Obama administration

Mr. Rhodes regrets

Featured image In David Samuels’s valuable New York Times Magazine profile of Obama administration national security adviser Ben Rhodes, Rhodes presents with a mind that is said to have “melded” with that of President Obama. I think that Rhodes proves this to be untrue in one relevant respect. Rhodes and Obama have rightly sized up their media interlocutors as young ignoramuses and/or valued tools disseminating the administration’s line. Samuels shows Rhodes crowing »

The runt of Rhodes

Featured image Obamacare was built on an edifice of calculated lies. Some of us could see the propositions on which President Obama sold Obamacare as falsehoods at the time of the selling. Others have learned from bitter experience after the buying. President Obama and his team hold a low opinion of the intelligence of the American people. See, for example, the case of Jonathan Gruber. Having elected him president twice, we have »

How Does Hillary Run On a Bad Economy?

Featured image Democrats love to cherry pick statistics to make the case that Barack Obama’s stewardship of our economy has been successful. Obama himself often claims to have saved the world economy from disaster, but how? If anything averted collapse, it was the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which was executed by the Bush administration, for better or worse. If any government measure saved the economy, it was TARP. The “stimulus” bill that »

Aspects of the rot

Featured image Victor Davis Hanson captures important aspects of the latter days of the Obama administration in his PJ Media column “Sleeping dogs are waking.” Here he identifies a few signs of the racial mania that Obama has aggravated if not inspired: [T]he Obama era has reawakened ethnic chauvinism and multiculturalism in a way we have never quite seen before in recent American history. Who would have thought that in 2009, the »

The Man Who Would Be King

Featured image Here at Power Line, we have argued strenuously that President Obama’s orders suspending enforcement of various immigration laws are unconstitutional because they violate the Take Care Clause. Law professor and former appellate judge Michael McConnell makes that point powerfully, reviewing the long struggle in Great Britain over royal prerogatives, the context of the founders’ inclusion pf the Take Care Clause in the Constitution, and its subsequent legal history in the »

Obama to Energy Producers: Drop Dead

Featured image Oh, well, if Hillary kills off what’s left of the coal industry, at least we still have a booming natural gas industry, creating lots of good-paying jobs and with a potential for significant exports to help with our miserable trade balance. Wait, what’s that? U.S. Rejects Multi-Billion Dollar Jordan Cove Gas Export Plan U.S. regulators rejected Veresen Inc.’s multibillion-dollar proposal to build a terminal in Oregon that would export as »

Peak Esposito (2)

Featured image In today’s New York Post Betsy McCaughey draws attention to a striking episode of the Obama administration’s rank lawlessness. As it has been frequently in the past, Obamacare is the occasion: In 2014, the White House tried to avert that disaster by promising insurers a taxpayer-funded bailout, but public outrage and quick action by Sen. Marco Rubio put a stop to it. Now the administration is at it again. Desperate »

Peak Esposito

Featured image While it is difficult to date the onset precisely, we entered the Esposito phase of the Obama presidency within the past few years. It is the phase in which Barack Obama’s barking leftist mania for rule by decree became manifest. In late 2014, for example, The Hill took a look back at “Obama’s ‘pen and phone’ barrage.” The barrage continues. Since then we have grown accustomed to it. In Woody »

What I Will Miss About Barack Obama

Featured image As the Obama administration limps through its last months, its impending demise is mourned by few. One of those few is the perennially clueless David Brooks, apparently the New York Times’s idea of a conservative. Brooks is infamous for falling in love with the crease in Barack Obama’s pants. Seven years later, he has found more to like about our failed president: I Miss Barack Obama. Many of the traits »

Breaking: Supreme Court Blocks Obama’s Climate Plan

Featured image This is huge. The Supreme Court, by a 5 – 4 vote, has just issued a stay of Obama’s so-called “Clean Power Plan,” pending a full review of the case by a lower appeals court. ABC News reports: A divided Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to halt enforcement of President Barack Obama’s sweeping plan to address climate change until after legal challenges are resolved. The surprising move is a blow to the administration »

Talkin’ unemployment blues

Featured image President Obama made an appearance in the White House press room on Friday to take a victory lap over the fall of the official unemployment rate (U-3) to 4.9 percent (video below, about 15 minutes). Is that number for real? Referring to the hell he saw tending to wounded men during the Civil War, Walt Whitman held that “the real war will never get in the books.” By the same »

Obama to Oil Companies (and Motorists): Drop Dead

Featured image One of the great things about being a leftist is that you never have to be consistent. Fossil fuels are too cheap!, we are constantly told, and their overuse is wrecking the planet. But when oil prices and gasoline pump prices soar, the left complains that the oil industry is gouging us. But when oil prices collapse and the pump price goes down, what does the left want? Higher taxes »

In which Vance Opperman tells a tale

Featured image Vance Opperman is an extraordinarily wealthy Minneapolis businessman and former practicing attorney. He’s also an active Democrat whose financial contributions would be more than sufficient to secure him an ambassadorship to the country of his choice, though he pleads that he “will trade lutefisk for ambassadorship.” (Humor isn’t his strong point.) City Pages reports that in 2014 he was Minnesota’s top Super PAC donor, contributing $260,000 to the WIN Minnesota »

Obama: Always Wrong, Never In Doubt

Featured image It seems incredible, but the Democrats are promoting the idea that the Obama administration represents a sort of economic triumph, comparable to Ronald Reagan’s 1980s boom or Bill Clinton’s 1990s stock market rise (putting aside the crash that ended the decade). Absent mass hypnosis, this will be a tough sell. Dan Mitchell takes a scalpel to the Democrats’ attempt at revisionist history (numerous links omitted): In a 2014 study for »

The Empty Seat at the State of the Union

Featured image Michael Ramirez has a better explanation: You know Obama is a lame duck when Nikki Haley’s responsive speech gets three times the publicity and ten times the controversy of Obama’s snoozer. »

His way

Featured image President Obama gave his last State of the Union Address last night. The White House has posted the text here and video here. I’ve also embedded the video below. Obama’s Iranian friends provided their own commentary in advance of the speech, seizing two Navy riverine ships and detaining 10 sailors (nine men and one woman). The mullahs were expressing their complete and utter contempt for Obama. Obama did things his »

Dan Gelernter: Obama does the military

Featured image We haven’t gotten around to noting the Obama administration’s order to open all military jobs to women, “removing the final barriers that kept women from serving in combat, including the most dangerous and grueling commando posts.” Dan Gelernter is an occasional contributor to the Weekly Standard and chief executive officer of Dittach.com. Dan comments: America takes its sports more seriously than its military. This is the conclusion we can draw »