* Bumped Up *

I am watching the disintegration of a Presidency as Barack Obama, through his incompetence and misguided policies, squanders the reservoir of goodwill he relied on for victory in 2008. And suddenly, I understood. Barack Obama is a covert Republican operative who agreed to infiltrate the Democrat party and try to recreate the debacle of Jimmy Carter.

Well played Mr. Obama. Well played!

In the short space of two and one half years Barack Obama has exacerbated the economic crisis, plunged America into a double-dip recession, alienated Congress and abandoned key allies in the Middle East. He has crafted a turd sandwich of epic proportions.

Want further proof he is a closet Republican? Read the rest

I haven’t written in a long time, I’ve spent the last year or so in reflective mode, trying to see a path that doesn’t just go over old ground: yes, we know Obama is an idiot, we knew it first… so what? The coming campaign for 2012 is, sadly, predictable – unless HRC reconsiders… but even then, we get the benefit of competence, intelligence, leadership… in the context of political corruption even the Gilded Age couldn’t comprehend. The solutions I can see would require an emergence of will and determination in this country that I don’t know if we even possess anymore… I will continue to put out ideas and plans for those who are interested but it’s more in the vein of “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

I don’t often get riled anymore, chalk it up to cynicism or burnt out faith in my fellow man. I more or less expect the daily freak show of stupidity and venality that parades across our ‘informational’ display devices these days. Like Captain Renault in ‘Casablanca’ I am faux “Shocked!, Shocked! To find out that there is gambling going on here!”.

But every once in a while, there occurs an act so vile, so venomous, so… evil, that I have to take notice or forfeit my ‘moral superiority’ card. Read the rest

Tonight, I’m tucking this thread in just below Craig’s post, and I’m going to share with you a couple quotes that I discovered in the past day: Read the rest

The Obama campaign looks to recreate the winning impertinence of the 2008 crusade of the pesky Blue kids who overwhelmed imperious Mrs. Clinton and stormed past the grouchy John McCain.

Early buzz suggest that the remake, Yes We Can Part II, is a flop in rehearsals. A sitting presidency is not an office that gets through a day without being pummeled by some unusually determined cranks.

The White House may be without a theme that makes sense. The ingenue spirit is gone with the jobless rate of the under 30. The results for 32 months of the administration are mixed to weak. Spoke with John Fund, at Hoover, who remarked that the nation hired a candidate without executive experience, and what we got was a president who thinks of himself and his victimhood first and second, who promotes his re-election to the exclusion of his own party in addition to the unaligned and the merely jobless nobodies.
Read the rest

Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President, by Ron Suskind

    In writing the following, I kept wondering: What is the price women pay in covering up the sexist behavior of the men they work for? Is it a sense of doom that unless they play the men’s games they’ll never succeed? Is it the price they feel they must pay in order to retain their viability for other jobs in their futures? However do Anita Dunn and Christina Romer cope with their self-inflicted wounds when they enabled Obama’s cover-up?

I am listening to Ron Suskind converse with Morning Joe‘s White House sycophants about the author’s new book, published today. Suskind refers to The Washington Post story that reveals that the Obama administration — embarrassingly — has had to backtrack from its widely-reported defensive argument that Suskind failed to quote people accurately, daring to hint that Suskind, a widely-respected, Pulitzer-winning reporter, made it all up.

Why the WH backtracking? Because Suskind possesses TAPES of the conversations the White House claims never occurred. From the WaPo’s “In early Obama White House, female staffers felt frozen out“:

… The acknowledgment Monday by White House officials of discontent among high-level female staffers … came even as Obama aides tried to paint the Suskind book as inaccurate. The book was reported with cooperation from the White House, but now it could backfire, raising questions about Obama’s management style. … Read the rest

Well, well, well. All kinds of people are coming out of the woodwork suggesting Hillary Clinton oughta give Obama a run for him money. From the recent Chicago Tribune Editorial by Steve Chapman in which he exhorts Obama to step down, and Clinton to step up, to Dick Cheney, who not only suggested she would have been a better president (no duh) to suggesting she should run, to James Carville suggesting Obama should “panic,” the country seems to finally be waking from its Kool Aide induced haze.

And it is pissing me off. Seriously. I don’t know if it is the off-the-chart pain levels I am enduring, or what, but it is pissing me off that – all of a sudden – the people who were in a position to make clear how inept Obama was, is, and would be, failed to convey that message adequately. No, not Cheney – I mean the media and Democratic political pundits who should have known, and most likely did know, better, but went-along-to-get-along so they could keep blathering on CNN, MSNBC, or whatever channel would have them. They rode this wave of a created back story of who Obama was, one that did not match the REALITY of who he was, by his handlers and string pullers rather than DOING THEIR JOBS, and now, NOW, they are coming out saying, “oh, yeah – Hillary would have been SO much better” after calling her, her husband, and her supporters a bunch of racist gun and Bible toters who could barely get dressed in the morning. All I can say is, BITE ME.

Ahem. Sorry. I have no patience or tolerance for this crap right now. Clinton would have been the best, they knew it then, but sexism trumps all any day of the week, and they sure as hell were not going to support any old (!) woman over a biracial freshman senator. Nosirree bob. Even as I write that one sentence – a freshman senator beating out a woman who had a vastly superior resume was treated like crap by these people in her own party AND in the media. And now they come crying saying it should have been her? Please. They CHOSE him over her. (Photo credit: blackagendareport.com)
Read the rest

I meant to write this story up back in July, however life and school turned it into a post-it note of something I wanted to address the next chance I had.

Are you all familiar with the advertising campaign that was put forth by the California Milk Board, the people behind the “Got Milk?” campaign? It was a highly sexist ad campaign, coming out of San Francisco (is that Favreau’s hometown?) making jokes about men being tormented by menstruating women and their “irrational” behavior. The ad maintains that milk will make “their” women make sense.

Read the rest

You and I have witnessed the soaring number of voices, from both traditional to lefty Democrats, finally getting the nerve to express their grave concerns about not just Obama’s ability to win a second term but, even moreso, about Obama’s clear inability to do the job of the presidency. But it is nearly unheard-of that a major newspaper, particularly the newspaper of the president’s hometown, would call on a president to step aside and not seek a second term. But in Sunday’s Chicago Tribune, Steve Chapman has dared to explain “Why Obama should withdraw” — and furthermore — suggested that Hillary Clinton replace Obama as the Democratic candidate in 2012:

When Ronald Reagan ran for re-election in 1984, his slogan was “Morning in America.” For Barack Obama, it’s more like midnight in a coal mine.

The sputtering economy is about to stall out, unemployment is high, his jobs program may not pass, foreclosures are rampant and the poor guy can’t even sneak a cigarette.

His approval rating is at its lowest level ever. …[...]

The vultures are starting to circle. Former White House spokesman Bill Burton said that unless Obama can rally the Democratic base, which is disillusioned with him, “it’s going to be impossible for the president to win.” …

Read the rest

Editor’s Note: Tonight, Larry Johnson joins Sunday’s experts panel on John Batchelor’s Show @ 9:30 or 10:30 p.m. ET. Listen via iTunes or NYC anchor WABC (scroll to “Listen Live“). Batchelor’s radio show airs nightly, 9 p.m.-1:00 a.m. ET.

: : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : :

What’s happened to Michele Bachmann? Is it her gaffe-prone brainiac? Is it the aspirational midday talk show hostess on the campaign trail? Is it the one-liners without policy foundation? Is it gender?

Bachmann scored a narrow victory over robotic Ron Paul at the Iowa Straw poll, and since then the narrative is that she can do nothing right. Luckless Pawlenty dropped out because of Bachmann’s win, and perhaps he has second thoughts.

There is no cohesion around any national candidate. Lucky Rick Perry started strong, but his talent looks to be that the more you hear, the less you hear.

Luckless Mitt Romney plods along, the sturdy non-Republican in the Republican camp. Read the rest

Bronwyn’s Note: This essay is cross-posted from Truthout.org with the express permission of Truthout’s editors. Why did I seek permission to cross-post this essay? Because it is interesting, and offers a perspective from a conservative D.C. insider who’s gone through a rather tumultuous shift in his views, and such a dramatic change always makes for compelling reading.
.

: : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : :

By Mike Lofgren who, Truthout explaims, “retired on June 17 after 28 years as a Congressional staffer. He served 16 years as a professional staff member on the Republican side of both the House and Senate Budget Committees.” Adds Michael Tomasky for The Daily Beast:

Many people are buzzing about an article at truthout.org by one Mike Lofgren, a longtime Republican staff aide on Capitol Hill who just couldn’t take the crazy anymore, left his job, and produced this buzzy (and quite well-written) lamentation about his party’s tactics and goals. If you haven’t read it, you must. …

And now, here is Mike Lofgren’s entire essay, titled “Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult“:

: : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : :

Barbara Stanwyck: “We’re both rotten!”

Fred MacMurray: “Yeah – only you’re a little more rotten.” -”Double Indemnity” (1944) Read the rest

Look at what I got in my e-mail! And on that shiny new car that I bought can only dream of buying with my high wages earnings that barely get me by, considering the jumps in the prices of everything from gasoline to milk!

What a deal! For only $10! Thanks, Barack Obama, for always looking out for yourself me and my unemployed neighbors who have to go to the food bank and who can’t drive because they 1) can’t afford to maintain a car, 2) can’t afford gas, 3) can’t afford car insurance, or 4) can’t pay off the speeding ticket.

Hey, I’m totally with all of you who despise drivers who dare to drive without a valid driver’s license and without insurance. There’s just one little problem: They can’t pay off the ticket they got, and then their troubles really began. Read the rest

In March of 2008, the Jeremiah Wright tapes hit the news, nearly derailing Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.  Obama’s spiritual advisor, the pastor of the church the Obama family had attended for 20 years, was seen on videotape cursing America, among other unsavory things.  But the liberal press quickly circled the wagons and declared it a non-issue.  Nothing to see here!  Move along, folks!

Obama dealt with the issue as he deals with all issues: a scripted speech read from teleprompters.  In that speech, he downplayed the fact that his own campaign had accused his rival, Hillary Clinton and her husband former President Bill Clinton of “playing the Race Card,” when in fact his campaign had taken their comments completely out of context and fed it to the press, thereby playing the Race Card themselves while accusing the Clintons of doing so.

Somewhere in this situation, the phrase “a national conversation about race” was put into our national psyche.  Actually, it was President Bill Clinton who had called for “a national conversation on race” back in 1997.  I guess that phrase was spoken or inferred by somebody during the Obama/Wright flap, because it seems to have become part of that event, but I’ve just spent an hour Googling variations on that phrase and the name Obama, and I can’t find a direct quote of Obama using that phrase.  Interesting. Read the rest

What if U.S. taxpayers could save, I’m guess-timating here, at least $1 billion per month in Social Security benefits? That’s $12 billion per year. Here’s how the Social Security Administration explains this benefit, which doesn’t include the expenses of the employees required to investigate, add, and administer the benefit:

About 4.4 million children receive approximately $2.4 billion each month because one or both of their parents are disabled, retired or deceased. Those dollars help to provide the necessities of life for family members and help to make it possible for those children to complete high school. When a parent becomes disabled or dies, Social Security benefits help to stabilize the family’s financial future. …

While I do not oppose such help, I do question whether such benefits should be added onto Social Security’s already overly burdened system. Furthermore, I question the need for a benefit to ALL children of the disabled, retired or deceased, and regardless of the families’ income and assets.

I first learned about this benefit when the wife of a relative developed debilitating multiple sclerosis. Although she was in no shape to work as an elementary school teacher anymore, the principal of the school allowed her to remain in her job just long enough so that she would receive the maximum amount in disability. The father? He still worked, full-time, and made very good money — around $60,000 per year. The disabled mother received $1,400 per month in disability payments. THEN their only child, an 11-year-old boy, began receiving $300 per month from Social Security — because there is no needs test for such SSA payments. Read the rest

Jon Stewart. This is must see TV.

This is important on many levels. Read the rest

You know about what I am talking – Obama’s exhortation to a bunch of college kids to tell Congress to pass his bill because they love him. Probably the worst reason on the face of the planet to pass legislation using a bill that the president insists be signed in its entirety, without studying the effects of the damn thing. Where have we heard this before? Ahem.

In case you missed it somehow, this is to what I am referring:

Read the rest