Obama Administration

An Open Letter to NBC

Leo Pusateri35 Comments

I wrote this to NBC news earlier today, but it could be easily applied to any of the fellow-traveler networks:

Dear NBC News:

You no doubt have now heard the news that the Obama administration’s Situation Room had received word of the terrorist nature of the Benghazi attack no later than two hours after it began. They did NOTHING to protect the lives of those in the Embassy compound. President Obama went to sleep, then jetted off to Las Vegas to raise campaign cash, meanwhile, relying on a manufactured cover story of some locals being riled up over a YouTube video that wasn’t seen.

There wasn’t any report in the cables or emails about a protest preceding the attack. The attack lasted over 7 hours before the final two occupants of the compound were murdered. And the Obama administration did NOTHING to help. Instead, they continued their COVER-UP of the video story, for WEEKS afterward and they even got to the point where they buy youtube views to make the video popular.

I listened to the NBC news top of the hour radio broadcast. Not ONE WORD of the above. Just Obama giving his “Romnesia” line, and something about his jetting 5000 or so miles today campaigning.

What– somehow you don’t think that these developments in Benghazi are NEWSWORTHY? That the administration not only knew of the attack, but refused to take action to protect the embassy occupants? And then, COVERED IT UP, LYING about the nature of the attack, and making his underlings spread his propaganda, FOR WEEKS, until the cover story collapsed under the weight of contrary evidence?

Not to mention that there remains an INNOCENT man still sitting in jail! Los Angeles Bail Bond offices voiced their opinions over this injustice in a collective voice that had almost no ear from the government. (Don’t tell me it had nothing to do with Obama’s cover story!!))

WHERE ARE WOODWARD AND BERNSTEIN????

Are you SO enamored, so infatuated with this president, that you, the press, are willing to be derelict to your Constitutional First Amendment duty and to cover up for his abject malfeasance? They did that with State-Controlled media in Soviet Russia. They do that in China. They have no choice. YOU HAVE A CHOICE!!

Are you that devoid of conscience???

DO YOUR JOURNALISTIC DUTY

******UPDATE******

It took long enough, but ABC News is finally beginning to grow a pair:

NBC still doesn’t have word one about this story on their website.

abcnews.go.com

Congressional Republicans ask why Obama described attacks as response to film.

Will The REAL ‘post racial’ Barack Obama, Please Stand Up?

Leo Pusateri59 Comments

As the Daily Caller reports, a video of a 2007 speech from Barack Obama has surfaced.  An astonishing video, to be sure.

Gone is Obama’s measured midwestern, pedantic dialect.  Gone is Obama’s ‘post racial’ tone.  Gone is Obama’s supposed distance from Pastor Jeremiah Wright (you remember “G-d DAMN AMERICA!” Reverend Wright-you know, the guy that Obama sat in front of for over 20 years, that he supposedly never listened to).   In fact, in the video, Obama embraces Jeremiah Wright, naming him as his mentor and counselor.

Class warfare rhetoric is rampant in this video, as is his allusion to the principles inherent in liberation theology.

It is said that the true character of a person can be seen by how that individual acts when he or she feels that they’re not being watched.

Ladies and gentleman, I give you Barack Obama,

unplugged and unhinged.

Teetering on the Precipice

Retired Spook115 Comments

I suspect more than a few within the Obama campaign and inner circle are in the midst of an Oh, crap moment. I’d have to think they were hoping to get to November 6th without any significant Arab Spring fallout or monetary crisis events. Turns out they have both, only 53 days out from the election.

With the Middle East on fire and both the Fed and the European Central Bank setting in motion virtually unlimited monetizing of the massive debt that Progressive policies have created, Obama’s chances of getting re-elected are growing slimmer by the day.

The premise of the lead article at MarketWatch this morning is that if Spain can just be bailed out, the world is home free.  Happy days are just around the corner.

I don’t know if the first commenter to the MarketWatch article realizes how prescient his comment is:

Fred is taking a tractor-trailer driving test. They come to the crest of a big hill and as they head down the instructer askes Fred “now what would you do if your brakes gave out right here?” “Why I’d call my friend Willie.” “And why would you call your friend Willie?”  “Caws he ain’t never seen a wreck like this one’s gonna be!”

Mark Hulbert’s column pretty much nails it:

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (MarketWatch) — It’s somehow fitting that the stock market would celebrate the fourth anniversary of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy by staging a huge rally in the wake of the Fed announcing more quantitative easing.

That’s because both the events of mid-September 2008, as well as those on Thursday, underline just how inscrutable — and, therefore, ultimately unpredictable — the markets can be.

Just take the rationale given for the market’s huge rally on Thursday. In essence, we’re told, the market rallied because the Federal Reserve concluded that the economy is in such horrible shape that it must be put on even more remedial life support.

Got that?

Far from seeing any irony in any of this, however, many investors have evidently decided that happy days are here again.

With the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA +0.20%  now a couple of thousand points higher than where it stood when Lehman Brothers went belly-up, many investors are commemorating the fourth anniversary of that bankruptcy by telling themselves that any Lehman-like danger has passed.

If only.

Go read the whole thing.  The comments he posts from supposedly astute market analysts in September, 2008 are interesting.

UPDATE, by Mark Noonan:

Instapundit has an excellent run-down on reaction to the “questioning on a probation matter” of the maker of the film the Administration absurdly blames for the riots.  Here’s what gets me:

Reader Jack Moss writes: “Probation is not a law enforcement function, it’s under the court. If his probation officer wanted to question him about the use of a computer, that broke his probation fine. But that wouldn’t include questions about making an anti-Islamic movie. It’s irrelevant. That means that the FBI showed up outside their jurisdiction for a reason given by their superiors. The question then is who ordered them there.”

Suppose this guy was in violation of his probation – ok, fine:  how often do probation violators get an after-midnight knock at the door?  Especially violations of a probation on a non-violent crime?  With a huge string of MSMers there to film every second of it?  The whole thing stinks – partially of intimidation but mostly of appeasement…Obama and Co are convinced (or at least are trying to convince us) that the film caused the riots.  In defense of his twaddle they have now swung the law enforcement power of the United States against the man who made the offending film and it appears that they are doing it to show the Muslim world that they’ll crack down on “blasphemy”.  All this will do is convince the radicals that we can, indeed, ban “blasphemy”…and that if they murder Americans, we’ll go ahead an do it.  So, guess what?  We’ll shortly get more murdered Americans…

obAMATEUR’s Speech? BORING! Nothing New. Just Stale Recycled Ideas ….. Failed Ideas.

tiredoflibbs69 Comments

When you are in a tight race with your political opponent, you should not recycle a Jobs Act speech that failed to even persuade Democrats in Congress to pass your signature re-election initiative.

But that’s what the obAMATEUR did. After Bill Clinton filled the delegates with what they wanted to hear.  obAMATEUR took to the stage and reduced, reused, and recycled old states of the union speeches that have failed him for four years.

It was boring. It was unoriginal. And it was filled with more empty promises. Remember, he promised to cut the deficit in half  or he would be a one term pResident.  Clint Eastwood’s empty chair could have given a better speech than what obAMATEUR read from the teleprompter last night. And to think he wanted to give that in a 80,000 seat stadium!

This was a safe speech you give when you have a lead. This was not a speech you give in a tight race. Don’t believe me? Here are excerpts from his past States of the Union and Jobs Act speech. Lots of platitude, lots of rhetoric, little in detail, and a lot of worn out lines that have failed him before.

Listen to these lines. This speech was unoriginal. He stacked it with straw men and ignored his own two major initiatives from the first term: Obamacare and the Stimulus.

This was a failure and you know it was because he failed to even bring up his own major initiatives. On Obamacare, he mentioned parts of it, but never defended it or referenced the “Affordable Care Act” (Affordable? Rates have risen more dramatically than they would have without obAMACARE).

His only “accomplishment”, his gold ring (at least it was a couple of years ago) and he does not mention it?  He does not tout it?

As I have said before, he is fulfilling his own statement.  When you have no accomplishments, no record on which to run, there is nothing to do in a campaign but attack, obfuscate and LIE! (and please velma do not write AGAIN, “you would not acknowledge the President’s accomplishments” – LIST AND DEFEND THEM).

In short, the speech was PATHETIC.

Open Thread: BAraCKWARDS! Hope and Change A Miserable Failure!

tiredoflibbs42 Comments

Why? You ask that ‘Hope and Change’ is a miserable failure?

Well, for one thing, if he had a successful record on which to run we would not see the LIES and the PANDERING of certain groups from the left.

The Obama propaganda team tries to distance itself from the now-infamous Romney cancer ad.  But there’s one problem …

Re-igniting the war on women, at a campaign stop this week, Dear Ruler accused Republicans of wanting to take the nation“back to policies more suited to the 1950s than the 21st century.”

We have not one, not two, but three members of the ObamaMedia who say that Mitt Romney’s ad on Obama gutting welfare reform is raaaaaaaacist.

His green energy programs, most of which went bankrupt…

The Solyndra scandal widens … Obama’s staff arranged for him to be personally briefed last summer on the loan program to help clean-energy companies like Solyndra.

NEGATIVE net job creation even after the stimulus (over $1 trillion in new spending), in which we were promised unemployment would not rise above 8%.  We have been over that for FORTY STRAIGHT MONTHS.  His team predicted that we would be around 5.6%.

Compared with each president since 1945, Obama ranks dead last in job creation, losing 316,000 jobs.

On Monday, August 13, the national debt will reach $16 trillion.  Obama, the same ruler who in 2009 promised to CUT THE DEFICIT IN HALF by the end of his first term, is responsible for more than $5 trillion of that debt.

Out of control spending with the stimulus and other WASTEFUL programs, Solyndra, nationalizing the auto industry, cash for clunkers, omnibus spending bills, etc. etc.

How the Department of Homeland Security wasted millions of tax dollars on a chemical facilities security program.

“We must pass healthcare to see what is in it.” – we were sold a FRAUD when it came to healthcare.  Premiums are going up at a more alarming rate that BEFORE and actually seeing a doctor will take longer and care will be rationed to control costs.

Nearly two-thirds of employers expect to see a cost hike in their health plans when ObamaCare goes into effect in 2014.

A new CBO report says that under ObamaCare, 30 million non-elderly Americans will remain without health insurance in 2022.

And from the GOVERNMENT IS OUT OF CONTROL FILE:

The Oregon man convicted of collecting rainwater and snow runoff on his own property surrendered to authorities this week to begin serving his 30-day jail sentence.

The looters, moochers and drones will insist on four more years of this train wreck of an administration.

Pathetic.

Keep it civil people….

Update: whatever happened to:

“I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits — either now or in the future.” 
(Remarks by President Obama to a Joint Session of Congress, September 9, 2009)
This afternoon Budget Committee Ranking Member Ryan walked through why the bill put forward by Democrats FAILS the President’s deficit test.
Vice-Presidential candidate Paul Ryan took apart obamacare in six minutes.

The Wisconsin Recall Election

Retired Spook127 Comments

There’s a really interesting dynamic at work in Wisconsin, in the run up to the June 5th recall election of Governor Scott Walker.

The majority of polls show Walker once against beating Barrett, with a recent Public Policy Polling poll showing Walker garnering 50 percent of the vote to Barrett’s 45 percent.

This 5 percent margin was unchanged since PPP last polled Wisconsin voters in April, showing that the May 8 Democratic primary did nothing to help boost Barrett’s chances at beating Walker in June.

However, Barrett’s failure to catch steam might be at the fault of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). In an exclusive report by the Washington Post, top Wisconsin Democrats are furious at the DNC for not helping to fund Barrett’s gubernatorial bid against Walker.

“We are frustrated by the lack of support from the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Governors Association,” a top Wisconsin Democratic Party official told the Washington Post. “Scott Walker has the full support and backing of the Republican Party and all its tentacles. We are not getting similar support.”

One has to wonder just what development has stalled the near hysterical fervor of Democrats to get rid of Scott Walker.  The secret could well lie in recent revelations that the Bureau of Labor Statistics may have knowingly or unknowingly represented a false picture of the jobs and unemployment situation in Wisconsin (gee, where have we heard that allegation before?)  I had read a while back that unemployment in Wisconsin had dropped from 7.8% to 6.9% in Walker’s first year in office, and figured that would be a plus in the recall election.  So I was more than a little surprised when Democrats began charging that, under Walker’s leadership, Wisconsin had the WORST job creation record in the entire country.  Sounded like fuzzy math to me, until a read this piece today:

Relying on an alternative set of jobs numbers, embattled Wisconsin Gov Scott Walker is touting job creation during his term in office, saying numbers from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics — which show Wisconsin losing jobs during that period — are not accurate.

The new numbers from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, released by the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development, calculate that Wisconsin added more than 23,000 jobs between December 2010 and December 2011, the first full year of Walker’s term.

During his campaign, Walker promised to add 250,000 private sector jobs in his first term as governor.

The numbers diverge sharply from BLS stats, which showed Wisconsin lost 33,900 jobs over that same period. That put the Badger State in last place for job creation nationwide.

Wisconsin’s number-crunchers claim their numbers are more accurate because they are based on data from “nearly all Wisconsin businesses.” The BLS numbers, by contrast, are an estimate based on data from 5,500 Wisconsin companies, which comprise just 3.5 percent of the Wisconsin workforce.

“It looks like 160,000 Wisconsin employers helped show us the thousands of new jobs that BLS estimates missed last year,” Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development Secretary Reggie Newson said in a press release. “The bottom line is Wisconsin added jobs in 2011.”

Obama’s only chance at getting reelected is for published national unemployment figures to come down at least another percentage point, since no president since FDR has been reelected with unemployment over 7.2%.  It’s pretty clear that what we need on the national level is a coordinated effort on the part of the Departments of Workforce Development from each state to come up with a comprehensive report and then compare it to the figures presented by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.  My sense is that most thinking Americans already know that the 8.3% unemployment and the 4.1 million jobs created or saved are simply made up figures, but it would be nice to have something besides a NewsMax headline telling them that their intuition is right.

Who is Really Waging a War on Women?

Retired Spook263 Comments

Any Conservative who has been paying attention to politics for any length of time knows that one of  the fundamental truths that applies to Progressive Democrats is that whenever they get caught doing something (fill in the blank – bad, illegal, unethical, repugnant, racist, sexist, etc.) their first reaction is to accuse Conservatives of (a) doing the same thing, or (b) doing something worse. The recent fabrication by the Left: the “GOP war on women” is just the latest example of this tactic.

So, is there really a “war on women”?  And if so, who’s waging it?  I would contend that the war actually started in the Obama White House.

In an excerpt obtained by The Post, a female senior aide to President Obama called the White House a hostile environment for women.

“This place would be in court for a hostile workplace,” former White House communications director Anita Dunn is quoted as saying. “Because it actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women.”

But of course, women White House staffers get paid the same as the men, so they really don’t have any room to complain — right?  Wrong.

President Obama has been outspoken in his criticism of “paycheck discrimination” that has women earning less than men for the same jobs, but a new report shows that female employees in the Obama White House make considerably less than their male colleagues.

According to the 2011 annual report on White House staff, female employees earned a median annual salary of $60,000, while the median salary for male employees was $71,000 — about 18 percent more, the Washington Free Beacon reports.

“Women are Obama’s base, and they don’t seem to have enough people who look like the base inside of their own inner circle,” former Bill Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Meyers told the New York Times.

But out in the general workplace, women have faired pretty well under Obama economic policies, right?  Wrong again.

The recent jobs report from the Labor Department had some alarming facts. The number of women employed in America declined last month as many dropped out of the work force, giving up on looking for work altogether. Of the 740,000 jobs lost since Obama took office, 683,000 of them were held by women. That is unsustainable.

Across America, women are feeling the pain of the weak economy—in the job market and at the kitchen table. Wives are worried about shrinking wages and rising prices as they try to make ends meet. Mothers fear for their children’s futures as the national debt skyrockets and college becomes unaffordable. Businesswomen are frustrated by the regulations and economic policies that make hiring impossible. Fewer women are working, and more are living in poverty.

And finally, the attack on Ann Romney by Democrat hack, Hillary Rosen, will almost certainly endear Democrats to stay-at-home moms – NOT.

All this begs the question, what would Obama have to do to lose support among women?

A Real Leader Gives Credit and Takes Responsibility While obAMATEUR Takes Credit and Shirks Responsibility.

tiredoflibbs75 Comments

What makes a leader?

Does this pResident have the abilities to be a leader?

This was the President that had “to descend his throne to become President” was going to “heal the planet”, “stop the rising oceans”, “improve relations with other nations”, “fix the economy”, “pay down the debt”, “balance the budget” etc. etc.  His failures just keep piling up.  But to listen to him, it is someone or something else’s fault – the tsunami, the Arab Spring, flooding, the evil Republicans, Big Oil, the Chinese and on and on and on…..

While, of course, our resident leftist, mindless drones would say “YES! HE IS A LEADER”.  His actions and record say otherwise.

Have at it! (It seems our resident leftist drones cannot comment on the more cerebral topics.  That is a little harsh…They cannot defend the indefensible.  Here is somewhat of an open topic for them to repeat their talking points.)