Tag Archives: White House

To Brief Or Not To Brief: Shouldn’t Be A Question

BY B. JAY COOPER
Reprinted from BJayCooper.com

Reed Cherlin, a former assistant press secretary in the Obama White House, wrote a provocative piece for Slate proposing eliminating the daily White House press briefing. He argues, accurately, that the briefings have become a “preening” exercise for the media and a “first, make no news” goal for the Obama press office team.

If those two conditions were to be true and constant, I’d agree with Mr. Cherlin. But, they needn’t be.

I worked in the White House press office in the late 80s, before the Internet and before the onslaught of cable news channels and their ubiquitous talking heads who typically take one extreme position or another and take it over and over all day. The briefings have become even more performance art than they were in my day. But, and I don’t mean to sound like my father but, “in my day,” they also served a purpose. Continue reading →

Obama on the Ropes

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 →

Watergate Lessons Not Learned (Part I)

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

The leaks of classified information from the Obama Administration in recent weeks raise the specter of a Watergate scandal and lessons not learned.

There have been at least five different incidents in which it appears people in the White House or the Obama Administration, or people with their sanction, have leaked highly classified information to the media, presumably to make Obama look tough on terrorism.

Each incident has its own set of dubious circumstances. Each has its own disturbing story of compromised national security, the endangerment of professionals in clandestine services, the abuse and betrayal of our friends and allies, and the abuse of the White House and other government offices for partisan advantage.

The five latest incidents were: Continue reading →

Time to Hit The Road We’ve Traveled

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Does anyone else find it odd that the President’s campaign team is releasing its Hollywood biopic “The Road We’ve Traveled,” a full six months before the actual election and in the middle of a bloody and nasty Republican primary?

This is not some in-house production. Davis Guggenheim, who put together “Waiting for Superman”, and “Inconvenient Truth”, produced this for the President and perhaps the most popular actor in Hollywood, Tom Hanks, is the narrator.

This is the kind of film you show at the Convention. This is the kind of film you buy network time in the middle of High School football season. You don’t release this the day before St. Patrick’s Day, unless of course you are starting to panic about your crashing poll ratings.

Speaking of St. Patrick’s Day, the former White House Chief of Staff, Bill Daley, an Irishman if there ever was one, decided his first move after leaving the Obama Team was to join the Third Way, the “think tank” dedicated to making the Democratic Party less radically socialist. Good luck with that. Continue reading →

Contraception Issue Abuse of Executive Power

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

The White House announced its new rules on requiring employers that provide health insurance to provide contraceptive services with no additional cost to their employees.

I understand this is broadly interpreting the rule, but I am not going to discuss the policy, religious, moral, or any other aspect of the rule itself.

It apparently only came as a surprise to the White House when conservatives and Catholics (among others) rose up in vocal opposition on the grounds that charities run by religious organizations – like hospitals – would have to provide a specific insurance benefit which is contrary to their religions tenets.

Others have debated the pros and cons of that in other venues and I won’t get into that again here.

The White House hurriedly announced a “compromise” which is an odd construct in that like Republicans in the House and Senate during the writing of the underlying health care legislation, only Democrats were involved. Continue reading →

Obama’s Double-Dip Learning Curve

BY TONY BLANKLEY
Reprinted from The Washington Times

In one of the least-needed reassurances in modern political history, President Obama’s top political man, David Plouffe, “told Democrats late last week that the White House would not suffer from overconfidence. ‘What I don’t want to suggest is that we’re sitting around and thinking everything is great,’ he said.”

With the White House’s own economists predicting 9 percent or worse unemployment on Election Day, the president at about 39 percent job approval, college graduates unable to find jobs, a quarter of American homes under water, no credible White House policy or strategy for changing things – and with most non-institutionalized Americans convinced we are in a recession that is going to get much worse – it is surpassingly odd that Mr. Plouffe, as The Washington Post said, was worried that his fellow Democrats might think the president and his men think everything to be hunky-dory. Continue reading →

Trouble Rhymes with Carville

BY RICH GALEN

Reprinted from Mullings.com

One of the most enduring songs from the 1957 Broadway musical, “The Music Man” is named “Trouble.”
Trouble, oh we got trouble
Right here in River City!
With a capital “T”
That rhymes with “P”
And that stands for Pool.

Yesterday the Democrats had trouble with a capital “T” that rhymes with “C” and that stands for Carville. As in James. As in my former back-door neighbor. As in husband to Mullfave Mary Matalin.

The James wrote an essay for CNN in which he stated it was time for President Obama to panic. I am not paraphrasing. He wrote that after thinking about the drubbing Obama and his fellow Democrats got in two special Congressional elections – one in Nevada and one in New York City, he wrote: “What should the White House do now? One word came to mind: Panic.” Continue reading →

Drill, Don’t Drill, Drill

Lybia, Japan and Other News

BY RICH GALEN

Reprinted from mullings.com

There has been so much going on this week, it’s almost impossible to make sense of it all in just one column.

First of all the is the ongoing non-war in Libya. It is a non-war in which country appears to want to take control.

Continue reading →

Futile Death in Afghanistan

BY TONY BLANKLEY

Reprinted from the Washington Times

The administration’s Afghanistan war policy seems to be settling into a dismal combination of confusion and cynicism. Before the November elections, the administration was adamant that the troops would start coming home by July 2011. That, it is presumed, was to keep the president’s liberals calm.

Continue reading →