Tag: barack obama

[BREAKING] Boehner to House GOP: Vote against the stimulus.

But, hey, remember: “I won.”

Or, as Heritage put it, “The Pelosi-Reid-Obama Debt Plan”. Anyway, Politico reports:

President Barack Obama is coming to the Capitol this afternoon to curry favor with congressional Republicans. But it appears GOP leaders have already made up their minds to oppose his $825 billion stimulus plan.

House Republican Leader John A. Boehner and his No. 2, Whip Eric Cantor, told their rank-and-file members Tuesday morning during a closed-door meeting to oppose the bill when it comes to the floor Wednesday, according to an aide familiar with the discussion. Boehner told members that he’s voting against the stimulus, and Cantor told the assembled Republicans that there wasn’t any reason for them to support the measure, according to another person in the room. Cantor and his whip team are going to urge GOP members to oppose it.

In a nod to the president, Boehner did point out that this is the third time that Obama has met with Republican leaders, compared with the zero meetings they’ve held with Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — a now-familiar refrain from Republicans in the House. But Obama’s diplomacy clearly isn’t buying any votes yet.

(H/T: Instapundit) Apparently, “I won.” counts as diplomacy these days. Continue reading [BREAKING] Boehner to House GOP: Vote against the stimulus.

Geez, the new Whitehouse.gov site is just plain *bad*.

Don’t they have people for this?

It was Mary Katherine Ham’s article that tipped me to the problem:

Barack Obama’s administration may be promising the “greatest ethical standard ever administered to an executive branch,” and increased transparency over his predecessor, but it seems to be forgoing at least one transparency practice that was routine in the Bush White House— transcripts of the daily press briefing.

It’s been four days since Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’ first (and widely panned) appearance before the White House press corps, but no transcript, summary, or video of the event has shown up on WhiteHouse.gov. The delay could be forgiven in a less tech-savvy bunch, but given the Obama team’s considerable online skill, the omission of the the transcript is clearly intentional.

The decision to withhold transcripts is not a departure from the Obama Team’s online posture during the campaign, and signals that’s exactly the posture they intend to take for the next four years. Team Obama got a lot of credit for being an active online presence, which indeed it was, but that presence was built for message control, not openness. (My.BarackObama, the campaign’s social networking platform, is a different story, but it was cordoned off from the official campaign material, which was pretty tightly controlled.)

Continue reading Geez, the new Whitehouse.gov site is just plain *bad*.

White House of the Gifted.

(Via Glenn Reynolds) Smoothness. Professionalism. Competence.

Fire alarms.

Shortly after 4 p.m., the stench of smoke began filtering back to the press booths in the White House.

[snip]

None other than Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton who — on his third day in the White House — was still having a little trouble working the door.

Trying to get into the briefing room from the outside, Burton inadvertently short circuited the electronic door opener, causing small plumes of smoke to fill into the inside of the briefing room.

Crossposted on RedState.

“I won.”

Indeed, you did.

No argument from me: you won.

In fact, let the record show that your official response to the GOP’s offer of assistance and advisement was “I won.”

So, it’s all yours. Your responsibility, your obligation, your reputation on the line. Not ours: yours.

Because, after all, you won.

Crossposted at RedState.

OK, folks: place your bets!

As we all know, the President decided to not Executive Order the Mexico City policy out of existence yesterday – can’t imagine why, at all, at all – but today is another day, and the betting is that he’ll get around to it Real Soon Now. So the real question is, when? Does he do it first thing in the morning and get it over with, or does he do it just in time for it to miss the Friday night news?

Hey, this is actually an important question: this is going to be the first thing he does in office that is guaranteed – absolutely, completely, and unquestionably – going to bother a significant hunk of the people who voted for him. How he handles it is going be… ah, diagnostic.

Moe Lane

PS: Notice that I’m doing President Obama the courtesy of assuming that he has at least as much spine as President Bill Clinton did.

PPS: That being said, if I was a betting man I’d be betting for somewhere around 4:45 PM.

Crossposted at RedState.

Liberal shocked, shocked! to find identity politics going on in the NY Senate pick.

Let the record show that I say the following without heat: I don’t think that I’ve ever met Robert Stein, and I certainly have nothing against him. But this plaintive question via (Hot Air) is a bit rich:

In Illinois, the future felon Rod Blagojevich appoints Roland Burris amid calls to retain the President’s seat for an African-American and now, with Caroline Kennedy gone, New York’s governor speaks publicly and privately about “the importance of selecting a woman to replace Mrs. Clinton.”

With the critical questions facing the Senate, when and how did substantive qualifications fall behind demographics in making choices for such high office?

The answer is “January of 2007,” which is of course the point where the Democratic Party took control of Congress. To evoke Fred Thompson / Admiral Painter, those guys don’t take a dump without reading a poll first.

Case in point:


Barack Obama Postpones Decision to Send Tax Dollars Overseas for Abortion

Continue reading Liberal shocked, shocked! to find identity politics going on in the NY Senate pick.

Geez, Netrooters: if all you wanted was another Bush…

…we actually had a spare.

We just assumed that you weren’t up for Jeb having his turn. But apparently this was a bad assumption on our part (original alert via MsUnderestimated):


…

Our bad, I guess.

Moe Lane

PS: How are your new unicorns settling in?

Well, one million at the Mall is nothing to be *ashamed* of.

That’s quite a lot, really.  Maybe not quite record-breaking, but still quite a lot:

A record crowd for inauguration? Hard to say

Reporting from Washington — More than 1 million spectators convened on the National Mall to watch Barack Obama take the oath of office Tuesday, but it was unclear if the crowd surpassed the record thought to have been set at Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1965 inauguration.

Though early estimates ranged as high as 2 million people, satellite images of Obama’s swearing-in suggested the crowd was probably about half that, said Clark McPhail, who has been analyzing crowds on the National Mall since the 1960s.

Not the three million or so that the consensus had come up with, but… passable. Very passable. Besides, tons of people watched it on television or online, no doubt.

After all, you wouldn’t actually have to do anything to see it that way.

Moe Lane

PS: How did Bush do? Bless your heart, if I didn’t care then, why should I care now? I’m sure that he had less than Obama did, if that’s what’s worrying you.

So, who will this tick off more?

I’m thinking that they may need to get the camera out for this one.

Obama Reaches Out for McCain’s Counsel

WASHINGTON — Not long after Senator John McCain returned last month from an official trip to Iraq and Pakistan, he received a phone call from President-elect Barack Obama.

As contenders for the presidency, the two had hammered each other for much of 2008 over their conflicting approaches to foreign policy, especially in Iraq. (He’d lose a war! He’d stay a hundred years!) Now, however, Mr. Obama said he wanted Mr. McCain’s advice, people in each camp briefed on the conversation said. What did he see on the trip? What did he learn?

[snip]

Over the last three months, Mr. Obama has quietly consulted Mr. McCain about many of the new administration’s potential nominees to top national security jobs and about other issues — in one case relaying back a contender’s answers to questions Mr. McCain had suggested.

Mr. McCain, meanwhile, has told colleagues “that many of these appointments he would have made himself,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and a close McCain friend.

Continue reading So, who will this tick off more?

Paper Tiger Watch?

I have to disagree with Debra Saunders slightly, here. After discussing Bush’s administration – both the good and the bad – she concludes that history will favorably judge the outgoing President on what did not happen:

Osama bin Laden once told Time magazine that the U.S. withdrawal from Somalia after the murder of 18 U.S. troops on a humanitarian mission made him realize “more than before that the American soldier was a paper tiger and after a few blows ran in defeat.” Members of al-Qaida have told intelligence officials they never thought Washington would respond to the 9/11 attacks as ferociously as Bush responded. They expected a few bombs to be dropped, no boots on the ground, a swift withdrawal if casualties mounted — the usual short-attention span foreign policy that warped Lebanon, the Persian Gulf War, Somalia, the African embassy bombings and the attack on the destroyer Cole.

Bush showed America’s enemies a country that does not retreat in fear, does not bomb with impunity, and most important, does not desert civilians or foreign governments that trust us. If you think that doesn’t matter, look at Libya, which disarmed its weapons program. And see how much easier Obama’s presidency will be because Bush kept the faith.

Osama bin Laden may live, most likely quivering in a cave. And no one thinks America is a paper tiger anymore.

The problem is the word “anymore.” Continue reading Paper Tiger Watch?