Black and White Blooms and Summer Clouds wallpaper
The librul media at the L.A. Times is running this blatantly deceptive headline for a column – Obama now blames poor job numbers on congressional inaction. Wait! His party runs Congress
According to the president, he’s been “adamant” with Congress for months now about a new jobs bill to help small businesses. Obama says this really good bill is stalled in the Senate, where so much administration legislation has been crammed through so effectively by Majority Leader Harry Reid.
Reid’s been so good at it, in fact, that he’s now running for his political life in a reelection campaign back in Nevada where Obama’s legislation is not so popular.
This us assume this writer’s pants did not burst into flames when he wrote this column. That leaves us knowing for a fact – just like most conservatives – he has no idea how Congress works. A Republican minority and a couple of Democrats were able to kill the public option in health-care reform. Senate Republicans are holding up a major jobs bill with the mere threat of a filibuster. Some details of Senate parliamentary procedure can be pretty arcane but even your average numskull conservative media hack should have been able to figure this one out. That actually leave the last paragraph to RNC chair Michael Steele – who just woke up from that coma he’s been in since 1999 –
The administration’s “Recovery Summer” has been an epic failure and it is way past time for the White House to be straight with the American people and admit that an $862-billion stimulus did not do what was promised. It is clear that the Democrats’ strategy of reckless spending, ballooning deficits and higher taxes are not the answer and that we need to pursue Republican pro-growth solutions to get our economy back on track.
It was eight years of reckless spending, reckless tax policies, reckless foreign entanglements, reckless monetary policy, reckless enforcement of regulations and reckless management of the economy that left a disaster for Obama to fix. What day is it we can expect Conservatives to have an epiphany and start acting like mentally cogent adults. Steele and the L.A. Times hack are a reminder for those feeling a little down about the midterm elections. If moderates win we win. If right-wingers win, we win. If Democrats keep a bare majority in either house we’ll still get a little progress. If Republicans – who are counting their chickens as I write – win than they get a larger share of the blame for pushing the country back to the disastrous economic policies that got us to where we are today. We can all agree to disagree on many of the particulars of Obama’s economic initiatives, but overall he had to act and he did save the economy from being far worse off than had he sit on his hands and done nothing – If only Obama had …
See if this structure seems familiar to you: Over the past two years, Barack Obama has done X. Now, his poll numbers have slipped to 44 percent. His party is slated to lose a lot of seats in the 2010 midterms. Obama’s decision to do X is to blame.
“X” can be a lot of things. Maybe it’s the decision to attempt health-care reform. Or his socialist tendencies. Or his cool, professorial demeanor. In Matt Bai’s latest article, John Podesta says it’s Obama’s pursuit of an ambitious legislative agenda. If he’d spent less time passing legislation, he could’ve spent more time developing and selling popular themes. In John Judis’s latest article, it’s the absence of populism in Obama’s speeches and policies.
The problem with the essays is that they don’t consider the counterfactual. What if Obama had done not-X? Would things really be better for him?
Ezra’s poll number comparisons show President Obama doing well compared to Reagan and Clinton. Considering he is rebuilding the house Republicans burned down President Obama aint’ doing too bad. Republicans want the public to believe they have put away the matches and they’ll behave themselves this time. Circus master P.T. Barnum once said there’s a sucker born every minute.
It’s been a summer of setbacks for Sarah Palin. Candidate “cubs” endorsed by the Mama Grizzly in Chief have been suffering a recent string of primary election losses.
The Republicans’ 2008 vice presidential nominee promised a pack of “mama grizzly” candidates would rise up and defeat Democrats in this November’s elections. But office-seekers she supported in Kansas and Washington state lost their primaries despite her high-profile endorsements. And Karen Handel lost her runoff contest for Georgia governor a day after sharing an Atlanta stage with Palin.
Now, Alaska’s Senate primary on Tuesday is shaping up as an embarrassing defeat in her own backyard. Sen. Lisa Murkowski is expected to dispatch the challenger Palin has endorsed in the Republican contest.
Palin says it is not about picking winners. Kind of a weird admission that it is all a game and as long as her celebrity status keeps bringing in the millions from wing-nut welfare that’s all that matters. It will probably dawn on her or one of her handlers that she confabulated some more words and meanings and they’ll issue a clarification which will need to be clarified.
The Long Goodbye 