BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com
From Rabat, Morocco
I am in Morocco with Mullpal Peter Fenn as a bipartisan team to meet with and help train young people in and out of the Moroccan government on communication strategies.
The trip is sponsored by Legacy International through a grant from the U.S. Department of State. Continue reading
BY ROBERT WALKER AND CHARLES MILLER
Reprinted from the Wall Street Journal
During his first term, President Obama set out to transform NASA’s relationship with the private sector, announcing a plan in February 2010 to make technology, innovation and commercial space travel and exploration the centerpiece of his administration’s space strategy. Despite great resistance from special interests, the president proposed to cancel NASA’s programs to build government-designed rockets, leaving that to the private sector.
Unfortunately, Congress wouldn’t go along. Now that Mr. Obama has started a second term, however, he is well positioned to recommit himself to a vision that in the long run will benefit every American and may be remembered as a 30-year arc of Reagan-Bush-Obama space policy. Continue reading
BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com
In another example of his highly developed strategy of “leading from behind,” President Barack Obama gave a speech in Las Vegas coming out in favor of Immigration Reform just a day after a group of Senators announced the outlines of a bipartisan plan for … Immigration Reform.
Get used to this. In his first four years in office, President Obama pretended he had nothing to do with almost anything going on with the economy or in foreign policy. If it was going badly – whatever “it” might have been – it was all George W’s fault. Or the Republicans in Congress. Or both.
If it was going well – whatever “it” might have been – it was a first person victory “I did it,” or “My administration did it.” Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
John Boehner might be right. The President may very well want to annihilate the Republican Party. But if that is true it is going to take far longer than Mr. Obama thinks.
Obama’s speech on Monday and his efforts to force gun control on an unwilling Senate served two invaluable purposes for the GOP. First, it unified them to an extent that they haven’t been unified in a long while. Second, it made it awfully hard for Harry Reid to keep control of the Senate. Continue reading
BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com
One hundred years, and 100 pounds ago I was the coxswain on the freshman crew at Marietta College, Marietta, Ohio 45750.
During that year I learned that “starboard” means right facing forward, and “port” means left facing forward. President Barack Obama’s inaugural address on Monday was a clear signal that he intends to steer the ship of state hard a-port.
During the speech I Tweeted that it was “⅓ Gettysburg, ⅓ FDR, and ⅓ State of the Union.”
The speech didn’t have the traditional reach across the aisle to the other political party suggesting Republicans and Democrats are smart enough, dedicated enough, and patriotic enough to find common ground and make America a better place. Continue reading
BY FRANK HILL
Reprinted from Telemachus.com
We have a serious problem in America today.
Many Americans on both ends of the political spectrum think ‘compromise’ is a 4-letter word. It is clearly not. There were 10 letters in it last time we counted.
Beyond that mere formality, the whole concept of ‘compromising’ is met with disdain and scorn by activists at both extreme ends of the political spectrum.
The rest of the nation? They think our elected leaders in Washington are flat-out ‘crazy’ for not cutting deals and fixing what ails us as a nation. 32% of them in North Carolina alone are now officially registering as ‘Not Democratic’ and ‘Not Republican’ as they sign up as Unaffiliated/Independent voters and that number is rising by 8% per year. What does that tell ya? Continue reading
BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON
“I’ve come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutal interest and mutal respect and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition.” — President Barak Obama in Cairo, Egypt, June 4, 2009
In the last two weeks, three years after that speech, militant Islamists have been engaging in violent, lethal protests against the United States in Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey, Tunisia, Indonesia, and Guinea. In Afghanistan, the U.S. is also facing violence from within, from Afghan police we have trained and work alongside.
Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, distanced her boss from the protests in a whirlwind weekend tour of Sunday talk shows. Continue reading
BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON
People are not sure what to call it—excessive partisanship, bad behavior, negativism, gridlock, polarization, stridency, intolerance, ideological extremes.
It is collectively, incivility and it is, arguably, worse now than it has been in American history.
Something must be done about it.
Pundits such as the Washington Post’s George Will and the Washington Examiner’s Michael Barone have argued otherwise. Barone, for example, recently bemoaned the bemoaners of what he called ‘hyperpartisanship’ in American politics, suggesting that the problem is not as bad as it may seem and attempts to rectify it in the past have just made matters worse.
BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON
There has been much written about President Obama’s speech in Roanoke, VA, on July 13. What drew so much attention was this: “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet…”
There is some discussion as to what “that” refers, whether it is the small business or the “unbelievable American system”. But semantics is a distraction.
The debate should be over the speech itself, not its sentence construction. Continue reading
BY FRANK HILL
Reprinted from Telemachus.com
Well, no one saw that coming, did they?
Virtually every professional pundit said they ‘knew’ that the individual mandate would be overturned by the Supreme Court by a 5-4 majority today.
They got the 5-4 majority correct. They just didn’t envision Chief Justice Roberts siding with the 4 Justices appointed by Democratic presidents Clinton and Obama. On anything. Ever.
So what the heck happened and what does this all mean now for your health care; your taxes and our national budget deficits and economy? Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
In many ways, it was a perfect decision.
John Roberts probably didn’t want to face the heat for destroying President Obama’s top legislative achievement. And the country probably couldn’t survive a Constitutional crisis that pitted the President vs. the Supreme Court.
But Roberts neatly threaded the needle by declaring the use of the Commerce Clause as an excuse to dictate to people to buy insurance unconstitutional, while acknowledging that Congress does have the power to tax, and that the mandate amounted to a tax.
This serves Republicans well, because if there is one thing that Republicans are good at, it is running against tax and spend Democrats. Continue reading
BY RICH CALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com
The G-20 summit in Los Cabos, Mexico is, thankfully, over.
During the proceedings we watched as President Barack Obama maneuvered himself into a position of being – if not totally inconsequential – certain a minor member of the chorus.
From Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush American Presidents have held the title “the most powerful man in the world.” Sometimes it was altered to “the most powerful man in the western world” but, you know what I mean.
Barack Obama has not just allowed that label to lapse. He appears to have been happy to toss it aside.
This isn’t about American exceptionalism. It’s about Obama ordinariness.
Obama is not First Among Equals at international meetings. At best he’s fourth among equals between Russia, China, and Germany. If you include Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, Obama is no better than fifth. 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 JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
My Uncle Bob calls it the dreaded perpendicular shot.
In golf, when you mis-hit a golf ball so badly that it almost kills the person standing next to you, you have hit a shank. A shank can happen to anybody. And it is very, very scary when it does happen.
The golfer has no idea how it happened or why. One minute you are hitting the ball straight as an arrow. Then next minute, your ball is whizzing around the head of your playing partner.
There was a great scene in the movie “Tin Cup”, when Kevin Costner, the washed-up player who attempts a dramatic come-back after winning a qualifier to play in the U.S. Open, gets a bad case of the shanks on the practice tee before he starts his round. His caddie, played by Cheech Marin, goes through a crazy routine that seems completely non-sensical, all to achieve one goal: To get Costner’s character to forget about his shank and to start hitting the ball again.
I was thinking about that scene and about shanks in general when thinking about what happened to our financial markets four years ago. Continue reading
BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON
In the 1981 classic movie, Absence of Malice, lead character Michael Gallagher tells reporter Meghan Carter that everything she wrote about him was accurate, but none of it was true.
I thought of that line as I watched the State of the Union speech January 24. Everything the President said that night was accurate, but much of it wasn’t true.
That conundrum is among the principle reasons why governing has become so difficult and why Washington is so dysfunctional.
In order for opposing sides to negotiate their way to consensus, they must first agree on their facts. They can have differing opinions on the meaning and import of those facts, but they have to get their facts straight first. Every parent knows you can’t resolve a dispute between two children until you know how it started and who id what to whom. You’ve heard it many times at the outset of political deliberation: Let’s first determine on what we can agree before addressing that on which we differ. Continue reading
BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com
We know the Iowa Caucuses will be held next Tuesday. A week after that, New Hampshire will hold its primary. What’s the difference?
One week. Very funny. Not counting that.
A caucus…
SIDEBAR
The plural of “Caucus” is not “Caucii,” as someone – probably someone who OD’d on cable news programs over the New Year weekend – will likely say at the Keurig machine with great authority on Tuesday.
Caucus is not a Latin word. According to the Merriam-Webster 3rd Unabridged, the etymology of “caucus” is: probably of Algonquian origin; akin to caucauasu elder, counselor; and was first used in 1760.
END SIDEBAR
… is a meeting of people from the same precinct held at a specific time in a specific place.
Under the GOP rules in Iowa people will go to a site representing one of 1,774 precincts; will check in to ensure they are really registered Republicans in that precinct and not members of the “Occupy the Caucuses” thugs, will listen to people speak on behalf of one candidate or another, and will write the name of the candidate they are supporting on a piece of paper which will be collected in some approved manner. Continue reading
BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON
Random Thoughts
The Keystone Pipeline is a project of a Canadian company intended to double the amount of crude oil brought into the United States, creating tens of thousands of jobs, decreasing our dependence on Middle Eastern and Venezuelan oil, and maybe even reducing the cost of energy. The pipeline would extend from Alberta, where oil is being extracted from oil or tar sands, through the American Midwest to refineries in Texas. It’s a private project but it is international and therefore needs approval of the State Department.
The project caused consternation among environmental groups and some of the communities along the path of the pipeline, particularly in Sand Hills of Nebraska. The solution for the local residents of the Midwestern states is to relocate parts of the line and increase safety to ensure, as best as possible, that the pipeline is as environmentally safe as a pipeline can be, balancing their concerns with the economic benefits.
The only solution acceptable to the more extreme environmental organizations is killing the project outright. Well that was until President Obama stepped in.
Wait. I’m sorry. The President didn’t step in. Presidential Candidate Obama did. Continue reading
BY FRANK HILL
Reprinted from Telemachus.com
A very high-level and important person that you may know personally or have heard of said that this is the answer President Obama gave when he was asked why he did not introduce the Bowles-Simpson (let’s call it ‘BS’ for brevity’s sake) recommendations as a bill in the US Congress.
Just who is the President here and who are the minions serving whom?
President Obama might have had the best of intentions when he officially signed the document creating the BS Commission by Executive Order 13531. We’ll give him credit for that at least, although at the time, we speculated on January 29, 2010 that this commission would fail just like the other 18 before it.
But when the BS Commission failed to pass the recommendations by the required 14 votes out of the 18 members present in late 2010, President Obama still had it within his power to be the Chief Executive of this great nation of ours and ask the Democrat Majority in the Senate to introduce the BS recommendations and force a vote on the floor of the US Senate and then the US House. Continue reading
BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com
On November 6 next year – 52 weeks from tomorrow – those of us who haven’t availed ourselves of early voting, absentee voting, mail-in voting or some other form of not standing in line on election day will, in fact, be stepping into a voting booth to vote for President and Congress and for about a third of the population, for U.S. Senator.
For those of us who do this for a living, we will spend the next 12 months trying to tease out who is ahead, who’s behind and why. This process is easier when we are into the finals; when we know who the Republican candidate will be to run against President Obama.
While the popular press thinks the muddled GOP results are good for Obama, I think they are wrong. We’ll get back to that later.
The most recent poll was the ABC News/Washington Post poll which shows Romney about two percentage points ahead of Cain (25-23). That poll was, as we say, “in the field” from last Monday through last Wednesday meaning the Cain story had broken and was on everyone’s lips in between sips of coffee. Continue reading
BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com
President Obama has announced all U.S. troops will be withdrawn from Iraq by the end of the year. Eight years, 4,500 U.S. troops killed and more than 33,000 wounded and we’re leaving. My vast store of knowledge about the military/political situation in Iraq ended in May 2004 when I came home and it wasn’t that vast even when I was there. I point that out to put myself squarely in the corner of people who say “I have no clue whether this is a good idea or not.”
Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta said in what I read as an extremely diffident statement, “Going forward, we will work closely with the Iraqi government and their armed forces to help them continue to build a stronger and more prosperous country.” I spent a considerable amount of time on the phone yesterday with a friend in the Gulf region – the “Persian,” not the “of Mexico” – who said with some conviction that the Iranians would be calling the shots in Iraq in short order. Continue reading