Free Republic

It has been one year since The One became our president. Most polls today put his approval rating right about at his margin of victory of a year ago. But when people are asked about his policies, rather than his personality, well, even CNN can't spin these numbers.

Barack Obama: Media Sweetheart and Golf Addict by Brian Darling (more by this author) Posted 11/02/2009 ET Barack Obama enjoys wide support from his liberal friends in the media. That allows them to ignore the growing discontent average Americans hold toward a leader who promised so much and has delivered so little. Politico and CBS News reported last week that the president has played 24 rounds of golf this year. Yet no media outlet has accused Obama of spending too much time on the greens and not enough time in the Oval Office. Pelosicare Unveiled As the Senate continues to...

How can the government pretend that it can manage, overhaul, streamline and reform the health care system in the United States when it can't even deliver enough flu shots to prevent a pandemic? We have seen the H1N1 virus coming for over a year. It is no surprise that much of America needs vaccination. It was no secret that the flu season was approaching. But, now that it is upon us, we find ourselves pathetically short of shots. One year ago, the government told us that we would have hundreds of millions of vaccinations available. Then, over the summer, the...

And They Want to Be Our Health Care Providers http://www.wiseandfrugalgovernment.blogspot.com In 2002, Caltrans (California Department of Transportation ) began the construction of a new eastern span of the Bay Bridge. The estimated cost was $1.3 billion dollars. The plan? To rebuild rather than retrofit the span after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 caused a section of the bridge to collapse. After a series of delays and cost overruns the bridge is now expected to be complete in 2013 at a total cost to taxpayers of $6.3 billion. Just $5 billion or 384% over budget. That was before the break...

BRATISLAVA - Corruption, doubts over Afghan leadership and faltering public support have emerged as the main stumbling blocks to a demand for more North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) troops in Afghanistan. NATO secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, had wanted NATO defense ministers meeting in the Slovakian capital of Bratislava on Thursday and Friday last week to agree to raise troop numbers in Afghanistan. The United States and NATO troops commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, has asked for 40,000 more troops. Rasmussen made energetic appeals to NATO states to endorse the general's plan, which also calls for a shift in...

A simple ... search of Michal Preclik's name turns up an Interpol wanted poster from his native Czech Republic. So where was he arrested? In Nebraska's maximum-security prison, where he was not an inmate, but a guard. Preclik had worked at the prison for a year and his arrest came just two months after officials at Tecumseh State Correctional Institution promoted the 32-year-old to corporal. Prison officials learned last month that he was wanted on suspicion of drug and fraud crimes. "This is just unbelievable that the state of Nebraska is hiring international criminals," said state Sen. Heath Mello of...

WASHINGTON -- The number of newly laid-off workers filing claims for unemployment insurance has fallen to the lowest level since early January, a sign the labor market is slowly improving. The Labor Department said Thursday that first-time claims for jobless benefits dropped to a seasonally-adjusted 514,000 from an upwardly revised 524,000 the previous week. The fifth decline in six weeks was below Wall Street economists' forecasts of 525,000, according to Thomson Reuters. The four-week average, which smooths fluctuations, fell for the sixth straight time to 531,500. Economists closely watch initial claims, which are considered a measure of layoffs and the...

As the media and political observers pick over the remains of the failed Olympics-bid debacle, the debate has boiled down to this: Will it be a temporary embarrassment for the president or a long-term problem, an emblem of overreach and underachievement? There is more to this than simply predicting the toll it will take on Obama. Both the rebuff and the Obama team’s stunned reaction have stripped the veneer from the Obama mystique. Suddenly, the entire country realizes that that there is no “master plan” behind what Obama does. In fact, there may be no plan at all. Obama’s frosty...

With four months left to meet its self-imposed deadline for closing the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Obama administration is working to recover from missteps that have put officials behind schedule and left them struggling to win the cooperation of Congress...Today, officials are acknowledging that they will be hard-pressed to meet that goal. The White House has faltered...because of the legal, political and diplomatic complexities involved in determining what to do with more than 200 terrorism suspects at the prison. But senior advisers privately acknowledge not devising a concrete plan for where to move the detainees and...

An expert in U.S. politics says a climate agreement in Copenhagen is unlikely. President Obama’s speech to the United Nations is a clear indication that the United States cannot deliver at the United Nations Climate Summit in Copenhagen in December until the health reform is in place. And as long as President Obama’s health reform package remains to be passed by Congress, the United States will not enter into any climate agreement, according to Copenhagen University’s expert in American politics Mads Fuglede. “There are two things that fill the American debate right now – health reform and the financial crisis....

This just looks bad. Really bad. The New York Times Company has been required to reveal startling management incompetence, an inability to correctly apply its own executive compensation scheme to the top two figures in the company, overpaying the bosses. Publicly-traded corporations like the Times must file a Form 8K within four days of various events, so the details of the screw-up are now on the record. The company filed the 8K following the end of trading yesterday. A summary of the substance is here.

President Obama complains about misinformation out from the opponents regarding the health care debate, however, it seems he is a major source of misinformation himself. Here is a brief and by no means exhaustive examination of President Obama’s comments at just one town hall meeting. (transcript of town hall) Mischaracterizing Senator Isakson of GA over end of life legislation. It turns out that I guess this arose out of a provision in one of the House bills that allowed Medicare to reimburse people for consultations about end-of-life care, setting up living wills, the availability of hospice, et cetera. So the...

There is a lot of invective being flung around by liberals and conservatives these days regarding the each other’s motivations. We hear accusations of “un-American”, unpatriotic, astro-turfing, the police accused of acting stupidly, etc. All of these invectives are nothing more than an attempt to sidestep the legitimate concerns of people asking questions instead of properly showing leadership by addressing the concerns. It seems some people confuse leadership with salesmanship. A leader who expects people to follow them must engender trust for that to happen; clearly hurling invectives at the followers doesn’t engender trust. A salesman is expected to narrowly...

There is now not even a hint of an effort to make the narrative on Afghanistan consistent. From the AP: President Barack Obama’s national security adviser did not rule adding more U.S. forces in Afghanistan to help turn around a war that he said on Sunday is not now in crisis. James Jones, a retired Marine general with experience in Afghanistan, said the United States will know “by the end of next year” whether the revamped war plan Obama announced in March is taking hold...

The U.S. government must fundamentally redefine the struggle against terrorism, replacing the "war on terror" with a campaign combining all facets of national power to defeat the enemy, John O. Brennan, President Obama's senior counterterrorism adviser, said Wednesday. Previewing what aides said will be the administration's most comprehensive statement to date on its long-term strategy to defeat al-Qaeda and other violent extremists worldwide, Brennan said in an interview that the United States will maintain "unrelenting" pressure on terrorist havens, including those near the Afghan-Pakistani border, in Yemen and in Somalia. However, Washington must couple the military strikes that have depleted...

After many a disappointment with someone, and especially after a disaster, we may be able to look back at numerous clues that should have warned us that the person we trusted did not deserve our trust. When that person is the President of the United States, the potential for disaster is virtually unlimited. Many people are rightly worried about what this administration's reckless spending will do to the economy in our time and to our children and grandchildren, to whom a staggering national debt will be passed on. But if the worst that Barack Obama does is ruin the economy,...

In a call asking for support on health care reform from liberal bloggers, President Obama admits that he is not familiar with a key provision of the bill he is pushing. The health reform bill is a legal document that is more than 1,000 pages long, and by every measure requires a good amount of time to go through and digest. The health care reform legislation is massive in scope and in impact, so it seems logical that the executive and legislative branches should take the time to read it. President Obama admitted that he was "not familiar" with a...

At the beginning of the film, The Paper Chase, the somber professor tells his classroom of first year law students that they would have to learn to think like lawyers. He meant the need to cultivate the skill of analytical thinking that is required to understand legal issues. Understanding basic contract or tort law isn’t the great struggle in law school. Figuring out how to spot an issue, understand the rule of law and apply it to a given set of facts is the mission. Next is grappling with the Weltschmerz of not being the smartest one in the room...

Enjoy!

George Torres' future looked pretty bleak: The supermarket mogul had been stripped of his riches by government prosecutors, convicted in a massive racketeering case and was awaiting a potential life sentence in federal prison. But in a stunning reversal of fortune Tuesday, the government released its grip on Torres' assets, a judge tossed out the most serious convictions against him, and he was ordered set free -- at least for now. The turnaround came after prosecutors in the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles turned over tape-recorded conversations that contained information that was potentially beneficial to Torres' defense regarding at...

The Media Fall for Phony 'Jobs' Claims The Obama Numbers Are Pure Fiction. By WILLIAM MCGURN Tony Fratto is envious. Mr. Fratto was a colleague of mine in the Bush administration, and as a senior member of the White House communications shop, he knows just how difficult it can be to deal with a press corps skeptical about presidential economic claims. It now appears, however, that Mr. Fratto's problem was that he simply lacked the magic words -- jobs "saved or created." "Saved or created" has become the signature phrase for Barack Obama as he describes what his stimulus is...

AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA By Lou Pritchett Dear President Obama: You are the thirteenth President under whom I have lived and unlike any of the others, you truly scare me. You scare me because after months of exposure, I know nothing about you. You scare me because I do not know how you paid for your expensive Ivy League education and your upscale lifestyle and housing with no visible signs of support. You scare me because you did not spend the formative years of youth growing up in America and culturally you are not an American. You scare...

It looks like the Obama administration has finally found a home for the 17 Uighurs detained at Gitmo. According to the Associated Press, the small Pacific Island of Palau is reportedly taking all 17 Uighurs in exchange for $200 million. If true, this raises a few obvious observations and questions. First, it says much about how poorly the effort to close Gitmo is going that no nation, other than an island resort nation that is heavily dependent on aid from the U.S., is willing to take the Uighurs. The Obama administration considered the Uighurs the easiest bunch of detainees to...

WASHINGTON - The government's inadvertent and red-faced Internet posting of a 266-page list of U.S. nuclear sites provided a one-step guide for anyone wanting details about such sensitive information. Obama administration officials said Wednesday the document contained no classified material about nuclear weapons. They contended the locations and other details already were available from public sources. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said "a snafu" led to the online posting. "A little embarrassing," he acknowledged. The document, stamped "highly confidential safeguards sensitive," made it onto the Government Printing Office's Web site - and why that happened was not immediately clear. A newsletter...

WASHINGTON (AP) - An Environmental Protection Agency proposal that could lead to regulating the gases blamed for global warming will prove costly for factories, small businesses and other institutions, according to a White House document. The nine-page memo, released Tuesday by Republican senators, is a compilation of opinions made by numerous federal agencies prior to the EPA determining in April that greenhouse gases pose dangers to public health and welfare. That finding set in motion the regulation of six heat-trapping gases from cars and trucks, factories and other sources under the Clean Air Act for the first time. The document,...

Recently a number of overly rosy pronouncements have been coming out of the Whitehouse in an attempt to talk up the economy and consumer confidence. In the corporate world, putting a brave face on a bad situation is called Happy Talk. The CEO comes out with the pep talk to boost flagging employee morale to keep up productivity and key employees from jumping ship. The positive spin can be come from true concern for the drag on team spirit that would make the difference between success and failure through vision and teamwork. The overly positive spin is done cynically in...

Nancy Pelosi’s attempt to evade responsibility for her role in approving the use of waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques took another hit today in the Washington Post — and this time the fire comes from her side of the aisle. Pete Hoekstra upped the ante as well, demanding the release of precise minutes of Congressional briefings, and Leon Panetta has promised to make them available, at least to Capitol Hill:

It would be naïve to think that we are not going to see Obama and his Democratic majorities impose a form of National Health Care (NHC) as early in this term as he can. We will most likely see this just prior to the 2010 Congressional elections in an effort to keep his majorities by "buying" the votes of non-tax-paying citizens but before the system collapses under the price tag of whichever format he chooses. Current Government Participation To understand fully the implications of the information to follow, one has to appreciate the role the federal and state governments currently...

America has a former New York Times journalist, Steven Rattner, as our auto czar, a man with zero auto industry expertise. And it shows. To be completely fair to Rattner, he did leave journalism for investment banking, and went on to run a private investment firm, but he has no actual experience in the auto industry. Even worse his firm is now mired in a pay-to-play scandal. This was a problem that the Obama team knew about when it nominated Rattner as the car czar; in Chicago, these types of scandals are met with a blasé attitude. Perhaps Barack Obama...

Howard Kurtz at the Washington Post is covering the apparent demise of another ancient American newspaper; the Boston Globe. Yes, it was a liberal rag - a laughably small minded, mini-me imitation of its parent, the New York Times. But if one believes that a city's newspapers are more than mouthpieces for one political party or another, that covering art, culture, sports, fashion, and local business is an important task beyond politics that helps unite and define a metro area - then we may be suitably chastened by the demise even of a paper that thought John Kerry was the...

When the new administration took over Washington and our smiling, community activist, leader took the oath of office, the chuckles began as we witnessed the most expensive inauguration in US history and the start of the transformation of America. I giggled -- initially. This idol-worshipped man with absolutely no background or experience became our new President. I laughed at how America had been taken for a ride. When the President embarrassed America with his lame gift to the British Prime Minister, it was so sad it was funny. I giggled under my breath. When the One could not convey any...

(CNN) – House Minority Whip Eric Cantor and former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said in an interview airing on CNN's State of the Union Sunday morning that the GOP wasn't directly responsible for much of the party's electoral misfortune in 2008. "I frankly believe that much of what happened in the last election revolved around the fact that the economy fell apart at the time we were, if you will, holding the hot potato. Republicans and Democrats have been playing this game, passing the hot the potato, spending money like there was no tomorrow," Romney told John King. "And...

When your house is on fire going back to sleep instead of sounding the alarm means you wind up cooked to a crisp and (at best) suitable to be served for dinner - and at worst, you're charcoal. The mainstream media has routinely ignored the game-playing that has been going on in the reporting of financial results for the last two years. Anyone who reads The Ticker knows that "mainstream media" complicity is a big part of why this wasn't stopped before it blew up in everyone's face and why the people sat still for bailout after bailout - all...

Sorry Canada, its going to be a long four years. In an article called "The Border for Dummies" Canada's National Post asks a salient question: "Can someone please tell us how U. S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano got her job?" I think I can offer some enlightenment. You see, Janet is an ideologue. She is the kind of person who will pursue ideological goals without regard for truth, a person who can be expected to reinvent reality to fit the ideological vision of the administration, which she does with abandon. She is the perfect Obama Administration appointee. adame...

NEW YORK – Investors are back to worrying about banks. Long-present unease about soured loans bubbled over on Monday after Bank of America Corp. said it set aside $13.4 billion to cover lending losses, even as it posted a profit for the first quarter, and as anxiety grew about the results of the government's "stress tests" to determine if banks will need more government bailout money. While Bank of America and other big banks like Citigroup Inc. have fared better so far this year than many believed they would, nervousness is growing now over the massive losses from defaulting loans...

Orange County — A man accused of trying to kidnap a 9-year-old girl was released from jail Friday even though a sex-crimes detective originally wanted him held without bail. A deputy in training changed the bail amount to $5,000 without checking with his superiors, though it's unclear whether any policies were violated. Jail and Sheriff's Office officials are trying to determine who, if anyone, is to blame. Marcus Younge, 23, was booked into the Orange County Jail at 1 a.m. Friday on charges of attempted kidnapping. He was bailed out hours later without seeing a judge. "It's the attempted kidnapping...

“There’s a lot of -- I don’t know what the term is in Austrian -- wheeling and dealing, and people are pursuing their interests, and everybody has their own particular issues and their own particular politics,” he said in response to an Austrian reporter’s question.

Fans of Barack Obama are impressed with his ability to do two or three things at one time, as am I. Here is a classic twofer: he succeeded in exposing both the intellectual inadequacy and the moral bankruptcy of his worldview in one terse statement. As a bonus he threw in an example of his deceitful manipulativeness. This came in his recent press conference when he was asked to defend his proposal to reduce the maximum deductibility of charitable donations to 28 percent. Under his proposed regime, someone who pays 39 cents in taxes on each earned dollar would only...

In the end, it may be Obama's transparency that does him in. Not the kind he promised in the campaign, of course. More and more supporters are waking up to the reality of the man they helped put into the White House. In a sweeping but concise recounting on how President Obama's agenda is now all but lost, largely through a dead-on-arrival proposed budget, Byron York inasmuch predicts Obama may be already a lame duck president barely 60 days into his first term. How is this possible? How did it happen? Much is made of the popular but overused word...

LITTLETON, Colo. - Republicans better stop whining and start thinking of new electoral strategies to return to prominence, the new head of the Republican National Committee said Friday. "I’m tired of seeing the same old, same old," RNC Chairman Michael Steele told about 750 Republicans at a party dinner in suburban Denver. "I’m tired of hearing the same old arguments. I’m tired of hearing the complaining."

To hear GOP Chairman Michael Steele tell it, his recent donnybrook with radio host Rush Limbaugh - and his subsequent apology - were all part of a grand "strategic" plan. "I'm a cause-and-effect kind of guy," Steele told CNN’s Don Lemon on Wednesday. "So if I do something, there's a reason for it... Even it may look like a mistake, a gaffe. There is a rationale, there is a logic behind it," he said.

AMERICA'S enemies smell blood and it's type "O." All new administrations stumble a bit as they seek their footing. But President Obama's foreign-policy botches have set new records for instant incompetence. Contrary to left-wing myths, I wasn't a fan of the Bush administration. (I called for Donald Rumsfeld to get the boot in mid-2001.) But fair's fair. Despite his many faults, Bush sought to do good. Obama just wants to look good. Vice President Dick Cheney was arrogant. Vice President Joe Biden is arrogant and stupid. Take your pick. Don't worry about the new administration's ideology. Worry about its terrifying...

In a world growing more dangerous by the week in this dark spring of 2009, Washington may be the most dangerous city in the world. The city is safe enough for its residents - it is the rest of the country and world that is endangered by what Washington is capable of doing. On a bipartisan, bicameral, bigovernmental (executive and legislative branches) basis, rarely has so much policymaking, world-economy-transforming power been in harness to such unsteady political and policy instincts. Whatever one thinks of the American International Group Inc.'s bonus actions, last week's performance by Washington's political class should give...

There are growing indications that the Obama administration is melting down, unraveling and falling apart. The clearest indication is Barack Obama and his treasury secretary failing to come up with a plan to fix the bank/credit crisis. He is proposing solutions for every social problem ever identified by liberal Democrats, but doesn’t seem to be dealing with what should be his No. 1 priority. The bank fix is supposed to be announced by Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner, during this week. Nero fiddled while Rome burned, but the early days of the Obama administration will be remembered for his...

The AIG bonuses, alienating our allies, that Special Olympics crack on "The Tonight Show" there's certainly plenty of competition, but this was probably the worst week of President Obama's nascent administration. The problem wasn't just bad decisions followed by rash reactions and changing stories. The mistakes, oversights, cover-ups, and bad press of this past week all hit Obama in the most sensitive spots, undercutting the pillars on which he had built his rare transpartisan appeal. Fear Factor Hits The Nation The Coming Inflation Crisis During the transition, Obama won some Republican hearts with his promise of competence and intelligence. When...

It's never good when a top politician is forced to say that he has "complete confidence" in a key lieutenant - indeed, it often comes just before the lieutenant resigns or is summarily booted out. That's not likely to happen with Timothy Geithner any time soon because that would entail President Barack Obama admitting that rather than picking the only man in the world who could be an effective Treasury Secretary, he'd actually chosen a compltee dud. And that would reflect as badly on Obama himself as on Geithner. But Obama's latest words about Geithner sound ominous and could eventually...

Undisciplined. Disorganized. Overreaching. Dangerous. Even the Democrats are taking off the upside-down plastic buckets they've kept over their heads, like David Broder, David Ignatius, and even David Brooks, the house conservative at the NYT, who keeps trying to hug that dangerous median strip on the superhighway of life, dancing and dodging between all the whizzing cars and trucks. But the commentariat still doesn't understand that Obama is the worst control freak to occupy high office in the history of the United States. Obama is the Nanny to end all Nannies. Socialism is not a political philosophy for him. It's the...

Not long ago, after a string of especially bad days for the Obama administration, a veteran Democratic pol approached me with a pained look on his face and asked, "Do you think they know what they're doing?" The question caught me off guard because the man is a well-known Obama supporter. As we talked, I quickly realized his asking suggested his own considerable doubts. Yes, it's early, but an eerily familiar feeling is spreading across party lines and seeping into the national conversation. It's a nagging doubt about the competency of the White House. It was during George W. Bush's...

Britain's most senior civil servant has complained that Downing Street is finding it “unbelievably difficult” to make arrangements with the United States for the crucial G20 summit. Sir Gus O'Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary, reportedly said that the handover to the Obama Administration was hindering discussions about the meeting in London next month. The Prime Minister hopes that the summit on April 2 will produce a co-ordinated global strategy to tackle the economic downturn. So far, his attempts to get his Washington and European allies to agree to a coherent common platform for the meeting have proved frustrating. ...snip ... Mr...

The Department of Defense and the National Nuclear Security Administration had to wait more than a year to refurbish aging nuclear warheads — partly because they had forgotten how to make a crucial component, a government report states. Regarding a classified material codenamed "Fogbank," a Government Accountability Office report released this month states that "NNSA had lost knowledge of how to manufacture the material because it had kept few records of the process when the material was made in the 1980s and almost all staff with expertise on production had retired or left the agency."