Tag: washington dc

The real question is, are Democratic politicians done with Barack Obama?

I don’t often do this, but I feel that this Hill article about how much Barack Obama hates Washington, wants to leave it, and doesn’t like hanging out with all the other Democrats is missing a couple of key paragraphs at the end.  I intend to now provide them.

Barack Obama’s detachment from, and disdain of, Washington DC reportedly concerns many Democrats, particularly those running for re-election this year.  While the President continues to raise funds for the Democratic party, it is unclear how much campaigning he plans to do for at-risk candidates – or, indeed, how much campaigning those candidates want him to do.  As former Democrat (and current online Republican contributor to a major conservative website) remarked, “Going into 2010 Barry’s best assurance to candidates was that they had him in their corner.  So they [Democratic Members of Congress] trusted him.  And they got clubbed like baby harp seals for it.  Now the President’s best assurance will be, what? That he’ll stay holed up in Washington?”

Polling suggests that this may be a smart strategy.  Today’s RCP average shows that President Obama has a favorable/unfavorable rating of 42/54.  By comparison, former President George W. Bush’s comparable daily numbers in 2006 were 38/57: while President Obama enjoys a slightly higher amount of regard, many question whether his presence on the campaign trail in battleground states would be more welcomed by Democrats, or Republicans.  This may add some poignancy to the President’s choice to stay out of the limelight: it may be the best chance the Democratic party has to retain control of the Senate.

…or something like that.

Via Instapundit.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Why the Senate should consider maybe doing this defunding #Obamacare thing.

Because there’s a really, really, really bad warning sign coming out of DC.

Just days away from launch, the District of Columbia’s health marketplace is announcing a pretty significant delay.

While the D.C. Health Link will launch a Web site on October 1, shoppers will not have access to the their premium prices until mid-November. The delay comes after the District marketplace discovered “a high error rate” in calculating the tax credits that low- and middle-income people will use to purchase insurance on the marketplace.

The insurance marketplaces, if working as plan, are supposed to spit out an estimate for a tax credit after a shopper enters in some basic information about where she lives and how much she earns. In the District, that won’t happen next month. Instead, the eligibility determination will be made “off-line by experts” by early November.

Continue reading Why the Senate should consider maybe doing this defunding #Obamacare thing.

Washington DC’s Green Paint Vandal found?

Maybe:

Police have arrested a woman in the splattering of green paint inside two chapels at the Washington National Cathedral and are trying to determine if she has any connection to two similar incidents on the National Mall.

Police say 58-year-old [redacted] was arrested Monday inside the cathedral shortly after the paint was found and charged with defacing property. Assistant D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham said investigators were hoping to question her about the vandalism on the Mall, including at the Lincoln Memorial, but a language barrier was complicating those efforts.

The [East Asian] name redacted because if this is the vandal then she’s homeless and, on first glance, suffering from mental illness.  It’s looking unlikely that this was domestically[*] politically motivated, in other words.  Which, truth be told, is what I suspected; there isn’t an organized political group in America that would welcome the insane feces-storm that would have descended upon them if one of them was caught green-handed dumping paint on the Lincoln Memorial.  No, not even that one.  Or that one.  …Are you kidding?  That one would be the most terrified of all.

Moe Lane

[*It is possible that she’s a foreigner who doesn’t really get that things are done differently here.  Which is not incompatible with the ‘mental illness’ thing.]