BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com
In addition to Vladimir Putin’s strutting and fretting his hour upon the world stage, the big news out of the U.S. Senate yesterday was that seven Democrats voted with all 44 Republicans on a test vote on the confirmation of a guy named Debo Adegbile to be the head of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.
It was a nomination put forward with some vigor by President Barack Obama. Continue reading
BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SCCI) has released it’s long-awaited report on what did (and did not) happen in Benghazi on September 11, 2012 and what the Obama Administration said (and didn’t say) about it. The attacks led to the death of four Americans including the U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens.
The entire report is 85 pages long with about half of that devoted to appendices and to an “Additional Views” section by committee members. The SCCI is made up of 15 members; eight Democrats and seven Republicans. Continue reading
BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com
I am writing this shortly after 8 PM on Monday. By the time you read this, we might have dropped a hell fire missile on Bashir al-Assad’s head.
Not really, but there are some interesting ironies about the Syrian situation.
Secretary of State John Kerry (who famously – or infamously) pretended to throw his Vietnam-era medals over the White House fence in 1971. When I write “pretended” it is because, according to ABC News, Kerry said during a news program on the Washington, DC NBC affiliate on November 6, 1971: “I gave back, I can’t remember, six, seven, eight, nine medals.”
Later, during the Presidential campaign, he claimed “”I threw my ribbons. I didn’t have my medals. It is very simple.”
Working definition of a difference without a distinction. Continue reading
BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com
It’s now official. America is the France of the 21st century.
France was a big power in the 18th and 19th centuries. The French were pretty much in a constant state of war what with everything from the Seven Years’ War, to the French and Indian Wars, to the American Revolution, to the Napoleonic Wars.
Then came the 20th Century when World War I was mostly fought on French soil leading to their preemptive surrender in World War II. Since then the French still pretend to be a full-fledged member of the Planetary Cool Kids Table, but they have to sit on the end and fetch extra pints of milk for the real members. Continue reading
BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com
As if President Barack Obama didn’t have any embarrassing issues to deal with, now come the reports – not proof – of some really ugly allegations. The original reporting came from CBS which came into possession of a memo from the Diplomatic Security Service alleging wrongdoing and possible interference in at least eight investigations.
According to CBS, among the allegations were:
BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com
In the good old days when there were rules and there were people who knew the rules, and they taught the rules to new people, who then followed the rules there were basically three levels of discussion between reporters and sources: 1) On the Record 2) On Background 3) Off the Record
This is a good topic for discussion because the Attorney General of these United States, Eric Holder, is participating in an Obama Administration-wide charm offensive with the national media in an effort to try and get back to what President Obama considers to be the normal state of affairs: The press fawning over his every word, and every deed.
Unless you have been in Malawi or Zambia for the past few months you know that scandals are cascading over this White House like a storm surge over Carolina barrier islands.
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
Can they walk and chew gum at the same time?
That will be the question for congressional Republicans as they navigate the next year and a half before the 2014 elections.
The scandals that have dogged the Obama administration at the beginning of its second term have presented the House GOP with a seemingly golden opportunity. But all that glitters is not gold, and the temptation to put all of the political eggs in the scandal basket might be overwhelming but should be resisted.
The conservative advocacy group Heritage Action has sent a warning letter to congressional Republicans telling them to stop walking toward legislative accomplishments and focus only on chewing up the administration on the scandal front.
BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com
Over the past few weeks I’ve been writing like Grandma Moses painted: Sooooo very sweet.
Well, that’s over. So as Bette Davis (as Margo Channing) said in “All About Eve” in 1950: “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night”
The IRS is going to be the death of the Obama Administration. NOBODY LIKES THE IRS. I’m not saying all IRS employees are bad people, but neither are all meter maids bad people – we just don’t like to see them sniffing around our stuff.
Actually the IRS is not Obama’s biggest strategic problem.
James Rosen is. Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
Originally published in The Hill
Twenty-nine years before the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., John Dean, then the White House counsel, sent a list of names to IRS Commissioner Johnnie Walters. On the list were names of enemies of the Nixon campaign that were to be investigated and audited and generally harassed by the tax-collecting agency.
That was among the revelations that came from the Watergate investigation, which eventually led to the resignation of President Nixon.
Some 40 years later, the Internal Revenue Service is once again in the news for targeting political enemies of the president. I would bet my bottom dollar that there is no evidence that the current president is involved directly in this latest scandal. Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
This should give a sense of how politically far afield the conservative movement has gone.
The CPAC convention has invited Richard Fisher, the head of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank and big-time Democrat, to address the group while going out of its way to make sure that everybody knew that Bob McDonnell and Chris Christie, the two most popular Republican governors in the country, have not been invited.
Fisher has been invited because he agrees with Bernie Sanders that the U.S. government should somehow break up America’s largest banks.
McDonnell and Christie have been dis-invited because they governed in such a way as to make them the most popular Republican governors in the country. Continue reading
BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON
Gov. Mitt Romney introduced the crises in the Middle East to the campaign conversation this week with some tough talk about the tragedy in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, and the wave of protests that took place on that day in nearly a dozen other countries.
Romney is the wrong messenger, but he’s right about the issue. This is not about the campaign. This is about foreign policy.
The Obama Administration needs to come clean about what happened on that day and what has occurred since. And more needs to be said about our lame policies toward Iran, the growing militancy all across the Middle East (so much for the touted tilt toward the West of the Arab Spring) and the increased tension between Israel and her neighbors, the incomprehensible death and destruction in Syria, the eruption of more violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the volatile antics of Iran’s Ahmedinijad. Continue reading
BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON
“You hate to think that the President would purposely mislead the American people, but it sure looks like it to me.” — House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon 9/21/2012
Let’s give the President the benefit of the doubt for now on whether he is coming clean on events in the Middle East that led to the death of our Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, and three others. But Chairman McKeon should hold that thought.
We should focus first on UN Ambassador Susan Rice, who on Sunday, September 16th, went on a national media bender to deliver three messages: One, the violent protests in Libya were spontaneous. Two, the protests were caused by the release of an American video that insulted the Prophet Mohammed. Three, the two former Navy Seals who were killed in Libya were part of a security detail protecting the Ambassador to that country. Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
All hell is breaking out in the Middle East and in North Africa. Israel is preparing to go to war with Iran. China and Japan are at the brink of war. Unemployment is above 8 percent. The Federal Reserve is forced to buy forty billion dollars of mortgage-backed securities a month because the Chairman is very worried that the economy will backslide into a deep recession. The debt numbers are only getting worse as the government grapples with adding a new entitlement to an already over-subscribed entitlement system.
The Obama Administration is failing on both the international and domestic stage.
And Mitt Romney is on the defensive!
How the hell does that happen? Continue reading
BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com
If you think the Administration of Barak Obama has its arms around foreign policy, read this from the Associated Press yesterday: “Ultraconservative Islamist protesters climbed the walls of the United States Embassy in Cairo on Tuesday and took down the American flag, replacing it with a black flag with an Islamic inscription to protest a movie attacking Islam’s prophet, Muhammad.”
Did President Obama demand that the Egyptian government provide assurances that our embassy would be protected?
No.
In fact, Obama’s crack foreign service issued an… apology.
He apologized for the presumed existence of a movie that no one on this planet (to my knowledge) has seen in its entirety. Continue reading
BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com
The holes in the Obama Administration continue to show the greatest inherent problem to the President’s re-election: These people are incompetent.
At almost every level, in almost every issue the Obama Administration is barely keeping afloat. The recent leaks that Obama himself approves using drones to kill specific targets was first brought light in a New York Times piece: “Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre “baseball cards” of an unconventional war.”
Imagine the apoplexy among the studio hosts on MSNBC if George W. Bush had been found riffling “baseball cards” deciding who should live, who should die and in which order.
They would be “Leaning Forward” so far they’d be staring at their own backsides – as unpleasant an image as that might be. Continue reading
BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON
The Obama Presidency is a wonder to watch. Barack Obama is making changes, which taken together—the sum of their parts—are transforming government and politics in disturbing ways it will take years and maybe decades to reverse.
His presidency is the triangulation of three distinct characteristics of politics and government.
First, the Obama Presidency is an Imperial Presidency, accumulating and concentrating power in the Executive like few Presidents have done before.
Second, it is a campaign Presidency, intensely focused on winning a second term, at the expense of public policy and cooperation with Congress.
Finally, it is an Administration, a collection of Cabinet departments and federal agencies which he is using to move the government and the country in a starkly different direction than in any time certainly since Reagan, and maybe Roosevelt.
The Imperial Presidency, historically, is a label applied to administrations that have taken unilateral military actions or engaged in aggressive foreign policies: James K. Polk’s intervention in Mexico; Theodore Roosevelt’s internationalism; and in more modern times, Lyndon Johnson’s expansion of our role in Vietnam or Ronald Reagan’s aid to Contra rebels in Nicaragua. Continue reading
BY TONY BLANKLEY
Reprinted from the Washington Times
Whatever may happen in the hours after I write this column, two things are certain: The next chapter in the magnificent and ancient civilization of the Nile is yet to be known. The role that America plays in Egypt‘s great, unfolding story also remains in doubt.
BY GARY ANDRES
Reprinted from Weeklystandard.com
Last week’s anemic jobs report came as a sobering reminder that America’s economic malaise shows little sign of slowing. Overall non-farm payrolls shrunk by 95,000 in September, while private sector hiring decelerated for the third consecutive month. High unemployment is now an acute national headache that won’t go away.
BY FRANK HILL
Reprinted from Telemachus.com
‘Would John Maynard Keynes himself even agree with all this perpetual deficit-spending that has been going on for the past 40 years in America?’
BY GARY ANDRES
Reprinted from weeklystandard.com
Earlier this week, President Obama proposed another round of stimulus spending, aiming to boost the sagging economy and—he vainly hopes—his party’s slumping political fortunes.
The $50 billion ‘little brother’ of the $787 billion enacted two years ago is more of a campaign talking point for hemorrhaging Democratic candidates than a serious economic stimulus plan—and with good reason.
Continue reading