obama administration

Obama administration gives $433m no-bid contract to Democratic donor.

The last time I checked, didn’t the Left call this sort of thing ‘crony capitalism?’

Over the last year, the Obama administration has aggressively pushed a $433-million plan to buy an experimental smallpox drug, despite uncertainty over whether it is needed or will work.

Senior officials have taken unusual steps to secure the contract for New York-based Siga Technologies Inc., whose controlling shareholder is billionaire Ronald O. Perelman, one of the world’s richest men and a longtime Democratic Party donor.

Continue reading Obama administration gives $433m no-bid contract to Democratic donor.

Obama administration: It’s not war, it’s Kinetic Military Action!

Consider the three-letter acronym that can be formed by that.

Background: our adventure in Libya is apparently the War That Dare Not Speak Its Name. At least, the White House seems absolutely, completely determined to avoid the ‘war’ word, to the point where administration officials actually used the laugh-out-loud weasel term ‘kinetic military action‘ to describe the situation. ‘Kinetic’ is definitely the buzzword in play, here: Defense Secretary Gates himself said that if our ~~ad hoc cobbling together of largely unrelated objectives and media-friendly visuals~~ plan works then “the level of kinetic activity should decline.”

You are about to see why Rush Limbaugh has a multimillion dollar talk radio empire that dominates its particular market, and I am an admittedly-amiable and reasonably creative guy blogging from home. Because this is prime stuff here (via Hot Air) coming from Rush:

RUSH: I swear, this is surreal. KMA, kinetic military activity has replaced WTF, (laughing) which is winning the future. I’m sure you thought it was something else. (laughing) Kick my — has replaced what the — Okay, so I guess we’re to assume it’s not a protest anymore. It’s a kinetic assembling action. It’s not a riot. It’s kinetic thuggery action. It’s not a vacation. It’s kinetic leisure action. It’s not golf. It’s kinetic ball striking action. It’s not dancing. It’s kinetic foot action. It’s not sex. It’s kinetic Lewinsky. (laughing) I’m not drunk. I’ve been engaging in kinetic adult beverage action. It’s not an election. It’s kinetic voting action. It’s not radio. It’s kinetic Limbaugh action. Whatever. Kinetic means motion. Military means armed forces. Action means motion. Kinetic action, moving motion. And these are the smartest people in the world.

Continue reading Obama administration: It’s not war, it’s Kinetic Military Action!

#rsrh Wednesday is Reporters Whine to Politico Day.

Well, I didn’t actually go and look to see if Wednesday has become the traditional day for stories where reporters complain – off the record – about how the White House treats them like not particularly bright children who need regular beatings*, but we do keep seeing them. I recommend reading it only for its amusement value: after all, if they lack the self-respect to stand up for themselves, why should the rest of us care?

Moe Lane

*If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say that the problem here is probably at the editorial level. Not that it ultimately matters which parts of print/television media are being the greater cowards.

Heedlessness Watch: White House Tweeter feed broken.

In the grand scheme of things, I suppose that this isn’t much of a much. Petty, unthinking, heedless, and completely indifferent to the historical record:

Barack Obama‘s Webheads are getting ready to launch a new Twitter feed for President Change. But the White House already had a Twitter account. It has disappeared down the memory hole.

Given the widespread belief that Obama invented the Internet, many will scoff at the idea that the Bush White House had a Twitter account. But it did — and the administration handed over twitter.com/thewhitehouse at noon on Inauguration Day, just like it did with the whitehouse.gov website. Google still has the old account, with Obama’s tweets, in its cache [ed. – In fact, as Mere Rhetoric notes, the actual material’s gone].

…but not the worst thing that this administration has managed to do so far. Still, a little annoying: I got used to having the grown-ups be in charge of running the country.

Crossposted to RedState.

Want a job with the White House? Try Monster.com!

…well, not quite yet, but give them time:

Obama administration works with headhunters to fill out key positions

The Obama administration has been working with some of the nation’s top headhunters to recruit candidates to join the executive branch.

Administration officials have privately expressed frustration that they are struggling to hire talented personnel for key slots across the federal government, noting President Obama’s tough restrictions on lobbyists working for him.

Over the last several months, Obama’s transition team and administration have had informal communications with major recruiters, including Korn/Ferry International, Russell Reynolds Associates and Heidrick & Struggles.

I suppose that I could really be mocking about this, but I shan’t. This is actually excellent news: after all, I presume that the companies listed above do credit checks of potential hires. It’ll be delightful to get some executive branch appointees who actually pay their taxes.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Government by polls.

Ben Smith tries to put this in terms of Obama being between Bush (who didn’t really care much about what the polls said*) and Clinton (who cared a great deal about what the polls said*):

He is polling more than Bush – a bit less than once a week for most of his young term, two people involved said.

Elements of Obama’s approach bear the hallmarks of message testing, like the introduction of the words “recovery” and “reinvestment” to rebrand the “stimulus” package, and aides said the polling has focused almost entirely on selling policy, not on measuring the president’s personal appeal.

A source familiar with the data said a central insight of more recent polling had been that Americans see no distinction between the budget and the popular spending measures that preceded it, and that the key to selling the budget has been to portray it as part of the “recovery” measures.

But Obama, though polling regularly, is no Clinton either. The 42nd president studied Penn’s polls with “hypnotic intensity,” the Washington Post once wrote. Obama leaves political guru David Axelrod to sift through the results.

…but there isn’t much daylight between going over the poll results yourself and having your guy do it for you. If Obama’s White House is polling multiple times a month, and policy is being changed because of that polling, then he’s running a government-by-polls. And we really should have a word for that sort of thing by now.

Continue reading Government by polls.