Democrat Chuck Todd: Obama “on precipice of doing Jimmy Carter-like damage” to Democrats

You know it’s bad when fellow Democrats are saying this about Obama.

 

 

 

Liberal columnist: ‘Obama administration mistakes journalism for espionage’

 

Liberal columnist Eugene Robinson has a piece from yesterday that is critical of the Obama administration:

The Obama administration has no business rummaging through journalists’ phone records, perusing their e-mails and tracking their movements in an attempt to keep them from gathering news. This heavy-handed business isn’t chilling, it’s just plain cold.

It also may well be unconstitutional. In my reading, the First Amendment prohibition against “abridging the freedom . . . of the press” should rule out secretly obtaining two months’ worth of the personal and professional phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors, including calls to and from the main AP phone number at the House press gallery in the Capitol. Yet this is what the Justice Department did.

The unwarranted snooping, which was revealed last week, would be troubling enough if it were an isolated incident. But it is part of a pattern that threatens to redefine investigative reporting as criminal behavior.

 

Labor unions turning on Obamacare

 

A piece from The Hill today says labor unions are not too happy with Obamacare.  No word yet on whether these unions are racist…stay tuned.

Months after the president’s reelection, a variety of unions are publicly balking at how the administration plans to implement the landmark law. They warn that unless there are changes, the results could be catastrophic.

The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) — a 1.3 million-member labor group that twice endorsed Obama for president – is very worried about how the reform law will affect its members’ healthcare plans.

Last month, the president of the United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers released a statement calling “for repeal or complete reform of the Affordable Care Act”…

…In a new op-ed published in The Hill, UFCW President Joe Hansen homed in on the president’s speech at the 2009 AFL-CIO convention. Obama at the time said union members could keep their insurance under the law, but Hansen writes “that the president’s statement to labor in 2009 is simply not true for millions of workers.”

 

Chris Matthews: interest in Obama’s multiple scandals due to racism and white supremacy

 

Well, I have not heard this excuse in at least ten minutes.  Racism…that has to be it…why else would anyone care that the President, his administration and the IRS are involved in multiple scandals, involving intimidation, harassment, cover-ups, and deaths?  Has to be because of racism.

 

The problem is there are people in this country, maybe ten percent, I don’t know what the number, maybe twenty percent on a bad day, who want this president to have an asterisk next to his name in the history books, that he really wasn’t president. … They want to be able to say, well, he didn’t really have that batting average; he really wasn’t the first African American president; he really didn’t do health care; he really didn’t kill bin Laden. There’s an asterisk, and they have been fighting for that, the people like Donald Trump, since day one. They can’t stand the idea that he’s president, and a piece of it is racism. Not that somebody in one racial group doesn’t like somebody in another racial group, so what? It’s the sense that the white race must rule, that’s what racism is, and they can’t stand the idea that a man who’s not white is president. That is real, that sense of racial superiority and rule is in the hearts of some people in this country. Not all conservatives, not even all right-wingers, but it always comes through with this birther crap and these other references and somehow trying to erase ObamaCare, erase his record in history, and a big part of it is bought into by people like John Boehner, who’s not a bad guy, but he knows the only way he can talk to the hard right is talk their language.

I really wonder sometimes if people like Chris Matthews actually believe this nonsense or does he just know his role and what is expected of him if he wants to have a show on MSNBC?

 

 

Killing eagles is bad…sometimes

 

Unbelievable piece from Hot Air :

When it comes to enforcing the environmental laws concerning certain species of federally-protected birds, the Obama administration and their environmentalist allies have been impressively diligent in charging oil companies, coal plants, and power stations when said birds get tangled up in their power lines or drown in their waste pits; in the past five years, prosecutors have managed to wrack up tens of millions of dollars in fines and settlements from various businesses, including oil and gas companies, for these egregious offenses.

When it comes to winds farms, however, the federal government has been oddly negligent in enforcing these same laws — which is weird, seeing as how the American wind industry kills hundred of thousands of birds every single year. The Associated Press reports that the Obama administration has yet to levy any fines or file any suits against wind companies, and that Congress is picking up on the rather glaring enforcement discrepancy:

It’s a double standard that some Republicans in Congress said Tuesday they would examine after an Associated Press investigation revealed that the Obama administration has shielded the wind power industry from liability and helped keep the scope of the deaths secret…

More than 573,000 birds are killed by the country’s wind farms each year, including 83,000 hunting birds such as hawks, falcons and eagles, according to an estimate published in March in the peer-reviewed Wildlife Society Bulletin.

IRS targeting Tea Party groups “has more legs politically in 2014 than Benghazi” says NBC’s Chuck Todd

 

From Jim Geraghty at National Review:  “Scarborough, Todd Wonder Why Democrats Are Shrugging at IRS Scandal”

TODD: Why aren’t there more Democrats jumping on this? This is outrageous no matter what political party you are, that an arm of the government, maybe it’s a set of people just in one office but, mind you, that one office was put in charge of dealing with these 501c4s and things like that.

SCARBOROUGH:  Why didn’t the president say something on Friday afternoon?

TODD:  I don’t know. Maybe they were distracted by Benghazi. Maybe they made the decision they didn’t want it to be about healthcare. I raised this question – where is the sense of outrage? And the only pushback was, Jay Carney spoke about this at the press briefing and he was pretty strong. I have to say it didn’t sound very strong to me. I don’t know if the White House realizes. I think this story has more legs politically in 2014 than Benghazi.

More here.

 

 

White House has meeting with media allies on Benghazi fiasco – off the record

 

Politico reports that the Obama White House held an off the record meeting with their political strategists the media this afternoon to discuss the Benghazi  investigation.

The White House held a “deep background” briefing with reporters on Friday afternoon to discuss recent revelations about the Benghazi investigation, sources familiar with the meeting tell POLITICO.

The meeting was conducted on “deep background,” according to White House spokesman Josh Earnest, but sources told POLITICO that the existence of the meeting was “off the record.” The meeting began around 12:45 p.m. and postponed the daily, on-the-record White House press briefing until mid-afternoon.

The session was announced to reporters in the wake of an ABC News report showing that White House and State Dept. officials were involved in revising the now-discredited CIA talking points about the attack on Benghazi.

Emails obtained by ABC News show that State Dept. spokesperson Victoria Nuland requested that the CIA scrub references to an Al Qaeda-linked group, which, Nuland told White House officials, “could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings.”

Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly referred to the meeting as “off the record.” Though the existence of the meeting was off the record, it was conducted on “deep background.” 

UPDATE (3:05 p.m.): I asked Earnest to explain the meaning of “deep background,” as defined by the White House, for my readers. He emails:

Deep background means that the info presented by the briefers can be used in reporting but the briefers can’t be quoted.

Hmmm.  Someone must be on to something if the Obama White House is calling a special meeting with their comrades in the media.  Look for the media to all be singing the same tune by the time the Sunday shows roll around.

 

 

 

“Benghazi hearings in the Mirror Universe”

 

John Hayward has an excellent piece over at Red State titled Benghazi hearings in the Mirror Universe on the testimony by whistle-blowers in the Benghazi hearings on Wednesday of this week, and the attempts by the media to bury it.

It’s amazing to watch the media bury yesterday’s explosive testimony on Benghazi.  Just imagine for a moment that today is the day after a veteran career diplomat – the top man on the ground in Libya after the murder of the ambassador – testified that a Republican administration told him not to cooperate with Democrat congressional investigators, shook him up with a menacing phone call from the top political “fixer” for a Secretary of State widely viewed as a leading 2016 presidential candidate, demoted him under cloudy circumstances so they could portray him as “disgruntled”… and then spent eight months loudly boasting of their enthusiastic, transparent cooperation with Congress.  Imagine the media coverage – from the glowing profile of Gregory Hicks as a new whistleblower demigod in the pantheon of good-government heroes, to the hows of outrage that noble truth-seeking Congressmen were thwarted by the machinations of a shadowy White House bent on preserving its electoral viability, no matter the cost to public transparency or national security…

…Remember how reporters were grazing through the rubble and finding important documents, such as Ambassador Christopher Stevens’ journal, while the FBI was still bottled up in Tripoli?  Remember how the Administration kept falsely claiming the “crime scene” was under control, even though it wasn’t?  You sure would remember that if Barack Obama was a Republican, because the media would be busy stitching together montages of all the false Administration claims and comparing them to Hicks’ testimony from yesterday…

…In the Mirror Universe where this is a Republican scandal, you can bet your bottom dollar that the media would never have stopped asking why Stevens was so poorly defended, and why there was no plan in place to mount an effective rescue operation.  Instead, they let Obama apologists get away with talking as if they knew exactly how long the attack would last…

…Above all, a Republican administration’s claims of “transparency” would lie in ruins after yesterday’s hearings.  That’s an incontrovertible conclusion for anyone who paid the slightest attention to the testimony.  There were very specific allegations about Administration interference with congressional investigations, and no one has attempted to refute them.  There is no way to square this whistleblower testimony with the notion of an honest White House and Secretary of State working with Congress and keeping the American people informed.  That would be a huge story for the media today, if they were not primarily interested in ignoring all that bombshell testimony, so they can push the Obama-approved line that Benghazi is old news.  Just try to imagine them performing such a service for a Republican president.

It is amazing to watch these people in the media who claim to be “journalists” give cover to a Democrat Administration in a scandal that involved the death of 4 Americans, a cover up, intimidation of whistle-blowers and a continuous misleading of the American people.  We’ve gotten to the point in our country where the only time that Democrats, or the media, cares when someone dies is when it helps them politically (think Sandy Hook).  But, in defense of the media, it is probably how most of them are taught at “Journalism” School.

Rule #1:  if it harms a Democrat, it’s not news

 

 

 

 

Why Doesn’t Obama Fly the Parents of Chicago Murder Victims to Washington to Lobby for Gun Control?

 

Chicago ended 2012 with a total of 506 homicides.  That means that there are 506 families out there who lost a loved one: a son, daughter, brother, sister, mother or father.  Even more bad news:  in the first week of 2013 Chicago was already on pace to surpass 2012’s horrific number.

Only eight days into 2013, Chicago is already on a grim pace to not only continue the bloody trend of an elevated homicide rate — but to surpass it.

NBC Chicago pointed out that, as of Sunday, 12 people had been murdered in Chicago this year, which, at a rate of two a day, but the city on a pace for a devastating 730 homicides, higher than any one-year murder total in Chicago since 1997.

A story from June of last year states that fatal shootings in Chicago outnumber the US troops killed in Afghanistan:

Since the start of the year, 144 U.S. soldiers have been killed on duty in Afghanistan, while at least 240 people have been shot dead in Chicago.

Over the course of the war since 2001, around 2,000 U.S. troops have died in Afghanistan compared to the 5,000 gunfire victims in the Illinois city.

After seeing that the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims were flown on Air Force One along with the President of the United States to lobby Congress on gun control legislation, I wondered why the families of the Chicago victims were not given the same treatment? The Sandy Hook shootings were awful, but so is what is happening in Chicago.

Eleven parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook massacre will fly to Washington with the president on Air Force One tonight following Obama’s speech in Hartford, Conn.

They are coming to Washington to lobby Congress this week to pass measures to combat gun violence.

“There is no more effective advocate than a parent who has lost a child,” a senior administration official tells ABC News.

Can’t disagree with that, but I’m still curious why the parents in Chicago were never given the same treatment.

 

 

More “Change” We Can Believe in from Obama: Big Donors Get Plum Posts

Here is a bit of a reminder of what Obama claimed he was going to do back when he was a candidate.  It appeared as though he was well aware of the problem of money in politics.  He was going to “Change” all of that and do away with “business as usual” in Washington D.C.

 

Yeah, not so much:

President Obama announced Thursday that Penny Pritzker, an ex-national finance chair for the Obama campaign, will lead the Commerce Department. If confirmed, she will be the richest cabinet secretary in U.S. history. The president already skipped over her for the nod once.

The New York Times said of Pritzker in 2008, “Ms. Pritzker’s family is renowned for finding ways to avoid paying taxes on its wealth. The Pritzkers were pioneers in using tax loopholes to shelter their holdings from the internal revenue service, and many of their dealings have never been made public.”…

…On Wednesday, the president named another campaign bundler, Tom Wheeler to head up the Federal Communications Commission. Wheeler spent two decades as a lobbyist representing the two industry groups that represented every single cable company, and every single cellphone provider.

All of this comes after Obama turned his campaign team into a new lobbying, advocacy and fund-raising organization called Organizing for Amercia (OFA) that has reportedly been selling access with the President in return for large donations of at least $500,000.  A move that has even drawn criticism from left-wing groups.

The president of the United States should close down his new lobbying, advocacy and fund-raising organization, says a left-wing group that has long sought to reduce the role of donations in politics.

“If President Obama is serious about his often-expressed desire to rein in big money in politics, he should shut down Organizing for Action and disavow any plan to schedule regular meetings with its major donors,” said Bob Edgar, president of Common Cause, which helped pass the 2002 campaign finance law.

“With its reported promise of quarterly presidential meetings for donors and ‘bundlers’ who raise $500,000, Organizing For Action apparently intends to extend and deepen the pay-to-play Washington culture that Barack Obama came to prominence pledging to end,” Edgar said.

I guess the moral of the story is that you shouldn’t be President if you are rich, out of touch and take advantage of tax loopholes, but you CAN be appointed to Obama’s cabinet.

Watching Obama become what he once despised has been very interesting to watch.