in order to salvage Copenhagen they would have to push a fully binding legal agreement down the road, possibly to a second summit meeting in Mexico City later on.

    If it were still Bush, the media would say that he bullied the rest of the world into capitulating to his capitalist whims. Instead, the New York Times makes excuses for him. Funny how that works, huh?

    The current president is doing his level best to keep his accomplishments at “zero” – which is fine with me, except everything he doesn’t get done this year will all become “issues” that the Democrats will prostitute in the next election. Then they only have to drag out the same old bumperstickers we’ve been reading for decades.