Obama administration

“Grizzly Steppe”: Is This a Joke?

Featured image The Obama administration is retaliating against Russia for hacking into Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s email account. It would have been much better if the administration had reacted when Russia hacked into the White House’s and State Department’s computers in 2014, but, as Glenn Reynolds says, at that time only national security was at stake, while now, it’s something really important: the Democratic Party’s power. So yesterday the administration released its long-anticipated report »

Santa Obama’s Legacy

Featured image As Barack Obama’s presidency draws to a close, we can evaluate his legacy–although I fear that in some respects, the full extent of the damage he has done will not be known for some time. Michael Ramirez surveys the wreckage that Santa Obama delivered in his oversized bag. Consider this one a supplement to The Week In Pictures. Click to enlarge: »

The Obama Years in One Chart

Featured image Obama’s approval ratings are doing fairly well these days—comfortably and consistently over 50 percent. This, while the number of Americans who say the country is on the “wrong track” is at or near an all-time high. One polling guru I know says that Obama’s good numbers owe to the fact that he looks good in comparison to Hillary and Trump, which makes sense. And also that the “wrong track” number »

Of EpiPens and Weasels

Featured image Mylan NV has been taking a lot of abuse for sharply raising the price of its popular EpiPen. The Wall Street Journal explains the background on the price increase. It isn’t, as I would have assumed, a case of patent protection. The patent on epinephrine ran out years ago. Rather, it turns out that keeping the anti-allergy dose sterile is difficult and expensive. Mylan’s competitors have had a hard time »

Why Isn’t the Economy the Issue?

Featured image At the New York Post, Carl Campanile and Danika Fears make a good point: “Hillary, Trump too busy insulting each other to focus on Obama’s weak economy.” Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are too busy trading barbs on hot-button topics like race and immigration to discuss the economy, which has slowed to a crawl under President Obama’s watch. “The numbers are bad. There should be a concern about the weakness »

NY Times Blasts Obama’s Executive Tyranny

Featured image I’m sure the New York Times didn’t think it was doing what I claim in the headline here with its remarkable story yesterday on Obama’s use of executive power, but what else would you conclude from taking in the direct and cleared-eyed prose of Binyamin Appelbaum and Michael D. Shear: WASHINGTON — In nearly eight years in office, President Obama has sought to reshape the nation with a sweeping assertion »

The ordeal of Bill Henck

Featured image The IRS is at the center of the deepest scandals of the Obama administration. Bill Henck has given us a look from his perspective inside the IRS Office of the Chief Counsel, where he has worked as an attorney for 29 years. In 2014 we posted Bill’s personal account of a retaliatory audit conducted by the IRS against him in “Inside the IRS.” We followed up with subsequent posts by »

Ted Cruz exposes administration’s willful blindness to jihad

Featured image On Tuesday, Sen. Ted Cruz held a hearing of the Subcommittee on Oversight, Agency Action, Federal Rights and Federal Courts, which he chairs. The subject was the Obama administration’s willful blindness when it comes to radical Islamic terrorism. You can view the hearing below, and I encourage you to watch as much of it as you can. Sen. Cruz’s opening statement is here. Andy McCarthy’s testimony is here. Another of »

Deep thoughts with Loretta Lynch

Featured image We do not ascribe anything President Obama says to stupidity. Ignorance, occasionally. His ignorance of history is easily demonstrable, and it runs wide and deep. However, I wonder about Attorney General Loretta Lynch (as I wondered about her predecessor, Eric Holder). The Orlando massacre has put her public musings front and center and they do not flatter her. In Orlando on Tuesday she said: “To the LGBT community — we »

Honest, Earnest style

Featured image To rewrite history the Obama administration is toying with the devices that George Orwell depicted in 1984. The party line that Orwell attributed to Ingsoc provides this rationale: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” Today’s New York Post editorial comes up with another example, this one involving the oxymoronically named White House spokesman Josh Earnest. At the May 9 press briefing, Kevin »

75 years from now

Featured image In the the Gram Parsons song “One Hundred Years From Now,” the singer observes: “Nobody knows what kind of trouble we’re in.” Looking on the bright side, however, he doubts that one hundred years from now people will “still feel this way.” That must be the theory behind the State Department’s approach to the Freedom of Information Act in a lawsuit brought against it by the RNC. CNN reports that »

This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

Featured image I’ve been meaning for a while to knock out an article on the theme, “there’s nothing wrong with America that 4 percent growth won’t solve.” That’s an exaggeration, of course, but not much of one. Faster economic growth will alleviate a number of our leading problems, especially stagnant wages, a sinking labor force participation rate, badly unbalanced budgets, adult children living in basements, ESPN’s sinking ratings, etc. One difficulty is »

Barack Obama: The Unspoken Issue In This Year’s Campaign

Featured image At InstaPundit, Richard Benedetto makes an interesting point: Usually when an incumbent president is leaving office and a slew of candidates are battling for his job, that departing chief executive’s record is a major campaign issue. But not this year, even though two of three Americans say the country is on the wrong track, job creation is sluggish, income inequality continues to rise and Mr. Obama’s job approval barely tops »

Quote of the day

Featured image The Weekly Standard’s Chris Deaton captures the quote of the day from Senator Tom Cotton speaking with Hugh Hewitt on Hugh’s syndicated radio show this morning: Arkansas senator Tom Cotton hammered the president’s foreign policy staff Tuesday morning, explaining why he’s become “public enemy number one at the White House” over his opposition to the Iran deal. “I guess I became public enemy number one at the White House because »

Shower Wars, Circa 1971

Featured image I spent the summer after graduating from college in Hanover, New Hampshire, working in a menial capacity on the Daniel Webster Papers project and mostly having fun. One day that summer, I had lifted weights at Dartmouth’s field house and was in the men’s locker room, preparing to take a shower, when the locker room was “liberated” by feminists. This was first wave, or possibly second wave, feminism. Feminists of »

Who controls the past

Featured image In his Times Magazine profile of Ben Rhodes, David Samuels shows how the Obama administration created a fictional narrative to support our alliance his one-sided love affair with the Islamic Republic of Iran. If the truth does not inhibit you, you can make stuff up. If you can make stuff up, and if you’ve got an army of willing tools to retail your stories, you’ve got it made. Taking his »

Mr. Earnest at work

Featured image Rep. Jason Chaffetz has invited White House national security adviser Ben Rhodes to a May 17 hearing on the Iran deal. Chaffetz’s invitation follows the New York Times Magazine profile of Rhodes in which Rhodes brags about the success of the lies he disseminated on behalf of the Iran deal. The Hill reports that Rhodes has not yet responded to the invitation and that he may be subpoenaed to testify. »