The Chameleon President On the Today Show

David Zurawik of the Baltimore Sun describes tough-show  Obama’s thinning skin in his article:

‘Today’ interview: Obama shows press contempt.

A year ago, I wrote about President Obama being thin-skinned about criticism from the media and having a not so barely suppressed contempt for the press.

And I caught holy heck from some readers and far too many of my colleagues who were still deep in a post-election swoon with this man they kept referring to as so “elegant and cool.” Read that column titled “Time for Press to quit being used by Obama” here. It is the first of several columns and posts that I wrote on that theme.

Well, the president took thin skinned to a new level Tuesday morning in his interview with Matt Lauer on NBC’s “Today” show. I do not know what the president and his advisers were trying to accomplish with this conversation that took place in Michigan before Obama spoke to a high school graduation in Kalamazoo. But I have never seen Obama look and sound more petty, petulant and tinny.

Obama’s big problem isn’t that he can’t act decisively, can’t emote on cue for the cameras, trusts experts too much or that he defers excessively to CEOs. His problem — and it is starting to look like a genuine fatal flaw — is that he can’t take criticism, particularly from the press, which he seems to have an unnatural and Nixon-like hostility toward. And this interview with Lauer showed that all too clearly.

Confession time: When I first heard of the “Today” interview Monday, I thought, “Sure where else would a slumping Obama go when he needs some softballs that he can hit out of the park and try to get his stroke back except “Today,” the place that offers safe harbor to the likes of reality TV’s Kate Gosselin.

But I am glad I held off on writing until I saw the full interview this morning, because I was pre-judging and would have been wrong on that count. Lauer was prepared, focused and gave the President very little room to play his usual TV interview games. Lauer did a very good interview, and good for Lauer and “Today” and for all of us who want the best information we can get about the man running the country in these tumultuous times.

Lauer asked Obama directly about the comparisons of the president’s performance in the Gulf with that of George W. Bush during Katrina.

That’s when the “cool and elegant” Obama started getting riled and announced, “This is not theater… I don’t always have time to perform for the benefit of the cable shows.”

Really? This is the guy who has been on every cable channel in America it seems — cooking steaks with Bobby Flay, shooting hoops and filling out NCAA brackets with any ESPN or CBS Sports analyst who shows up at the White House with a basketball, trading barbs with comedians and talk show hosts at the drop of a ht.

For most of his first year in office, it seemed as if Obama was always on TV in safe settings — and no one played the TV-as-theater game better since John F. Kennedy. 

But not any more. The TV gods have abandoned Obama, and now, the more he tries to use TV to get on top of the Gulf disaster the more his contempt for the men and women who bring us news via that medium is exposed.

Here’s Obama saying he was on top of the spill from day one and in the Gulf before the news media — two statements that while they open to some interpretation are quite a stretch.

“I was down there a month ago, before most of these talking heads were even paying attention to the gulf,” he told Lauer. “A month ago I was meeting with fishermen down there, standing in the rain talking about what a potential crisis this could be. And I don’t sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar; we talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick.”

Love the elegance of that last phrase.

And when Obama tried to replay his pre-tested soundbite answer that he wasn’t elected to “vent,” but rather to “solve problems,” Lauer expertly led him down the BP path with quotes from BP CEO Tony Hayward.

“But to solve the problem you need to have a reliable partner,” Lauer began. “Let me read you some of things that Mr. Hayward has said over the course of this disaster.  He said, ‘The Gulf of Mexico is a big ocean.  The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water value;’ – somewhat obvious – ‘the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to be very very modest.’ And then he said, ‘no one wants to end more than I do, I want my life back, family members of those 11 people who died on the rig, and people’s whose lives are going to be changed for years want their lives back too.’ He doesn’t work for you but if he did, would you want him out?

“He wouldn’t be working for me after any of those statements,” Obama said. 

And yet, Obama is still working with Hayward, and for several weeks, was deferring excessively while we now know BP kept crucial facts about the spill from Americans.

It was the so-called talking heads like NBC’s Brian Williams, Mr. President, who helped the American people first get a sense of what a catastrophe this was — even as your administration helped BP keep cameras away from the accident, while allowing Hayward and his minions to egregiously low ball the amount of oil gushing into the Gulf. It was your administration, Mr. President, that allowed, if not helped, Hayward and BP lie to us about the horrible thing that was happening to our country.”

Comment:  This president is a very skilled and gifted chameleon.

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For the Sake of Our Liberties, Draw a Mohammed!

The conservative blogsite, The New Criterion, is presently advertising “cartooning for free speech” which means stirring up some general interest to rescue “Everybody Draws Mohammed” in its June article of that title:

“In April, Comedy Central received a (partially) veiled death threat against the creators of South Park from a New York– based group called Revolution Muslim. Their tort? Portraying Mohammed in a bear suit (a scene that Comedy Central, capitulating to the bullies, censored). In response, Molly Norris, a Seattle artist, suggested denominating May 20 “Everybody Draws Mohammed Day.” Nick Gillespie at Reason magazine took up the challenge and mounted an everybody-draws-Mohammed contest. By the time you read this, the winner will have been announced and, who knows, perhaps Revolution Muslim or some sister organization will have issued another round of death threats.

The conjunction of the words “cartoon” and “Mohammed” inevitably brings to mind the phrase “Danish cartoons,” the dozen images of Mohammed published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten five years ago. Everyone remembers what happened then: an excess of Muslim rage that left some 150 people dead and a goodly lot of Danish property trashed worldwide. What is not quite so well known is that the rampage was deliberately fomented by Danish imams who brought the cartoons to the Middle East to stoke the fury of their co-religionists. In fact, they brought not only the Jyllands-Posten cartoons but also three coarse images of Mohammed that they had created themselves. One portrayed Mohammed as a pedophile, one showed him with the face of a pig, the third we will forbear from describing. “It is,” Gillespie notes, “nothing less than amazing that holy men decrying the desecration of their religion would create such foul images, but there you have it. It is as if the pope created ‘Piss Christ’ and then passed it off as the work of critics of Catholicism.”

There is another aspect of the episode that that bears noting. We live in a culture in which bargain-basement outrage is a coveted ticket to artistic notoriety. Whenever you see the words “challenging” or “transgressive,” you know you are in for something repellent, which the “progressive” cultural establishment will reflexively hail as a brave assault on conventional thinking. The irony, of course, is that nothing could be more conventional than the pseudo-radicalism of this coddled faux avant garde. Exhibitions like “Sensation” do not challenge established taste: they are established taste. Hence the devolution by which the repellent became the tedious. “Provocation for its own sake,” as Mark Steyn recently noted in National Review Online, “is one of the dreariest features of contemporary culture.” But “Everybody Draws Mohammed” is not about gratuitous provocation. It is about standing up for freedom, for the liberating values of Western civilization, in the face of blatant efforts to crush that freedom. The real provocateurs are not the contestants in the Everybody Draws Mohammed contest. No, the real provocateurs, as Steyn observes, “are the perpetually aggrieved and ever more aggressive Islamic bullies—emboldened by the silence of ‘moderate Muslims’ and the pre-emptive capitulation of western media.” Hence the value of initiatives like “Everybody Draws Mohammed.” Their aim is not so much to offend as to defend: to defend freedom and Western culture against an aggressive ideology that slyly exploits liberal fecklessness. When the demonstrations against the Danish cartoons first erupted, the English journalist Charles Moore had the right idea: every newspaper in the West ought to have republished the images that had first appeared in Jyllands-Posten. Steyn recommends a similar response now: “The only way to stop this madness destroying our liberties is (as Ayaan Hirsi Ali puts it) to spread the risk. Everybody Draws Mohammed Day does just that. Various websites are offering prizes. I only wish we could track down those sicko Danish imams who drew their prophet as a pig, and send them the trophy.” ”

Comment:  For the three or four people left in Minnesota who recognize the name, Charles Dickens, there is an excellent article at The New Criterion reviewing some of the biographies of that exceptional Englishman.

Know the Latest in “Obamacare” at ObamaCareWatch.org

Today marks the launch of what will be an invaluable website for elected officials, candidates, journalists, and, really, all Americans: ObamaCareWatch.org.

Friend and at one time fellow highschool teacher, Mark Waldeland sent me the notice announced by William Kristol of the Weekly Standard, that: ObamaCareWatch.org has been ‘orged’ to inform…….

“Directed by noted health care expert (and frequent TWS contributor) James Capretta, the site provides one-stop shopping for anyone who wants daily updates on the current and anticipated effects of Obamacare, the facts and arguments about it, and new developments concerning it. As Capretta says, “The administration and its allies will spend millions trying to persuade [us] that up is down when it comes to health care. We have launched this web site to set the record straight.ObamaCareWatch.org pulls together all of the best evidence and analysis about the legislation, as well as relevant news items and commentary, in an accessible and searchable format for anyone to use as they need to.  Our aim is to provide Americans with the facts so that they can hold those who sponsored and passed ObamaCare accountable for what they have done.”

Go there, use it, and call it to the attention of all the candidates, commentators, activists, and citizens who would benefit from it.”

Comment:  So Obama fooled us about another trillion dollars worth….it’s only money.

Mark Steyn on Helen Thomas and the Left’s Ethnic Cleansing of Jews

For some time now the United Nations  leaders, bureaucrats, Secretaries, novelists, reporters, pundits all…almost all leftwing bigots as well,  have been demanding some sort of ethnic cleansing of Jews from Israel.  I have been surprised that no one has noted this political strategy of the Left until Helen Thomas explained it so clearly the other day.

At last the quickest brain of them all, Mark Steyn spills it out in an article at the National Review online, in the following paragraphs, first referring to the “retirement” of Helen Thomas:

“Apparently, say the BBC and The Guardian she has quit over “anti-Israel comments”.

Really?

What did it for Helen Thomas was not her “anti-Israel comments”. After all, no one ever has to resign for what they say about Israel. No, what did it for Helen Thomas was that her comments made express reference to “The Jews” and therefore could be pointedly and properly categorised as anti-Semitic…
But here’s the irony: it’s those very same Leftist institutions – the BBC, The Guardian and suchlike – who most vehemently stress that being anti-Israel is not the same as being anti-Semitic and yet it is they who are the quickest to forget that distinction when it suits them.

Helen Thomas is a vile old Jew-hater. The great thing about the land of the First Amendment is that she’s free to be one. What’s odder is why so many people feel it necessary to obscure the nature of what she said, or to pass off her fate as yet another of the many obstacles “anti-establishment” “liberals” face in America. Helen Thomas had a privileged seat at the White House for decades. At his six (count ’em) press conferences, President Obama has taken questions from her on three occasions. She is the establishment – or was, for half a century. And that ought to be a source of shame:

All of my grandparents were born there.

They were lucky enough to get out of Poland and into Canada, but everyone who stayed in Poland ended up in ovens, or burned alive in a barn in southeastern Poland – I assume you have heard of Jedwabne… The Poles didn’t like the sound of the screams, so they played music outside the barn to drown out the sounds…

My grandmother, she used to get letters from her father, the Rabbi, once she had arrived in Canada. They were from a little town near the eastern border with Russia…

Guess what, Helen? The letters just stopped coming all of the sudden.”

Comment:  Did Helen not know that many Israelis are refugees from Iran, Iraq, and Arab Africa?   Most Lefties don’t and really don’t seem to give a damn about such subtleties as long as Israel disappears…….in the name of restoring “Peace among all Peoples”.

Tenth Grade Hockey Sprints, Mickey Kaus, Samuel Gompers, and Boxer

I saw an interview of Mickey Kaus of California the other night.  Here is a Liberal I could really like.   Not that I would vote for him over a conservative, say,  Chris Christie….after all, I am a liberal not a Liberal, so that makes me and Dennis Prager both today’s conservative. 

There are worthy Liberals in contrast to the Obama Liberal.  Obama is not a Liberal, but a Marxist.  I do not like folks who pretend who they are.  A comparison today, I suggest, is to view a bit of Chris Christie and the view a bit of Barack Obama….in speech….in full swing…..without teleprompter……speaking honestly representing who he is and what he believes and what his role is…..One of these people lives in the dark.  He speaks memorized words.  He is wary of people.  He refrains from being public about his motives, his beliefs, his person, his purpose, his honesty.  His one speech conflicts within it as well as with most other speeches, depending upon whom he desires to con for profit.

The other person is quick, refreshed,  has some maturity to give him a form of who he is.  He has no  time to con, knows his purpose, makes his purpose public and honestly describes what his intentions are.   He has formed his ideas of an adult world instead of measuring his words for some kind of value beyond substance.  It appears he likes people, friend or foe.  He refreshes the air.

Mr. Obama’s bad habits as I read them,  remind me of my days as tenth grade hockey coach at a Minneapolis public high school.   During sprint drills there  always would be a guy or two who’d  give you everything he has in the drill………only if he thinks you, the coach, are watching.    The minute your back is turned, the kid loafs.   He’d put on a good show only when on stage.

He proved unreliable when playing in a real game.

Such  souls  can’t figure out that honesty and sincerity are at the base of good work.  No one ever has to fake it if the player….or politician…..is doing his very best  for his own self appraisal and growth to problem solve and state or play  his plan clearly and straighforwardly and in open, fair debate or competition.

Mr. Obama is a Marxist.  Marxists cannot and never could debate honestly and openly in public.  The American Left knows full well the word Marxist has an evil past……for in its various stuggles for supremacy, Marxism  has caused the deaths of 100,000,000 people since it began to infect the world’s religious political  Left.  Note carefully the words of Samuel Gompers in the introduction to Jeremy Lotts’s article, “Mickey Kaus’s Boxer Rebellion”  published at realclearpolitics:

“Legendary labor leader Samuel Gompers was once asked what, exactly, organized labor was after. What was the end game? How much would be enough? Gompers answered “more.” He explained “when it becomes more, we shall still want more. And we shall never cease to demand more until we have received the results of our labor.”

That last bit was a rhetorical concession only — a bit of false modesty to keep unions from sounding like greedy capitalists. Organized labor will always press for “more,” from employers and, increasingly, from government. These are demands without end. There is no way to meet them that will not lead to ruin.

The End of Equality was the title of popular blogger and California Democratic Senate hopeful Mickey Kaus’s first and only book. It was a lover’s quarrel with a liberalism that he thought had forgot something important: how to say no to its interest groups. Liberals no longer knew how to resist some of the more outlandish demands of welfare advocates, labor unions, and other lobbies, and this had put them at odds with American voters, Kaus argued.

The book was published in 1992 and it proved influential in the debate over welfare reform. The left had stymied efforts to reform welfare under President Ronald Reagan. The challenge from reformist Democrats, including Kaus, proved too much. After the disastrous 1994 midterm elections, a Republican Congress passed — and a Democratic president signed — legislation that ended welfare as a way of life for millions of Americans.

Kaus often comes in for criticism as a crypto-conserative, but reading his book, his blog, or listening to his speeches should put the lie to this criticism. He is clearly a liberal who believes in a large, activist government. He has always supported some system of publicly guaranteed national healthcare. Kaus’s quarrel with the Obama administration on healthcare was that he thought it was selling reform on thoroughly fraudulent grounds, thus making it more vulnerable to challenge.

But Kaus differs from modern liberals in that he does not consider “more” an acceptable answer to the question, “What does liberalism want?” He thinks government should do certain things to ensure social but not necessarily economic equality. And he believes that, in order to govern effectively, Democrat-controlled government needs to stand up to some pretty powerful Democratic interest groups and tell them “enough” or even “give it back.”

In his current protest campaign, that means that Kaus has singled out unions for criticism, as well as the “Hispanic lobby.” He argues that unions have wrecked American manufacturing and education, and made government at all levels prohibitively expensive.

Kaus wants the Obama administration and the California government to work to reverse these trends, rather than accede to most union demands. He also wants the federal government to seriously cut back on the flow of illegal immigrants before it considers granting the demands for “more” amnesty for illegals already in the country.

Critics, including Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer, argue that these positions make him a de facto Republican. Kaus counters that they are really bad liberals, because they are not thinking through where such demands will lead. That message does not appear to have resonated with California Democratic primary voters. The Republican Party nomination this year is fiercely competitive. Nobody seriously argues that Boxer won’t crush the shoestring Kaus challenge underfoot.

That Kaus’s candidacy and message have been so easily dismissed by the primary electorate could end up being bad news for Democrats. Kaus wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “We need nonretired Democrats who tell the unions no. Or else, perhaps after more bankruptcies and bailouts, Republicans will do it for them.”

Comment:  Good Luck, Mr. Kaus.

Obamacare Fraud Obama’s Autobiography?

Remember Pelosi’s command that the Obamacare bill had to pass before the public would come to understand its benefits.   It turns out that the public is more horrified every day at what it understands…..as was the forecast. 

At ObamaCare Watch, James C. Capretta writes:

This week, we learned that the Obama administration is orchestrating a $125 million propaganda campaign to sell the recently enacted health-care law to the public.  That effort will be funded by labor unions and other groups from the Democratic political orbit.  It comes on top of the misleading government mailer sent to the nation’s seniors, at the expense of taxpayers, touting the supposed benefits of ObamaCare for the elderly.  On Tuesday, the president himself will join the fray again to make the sales pitch, this time promoting the colossal waste of taxpayer money associated with $250 per senior bribes to be issued this summer and fall.

The problem the White House has, however, has never been insufficient public relations spin.  The problem is the substance.  Americans care deeply about their health care, and they have seen right through the Democratic rhetoric on ObamaCare from day one.  They know that it is a poorly conceived experiment, built on the flawed assumption that the problems in U.S. health care can be solved with heavier regulation, subsidization, and micro-management from Washington, D.C.

In Medicare, the results of the new law will be disastrous.  ObamaCare will cut payments to the private insurance component of the program (called Medicare Advantage, or MA) by nearly $200 billion over ten years.  The chief actuary of the program says this cut will eventually drive 7 million seniors — many with low-incomes — out of the plan they would prefer to enroll in.  And it will mean thousands of dollars in benefit reductions for every MA enrollee, beginning next year.  These seniors won’t be silenced with patronizing and one-time checks.  In addition, the new law imposes arbitrary price cutting for all manner of Medicare services, which the chief actuary says will harm access to care by forcing scores of institutions to stop taking Medicare beneficiaries.

Last week, we learned that the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) has postponed issuing guidance on the ill-conceived “medical-loss ratio” requirement in the new law because, as passed by Congress, it will cause massive and unnecessary disruption to millions of current insurance enrollees.  One estimate is that 1 to 2 million people with individual insurance will lose their coverage if the requirement is imposed because national insurers will be forced to exit the market to avoid large business losses.

The president has said repeatedly that Americans will get to keep the insurance they have today if they like it.  But that’s quite clearly not going to be the case.  Douglas Holtz-Eakin, of the American Action Forum, has released a new study that shows some 35 million Americans will get bumped from job-based coverage under the new law and be forced into the new government-managed system.  That’s because the massive new subsidies promised by the government will make dropping insurance unavoidable for thousands of employers.  He also predicts the migration out of employer plans will drive up the overall federal costs dramatically, adding another $500 billion over ten years to the costs projected by the Congressional Budget Office for the bill.

Perhaps that why CBO’s Director, Doug Elmendorf, is saying that the federal government’s health costs are still unsustainable, even after passage of the new law, despite repeated presidential promises that ObamaCare would solve our budget problems by painlessly “bending the cost curve.”

The truth is, the more we learn about ObamaCare, the worse it gets.  It’s filled with budgetary gimmicks and flawed assumptions that will bankrupt the U.S. treasury. Its taxes will force deep cuts in employment in the medical device and other industries.  Restaurants and other employers will have strong incentives to avoid hiring workers from low income households in order to lessen the burden from the law’s mandates and penalties.  It will disrupt insurance for millions of Americans who are perfectly happy with the coverage they have today.  And the government’s clumsy cost-cutting efforts will undermine the quality of American medicine.

Most Americans already instinctively understand all of this.  But it’s also clear that the administration and its allies will spend millions trying to persuade them that up is down when it comes to health care. We have launched this web site to set the record straight.  ObamaCareWatch.org pulls together all of the best evidence and analysis about the legislation, as well as relevant news items and commentary, in an accessible and searchable format for anyone to use as they need to.  Our aim is to provide Americans with the facts so that they can hold those who sponsored and passed ObamaCare accountable for what they have done.

Comment:  If one wants to know the real Barack Husein Obama,  the Obamacare fraud is his autobiography……It tells everything about who he really is…….the man who after twenty two years of membership in Jeremiah “God Damn America” Wright’s church in Chicago, claimed he had no idea his father figure had ever said such things.    My, my.

Learn the basics about the new health care law.  

 

Obama’s FTC Seeks to Establish Internet Tax to Save Left Wing “News”

Since the rise of the internet and talk radio, Leftist and Liberals of federal government elected and appointed levels and their allies in the news media, have threatened to license or otherwise disenfranchise popular writings, isolating them from the traditional leftwing news media grown out of university journalism schools.  Republicans in Congress haven’t  made much noise about the issue in public, being somewhat at sea on these issues.

In Liberal thought journalists must become Liberal, or better yet, Marxist,  before any are allowed to report or give opinions about the peoples’  matters.  How else could the country change its bourgoise attitudes about liberty and private enterprise rather than become  enlightened  by academe  fiat.  

More recently candidate Obama preached unity….that is, everyone should dance Marxist and happiness and peace will break out all over.

Although the mass media rallied behind the young fellow as cheerleaders do at foot ball games, there still remained those dregs, computer people who dared to express themselves in unObamalove postures. 

Other computer people put traditional newspaper advertising  just about flat out of business.

The Left has since proposed laws, taxes, fines, standards, definitions, to shut down nonLiberal, nonMarxist oriented newspapaers.   More recently it has noted universally how much easier Obamacare healthcorps could have been passed by Congress if these wasps from the wild  had their stingers removed. 

Obama Marxism as is true of any Marxism, depends on bloating government large enough so that bureaucrats have enough power to  control and punish the citizen whenever their is a question about the citizen’s  Marxism.    Obama worships unity.

The following article appeared today at National Center for Policy Analysis on the issue  of restoring journalistic power:

“The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been nosing around how to save journalism and in its just-posted “staff discussion draft” on “potential policy recommendations to support the reinvention of journalism,” it makes its bias clear.  The FTC defines journalism as what newspapers do and aligns itself with protecting the old power structure of media, says the Business Insider.  

There are four major policy ideas presented in the document, says the Insider. 

Antitrust exemptions: 

• The FTC looks at allowing news organizations to collude to set prices to consumers and with aggregators.
• That is the precise opposite of what an agency charged with protecting competition for the benefit of customers should be considering. 

Government subsidies: 

• Increased funding for public broadcasting; a national fund for local news suggested in Columbia’s report on journalism; a tax credit for employing journalists; citizen news vouchers; and grants to universities for reporting.
• It also looks at increasing the present postal subsidy; using Voice of America and Radio Free Europe content in the U.S.; and enabling the Small Business Administration (SBA) to help nonprofits. 

Taxes: 

• The FTC looks at licensing the news: having Internet service providers (ISPs) levy a fee that the government then doles out to its selected news purveyors — call that the internet tax.
• In another section, it examines the iPad tax; a tax on the broadcast spectrum; a spectrum auction tax; a tax on ISPs and cell phones; and a tax on advertising. 

New tax status: 

• The document spends much space looking at ways to make journalism a tax-exempt activity and suggests the IRS should change its regulations to enable that.
• It also looks at changing tax law to enable hybrid corporations (“benefit” and “flexible purpose” corporations that can judge success on serving a mission and not just maximizing profits). “

Source: Jeff Jarvis, “The Government Wants To Save Newspapers and Media Moguls,” Business Insider, May 29, 2010. 

Comment:  I wonder how the New York Times will cover this issue.