The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news.

Remember how families of a dead soldier had "unlimited moral authority" to sit outside of Bush's ranch for years?

So much window dressing.

If it is a Democrat in the White House, then who cares?

Father of Benghazi victim calls Hillary "scum."

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news...

The Democrats refuse to talk about the poor and the unemployed.

Obviously, if a Republican in the White House, this would be evidence that they were heartless and out of touch with the concerns of Americans.

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is no bad news.

Investor's Business Daily provides a snapshot of Obama's record three years into his administration, and one which contradicts the media narrative:

The Obama administration recently created a new White House post charged with rapidly responding to unfavorable stories. They could have spared the taxpayers $72,500, since the mainstream press is already doing that job free of charge.


A case in point is the media's rapid and fierce response to Mitt Romney's claim that President Obama's economic policies have made the country worse off. Rather than investigate the claim, they've made it their mission to debunk it.

Reporters are challenging Romney at every stop, demanding that he square his talking point with the fact that, gosh, GDP is growing and the number of workers with jobs seems to be growing, too. And, look, the stock market is higher than when Obama took office. And so, too, are corporate profits. What right does he have to make such outlandish claims?

But — can you believe it? — Romney won't stop! CBS News' latest dispatch even complained in the headline that "Romney repeats disputed charge, says again that Obama made recession worse." Sure, they noted, the economic numbers "aren't stellar" but they "clearly paint a picture that shows improvement from a very weak starting point." So there.

To be sure, Romney muddied his message a bit, seeming to backtrack at one point in response to a reporter challenging his claim. And, to be completely accurate, Obama hasn't made the recession worse, since it was almost over by the time he got into office and before any of his policies had a chance to make a real impact.

But it's clear he's made the recovery worse. And there are, in fact, many economic indicators that are demonstrably worse since Obama took office. Here are a few we've noted in this space before:

• There are 2 million fewer private-sector jobs now than when Obama was sworn in, and the unemployment rate is 1.5 percentage points higher.

• There are now more long-term unemployed than at any time since the government started keeping records.

• The number of Americans on food stamps has climbed 37%.

• The Misery Index (unemployment plus inflation) is up 62%.

• And the national debt is about 40% higher than it was in January 2009.

In fact, reporters who bother to look will discover that Obama has managed to produce the worst recovery on record.

By this point in the Reagan recovery after the 1981-82 recession, for example, unemployment had been knocked down to 7.4% from a peak of 10.8%, and quarterly GDP growth averaged a screaming 7%.

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news....

...could you imagine the news stories if there was a Republican in the White House?

33 Shocking Facts Showing the Economic Downturn Since Obama Became President.

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news...

CBS and NBC again refuse to criticize Obama after ISIS captures Ramadi.

CBS and NBC continued their refusal on Monday evening to criticize the Obama administration’s handing of Iraq and so-called policy on ISIS as the Islamic terror group seized control of Ramadi over the weekend. 

 While those two networks continued to spin for the White House, ABC went in the other direction (albeit slightly) by providing a blunt critique of the Obama administration for “painting far too rosy a picture of how this war is going for far too long.” 

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news...

...not even when the President uses "McCarthyite" tactics to intimidate political donors to his opponent:

Try this thought experiment: You decide to donate money to Mitt Romney. You want change in the Oval Office, so you engage in your democratic right to send a check.

Several days later, President Barack Obama, the most powerful man on the planet, singles you out by name. His campaign brands you a Romney donor, shames you for "betting against America," and accuses you of having a "less-than-reputable" record. The message from the man who controls the Justice Department (which can indict you), the SEC (which can fine you), and the IRS (which can audit you), is clear: You made a mistake donating that money.

Are you worried?

Richard Nixon's "enemies list" appalled the country for the simple reason that presidents hold a unique trust. Unlike senators or congressmen, presidents alone represent all Americans. Their powers—to jail, to fine, to bankrupt—are also so vast as to require restraint. Any president who targets a private citizen for his politics is de facto engaged in government intimidation and threats. This is why presidents since Nixon have carefully avoided the practice.

Save Mr. Obama, who acknowledges no rules. This past week, one of his campaign websites posted an item entitled "Behind the curtain: A brief history of Romney's donors." In the post, the Obama campaign named and shamed eight private citizens who had donated to his opponent. Describing the givers as all having "less-than-reputable records," the post went on to make the extraordinary accusations that "quite a few" have also been "on the wrong side of the law" and profiting at "the expense of so many Americans."

These are people like Paul Schorr and Sam and Jeffrey Fox, investors who the site outed for the crime of having "outsourced" jobs. T. Martin Fiorentino is scored for his work for a firm that forecloses on homes. Louis Bacon (a hedge-fund manager), Kent Burton (a "lobbyist") and Thomas O'Malley (an energy CEO) stand accused of profiting from oil. Frank VanderSloot, the CEO of a home-products firm, is slimed as a "bitter foe of the gay rights movement."

These are wealthy individuals, to be sure, but private citizens nonetheless. Not one holds elected office. Not one is a criminal. Not one has the barest fraction of the position or the power of the U.S. leader who is publicly assaulting them.

And:

The real crime of the men, as the website tacitly acknowledges, is that they have given money to Mr. Romney. This fundraiser of a president has shown an acute appreciation for the power of money to win elections, and a cutthroat approach to intimidating those who might give to his opponents.

He's targeted insurers, oil firms and Wall Street—letting it be known that those who oppose his policies might face political or legislative retribution. He lectured the Supreme Court for giving companies more free speech and (falsely) accused the Chamber of Commerce of using foreign money to bankroll U.S. elections. The White House even ginned up an executive order (yet to be released) to require companies to list political donations as a condition of bidding for government contracts. Companies could bid but lose out for donating to Republicans. Or they could quit donating to the GOP—Mr. Obama's real aim

I used to think that the answer to the issue of political corruption was to require that all donations be made public, but given the Left's endless capacity for blacklisting and public-calumny, I'm beginning to think that the secrecy of the polling place may need to be extended to other parts of the political process.

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news...

...such as the fact that the President ordered a Tomahawk missile attack on civilians and is personally involved in jailing a journalist who reported on the attack.

Glen Greenwald seems to be the only leftist interested in what the Noble Peace Prize winner is doing:

Jeremy Scahill, The Nation‘s national security correspondent, is easily one of America’s best and most intrepid journalists. He spends his time in dangerous places in order to uncover what the U.S. Government is doing around the world. He often produces vital scoops that, during the Obama presidency, are — for reasons often recounted here — largely ignored by the American establishment media and both political parties. In July of last year, he returned from Mogadishu and documented the Obama administration’s maintenance and proxy operation of secret CIA-run prisons in Somalia of the type that caused so much controversy during the Bush administration and which Obama supporters like to claim the President ended, and last month he returned from tribal regions in Yemen and detailed how U.S. civilian-killing drone strikes (along with its support for Yemeni despots) are the single most important cause fueling Al Qaeda’s growth in that country. But his newest article – describing President Obama’s personal, direct role in ensuring the ongoing imprisonment of a Yemeni journalist – may be his most important one yet; even for those inured to the abuses of the Obama administration, it’s nothing short of infuriating.

And:

Despite that important journalism — or, more accurately, because of it — Shaye is now in prison, thanks largely to President Obama himself. For the past two years, Shaye has been arrested, beaten, and held in solitary confinement by the security forces of Saleh, America’s obedient tyrant. In January, 2011, he was convicted in a Yemeni court of terrorism-related charges — alleging that he was not a reporter covering Al Qaeda but a mouthpiece for it — in a proceeding widely condemned by human rights groups around the world. “There are strong indications that the charges against [Shaye] are trumped up and that he has been jailed solely for daring to speak out about US collaboration in a cluster munitions attack which took place in Yemen,” Philip Luther, Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa, told Scahill. The Yemen expert, Johnsen, added: “There is no publicly available evidence to suggest that Abdulelah was anything other than a journalist attempting to do his job.”

Shaye’s real crime is that he reported facts that the U.S. government and its Yemeni client regime wanted suppressed. But while the imprisonment of this journalist was ignored in the U.S, it became a significant controversy in Yemen. Numerous Yemeni tribal leaders, sheiks and activist groups agitated for his release, and in response, President Saleh, as the Yemeni press reported, had a pardon drawn up for him and was ready to sign it. That came to a halt when President Obama intervened. According to the White House’s own summary of Obama’s February 3, 2011, call with Saleh, “President Obama expressed concern over the release of Abd-Ilah al-Shai.” The administration has repeatedly refused to present any evidence that Shaye is anything other than a reporter, and this is what State Department spokesperson Beth Gosselin told Scahill in response to his story...

Via Mark Shea.

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that is never any bad news... ...such as that Afghanistan has turned into "Obama's Vietnam." James Geraghy's "Morning Jolt" offers this:

Chalk me up as one of those folks increasingly wary about our involvement in Afghanistan. The problem is not that our cause isn't just or the Taliban doesn't deserve every bit of ordinance we drop on them. But I just find myself wondering what we'll achieve in year twelve that we haven't achieved in years one through eleven. If we had an ally we could completely trust, the entire situation would look different. But as the war continues, our "ally" looks less and less trustworthy. At the end of August, when the press was obsessing over Todd Akin and whether Clint Eastwood had embarrassed himself at the Republican convention, there was this other news story developing halfway around the world:

Rogue Afghan soldiers and police turning their weapons on their allies are now the leading cause of death for NATO troops. On Aug. 28 a man wearing an Afghan army uniform opened fire on Australian soldiers in the southern province of Uruzgan, killing three and wounding two. That attack brought to 15 the total number of NATO personnel killed in so-called "green-on-blue" assaults in August -- and raises serious doubts about the alliance's war strategy, which calls for close cooperation between foreign and Afghan troops as the Afghans gradually assume responsibility for their own security. Of the other 35 international troops who died in Afghanistan this month, 12 were killed by Improvised Explosive Devices and nine died in helicopter crashes. Insurgent gunfire and a suicide bomber accounted for the remaining fatalities.

Marine Corps Gen. John Allen, commander of NATO's International Security Assistance Force, told Danger Room he didn't know why the Afghan troops turned their weapons on their foreign allies. He implied the "sacrifices associated with fasting" during the the Muslim holy month of Ramadan might have played a role -- then quickly qualified the remark, saying Ramadan wasn't exclusively the problem. In any event, "there is an erosion of trust that has emerged from this," Allen said in a separate interview. In a "normal" media and political environment, this would be a huge deal, with less focus upon which lawmaker or party should be blamed than a national debate on the more basic questions: 1) Is our mission in Afghanistan worth the price we're playing? 2) Is our mission achievable with rate of violent betrayal on the part of the Afghan forces we're seeing? 3) If we do believe that our mission is necessary, then how do we ensure the safety of our troops and weed out the infiltrators within the Afghan forces? If this were occurring under a Republican president, the declaration of defeat and comparisons to Vietnam would be loud, incessant, shrill and ubiquitous. Because this is occurring under a Democratic president, you get intermittent coverage -- the media checks the boxes, but there's no steady drumbeat, no newsweekly cover pieces, no hour-long specials on the cable networks, few columns in the Washington Post and New York Times about it. We may cynically conclude that there's no real pro-Obama or anti-GOP spin that can be put on this story -- there's no easily discernible angle to advance the cause of the left -- and so the story doesn't quite disappear but it just bobs up and down every now and then. I mention this because it happened again this weekend:

Four U.S. troops were killed Sunday near a remote NATO installation in southern Afghanistan when a member of the Afghan security forces opened fire on them, military officials said. On Saturday, an Afghan gunman thought to belong to the local police killed two British soldiers in southern Helmand province. The six casualties brought to 51 the number of coalition forces -- most of them Americans -- killed by their Afghan partners this year.

In case you're wondering, President Obama did offer a comment on this in mid-August. Nothing wrong with his statement, but not many specifics, just a general sense of "we're working on it":

"Obviously we've been watching with deep concern these so-called green-on-blue attacks," Obama said during a surprise appearance before the White House press corps. "We are already doing a range of things, and we're seeing some success when it comes to better counterintelligence, making sure that the vetting process for Afghan troops is stronger. And we've got what's called the Guardian Angel program, to make sure that our troops aren't in isolated situations that might make them more vulnerable. But obviously we're going to have to do more, because there has been an uptick over the last 12 months on this."

Judging by what we've seen in recent weeks, that "range of things" aren't really having success. There's room for a much more complicated story than "Obama stinks" or "the Afghans stink," but the media has to set out to tell those stories. But the desire to reduce every development in the news to "here's the latest reason why our preferred candidate rocks and your candidate stinks" means that a) certain stories get ignored or downplayed and b) something like Romney's reaction to attacks on our embassy are treated as 20 times as important as the actual attacks themselves.

Apres moi, le deluge.

Well, like I always say, the nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news.

Nope, the bad news is being saved up for the next president.

//Because of DC media’s nerd-prom infatuation at the thought of being a part, any part, of this socially cool West Wing Presidency, we have to turn to other sources in calling out this ridiculous clipboard hashtag foreign policy. Earlier this year in a brief appearance during Jon Stewart’s Night of Too Many Stars, and much to the horror of the crowd, stand up comedian Bill Burr tore into Michelle Obama over the White House’s penchant for doing nothing to stop these events except guilt-shaming us with puppydog eyes:

“She’s sitting there holding up those hashtags, Bring Back Our Girls.  Remember that hashtag #BringBackOurGirls? That blew my mind, like, why are you showing me that? I’m a stand up comedian. Like what am I going to do to get back the girls? Why don’t you look across the dinner table — you see that guy? That is the Leader Of The Free World. Tell him to pick up a phone, call some Navy SEALs and solve it….what am I going to do? Show up with a sharpened mic stand? HEY EVERYONE MICHELLE TOLD ME TO BRING THEM BACK”//

A nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news...

...can you imagine the howls of outrage 2017 when there is a Republican in the White House and the media discovers this?

THE DISASTER OF OBAMANOMICS, IN TWO CHARTS

Apologists for the Obama administration sometimes argue that the nation’s declining rate of labor force participation is largely a function of baby boomers retiring from the labor force. Unfortunately, this is not the case. This chart, prepared by the Senate Budget Committee, pretty much says it all. An unprecedented number of men–one in six–between the ages of 25 and 54, what should be their prime earning years, are either unemployed or out of the work force entirely. One in eight, the highest proportion since record-keeping began in 1955, are out of the labor force:

Another 2.9 million men in the 25-54 age group haven’t given up–they are still in the labor force–but are currently unemployed. There are 61.1 million men in the U.S. between 25 and 54, and currently, 10.2 million of them are not working. At all. This is 2.7 million more non-working men than in 2007, before the recession and the Obama non-recovery began:

At some point, we will have a better government and better economic policies. But the damage done to a generation of American men (and women too, of course) will not easily be undone. Those who missed a chunk of what should have been their most productive years, or departed the labor force entirely, will suffer from Obamanomics for the rest of their lives. The damage being done by our current, inept economic policies is literally incalculable.

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is no bad news...

...except on Fox News

Hot Air reports:

Not obligatory on our part, mind you, but apparently on Barack Obama’s part. Why he agreed to do an interview with Fox and Bill O’Reilly is anyone’s guess, because he clearly wasn’t there to answer questions. Instead, we got this strange dance where both men almost continually interrupted each other, and the President of the United States claiming that every problem in his administration could be blamed on Fox News.

Hey. if that’s true, why did Obama give Fox the interview? Apparently, Obama can’t fire anyone.

For instance, here’s part of the exchange about Benghazi, which was a terror attack despite the White House’s initial insistence that it was a demonstration that spun out of control:

O’REILLY:  – but I just want to say that they’re — your detractors believe that you did not tell the world it was a terror attack because your campaign didn’t want that out.

OBAMA:  Bill, think about…

O’REILLY:  That’s what they believe.

OBAMA:  – and they believe it because folks like you are telling them that.

O’REILLY:  No, I’m not telling them that.

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news...

...until the situation starts stinking like a decaying mackerel.

5 Big Stories that the Press will "Discover" After the Election.

Among other stories the media are likely to "discover" now that voters have made their decision:

• The economy really does stink. The press studiously ignored the ongoing economic catastrophe under Obama, while parading any "green shoot" they could find that suggested growth was around the corner.

Don't be surprised if, after the election, they start to notice that three years of subpar growth have left the middle class further behind and more mired in poverty, and created a vast pool of long-term unemployed.

• Massive debt and entitlement crises loom. Despite four straight years of $1 trillion-plus deficits and a national debt that now exceeds total GDP, the media largely treated the debt crisis with a collective yawn.

Ditto the looming bankruptcy of Medicare and Social Security. These crises are nevertheless real and will have to be dealt with soon, a fact the press will almost certainly acknowledge after Nov. 6.

• The debt ceiling limit is fast approaching. Another story that went largely unremarked this campaign is the fact that the country is approaching the new debt ceiling limit. The Treasury Dept. warned last week that it expects the government to reach its borrowing limit before the end of the year.

Congress and the White House will have to deal with that just as they're trying to avoid the fiscal cliff.

• ObamaCare isn't what it was cracked up to be. After two years of ignoring health reform's fundamental flaws, the press will likely admit that ObamaCare is fundamentally flawed.

Reports are sure to appear pointing out the law's lack of cost controls, its adverse impact on doctors and hospitals, and the fact that, after spending $1.76 trillion, it will still leave 30 million uninsured.

• Obama's deficit-cutting plan won't work. The press let the president get away with one of the biggest whoppers yet — that his tax hikes on "the rich" would be enough to pay for his spending binge and bring down the deficit $4 trillion.

Obama's own budget proved this wasn't the case. And after the election, you can bet the media will be "shocked" to find that his numbers didn't add up.

• Questions about Benghazi still demand answers. After almost two full months spent burying the Benghazi story, expect the mainstream press to wake up and notice that, as the Washington Post admitted in an editorial last Friday, "a host of unanswered questions"

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news.

If Romney were president.

//The news out of the Perpetual War on Terror is pretty grim these days. The US military knowingly but “accidentally” bombed a hospital in Afghanistan, killing 22 doctors and patients. Just days later, the president decided not to draw down troops in the country as previously planned, but will instead keep nearly 6,000 of our sons and daughters in the country until at least 2017 when his term ends. At the same time, the inner workings of the president’s drone war, including questionable intel, lax target timeframes, and horrifying collateral damage ratios, have been brought to light by a whistleblower.

But you’d be forgiven for not noticing any of this. While it has been reported in the news media, there has been almost no secondary public reaction. I think that’s entirely because of one factor: Barack Obama won the last election, not Mitt Romney. If Romney had been elected in 2012 and in the year before his reelection campaign had bombed a hospital, decided to keep troops in Afghanistan, and had details of his robot assassin program leaked, things would probably look a little different today.

If Romney were president right now, the White House would be surrounded by protesters and candlelight peace vigils night and day. Some would wave American flags, some would wave signs calling for impeachment, some would have pictures caricaturing the president as Hitler or an animal. They would chant “Not in our name!”, or “Bring them home!”, or “Hey ho, hey ho, Romney has got to go!”

If Romney were president, nightly news reports on CBS, NBC, and ABC would have regular features on war crimes, quagmires, and collateral damage. CNN would be wall-to-wall with team coverage of protests, interviews of bombing witnesses, and Anderson Cooper walking through rubble in full body armor.

If Romney were president, every political analyst left of Judge Napolitano would be fretting over the war-weary public turning the upcoming election into a referendum against the president and his party. Vox and FiveThirtyEight would have maps showing how many Senate seats Republicans would lose because of the president’s sure-to-plummet approval rating. And then there’s MSNBC.//

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news...

...but when a Republican is in the White House, there is always bad news.

CBS News reports that improving economy may lead to more traffic fatalities.

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news.

But when a Republican is in the White House it's always bad news.

The NYT returns to work.

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news...

...such as when President Obama signs legislation permitting the president to become a dictator...

...because you know if Bush had done this, we would all be hearing about it.

Dick Morris writes:

With two presidential signatures- one on New Year's Day and the other issued last week - President Barack Obama has assumed the right to assert dictatorial powers over almost all aspects of the U.S. economy and to hold American citizens indefinitely without trial!

(This is not some "Space Aliens Invade" story. It is really happening).

On New Year's Day, Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to fund the Pentagon. But smuggled into its language is an explicit authority "allowing him to indefinitely detain [US] citizens" according to Jonathan Turley writing in the U.K. Guardian newspaper.

While the story was buried in the American media, Turley notes that it is "one of the greatest rollbacks of civil liberties" in American history.

At first, Obama "insisted that he signed the bill simply to keep funding for the troops." But, Turley reports, "that spin ended after sponsor Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) disclosed that it was the White House that insisted that there be no exception for [US] citizens in the indefinite detention provision."

Turley is critical of "reporters [who] continue to mouth the claim that this law only codifies what is already the law. That is not true.

The administration has fought any challenges to indefinite detention to prevent a true court review."

Read the full text of Turley's article at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/02/ndaa-historic-assault-american-liberty

Perhaps even more terrifying is the executive order President Obama signed on Friday, March 16 giving him vast powers to control every aspect of the U.S. economy in the event of war or even during a peacetime "emergency." Edwin Black, writing for the liberal-oriented Huffington Post, says that the order "may have quietly placed the United States on a war preparedness footing" possibly in anticipation of "an outbreak of war between Israel, the West, and Iran."

Read the full text of Black's article at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/edwin-black/obama-national-defense-resources-preparedness_b_1359715.html

The Order entitled "National Defense Resources Preparedness" gives the president the power "to take control of all civil energy supplies, including oil and natural gas, control and restrict all civil transportation," according to Black. It also even allows a draft "in order to achieve both the military and non-military demands of the country."

Obama's order would be effective both during times of war and times of other emergencies. It says the purpose of the order is to assure that "the United States [has] an industrial and technological base capable of meeting national defense requirements and capable of contributing to the technological superiority of its national defense equipment in peacetime and in times of national emergency." (Emphasis added)

The far reaching order authorizes the president "in the event of a potential threat to the security of the United States, to take actions necessary to ensure the availability of adequate resources and production capability, including services and critical technology, for national defense requirements."

Likely the president already has most of the enumerated powers as part of his role as commander in chief. So, why the order right now?

Black speculates that it is related to the tensions over Iran's nuclear program. Is the president reminding big oil that he would take over their industry in the event of war? Or is Obama equipping himself with vast powers to be used even in peacetime as a result of whatever he decides is a "national emergency." Could the rise in gas prices constitute such an "emergency?" Is the issuance of this order right now a shot across the bow of oil companies to get them to go easy on oil prices? Where are we? Stalinist Russia?

In any case, these two presidential signatures - one on a law and the other on an order - together constitute a massive power grab totally unsuited to a democracy. The idea that he would be preparing to assume dictatorial powers seems so remote that the mainstream media has not even reported on these initiatives. But they should give all of us pause.

Whether signed by a Republican or a Democrat, this sounds like a Bad Idea.

But you know that if a Republican had done it, at least there would be a lot of blow-back about it.

Which, honestly, would be a Good Thing.

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news.

Jim Treacher writes about the irony of the Washington Post lauding the fact that in the Obama economy people are losing hope about things getting better:

It’s odd… You only read stories about how great it is to be poor, how empowering it is to settle for less, when a Democrat is president. If a Republican was in charge, would WaPo be doing stories about how awesome it is to live in a breadbox?

They’re just trying to prepare you for the inevitable crash. Their ideas don’t work and they know it, so now all they can do is try to make you think their failure is somehow a statement of principle. The dystopian post-Obama future depicted in Dan Simmons’ Flashback gets a little more plausible every minute.

Get ready for many more reminders from our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters in the media that we don’t know how good we’ve got it. And if we want to hang onto what little we have left, we’d better keep electing Democrats.

They think you’re stupid, America. And look how stunningly you just proved them right.
 

Update:

After checking out the Washington Post story, it's worse than Treacher says.

Compare the breathless prose of the article about "tiny houses" with the actual product, which resembles nothing so much as the kind of homes that seasonal agricultural workers live in during harvest season in the Central Valley.

Worse, the WaPo completely glides over the fact that the plan is to build these "Obama houses" in "vacant lots," i.e. property owned by other people.  So, the plan is for people to become "squatters," which has created all kinds of dysfunctions in the other European-style Socialist poverty paradises.The BBC reports:

Now there are far fewer forgotten and abandoned buildings in our cities, so some squatters have resorted to taking over private homes, temporarily left vacant while the owners are away. This rightly enrages our sense of fair play and provoked the government into action to outlaw squatting in residential buildings.

 That's right, in England, you could head out for your summer vacation and return home to find people had "occupied" your home in the brief time you were gone and you would be forced to go through a cumbersome process to regain your home that would take days to put into effect.  This blog post describes the process:

 have just one home, and obviously I am sometimes away for a few days, on holiday or staying with other people. If someone gets into it while I am away, and squats in it, I can get an order as a “displaced residential occupier”, and I can obtain, within a few days, an interim possession order (IPO) which will enable me to enter the premises at will. Any unlawful occupiers who refuse to leave within 24 hours of the granting of an IPO is committing a criminal offense. 

To me, that is insufficient. There doesn’t appear to be a deterrent against squatting in my house in the first place, (as long as I can’t prove they broke in themselves), just against staying there after I get an IPO. That is too late. Having had my house broken into and robbed in the past, I know that I don’t want anyone potentially defiling and contaminating my house for a minute, let alone the few days it would take to force them to leave. Who knows what damage and invasion of privacy they would do, especially in the 24 hours after they know they are being forced to leave?
 

There are arguments both ways about whether squatting should be criminalised (as it already is in Scotland):
 

I can understand arguments for making sensible use of long-term-empty property. But my position here is much simpler in scope: I want it to be a criminal offense for anyone to squat in my home. That may be sufficient to deter anyone from trying it, and so avoid all the problems that I would otherwise face until the squatters leave. It is roughly equivalent to saying (in some hypothetical country): “instead of it just being an offense not to hand goods back within a day of taking them, we are making it a criminal offense to take goods in the first place”. I suggest the latter deters theft, while the former wouldn’t.

“Entering” is far worse than “breaking”. Indeed, having someone squatting in my home for a day or so, with access to personal and private correspondence and other important things of little monetary value, would be far worse to me than having my most resell-able (and insured!) goods stolen. So the offense of “entering” (necessary for squatting), whether or not it can be proved to involve “breaking”, needs to be at least as serious as the crime of “breaking and entering”, at least for my home and others like it.
It is argued that it is rare for squatters to use a domestic property unless it has been empty for a significant time, implying that it is unlikely that squatters will use my house. But if it is so rare, then few squatters would ever be affected by a change to the law to make it a criminal offense, so there should be no objection to such a change from people representing squatters.

 How about just protecting property rights?

It probably isn't surprising to find that in the age of Obama and the "Occupy Movement," the WaPo can be so cavalier about the historic basis of American civilization.

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news!

Wasn't one of the purposes of Obamacare supposed to be that it would slow down healthcare spending?

Well, it's failed in that, also, but now, we are told, that's a good thing.

WASHINGTON, April 30 (Reuters) - As the U.S. economy teetered on the brink of contraction in the first quarter, one thing stood out. Healthcare spending increased at its fastest pace in more than three decades.

That surge is attributed to the implementation of President Barack Obama's signature healthcare law, the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Because of Obamacare, the nation narrowly avoided its first decline in output in three years.

"GDP growth would have ... been negative were it not for healthcare spending," said Harm Bandholz, chief economist at UniCredit Research in New York.

Healthcare spending increased at a 9.9 percent annual rate, the quickest since the third quarter of 1980, and it contributed 1.1 percentage points to GDP growth.//

So, if Obamacare wasn't a complete failure, then Obama's entire economic policy would be a complete failure.

*Sheesh*

Brit Hume characterizes the article as a joke.

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news...

...such as enemies lists and using unequal application of criminal laws to attack critics of the President.

//The indictment of a major critic of the president has elicited little more than yawns from the media.

This is a case where you don’t even have to connect the dots. Just read a little history:

After news broke Thursday that federal prosecutors had charged conservative commentator, author, film-maker and professional Obama-basher Dinesh D’Souza with violating campaign finance laws, Walter Olson at the Overlawyered blog posted on the relatively mild civil sanction meted out to a “big-league trial lawyer” who’d done pretty much the same thing D’Souza is accused of. D’Souza has been indicted for allegedly paying $20,000 to reimburse straw donors to the campaign of Republican Senate candidate Wendy Long, who lost a 2012 contest against incumbent Kirsten Gillibrand. Arkansas trial lawyer Tab Turner, as Overlawyered recounted in 2006, reimbursed donors of $8,000 to John Edwards’ 2004 presidential campaign and just had to cough up a $9,500 civil fine. By highlighting the contrast in his post Thursday, Olson seemed to be suggesting that D’Souza has been selectively targeted for prosecution because he’s so critical of the Obama administration.

Former acting U.S. attorney general George Terwilliger of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius raised the same suggestion in an interview Friday. Terwilliger, who served in the administration of two Republican presidents and later defended noted Los Angeles lawyer Pierce O’Donnell against campaign finance charges similar to those leveled against D’Souza, told me there are “legitimate questions that could be asked about the political motivation for bringing the case.” Want more conspiracy theorism? Dominic Gentile of Gordon Silver, who represented Nevada campaign finance defendant Harvey Whittemore, conducted exhaustive research on so-called conduit payments of the sort D’Souza is accused of making. In Whittemore’s sentencing memo, he documented civil and criminal penalties in “straw donor” cases. “Twenty thousand dollars?” Gentile told me. “I’ve never heard of a $20,000 criminal case” for campaign finance violations.” And at D’Souza’s arraignment Friday in Manhattan federal court, his own lawyer,Benjamin Brafman, told U.S. District Judge Richard Berman that whatever D’Souza did, his conduct wasn’t criminal.

This thing stinks to high heaven of political motivation.

First, there is this very curious note in the DoJ press release on how D’Souza’s crime was discovered:

The Indictment is the result of a routine review by the FBI of campaign filings with the FEC by various candidates after the 2012 election for United States Senator in New York. Mr. Bharara praised the investigative work of the FBI.

How is it possible that a measly $20,000 in donations could leap out at investigators during a “routine review”? Most people charged with this crime front hundreds of thousands of dollars — and end up with far lesser charges. And are we to believe this “routine review” only snared Mr. D’Souza? If $20,000 in contributions leapt out at the FBI, are we to believe that D’Souza is the only contributor guilty of setting up straw donations? Where are the other lawbreakers?//

It's not news...no one cares...move along.

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news...

...and if things continue as they are there won't be any bad news about the Depression we are and will be in.

These are damning economic facts:

The administration’s sole support for its contention that there has been meaningful job market improvement on its watch rests on one carefully chosen statistic: “The economy has now added private sector jobs for 30 straight months, for a total of 4.6 million jobs during that period.”
That claim is incorrect. It is true that the Establishment Survey at the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that private-sector employers had 4.63 million more workers in August than they did in February 2010 after seasonal adjustments. However, the BLS’s separate Household Survey tells us that the ranks of the unincorporated self-employed, all of whom are certainly private-sector participants, shrank during that time by 440,000 to a seasonally adjusted 9.46 million, knocking down the administration’s cherry-picked number by 9.5%. (The BLS doesn’t seasonally adjust its figures for the far smaller cadre of those who are self-employed but incorporated; their respective raw values in February 2010 and August 2012 were virtually identical.)

Qualitatively, the job market decay is all around us. The following stats only scratch the surface of the ugliness (all figures are seasonally adjusted):

• Full-time employment only increased by 43,000 in August. It’s down (yes, down) by 902,000 since March, and by over 1.4 million since Obama took office.
• 562,000 fewer married men and 700,000 fewer married women were employed in August than were when the recession officially ended in June 2009.
• 22% of the 3.47 million private-sector jobs created since the recession’s end have been at temporary help services.
• What about what the new jobs created actually pay? The National Employment Law Project recently reported that “Lower-wage occupations were 21 percent of recession (job) losses, but 58 percent of recovery growth. Mid-wage occupations were 60 percent of recession losses, but only 22 percent of recovery growth.” The leftists at the NELP wouldn’t state the obvious, so I will: Their research proves that the Obama administration’s economic policies are gutting the middle class.

President Obama’s failed stimulus program, brutally expensive and common law-shredding auto company bailouts, bankrupt “green energy” initiatives, and other exercises in “fundamentally transforming” the economy have extended a deep recession which predominantly traces its origins to decades of dangerous Democrat-driven housing policies, pervasive fraud against Wall Street and investors at Democrat crony-controlled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and 2008 campaign promises by Obama and fellow Democrats which the nation’s entrepreneurs, businesspeople, and investors correctly saw as threats. The president’s and fellow party members’ bully-pulpit hostility directed at the productive (“You didn’t build that“), the regulatory regime’s unprecedented overreach, and the prospect of ObamaCare’s disruptive implementation have created an atmosphere of chilling uncertainty virtually guaranteeing that the nation’s economic malaise will continue as long as they control the levers of power.

That cannot be allowed to happen.