Tag: john boehner

#rsrh John Boehner teaches Barack Obama a valuable life lesson.

Do Not F*ck With The Speaker Of The House.

President Barack Obama on Wednesday agreed to unveil new jobs proposals in an address to Congress on September 8, bowing to pressure from Republicans, who objected to the original date set for his high-profile speech.

Obama’s long-awaited proposals could set the agenda in Washington for the coming months, but his preferred date of September 7 had an unpalatable political edge for the opposition party: Republican presidential candidates were scheduled to hold a televised debate on the same evening, at the same time.

Continue reading #rsrh John Boehner teaches Barack Obama a valuable life lesson.

President wishes to troll GOP debate.

I cannot BELIEVE that I had to write that out.

The basic gist of this is as follows: President Barack Obama has requested – please note that word – that he be permitted to address Congress about jobs in a special joint session next Wednesday evening at 8 PM. Unfortunately, the White House is apparently as self-aware about national events as is, say, a brain-damaged basset hound, because it unaccountably missed noticing that there was a major Republican debate scheduled for that date and time. One being hosted by a major news network (NBC) and online news site (Politico). Such an abject lack of intellectual curiosity about one’s surroundings – remember, it’s the White House itself which is claiming that they had not known about the conflict ahead of time – is perhaps not unexpected from this administration, but it’s certainly not what you would call seemly. Or adult. Indeed, calling it ‘adolescent’ defames teenagers.

Now, everybody here knows the truth – the White House is desperately trying to control the conversation about Obama’s performance to date, largely because if they don’t the conversation will be Barack Obama: Tedious Idiot, or Blithering Idiot? – but we’re expected to pretend otherwise. I shall not: and before I go any further, let me just note that there’s a reason why we have a minimum age requirement for the Presidency. It’s because the Founding Fathers wanted to keep children from running this country.

Alas. Continue reading President wishes to troll GOP debate.

#rsrh Speaker Boehner survives.

Roll Call titled this article “Boehner Threads a Needle,” and I think that they have the right of it.  If he had lost control of the debt ceiling process, Speaker Boehner would have been crippled for the rest of this term, and probably been out of the leadership cadre as soon as it could have been done without unnecessary embarrassment; as it is, the various factions of the GOP caucus have a pretty good idea of how far they can all push things before they run up against the Speaker of the House’s power, which is… considerable, in this country*.

Fortunately, this entire exercise should also give the Speaker an idea about how very, very seriously the Right is taking fiscal issues right now, too.  Given that Speaker Boehner would very much like to keep being Speaker Boehner, that’s all to the good.

Moe Lane

PS: I know that a lot of folks are unhappy about the final deal: not enough ground was recaptured.  True.  We didn’t liberate Paris on June 7, 1944, either… oh, sorry, violent rhetoric.  My bad.

*One reason why so few Speakers run for President; it’s almost as powerful a job and, apparently, often a lot more fun.

#rsrh QotD, Reluctant Props Given edition.

I hate giving the House Minority Leader credit for wit – hey, I’m a partisan hack, remember? – but this was pretty funny.

In an interview with ABC News’ Diane Sawyer, Pelosi said she will “absolutely” vote yes on the compromise package, even though she agreed with one colleagues’ characterization of it as a “Satan sandwich.”

“It probably is – with some Satan fries on the side,” Pelosi said.

Via Hot Air.

Moe Lane

PS: Speaker Boehner gets off a good one, too:

After the vote, which could come as early as tonight, where does the speaker expect to be tomorrow morning?

“Hopefully hiding somewhere,” he said.

#rsrh QotD, That Was MEAN Of You, @annalthouse edition.

Ann Althouse, while scoring the dueling press conferences last night (she figures Boehner won*), observed that compromise was a favorite theme in the President’s comments last night.  In fact, President “I won” Obama was and is very upset that we’re not embracing compromise, because that’s what this country is all about**.  So Ann muses:

I had to stop and think: Is America really about compromise? I thought of the Missouri Compromise. And the Three-Fifths Compromise. Maybe compromise is a dirty word for a good reason!

The more I look at that, the more enjoyably ruder that sentence gets.  As always, context is key…

Moe Lane

*Let me address this, actually.  If you’re a netrooter, you almost certainly thought that the President did better than Boehner did last night; and if you’re a VRWCer, you almost certainly thought that Boehner did better (we will now pause for the 5% or so contrarians from both sides to chime in with their contrarianism).  And, yes, even if you thought that the representative for your side sounded better you don’t necessarily believe him.

But that’s not the issue: the issue is what the folks who aren’t us or the netroots thought.  We’ll probably know that in a week or so.

**Which factoid should come as a bit of a shock to the Confederate, Old Imperial Japanese, Nazi, and Italian Fascist governments.  Not that you can actually check with any of them, of course – but, hey, you can always get an old ex-Soviet apparatchik drunk and ask him what he thinks about America’s willingness to compromise.

#rsrh Shocker: Speaker Boehner, Senate Minority Leader McConnell…

…apparently get along well.

I presume that the goal of the New York Times here is to try to get Republicans currently riled at McConnell also riled at Boehner, and vice versa.  Which is their privilege as an unofficial, yet obvious Democratic party house organ; but I fail to see why the obvious truth that the two men have decided to work together is such a surprise.  As Samuel Johnson once noted:

Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

…and God knows that four years of Democratic control of Congress and three of the Presidency have certainly done much to slowly strangle the fiscal life out of the country already.  That the two top Republicans in Congress have decided in response to act like adults and not like spoiled, petulant children is hardly newsworthy, is it?

(pause)

Don’t answer that.

Moe Lane

(Via Hot Air Headlines)

Speaker Boehner gets three minutes of President Obama’s time…

…for the trivial issue of trying to avoid a government shutdown this Friday. Unfortunately, it was only three minutes; nothing was accomplished in that time period, which means that we’re still on track for said government shutdown by the Democrats. And there probably won’t be any more meaningful negotiations today, mostly because President Obama has dinner plans tonight. Dinner plans involving Al Sharpton – because while keeping our soldiers paid and everything is all very well, what’s really important is the 2012 election.

(pause)

You know, there is an endemic conspiracy theory out there that suggests that the United States is actually run by a shadow government that operates all of our Presidents like puppeteers operating, well, puppets. I am here to tell you that this is obviously not the case; and I further submit that it is in some ways a shame that this is not the case – because if it were the case then we might have some faint hope of FINDING SOMEBODY WITH COMMAND AUTHORITY WHO WAS INTERESTED IN EXERCISING SOME.

Honestly, I don’t know why Obama is running for re-election. He obviously hates the job, and resents the rest of us for expecting him to actually do it.

Moe Lane (crosspost) Continue reading Speaker Boehner gets three minutes of President Obama’s time…

Four years for this moment.

Give John Boehner that damn gavel, Nancy.

You can watch it here.

Moe Lane

PS: Amusing factoid: despite having more members in her caucus for the 112th Congress than John Boehner did for the 111th, Nancy Pelosi got one less vote for Speaker in the 112th Congress than John Boehner did in the 111th.

The Hill: Voters find Democratic party more extremist.

This was one of their questions in their recent poll of ten open-seats (details here): 44% of likely voters think that the Democratic party is too extreme, as opposed to 37% who think that the GOP is too extreme.  According to this poll, in fact, 22% of Democrats think that their own party is too extreme (11% of Republicans think the same of their own party)… and the breakdown of independent voters is virtually identical (43/37) to that of likely voters.

It’s the one-in-five of Democrats that’s the most interesting: consider that the districts being surveyed are a pretty good mix of Red and Blue, but did not have much in the way of hyper-Blue urban areas.  What they’re surveying here are the suburban and mildly urban areas, where people feel perfectly safe in openly having Republican friends and where a GOP bumper sticker won’t get your car keyed.  And in those places Democratic… I believe that it’s called ‘branding’… is taking a bit of a a beating.  Why?  One argument is that it’s because ordinary, decent Democrats are noticing that their leadership is somewhat at odds with the regular party voter:

“It is a reflection that the faces of leadership of the Democrats in government are seen as very liberal faces: Reid, [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi [Calif.] and Obama,” [former GOP Congressman Vin Weber] said. “The leading faces of the Republican Party aren’t that well-known.”

Democratic Party strategists have tried to change that dynamic, working to raise the profile of House Republican Leader John Boehner (Ohio), who would be in line to replace Pelosi as Speaker in the event of a GOP victory in the House.

But that effort has shown limited success.

Continue reading The Hill: Voters find Democratic party more extremist.

#rsrh Boehner declares bacon tasty…

…water wet, and that President Obama needs to fire his economic team.  Only in Washington, DC would something that would be such a blindingly obvious statement anywhere else in America be the subject of a press conference – and only in Dizzy City would it be something that needs a press conference, because otherwise the self-appointed elites who run the government right now wouldn’t even perceive it.

I mean, seriously.  Of course Obama needs to fire his economic team.  They suck at their jobs.  They promised us a ‘mere’ 8% unemployment in exchange for an unprecedented stimulus package: and then they proceeded to botch said stimulus package and have now locked us into 9.N% unemployment for the foreseeable future.  Not to mention deficits that are hard to even contemplate in any sort of meaningful way.  And then there’s the small-business killing time bomb set to explode in next year’s tax hikes… I could go on.  So, yes, please fire these people, Mr. President.  As for their replacements?

Try a phone book.

Moe Lane

[UPDATE]: See also Andrew Malcolm, complete with a surprisingly (and inexplicably) apropos picture of meerkats.