Barrel Strength

Guardian newspaper reports on Obama’s first medical examination since becoming president.  Whilst pointing to general good health, it recommends that he stop smoking and “moderation of alcohol intake”.  If the stress of work is leading to alcohol dependency then there is only one piece of advice for Obama – you ain’t seen nothing yet.

This is what Lyndon Johnson’s Day-timer looked like in January 1968.

January 17 – Lyndon B. Johnson calls for the non-conversion of the U.S. dollar.
January 21 – Vietnam War – Battle of Khe Sanh: One of the most publicized and controversial battles of the war begins, ending on April 8.
January 21 – A U.S. B-52 Stratofortress crashes in Greenland, discharging 4 nuclear bombs.
January 23 – North Korea seizes the USS Pueblo, claiming the ship violated its territorial waters while spying.
January 30 – Vietnam War: The Tet Offensive begins, as Viet Cong forces launch a series of surprise attacks across South Vietnam.

That is enough to make any man drink.

Obama’s first year consisted of others taking measure of the man.  Now things will get interesting.

With Congress in school and Presidency in an on-the-job-training program US is in great hands indeed.

Update: Reason magazine notes that Waters has been a member of the House Committee on Financial Services since 1990!  Twenty years and she is still clueless.

The health dog-and-pony show has been widely declared a draw and given that it required skills other than campaigning skills, the outcome is not a surprise.  On the election campaign front, Obama continues to rack up wins and those who cross his path continue to suffer.

In September 2009 NY Gov. Paterson rejected WH entreaties not to run for reelection.  Eventually he learned the hard way not to mess with Chicago political crowd.  Earlier this week NYT dug up dirt and revealed that Paterson and state police officials contacted the woman who had accused David Johnson, an aide to the governor, of attacking her last year.  It finally forced Paterson to announce today that he will not seek reelection.

Obama is still a winner – when he is in his element.

One thing that your correspondent derives a great deal a pleasure from is reading leftist European newspapers, like the British Guardian.  They are very well written, thoughtful, well argued, albeit dead wrong.  The same cannot be said about the US leftist paper, such as NYT, which rely on deception and lies of omission to make their point.  The reason is obvious.  The US is a centre-right nation and Europe is centre-left.

One area where this has become painfully obvious is the coverage of Climategate.  The European leftist newspapers have been much more “forceful” in their coverage and US leftist newspapers have hardly noticed the kerfuffle.  This article provides a good overview of this disparity.  The European leftist realise that AGW is dead, while the naive US leftist, exemplified by NYT, dream on.

One of the oft repeated remarks during the US presidential campaign was the Obama was qualified to be the president by virtue of managing the presidential campaign.  It was another one of long list of self-referential statement during the campaign which was devoid of common sense.   Financial Times wrote an interesting article that examines the success Obama is having in actually doing the job.

Pundits, Democratic lawmakers and opinion pollsters offer a smorgasbord of reasons – from Mr Obama’s decision to devote his first year in office to healthcare reform, to the president’s inability to convince voters he can “feel their [economic] pain”, to the apparent ungovernability of today’s Washington. All may indeed have contributed to the quandary in which Mr Obama finds himself. But those around him have a more specific diagnosis – and one that is striking in its uniformity. The Obama White House is geared for campaigning rather than governing, they say.

In dozens of interviews with his closest allies and friends in Washington – most of them given unattributably in order to protect their access to the Oval Office – each observes that the president draws on the advice of a very tight circle. The inner core consists of just four people – Rahm Emanuel, the pugnacious chief of staff; David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, his senior advisers; and Robert Gibbs, his communications chief….

“Clearly this kind of core management approach worked for the election campaign and President Obama has extended it to the White House,” says Mr Podesta, who managed Mr Obama’s widely praised post-election transition. “It is a very tight inner circle and that has its advantages. But I would like to see the president make more use of other people in his administration, particularly his cabinet.”…

Whatever issue arises, whether it is a failed terrorist plot in Detroit, the healthcare bill, economic doldrums or the 30,000-troop surge to Afghanistan, the White House instinctively fields Mr Axelrod or Mr Gibbs on television to explain the administration’s position. “Every event is treated like a twist in an election campaign and no one except the inner circle can be trusted to defend the president,” says an exasperated outside adviser…

The same can be observed in foreign policy. On Mr Obama’s November trip to China, members of the cabinet such as the Nobel prizewinning Stephen Chu, energy secretary, were left cooling their heels while Mr Gibbs, Mr Axelrod and Ms Jarrett were constantly at the president’s side.

The White House complained bitterly about what it saw as unfairly negative media coverage of a trip dubbed Mr Obama’s “G2” visit to China. But, as journalists were keenly aware, none of Mr Obama’s inner circle had any background in China. “We were about 40 vans down in the motorcade and got barely any time with the president,” says a senior official with extensive knowledge of the region. “It was like the Obama campaign was visiting China.”…

Again, close allies of the president attribute the problem to the campaign-like nucleus around Mr Obama in which all things are possible. “There is this sense after you have won such an amazing victory, when you have proved conventional wisdom wrong again and again, that you can simply do the same thing in government,” says one. “Of course, they are different skills. To be successful, presidents need to separate the stream of advice they get on policy from the stream of advice they get on politics. That still isn’t happening.”…

Give a child a hammer and lots of things need hammering down.  Give the child a screwdriver and lots of things need screwing down.  Obama is the same.  Everything is a campaign issue because that is all he knows.

Count on the New York Times to remind The One that, like Ulysses, he is forced to “mete and dole unequal laws unto a savage race, that hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not [him]“. The only solution? Talk down to the poor fools in their own crude tongue:

The president simply couldn’t seem to escape his professorial past, to convey his passion and convictions in the plain words of plain folks, and to breach the chasm between the People’s House and people’s houses.

[...]

The president must communicate within the environment he inhabits, not the one he envisions. The next time he gives a speech, someone should tap him on the ankle and say, “Mr. President, we’re down here.”

Fortunately, Charles Krauthammer steps in to smack down this arrogant fop and his co-Obamaists.

A great source of left wing insanity is Open Left. It helps me guage the extent to which Climategate and the implosion of global warming doctrine has made any progress in leftist mindshare. Zilch. Nada.

In a recent posting, Paul Rosenberg of Open Left cited NASA’s latest figures, courtesy of James Hansen.

[These figures are trashed in Watts up with that here]

The alarmist figures show a one degree Celsius rise of global temperature since 1850, the end of the Little Ice Age. [Never mind the conceptual difficulties of a "global" temperature and the statistical underpinnings thereof].

This one degree rise in temperature since 1850 shows, according to Rosenberg:

“No rational person can pretend that there’s any doubt about global warming. It’s way too late for that. By now it’s clear that the “let’s hear both sides” crowd is openly pro-lie, and in fact, pro-end-of-human-civilization. They are moral monsters. Period.”

So, let us get this straight. A one degree rise in global temperature (forgetting all the measurement issues associated with the declining number of weather stations), since the end of the Little Ice Age (1300-1850) means that the world has warmed up by one degree centigrade. And this is a moral catastrophe!

Did human-generated carbon dioxide emissions play any role in this?  What role? What proportion of this quite insignificant rise of one degree centigrade have to do with us? This question is never asked.

Never mind, you hideous moral monster! My feeling trumps your fact! In the instant case, the hideous moral momonster is George Will. This does not suffice to temper author Rosenberg’s vitriol. The problem is – you guessed it – the System. (How many times have you hear a leftie use the words “the system” to prevent rational thought? But I digress.)

Speaking of George Will and how he was not censured enough, Open Left rants to its true believers:

“The problem …is the system.

“And not “just” when it comes to global warming. The problem is the system when it comes to everything. The “war on terror”, the financial system, the broken Senate, the dictatorial Supreme Court, all of these are ultimately nothing more than symptoms of the underlying fact that the system is the problem. Because the system simply does not care about the truth. Which means it doesn’t care about anything or anyone, other than covering its own sweet sociopathic ass. “

Open Left then proceeds to castigate Obama for not being pur et dur enough.

Conclusion: Any time you are tempted to think that you are being too harsh in your understanding of the political Left, read their blogs. Confirm and strengthen us, Lord, in our faith. And confirm and strengthen us, lefties, in our rejection of your doctrines and self-righteous  moral posturing, by better acquaintance with what you think and how you behave. Amen.

One of the things that was unusual about SOTU address yesterday was that Obama, when mentioning a person, did not use names.  This is unusual for presidents who like to weave a personal narrative.  An example is as follows.

Talk to the small business in Phoenix that will triple its workforce because of the Recovery Act.

Talk to the window manufacturer in Philadelphia who said he used to be skeptical about the Recovery Act, until he had to add two more work shifts just because of the business it created.

Talk to the single teacher raising two kids who was told by her principal in the last week of school that because of the Recovery Act, she wouldn’t be laid off after all.

Are these real people or figment of Axelrod’s imagination?  Perhaps there is another reason why they are not named, along the lines of what was first enforced by Obama’s fellow African Mobutu Sese-Seko.

At one point, in early 1975, the media was even forbidden from mentioning by name anyone but Mobutu; others were referred to only by the positions they held.

Konrad Yakabuski drops this among many prize clangers in his defence of Obama’s petulant State of the Union speech:

In theory, Mr. Obama did not need to sound as contrite as Bill Clinton did in his 1995 State of the Union speech…

[...]

[T]he new President’s electoral reversals to date – in two governors’ races and the special vote to fill the late Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat – have been surface wounds compared to the near decapitation Democrats experienced in 1994.

Yup, just a flesh wound:

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And it gets better:

Unlike Mr. Clinton, who declared in his 1996 State of the Union speech that “the era of big government is over,” Mr. Obama seems resigned to presiding over the biggest American government ever.

Resigned to it? When was there ever a sign that this was not in fact Obama’s cherished dream?!

No doubt Mr. Yakabuski is feeling that Matthews-like tingling in his leg as Obama takes manly grasp of the helm to set the controls for the heart of the sun.

Bill Gross of PIMCO is well known for talking up things that would most benefit his bond funds but this chart is too interesting to pass up.

The most interesting data point in this graph is Japan.  A country with declining demographics and a significant outstanding debt.  With no way to get out of mountain of debt it is safe to say that Japan as nation is in deep peril.  The problems of Greece are well known, along with their inability to do anything about it, which brings us to Canada.

If that graph had been done in the ’90s, Canada would have been a proud member of the “Rings of Fire” club.  What changed?  Starting in the early 90s the size of the Canadian government diminished and that was made possible by majority government under Liberals, which did not have to engage in negotiations with the opposition parties to implement their agenda.  This is instructive because of the problems US will face, when trying to tackle their debt.    California gives us insight into how problem will unfold at the federal level in US.  Specifically the inability to reach an agreement on budget, which Canada was able to avoid due to its parliamentary structure.  Can anybody in US say Second Republic?

Bill Gross goes on to paint a grim picture of UK, which your correspondent cannot disagree with.

Dr. Ceausescu, wife of Romanian leader Nicolae “The Genius of the Carpathians” Ceausescu, an eminent scientist of great repute, regarding who Wikipedia noted the following, now has some competition.

Ceausescu was given many honorary awards for scientific achievement in the field of polymer chemistry during the period when her husband ruled Romania. However, her educational and scientific achievements are disputed.

Ceausescu graduated from the University of Bucharest with a PhD in polymer chemistry and top in a class of 100 women with the honor of summa cum laude. Her thesis has 162 pages, 32 tables, 40 figures and 440 references and describes the invention of a very valuable artificial material. Her detractors consider it unlikely that a person like her would have been able to write such a thesis herself. After the Revolution of 1989, several scientists have claimed that Elena had forced them to write papers in her name while a later report from her instructors claims she had rarely attended lectures or classes, and instead had sent Securitate agents to drop off her homework. Allegedly, she was once thrown out of an adult education chemistry exam for cheating. Some claim the university gave her the honor of the doctorate solely because of her political position.

In trying to cement the claim that Barrack is much smarter than Elena, Axelrod stated this.

“This is someone who in law school worked with [Harvard professor] Larry Tribe on a paper on the legal implications of Einstein’s theory of relativity,” said senior adviser David M. Axelrod. “He does have an incisive mind; that mind is always put to use in pursuit of tangible things that are going to improve people’s lives.”

Obama fan Evan Thomas – “I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God.”

Obama regretter Jill Dorson – “I’m not sorry for you. I’m sorry for me. Because I voted for Obama for me, not for you. I voted for hope and change and all the intangibles that Obama was peddling in the wake of the financial crisis, Sarah Palin, Sept. 11 and all the other ills that shook our country in the last decade. I wanted something new. Something different. What I got was, I suppose, exactly what I voted for – a spin doctor. And not a very good one at that.”

Obama regretter David Green – “Barack Obama has now, in just a year’s time, become the single most inept president perhaps in all of American history, and certainly in my lifetime.  Never has so much political advantage been pissed away so rapidly, and what’s more in the context of so much national urgency and crisis.  It’s astonishing, really, to contemplate how much has been lost in a single year.”

Obama ex-fans in Indonesia – Members of the “Take Down the Barack Obama Statue in Menteng Park” group on Facebook say Obama has done nothing for Indonesia.  “Barack Obama has yet to make a significant contribution to the Indonesian nation. We could say Obama only ate and shit in Menteng. He spent his subsequent days living as an American,” the web page says.  “For the dignity of a sovereign nation, Barack Obama’s monument in Menteng Park must be removed immediately.”

No matter what the political persuasion, one thing almost everybody can agree on about Obama is his monumental ego and narcissistic tendency that knows no bounds.   Peggy Noonan, one of the members of the growing band of Sorry-I-voted-for-Obama movement, noted the following after Brown’s election.

President Obama carried Massachusetts by 26 points on Nov. 4, 2008. Fifteen months later, on Jan. 19, 2010, the eve of the first anniversary of his inauguration, his party’s candidate lost Massachusetts by five points. That’s a 31-point shift. Mr. Obama won Virginia by six points in 2008. A year later, on Nov. 2, 2009, his party’s candidate for governor lost by 18 points—a 25 point shift. Mr. Obama won New Jersey in 2008 by 16 points. In 2009 his party’s incumbent governor lost re-election by four points—a 20-point shift.

One would think that this would be enough to knock some sense into Obama.  Or the fact that according to Gallup he is the most divisive president at the end of the first-year, boasting a a 65% difference between Republicans’ and Democrats’ job approval rating, would cause one to rethink facts.  But no, Barry trundles merrily along.

In a report today Rep. Marion Berry discussed with Obama the possibility of a wide-ranging defeat in the upcoming mid-term election.  Rep. Berry stated the following.

“I’ve been doing that with this White House, and they just don’t seem to give it any credibility at all,” Berry said. “They just kept telling us how good it was going to be. The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.’ We’re going to see how much difference that makes now.”

It is far too early to predict a 54-seat swing, which happened in 1994, but Obama’s reaction leads one to believe he is unlikely to have learned much from previous debacles.  It is instructive to recall that Bill Clinton was a politician who was at ease with the voters  and easily connected with them, as opposed to Obama, who is frequently viewed as detached, cold and aloof by the electorate.  All this from a guy who can’t even speak to sixth graders without help from TOTUS.

Former “Happy Days” star Scott Baio jokes about Michelle Obama and gets real pushback in the form of death threats.

Is it only a matter of time before the Obama United Football Club hits the streets?

Oh, right:

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UPDATE

More likely candidates for the OUFC mantle:

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Obama stated the following in an ABC interview this morning.

“Here’s my assessment of not just the vote in Massachusetts but the mood around the country: The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office,” the president said in an exclusive interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos. “People are angry and they are frustrated. Not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years but what’s happened over the last eight years.”

After blaming Bush for Coakley’s loss, he then goes on to state the following.

If there’s one thing that I regret this year, is that we were so busy just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of us, that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values.

This from somebody who averaged more than one talk or interview per day.

Update

NYT’s resident idiot, Paul Krugman, says that Obama didn’t blame Bush enough!  You can’t make this up.

… Mr. Obama didn’t do what Ronald Reagan, who also faced a poor economy early in his administration, did — namely, shelter himself from criticism with a narrative that placed the blame on previous administrations.