Obama administration
March 6, 2013 — Scott Johnson
The Washington Times has obtained an email from an email from Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service official Charles Brown saying he asked if he could try to spread out the sequester cuts in his region to minimize the impact. The email indicates he was told not to do anything that would lessen the dire impacts Congress had been warned of. Times reporter Stephen Dinan quotes Brown’s message: “We have
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March 5, 2013 — John Hinderaker
At The Hill, John Feehery makes a provocative claim: John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are eating Barack Obama’s lunch: Don’t tell the Tea Party, but the tag team of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are currently mopping the floor with Barack Obama. The president convincingly won a second term in November, but since that time, the congressional Republican leadership has outfoxed, outmaneuvered and plain out-strategized him on just about every
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March 4, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Remember George W. Bush’s famous “16 words”? They came from Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech, where Bush said: “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” That was a true statement, but it caused immense controversy, for reasons that are now hard to remember. Fast forward to 2013, and President Obama’s State of the Union, where he said, talking about
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March 4, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Is it because folks remembered President Obama’s promise during one of the debates that there will be no sequester? Is it because word got out that the sequester was Obama’s idea? Is it because folks don’t mind the sequester and resent Obama’s effort to make it sound like the end of the world? Is it because the flap with Bob Woodward was more storm than drizzle? Or is it just
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March 2, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Tom Joscelyn writes: My latest in the Weekly Standard deals with Osama bin Laden’s files. The Obama administration, despite its supposed commitment to transparency, has released just 17 files and a handful of video clips from a corpus totaling “hundreds of thousands of documents and files.” Tom Donilon, Obama’s national security adviser, has said that the documents and files would fill a “small college library.” There are compelling reasons to
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March 2, 2013 — Steven Hayward
In honor of the recent Cabinet confirmations of John Kerry, Jack Lew, and Chuck Hagel, it becomes apparent that Churchill’s famous remark about Ramsey MacDonald as “the boneless wonder” is for once inadequate to the moment: Obama has installed an entire boneless chicken farm. To do full justice to the complete mediocrity that is Obama’s second term, we’ll need to roll out the entire repertoire of Churchill’s dismissals of MacDonald,
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February 28, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
I don’t regret writing earlier today that the MSM would be turned off by Gene Sperling’s statement to Bob Woodward that he would regret some of his reporting on the sequester. But it looks like I may have erred in this prediction. Politico reports that some in the media reject Woodward’s claim that Sperling’s remark amounted to a threat. Among that group, interestingly enough, is Bret Baier of Fox News.
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February 28, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Until very recently, I had a hard time imagining what it would take to get the mainstream media riled up about the Obama administration. After all, even the Benghazi horror failed to accomplish this. But the Bob Woodward flap has remedied my failure of imagination. Whatever the merit of Woodward’s specific charge that the White House, through Gene Sperling, threatened him, the controversy at a minimum has struck a nerve
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February 28, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
As Scott pointed out yesterday, Bob Woodward has thrust himself even further into the sequestration saga by complaining that a “very senior person” at the White House warned him in an email that he would “regret” his comment that President Obama moved the goal post by asking for more revenue. Politico has presented what purports to be the email containing the threat, which was written by Gene Sperling. In context
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February 27, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
here, that President Obama is winning the sequester battle but losing the war: The more time we spend on pointless disputes about budget cuts no one is expected to make soon, the less we spend trying to solve the problems that confront us today — and, God forbid, thinking about the future. The 2012 election gave President Obama new authority and new energy. Republicans want to place as much distance
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February 26, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
The Wall Street Journal focuses attention on two questions regarding Jack Lew and the paychecks he received from private employers before returning to government. First, why did New York University pay severance to Lew in 2006 when he left there voluntarily to work at Citigroup? In my experience, employers don’t pay folks to quit their job. Severance pay is what you get when you are, in effect, sacked. Second, why
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February 26, 2013 — Scott Johnson
President Obama’s transparent mendacity about his responsibility for the sequester is revealing. The obtuse Chuck Todd doesn’t think it’s a story; he characterizes it as a traditionally sterile argument about who is to blame for the unpleasantness (which is the way the New York Times treats the issue it when it deigns to touch it). Todd can’t be that stupid, can he? True, it would be nice to know how
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February 25, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Mackubin Thomas Owens serves on the faculty of the Naval War College. He is also the editor of Orbis, the quarterly journal of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and author of US Civil-Military Relations After 9/11: Renegotiating the Civil-Military Bargain. Saturday’s Wall Street Journal published Mac’s column “America’s kinder, gentler Department of Defense,” expanding on a theme he touched on here on Power Line. Although the column is accessible via
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February 22, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
We sometimes hear of the savings that could be realized by eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse” at federal government agencies. But substantial savings might also be achieved if only we could eliminate absurdity. Consider a lawsuit brought by the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) against United States Steel and the United Steelworkers Union under the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA). The suit challenges a practice, approved by the
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February 20, 2013 — John Hinderaker
In our republican form of government, politicians are not our rulers, they are our employees. That goes, too, for the bureaucrats who staff the many federal agencies. But these days, it seems clear that many politicians, and perhaps even more bureaucrats, have lost track of who is working for whom. To cite just one of many examples, President Obama and Congressional Democrats would not have rammed Obamacare through Congress against
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February 19, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Yesteday, in a post called “Waiting for Lefty,” I noted the complaint of some Republican Senators that President Obama hasn’t reached out to them to talk compromise on the big issues of the day. My take was that Obama isn’t calling them because he isn’t interested in compromises on the big issues of the day. His focus, instead, is on positioning Democrats to retake control of the House (while holding
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February 18, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
According to Politico, “GOP senators [are] waiting for Obama outreach” and disappointed that none has been forthcoming: President Barack Obama will need Republican senators to pass his ambitious agenda — and the White House has even identified the top prospects. But after months of buildup and a week since his State of the Union address, key aides on the Hill and at the White House acknowledge that even GOP senators
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