Tag Archives: Obama

Blagojevich Aide: Obama Knew

By Duane Lester - - 2 Comments

A former aide to Gov. Rod Blagovich says that President Obama was picking up on what Blago was putting down:

John Harris, Blagojevich’s former chief of staff, testified Wednesday in the former governor’s corruption trial that three days after the Nov. 4, 2008, presidential election, the ex-governor told Harris he felt confident Obama knew he wanted to swap perks.

“The president understands that the governor would be willing to make the appointment of Valerie Jarrett as long as he gets what he’s asked for. . . . The governor gets the Cabinet appointment he’s asked for,” Harris said, explaining a recorded call.

Harris said Blagojevich came away believing Obama knew what he wanted after having a conversation with a local union representative, who in turn spoke with labor leader Tom Balanoff, with whom Blagojevich met to discuss a Jarrett appointment. Jarrett, now a White House adviser, was seeking the appointment to Obama’s Senate seat.

Defense lawyers say Harris’ testimony contradicts the government’s previous public statements that Obama knew nothing about deal-making involving the Senate seat appointment.

Really hard to believe. No, seriously. Could you see anyone in the administration even considering offering a position in the federal government for a political favor?

White House says it contacted candidate about jobs

WASHINGTON (AP) – President Barack Obama was unaware a top aide encouraged a Colorado Democrat to apply for an international development job instead of challenging the candidate whom the president favored in a Senate race, the White House said Thursday.

Press Secretary Robert Gibbs faced fresh questions about another backroom political deal _ the first involving a Pennsylvania candidate, now a Colorado hopeful _ that put the Obama administration on the defensive. The White House acknowledged that it had contacted former Colorado House Speaker Andrew Romanoff about possible jobs in hopes of persuading him to skip the Senate primary.

Asked whether Obama was knew about the outreach, Gibbs told reporters: “He’s not aware of the individual circumstances.”

Well, that means nothing. You can read right up there that Obama didn’t know about this either.

White House Asked Bill Clinton to Urge Sestak to Drop Out of Senate Race

At the behest of the White House, former President Bill Clinton urged Rep. Joe Sestak to drop out of a Senate primary, according to a White House report. (AP)

The White House asked former President Bill Clinton to talk to Rep. Joe Sestak about the possibility of obtaining a senior position in the Obama administration if he would drop out of the Democratic primary race against establishment-backed Sen. Arlen Specter, the Obama administration said in a report released Friday morning.

This is what we in reality call a “trend.”

Honestly, is there any doubt in your mind that Obama knew what game was being played? In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Obama called the FBI and dropped the big G-Man hammer on Blago himself.

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People Who Watch Obama's Speech Too Stupid to Understand It? – Updated

By Duane Lester - - 0 Comments

Take a look at this sentence:

“That is why just after the rig sank, I assembled a team of our nation’s best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge — a team led by Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and our nation’s secretary of energy.”

According to Paul J.J. Payack, president of Global Language Monitor, the 32 million Americans who watched President Obama’s speech Tuesday night are just not bright enough to really pick up what the President was laying down.

No, really:

President Obama’s speech on the gulf oil disaster may have gone over the heads of many in his audience, according to an analysis of the 18-minute talk released Wednesday.

Tuesday night’s speech from the Oval Office of the White House was written to a 9.8 grade level, said Paul J.J. Payack, president of Global Language Monitor. The Austin, Texas-based company analyzes and catalogues trends in word usage and word choice and their impact on culture.

Though the president used slightly less than four sentences per paragraph, his 19.8 words per sentence “added some difficulty for his target audience,” Payack said.

Now, for various reasons, I didn’t watch the President’s speech, so I can’t comment on how hard it was to comprehend. But I can say that I understand what PrezBO was saying in the above sentence.

But let’s give Payack the benefit of the doubt. Let’s say that it was written at too advanced a language for the audience. What does that say about the public education system in America? If Americans cannot comprehend a speech written at a high school sophomore level, isn’t that evidence of an EPIC fail on the part of the government school system?

Ed Morrissey agrees with my assertion:

We have steadily increased federal spending on education through the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations. If all that gets us is an electorate who mysteriously can’t comprehend a speech given at a writing level equivalent to that of an average 15-year-old kid, then we’ve spent money on the wrong things, and let the wrong people benefit from it.

Or is Payack saying that anyone who would actually take the time to listen to Obama anymore is too stupid to understand it anyway?

That’s probable, but I don’t think that’s what he meant.

Update:

Noel Sheppard at Newsbusters notes President George Bush’s speeches were written at a higher level than Obama’s:

Apparently not according to an analysis published at Smart Politics on January 29, 2010, after Obama’s first State of the Union address:

Text of Obama’s Address has a readability score for an average 8th grader – two grades lower than George W. Bush’s Addresses and the historical average for modern presidents.

Shhh. Wait. It gets MUCH better:

Unlike the criticisms hurled at his predecessor, however, few have ever charged that the President, a former senior lecturer in Constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School, has written or spoken too simplistically or catered his words to the lowest common denominator.

However, a Smart Politics analysis of nearly 70 oral State of the Union Addresses since the mid-1930s finds the text of Obama’s speech on Wednesday evening to have one of the lowest scores on the Flesch-Kincaid readability test ever recorded by a U.S. President.

The Flesch-Kincaid test is designed to assess the readability level of written text, with a formula that translates the score to a U.S. grade level. Longer sentences and sentences utilizing words with more syllables produce higher scores. Shorter sentences and sentences incorporating more monosyllabic words yield lower scores.

Smart Politics ran the Flesch-Kincaid test on each of the last 68 State of the Union Addresses that were delivered orally by presidents before a Joint Session of Congress since Franklin Roosevelt. Excluded from analysis were five written addresses (Truman in 1946 and 1953, Eisenhower in 1961, Nixon in 1973, and Carter in 1981) and two addresses that were delivered orally, but not by the President himself (Roosevelt in 1945, Eisenhower in 1956). Prior to FDR, most, but not all, such Addresses were delivered in writing.

Obama’s Flesch-Kincaid grade level score of 8.8 for his first State of the Union Address was the fourth lowest score since FDR’s first Address in 1934.

What this means is that Obama wrote and delivered a speech that incorporated shorter sentences, with those sentences containing shorter words, than nearly every such Presidential Address in the modern era.  

Remember: he’s supposedly the smartest president in history!

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Obama and Islam: Joined at the hip?

By Duane Lester - - 8 Comments

I got the link to this video in an email from a friend who is probably the most non-political yet incredibly pro-American person I know. I’ve seen most of the clips, but there are a few new ones in there that I hadn’t seen and I think it’s important to see them all again just so we can stay aware of what we (Americans who love America) are dealing with.

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Who is the puppet master?

By Wes Weber - - 2 Comments

Our president is everywhere and speaking on TV almost every day, 5 times on Sunday and then Monday at Troy, NY and NYC for Letterman. Tuesday, he was at the UN in the morning, played basketball with his friend in the afternoon and spoke at the Clinton Global Initiative in the evening. Wednesday he is at the UN and then later this week he heads to Pittsburgh to propose a new world order for global finance! He has had the report from General McChrystal since August 30 and is still “analyzing” whether to try to win or not.

“McChrystal: More Forces or ‘Mission Failure’
Top U.S. Commander For Afghan War Calls Next 12 Months Decisive
By Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 21, 2009
The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan warns in an urgent, confidential assessment of the war that he needs more forces within the next year and bluntly states that without them, the eight-year conflict “will likely result in failure,” according to a copy of the 66-page document obtained by The Washington Post.
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal says emphatically: “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) — while Afghan security capacity matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.”
His assessment was sent to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Aug. 30 and is now being reviewed by President Obama and his national security team.
McChrystal concludes the document’s five-page Commander’s Summary on a note of muted optimism: “While the situation is serious, success is still achievable.””
(Source.)

No matter how bright he is, it is hard to believe he has time to think and to perform his presidential duties. He seems to be following his record from IL of voting present and ‘speechifying’ while others do the heavy work. We (not me, but a majority of voters) elected him to be president not just to look the part. We deserve to know who is doing the work and telling him what to do and what to say. Somehow the jokes about the teleprompter of the USA (TOTUS) don’t seem as funny as they did at first. With the number of radical czars who did not require Senate approval surrounding the Oval Office what can we believe about the change he promised in the campaign? I have a hard time believing that “We the People” knew what we were voting to change and what the goal is.

And now from the AP:

“Fidel Castro praises Obama on climate change
By PAUL HAVEN (AP) – 3 hours ago
HAVANA — Barack Obama’s call for action on climate change and his admission that rich nations have a particular responsibility to lead has received strong praise from an unusual source — U.S. nemesis Fidel Castro.
The former Cuban leader on Wednesday called the American president’s speech at the United Nations “brave” and said no other American head of state would have had the courage to make similar remarks.”

(Source.)

It looks like we have a reading/speaking puppet and a teleprompter as our leader. Who is in really charge?

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President Barack Obama is beginning to look out of his depth (By Edward Lucas, UK Daily Telegraph 9-20 09)

By Wes Weber - - 6 Comments

The British Press has him pegged!

“It is lovely to feature in other people’s dreams. The problem comes when they wake up. Barack Obama is an eloquent, brainy and likeable man with a fascinating biography. He is not George Bush. Those are great qualities. But they are not enough to lead America, let alone the world.

Admittedly, the presidential to-do list is terrifying. The economy requires his full-time attention. So does health-care reform. And climate change. Indeed, he deserves praise for spending so much time on thankless foreign policy issues. He is tackling all the big problems: restarting Middle East peace talks, defanging Iran and North Korea and a “reset” of relations with Russia. But none of them are working.”

And the article concludes:

“Mr Obama’s public image rests increasingly heavily on his extraordinary speechifying abilities. His call in Cairo for a new start in relations with the Muslim world was pitch-perfect. So was his speech in Ghana, decrying Africa’s culture of bad government. His appeal to both houses of Congress to support health care was masterly – though the oratory was far more impressive than the mish-mash plan behind it. This morning he is blitzing the airwaves, giving interviews to all America’s main television stations.

But for what? Mr Obama has tactics a plenty – calm and patient engagement with unpleasant regimes, finding common interests, appealing to shared values – but where is the strategy? What, exactly, did “Change you can believe in” – the hallmark slogan of his campaign – actually mean?

The President’s domestic critics who accuse him of being the sinister wielder of a socialist master-plan are wide of the mark. The man who has run nothing more demanding than the Harvard Law Review is beginning to look out of his depth in the world’s top job. His credibility is seeping away, and it will require concrete achievements rather than more soaring oratory to recover it.

* Edward Lucas writes for The Economist and is the author of The New Cold War (Bloomsbury, £8.99)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackobama/6210152/President-Barack-Obama-is-beginning-to-look-out-of-his-depth.html

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When you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there (by Wes Weber)

By Douglas Weber - - 0 Comments

(Another gem forwarded by my father for publication!)

Senator Kent Conrad, D ND, clarified for all of us the health care reform problem, with his appearance on Fox News Sunday, August 15th. He stated clearly and without any limiters that Obama does not have a plan for Health Care Reform. He has left that up to Congress!

Just think about that! He does not have a plan, or if he does, he has not shared it with the Democrat leaders in Congress, but, instead has left it up to them to create a reform bill. According to Politico.com:

Linda Douglass, communications director of the White House Office of Health Reform, e-mailed: “Nothing has changed. The president has always said that what is essential is that health insurance reform must lower costs, ensure that there are affordable options for all Americans and it must increase choice and competition in the health insurance market. He believes the public option is the best way to achieve those goals.” (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0809/26180.html#ixzz0OSpxwOZe)

The obvious problem is the fact, reaffirmed by Senator Conrad, that The President does not have a Health Care Reform Plan. Therefore any plan will achieve his objective and you can bet he will sign it! This seems to result in his ability to promise that almost anything that the polls say is important, is in his plan. If he hasn’t got a plan, then anything can be promised as in it or not in it. Instead of the details required in a plan we hear of his essential ingredients which vary based on the audience. In his initial speech to Congress on the State of the Union he promised to reduce the cost of health care while covering every American.

The biggest problem in The President’s ‘essentials’ is basic arithmetic! Including all Americans currently uninsured, which has been defined in various circles as between 20 and 47 million people, will add a major stress on the current system. If they must be assigned to the existing doctors and if they are able to go in for wellness checks and minor problems at no cost to the patient, government cost and provider stresses will be increased dramatically. The President has promised to keep costs down and even to turn the rising cost curve to a negative curve. At the same time he has assured us that there will not be rationing for older Americans who need medical care the most. This defies all logic and cannot be calculated using basic arithmetic or even new math!

There have been numerous attempts to do this through nationalized medicine such as is the case in most of Europe and Canada and so far there is not a single example of success. In the US it has been attempted in Massachusetts and Oregon. In every case cited, the programs are under fierce financial strains and coverage is rationed in one way or another. The newly elected head of the Canadian Healthcare System has declared this month that their system is about to implode and Vancouver is closing emergency care facilities due to lack of funds.

But none of the cases of failure seem to matter to our legislators and our President. The President sets lofty, mutually contradictory goals and the legislators rush to create plans tailored to give them full power over our lives without any concern for our feelings. They have forgotten or ignored the line from our Declaration of Independence that reads: “Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

It is time for the governed to make it clear to the government that they are not given the power to do as they please for their own aggrandizement, but, they are to use their powers to meet the wishes of “We the People” within the strict framework of the US Constitution. If they do not understand this basic principle, then they should be replaced by those who do.

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Inside the Mind of a Zero Accountability Voter and The Damage They Cause

By Duane Lester - - 2 Comments

What is a zero accountability voter?

Here’s how I define it. A zero accountability voter is a person with the ability to vote and has nothing to lose personally from the results of their vote. This person can vote for a politician who promises to give them anything, and they think they will not have to pay for it.

In general, it’s a person who contributes nothing, but collects benefits from the collective.

For example, a person votes for Obama, thinking he will pay for her gas or pay her mortgage:



Obama isn’t paying anything. He’s taking from someone else, by force of government, in order to give it to you.

Here’s another example.

“It’s free money!” said Alecia Rumph, 26, who waited in a Morris Park, Bronx, line 300 people deep for the cash to buy uniforms and book bags for her two kids.

“Thank God for Obama. He’s looking out for us.”

Free money? In her mind, it’s free money.

But it isn’t. It’s federal taxpayer money, and a bit of charity. From the New York Daily News:

The no-strings-attached money went to families receiving food stamps or welfare.

Every child between 3 and 17 was eligible for $200, which worked out to 813,845 kids across the state – including 498,866 in the city.

…

Billionaire philanthropist George Soros gave $35 million toward the program, with $140 million in federal stimulus funds routed through state government making up the rest.

So, even though the Daily News says the money “magically appeared on their electronic benefit cards,” there wasn’t anything magical about it. The government took the property of others, and gave it to those they thought needed it more. That’s not magic. It’s just plain force. But in the mind of the zero accountability voter, “it’s free money!”

Well, it’s free in one sense of the word. The recipients are free to do whatever they please with it. There is zero accountability. They simply withdrawal the money, and spend it however they please. While it’s supposed to go to school supplies, there’s nothing stopping it from going to cell phones or flat screen televisions or PS3s.

Who do you think they will vote for next time? The person who promises to give them the most.

For those who say the rich don’t pay enough taxes anyway, consider this:

According to newly released Internal Revenue Service data, the top 1% of American tax filers earned 22.8% of the nation’s income in 2007 and paid 40.4% of the nation’s federal income tax.

This would mean the top 1% of tax filers pays more federal income tax than the bottom 95% of tax filers combined, according to a Tax Foundation analysis.

…

The top 1% of tax returns in the U.S. for that year had an average gross income of more than $410,000.

What do you suppose will happen when you have more people depending on the government? You will have less people paying in. When you have an increase in the demand for money, but less people to draw from, you find yourself needing to soak those people more. And when they see themselves getting soaked, generally they find a better place for their money. You see this on the state level. People are leaving California, Michigan and New York because of the taxes being so oppressive.

On the other hand, the charitable donations of the rich are a different story. First, they don’t get the attention of the media like “free” and “magically” appearing money, but there is a major difference. It isn’t forced from them. They give it, just like Soros did. I’m sure Soros had his reasons, as I don’t trust him any further than I could throw him, but he did willfully part with $35 million bones here.

He said it meant more to him because he received charity as a child also:

Gov. Paterson and Mayor Bloomberg joined Soros to announce the payments at Public School 208 in Harlem, where the billionaire reminisced that as a penniless student in London, he survived because of a handout he got from Quakers.

“This gift has a special personal meaning to me, because I was once also a recipient of charity,” Soros said in a choking voice. “I’m very pleased that I’m able to repay what they gave me.”

And the fact remains, America is the most charitable country in the world. Our corporations are very generous also. But remember, this wasn’t all charity. This came from the stimulus plan.

Maybe if we stopped looting people and businesses so much and let them donate more to charity, people would stop voting in leftists since there is nothing in it for them. Which is what the mind of the zero accountability voter boils down to: what is this person going to give me?

While the money may be magically appearing and be free now, there are long term repercussions of the looting of the rich in favor of the poor. It’s that long term outlook that the zero accountability voter lacks, or refuses to consider. As long as the government encourages them to suckle, they will never be weaned. They will become dependents.

And the rich will either be slaves to a repressive government, or they will leave. What would you do?

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Obama Channels Baghdad Bob on Trade Wars

By Duane Lester - - 2 Comments

President Obama is in Mexico with Stephen Harper for a summit with America’s neighbors. While standing next to the leaders of two nations he has started trade wars with, he said there was no problem with the trade between the countries because of his protectionist policies:BaghdadObama.jpg

“This in no way this has endangered the billions of dollars of trade taking place between our two countries,” Obama said, standing beside Harper and Calderon at a final news conference.

This is an interesting, and false statement, which become obvious when you read the second paragraph in the article:

Obama told journalists at a summit with the leaders of Canada and Mexico that Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has raised the issue every time they have met.

So, help me understand this. If this is no big deal, like Dear Leader says, then why would Harper bring it up, every time they meet? It seems to be a serious concern of Harper’s. And for good reason. Here’s what I wrote about the trade war with Canada:

The $787 billion stimulus bill Obama signed into law contained a “Buy American” provision that economists warned against. The protectionist provision mandates that “only U.S.-made goods be used in projects funded by the bill.” At the time, the Canadian government voiced concern.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper attempted to calm fears, saying, “I think President Obama himself said that he wants to ensure that these stimulus packages do not lead to protectionist measures in the U.S. or anywhere else.”

Fast forward three months and you find The Washington Post reporting that Canadian suppliers are being turned away from jobs in America.

Ordered by Congress to “buy American” when spending money from the $787 billion stimulus package, the town of Peru, Ind., stunned its Canadian supplier by rejecting sewage pumps made outside of Toronto. After a Navy official spotted Canadian pipe fittings in a construction project at Camp Pendleton, Calif., they were hauled out of the ground and replaced with American versions. In recent weeks, other Canadian manufacturers doing business with U.S. state and local governments say they have been besieged with requests to sign affidavits pledging that they will only supply materials made in the USA.

What happened is simple, and rather devious. Rather than create federal programs to spend the stimulus money, Canadian firms say the United States is “filtering billions of federal dollars, which are subject to NAFTA rules, to municipalities, which let out the infrastructure contracts and are not subject to any trade agreements.”

Canadians have responded in kind, with towns in Ontario putting measures in place to bar U.S. companies from municipal contracts. This could be the first shot in a growing trade war with Canada that threatens to lock U.S. based companies “out of billions of dollars worth of Canadian projects.”

Nothing to see here. There is no problem. Everything’s fine.

It reminds me a lot of Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, aka Baghdad Bob, who held press conferences during the 2003 invasion of Iraq to tell us things like Americans were committing suicide in mass at the city gates. Obama says there is no problem, but Harper thinks there is, and the facts show, things are getting tense between the two trade giants.

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Barack Wants To Know Who's Talkin' Smack

By Duane Lester - - 18 Comments

Here’s something I find a little troubling. The White House is encouraging people to report those who send e-mails they claim are false.

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

My goodness. Now, you are to report your friends and neighbors to the government. How 1930s Germany…

Jon Henke asks a good question at The Next Right:

What, exactly, does the White House plan to do with this information?

That is the aspect that should worry you. However, you have to love the e-mail that Andrew deRenzy sent in:

I came across this site http://whitehouse.gov it’s spreading a lot of misinformation about healthcare

Now that’s funny. The government encouraging you to turn in your neighbors for speaking out against the government, not so much.

Hat Tip: Red State

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Obama As Joker "Mean Spirited and Dangerous," Bush as Monkey, "Meh…"

By Duane Lester - - 3 Comments

The picture of President Barack Obama as Heath Ledger’s Joker is the hottest Internet meme right now, but some on the left are upset by the comparison. First, let’s show how this all got started. Recently, this picture started showing up around Los Angeles:

obama-joker-poster.jpg

Photo Credit: Newsbusters

Since it started, it has gone viral.

Here’s the picture I’m using as the wallpaper on my iPhone:

Joker Obama.jpg

Now one Obama supporter says this goes beyond political spoofery and is “dangerous“:

Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable President Earl Ofari Hutchinson is calling the depiction, politically mean spirited and dangerous.

Hutchinson is challenging the group or individual that put up the poster to have the courage and decency to publicly identify themselves.

“Depicting the president as demonic and a socialist goes beyond political spoofery,” says Hutchinson, “it is mean-spirited and dangerous.”

“We have issued a public challenge to the person or group that put up the poster to come forth and publicly tell why they have used this offensive depiction to ridicule President Obama.”

Right. Like this was dangerous:

Bush-the-Joker002-copy[1].jpg

Or this:

George Bush Appreciation.jpg

Yes, I’m sure there was outrage when these hit the Internet…I just can’t remember it. Like Noel Sheppard at Newsbusters said:

In reality, if I wanted to, I could likely produce hundreds of disgusting drawings of Bush, Cheney, and others in their Administration plastered at publications across the fruited plain the last eight years.

That was acceptable commentary and political satire back then.

Now that Obama is in the White House, it’s called “mean-spirited and dangerous.”

What exactly is dangerous about this? While we are issuing public challenges, I issue one to you, President Hutchinson. Explain what is dangerous about the First Amendment. How is it dangerous to exercise that right? Or is the picture simply erroneous and you are the real clown?

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