It’s Thursday, February 14th, 2013….and in honor of Valentine’s Day, we offer this Ode to The Obamao:

We think that we shall never see
   a man as self-absorbed as B.
Whose only seeming daring deed
    was smoking vast amounts of weed.
Accomplishments? Can’t name a one;
    achievements? Likewise, he has none.
But lack of any aptitude
    has not decreased his attitude,
the smirking narcissistic gall
    of thinking that he knows it all.
    And though his ego boundless soars,
    he’s useless as tits on a boar.
What best describes our heartfelt ire?
    We’d hold our piss were he afire!

Or as my old friend Marc Katz would say, what a….

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, Commentary Magazine‘s Peter Wehner reads Jay Carney’s mind during his interview with Bret Baier:

Where’s Steve Kroft When You Need Him?

 

Which makes this interview between Fox News’ Bret Baier and White House press secretary Jay Carney so delicious. Under Baier’s firm, skillful questioning, Carney is forced to admit that yes, that really bad, terrible, awful, reckless, harsh, vicious, offense-against-God-and-Man idea was … the president’s.

How terribly inconvenient for Mr. Carney. What is also worth noting isn’t simply the admission by Carney, but his petulance. The former-Time-journalist-turned-Obama-mouthpiece is clearly very unhappy to be pressed on this matter. Because Mr. Carney, like the president, seems to believe that tough, direct, and respectful questions are a violation of journalist ethics in the age of Obama.

Next up, two of the best from the many commentaries we’ve read on The Obamao’s latest Hour of Homage….to himself.  First, the WSJ‘s Dan Henninger characterizes what was clearly meant to convey….

The State of Obama

The State of the Union speech was about just one thing: the Obama project.

 

Here’s what has to be understood. It’s all about him. A State of the Union speech normally is about relating a president’s public policies to conditions in the country. An Obama State of the Union speech is about one thing: the Obama project.

It would be unfair to say that everything and everyone else in a complex world are irrelevant. But let’s be clear about the priorities: Congress, the Cabinet of courtiers, the press, the people and indeed the national problems described in that State of the Union speech—it’s all brick and mortar in the future Obama monument.

That we are all just riding in Barack Obama’s sidecar should have been obvious from day one. His 2008 Denver acceptance speech enveloped nearly everything. The vast, sweeping goals he then laid out in January 2009 are virtually the same ones he described Tuesday night—the climate cleansed, education for all, social justice achieved and the drowning middle-class saved.

The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, an Obama admirer, commented without irony right after the State of the Union: “In some ways, what was most noticeable about the speech was what wasn’t in it: Nothing.” (We’d suggest “nothing” was all that was in it.)

Commentary from right to left after the speech noted the mismatch between its goals and money available in any conceivable federal budget. So why is he doing this? More to the point, what have we gotten ourselves into with this president?

Well, it’s big. Mr. Obama by his own statements has made clear that he’s at the center of something larger than the mere here and now. In a 2011 CBS interview he said, “I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president—with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR and Lincoln, just in terms of what we’ve gotten done in modern history.”

On another occasion: “Around the world, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, what they did was hard. It takes time. It takes more than a single term.” Again in 2011: “And now that King has his own memorial on the Mall I think that we forget when he was alive there was nobody who was more vilified, nobody who was more controversial, nobody who was more despairing at times.”

An unprompted remark at a fundraiser with NBA stars last year: “It is very rare I come to an event where I’m like the fifth or sixth most interesting person. Usually the folks want to take a picture with me, sit next to me, talk to me. That has not been the case at this event and I completely understand.”

Johnson, FDR, Lincoln, Gandhi, Mandela, Martin and Michael. What the rest of us do is bear witness.

“It is our unfinished task to make sure that this government works on behalf of the many,” he said Tuesday, “and not just the few.” Has anyone noticed how much of the Obama agenda is endlessly “unfinished”? The climate, great schools in every neighborhood, even real economic growth—it’s always just over the horizon.

Whether any of these laws and spending ideas—Fix-It-First, an Energy Security Trust, Paycheck Fairness—come to life, much less work, doesn’t matter. That’s not their first purpose. For Mr. Obama, the main thing is to join one or two real achievements, such as ObamaCare, to a laundry list of grandiose intentions and hope future historians conclude that what little he did and all that he dreamed made him a great man. Some might say it’s delusional. He’d say that history will judge. (We’d say God will….and heaven help Obama when he does.)

As to the American population, beset with anxieties over low growth and persistent unemployment, they’re expected to gut it out with their inspirational president. In year five, he’s proposing 15 “manufacturing hubs” that he says will be “global centers of high-tech jobs.” Anyone who has seen “Annie” on Broadway knows the translation: “The sun will come out—tomorrow.”

Coverage of the speech described how he’ll now “hit the road to sell his ideas to audiences in North Carolina, Georgia and Illinois.” It seems normal until you notice he spends little or no time trying to sell any of this to Congress itself. Most of his past high-visibility proposals have underachieved or disappeared in Congress. He prefers instead the wand of solo executive authority. Even Bill Clinton, no stranger to the admiration of crowds, spent presidential capital building support one-on-one with key members of Congress. Hillary or Joe Biden would have done the same.

Not this president. It’s about him and history. Everything is a function of mobilizing the base on behalf of the Obama project. The now-famous Obama campaign media operation in place the past four years has now reincarnated as Organizing for Action, essentially a mega-flack machine for selling the project.

And that’s a danger. Barack Obama is indeed in sync with the public will, so much so that he has largely dismissed and devalued the rest of the system, specifically Congress and the courts. In the next four years, that could prove to be a problem.

We’re far from certain The Obamao’s in synch with anything other than his overweening ego and a sizable segment of the public either too blinded by ideology or strung out on the government dole to recognize the America BO’s proposing is unsustainable….were it ever achievable in the first place.

But Henninger’s concerns are still valid….particularly regarding the courts.  Which is why we’d advise everyone to pray daily for the continued health of Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito….and, yes….Roberts and Kennedy.  Like Joe Flacco before the Super Bowl, are you assured of getting anyone better?  By the way, we’ve been sold on Flacco since he beat Navy his senior year at Delaware.

Second, the WSJ editorial board weighs in on….

The President’s Plans

Obama offers an agenda aimed at electing a Pelosi House.

 

The big question of President Obama’s second term is whether he wants to forge bipartisan compromises in the next two years, or whether he wants to spend these years campaigning against Republicans to regain Democratic control of the House in 2014 and then finish his Presidency with another liberal crescendo. Judging by his inaugural address and Tuesday night’s State of the Union, we’re guessing he’s going for Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Mr. Obama’s second inaugural was a clarion call to “collective action,” as he put it, and Tuesday’s speech showed what he thinks that should mean in practice. “The American people don’t expect government to solve every problem,” he said, while proceeding to offer a new government program to solve every problem:

Not enough job creation? Have the feds set up 15 new “manufacturing hubs” where business can get government advice.

Decaying public works? How about a “Fix-It-First” plan to pay the unemployed to repair roads and bridges? Thus do the “shovel-ready” stimulus projects of the first term become the “most urgent repairs” of the second.

Lousy K-12 results? Have the feds finance pre-school for “every child in America.” A government study only recently found that any benefits from the current pre-school program, Head Start, wear off by third grade. But he’d still make it a universal entitlement.

Not enough money to subsidize electric cars or more Solyndras? Create a new Energy Security Trust, funded by taxing oil and gas companies.

Not all women earn as much money on average as men? Pass the Paycheck Fairness Act so government can unleash the trial lawyers to enforce equal pay.

Climate change? Congress must “soon” pass the Lieberman-McCain version of cap and trade that couldn’t pass the Democratic Senate in 2010, or he’ll unleash his regulators at the EPA.

Stagnant wage growth? Raise the minimum wage to $9 an hour and index it for inflation. But if a higher minimum wage can conjure middle-class prosperity, why not make it $20 an hour—or $50?

There was so much more, but the common thread is that this is what a Democratic President might expect to pass in a liberal Democratic Congress. It is not an olive branch for bipartisan deal-making with the House GOP. In its ambition and partisan framing, the agenda sounded like the opening bell in the 2014 Congressional campaign, an attempt to mobilize the new liberal majority he believes he has forged in his first four years.

That was also the theme of his proposals on the budget. He embraced “tax reform,” though he defined it as lower taxes for businesses that do what he likes (manufacturers) and higher taxes for those that don’t (oil and gas companies). He also spoke of “entitlement reform,” but his only two concrete ideas were price controls on drug companies and more means-testing for affluent seniors. These won’t come close to solving the health-care entitlement problem that even he admits is unsustainable, which is why Republicans don’t think he’s serious.

The one possible exception to his partisan agenda was immigration reform, on which Mr. Obama wisely laid down no red lines that might kill a deal. His brief statement of principles sounded similar to the Senate bipartisan outline, save for his notable omission of a guest-worker program. That omission will please the AFL-CIO, but we hope Mr. Obama realizes that reform without a flexible, expansive guest-worker program will lose business support.

Mr. Obama has never lacked for confidence, and perhaps he is right that he can steamroll his opposition in Congress, or in the 2014 midterms. But it’s also possible that his re-election and a fawning press have made him too confident that the country wants as much new government as he seems to believe. The polls show voters think spending is a bigger problem than lack of revenues.

And for all his bragging Tuesday night of economic progress, his policies have produced a recovery with a mere 2% growth and falling middle-class incomes. Without faster growth in the private economy, his grand liberal plans will vanish faster than he imagines.

We’d like to believe the inevitable economic or foreign policy disaster resulting from his disastrous policies (and one is surely certain!) would spell the end of this Marxist Mephisto’s sinister sway.  But the more we see of the MSM’s slavish disregard of any facts, and their total detachment from reality, the more we’re convinced had The Obamao been caught in the Penn State football showers with a 15-year-old boy, they’d somehow seek to justify it….or blame it on Bush.

Can you say, “anti-Christ”?  We knew you could!  At some point, it’s the only possible explanation.

Which brings us to our Money Quote, courtesy today of Jonathan Tobin commenting on The Obamao’s purposeful misrepresentation (i.e., lie) about the true cost of his proposed spending:

“But by claiming that this staggering wish list wouldn’t “add a single dime to the deficit” he may have created a one-man credibility gap that even his impressive speaking ability and personal charm can’t close. You have to believe in the Tooth Fairy to buy the idea that this much new bureaucracy and involvement in the private sector won’t wind up costing a lot more money that we don’t have.“

Yeah, you would have to believe in the Tooth Fairy; either that or be….

….smokin’ dope!

Oh, by the way; if Joe Scarborough sees what needs to be said, why can’t anyone in the GOP, particulary Marco Rubio, similarly call a spade a spade?!?

“Let me begin by congratulating President Obama on the start of his second term”?!?  Are you kidding me?!?  This guy is out to utterly eviscerate everything we hold dear; when is the GOP going to stop making nice with Evil Incarnate?!?

Since we’re on the subject of Evil Incarnate, Michael Barone details how, from its inception,….

Obama’s gangster government operates above the law 

 

Presidents’ State of the Union addresses are delivered in the chamber of the House of Representatives in the Capitol. The classical majesty of this building where laws are made symbolizes the idea that we live under the rule of law.

Unfortunately the 44th president is running an administration that too often seems to ignore the rule of law. “We can’t wait,” President Obama took to saying after the Republicans captured a majority in the House and refused to pass laws he wanted. He would act to get what he wanted regardless of law.

One example: his recess appointments in January 2012 of three members of the National Labor Relations Board and the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Last month the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled unanimously that the NLRB recess appointments were unconstitutional. The decision written by Judge David Sentelle noted that the Constitution speaks of “the recess,” not “a recess,” and reasoned that it could only be referring to the recess between annual sessions of Congress.

Obama, like many presidents before him, interpreted the phrase as referring to any recess during which Congress is not in session. But he went one step further. When Harry Reid became Senate majority leader in 2007 he started holding pro forma meetings of the Senate every three days and stating that the Senate was not in recess. President George W. Bush, who had made recess appointments before, stopped doing so.

Bush took the view that, since the Constitution says that each branch of Congress makes its own rules, the Senate was in session if the Senate said so. Obama took the view that HE would decide whether the Senate was in session. Who cares what the Constitution says? As Sentelle pointed out, Obama’s view would entitle the president to make a recess appointment any time the Senate broke for lunch. “This cannot be the law,” the judge wrote.

Critics of his decision argue that under it the recess appointment power would be vanishingly small. But under Obama’s view the Senate’s power to advise and consent could effectively vanish.

The Framers contemplated that the Congress would take long recesses (as for many years it did) and that it could take months for senators to return to Washington to act on appointments. It’s plausible that the Framers would have considered recess appointments unnecessary in an era of jet travel. It’s not plausible that they would have approved of getting rid of the Senate’s power to vote on appointments altogether.

Meanwhile, decisions of the NLRB are the CFPB are in legal limbo, pending a Supreme Court decision. Hundreds of thousands of people and are affected and millions of dollars are at stake. There is a price for not observing the rule of law.

There are other examples. For several years the Obama administration has refused to obey a law requiring the president’s budget to be submitted on a certain date. As budget director, Treasury nominee Jack Lew refused to obey the law requiring him to issue a report in response to the trustees’ report on Medicare.

During the 2012 campaign the Pentagon told defense contractors not to inform employees that they may be laid off if the sequester took effect as required by the WARN Act. They were even told that the government would pay any fines for not complying. What law authorizes that?

Similarly, the Department of Health and Human Services has stated that the federal government can fund health insurance exchanges run by the feds for states that refuse to create their own exchanges. But nowhere does the Democrats’ hastily crafted Obamacare legislation say that.

In spring 2009 we got our first glimmers of this modus operandi. In arranging the Chrysler bankruptcy administration, officials brushed aside the rights of secured creditors in order to pay off the United Auto Workers. University of Pennsylvania law professor David Skeel pointed out that this violated the standard rules of bankruptcy law established, interestingly, during the New Deal.

And all on the taxpayer’s dime!

“We have just seen an episode of gangster government,” I wrote at the time. “It is likely to be a continuing series.” It looks like that’s one prediction I got right. This president, like all his predecessors since Woodrow Wilson started delivering these speeches in person, looks magnificent in the temple where laws are made. But he doesn’t seem to consider himself bound by them.

The White House is running things the Chicago way; and as Jimmy Malone so accurately observed:

Instead, the GOP seems content with unilateral disarmament; willingly competing, for all tense and purposes….

….like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.

And in International News of Note, Hope n’ Change comments on Team Tick-Tock’s policy towards the NoKo’s….or utter lack thereof:

Horse Scents

 

Following the shocking news that North Korea had detonated another, stronger nuclear device despite receiving a series of increasingly stern Hallmark cards from the United Nations, Barack Obama announced that he considers the act “highly provactive,” much like Reggie Love in thong underwear.

The president, who used his State of the Union address to talk about reducing our own nuclear arsenal, downsizing our military, disarming our population, and other far-reaching pussification efforts, said of North Korea that “they represent a serious threat to the United States of America, and we’ve got to be prepared to deal with that.”

Yeah! And how are we going to be prepared to deal with that…? With guns? Missiles? Bombs? Aircraft carriers? Drone strikes? Chuck Norris?!

Nope. Barry says “North Korea’s threatening activities warrant further swift and credible action by the international community.” And by “international community,” he of course means the United Nations who will, according to US Ambassador and shameless Benghazi shill Susan Rice, “do the usual drill” and issue a condemnation.  Although at this point, North Korea already has been on the receiving end of more “condemns” than Sandra Fluke.

Sadly, we can’t really expect the president to have a very solid policy on North Korea owing to the fact that he doesn’t really employ any experts on the region – despite this being a “serious threat” to our country.

In fact, in a highly-embarrassing mixup, Obama recently scrambled Seal Team Six to have them “terminate with extreme prejudice” the Pillsbury Doughboy after national security advisers mistook him for Kim Jong-Un, the poppin’ fresh leader of North Korea.

Still, we have to give the president points for consistency: he’s been pushing hard to make sure that only crazy people will have guns, and is now extending that policy so that only crazy countries will have nukes.

But as Hillary Clinton would say, “What does it matter at this point?”

Moving on, courtesy of Boston.com and Bill Meisen, it’s our “Life Imitates Art” segment, as The Obamao’s….

Pentagon creates new medal for cyber, drone wars

 

They fight the war from computer consoles and video screens. But the troops that launch the drone strikes and direct the cyberattacks that can kill or disable an enemy may never set foot in the combat zone. Now their battlefield contributions may be recognized. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced Wednesday that for the first time the Pentagon is creating a medal that can be awarded to troops who have a direct impact on combat operations, but do it from afar.

When we said “life imitates art”, we meant just that; as evidenced by this spoof which ran back in late December 2012:

Drone Pilot To Receive First Air Force Cross Medal Since Vietnam

 

http://aviation1970.blogspot.com/2012/12/drone-pilot-to-receive-first-air-force.html

Remember, like the dumbing down of our public education system, the deliberate decimation of America’s military has one purpose and one purpose only: the elimination of a potential source of opposition.  If you’re wondering, “Opposition to what?”, you might consider finding another blog!

On the Lighter Side….

And in another titillating tale ripped from the pages of The Crime Blotter:

Police: Wife kills former Penn player

 

They were young; young….and attractive!

Authorities say a woman fatally stabbed her husband — a member of the University of Pennsylvania’s 1979 Final Four team — as he slept. Police say she told a friend he had been watching child pornography. White was the starting center on Penn’s Final Four team. He was drafted by the Portland Trail Blazers and also played in Europe.

According to court records, 53-year-old Matthew White was stabbed early Monday in his bed at his home in the Philadelphia suburb of Media. Investigators say his wife, Maria Rey Garcia-Pellon, is charged with first-degree murder and is being held in Delaware County jail. It wasn’t clear if Garcia-Pellon had an attorney.

Police say Garcia-Pellon went to a friend’s home afterward and told her she had caught her husband viewing child pornography. “I caught him looking at pornography, young girls, I love kids,” Garcia-Pellon told investigators, according to a report on Philly.com. “I had to do it.”

According to the report on Philly.com, the couple’s neighbor, 87-year-old Jane Albany said Garcia-Pellon “seemed really sweet, but I felt a sadness about her.”

If she was sad before, wait until she tries her “child pornography” defense on a jury.

Finally, in the Science Section, a story not worth the paper it wasn’t printed on:

Earth-buzzing asteroid worth $195 billion, space miners say

 

The space rock set to give Earth a historically close shave this Friday, Feb. 15, may be worth nearly $200 billion, prospective asteroid miners say. The 150-foot-wide asteroid 2012 DA14 — which will zoom within 17,200 miles of Earth on Friday, marking the closest approach by such a large space rock that astronomers have ever known about in advance — may harbor $65 billion of recoverable water and $130 billion in metals, say officials with celestial mining firm Deep Space Industries.

That’s just a guess, they stressed, since 2012 DA14’s composition is not well known and its size is an estimate based on the asteroid’s brightness.

The company has no plans to go after 2012 DA14; the asteroid’s orbit is highly tilted relative to Earth, making it too difficult to chase down. But the space rock’s close flyby serves to illustrate the wealth of asteroid resources just waiting to be extracted and used, Deep Space officials said.

Deep Space officials noted they’ll next focus on providing cheap energy by either tapping directly into the core of the Sun or perfecting….

….perpetual motion.  In the meantime, they’d be more than happy to meet with prospective investors.

Magoo