HALF-FULL REPORT 01/18/13

This was an exceptionally busy week of spinning, posturing, grandstanding, lying, smearing and demagoguery as President Barack Obama sought to thwart Republican efforts to restrain the growth of federal spending; to impose new curbs on guns, and to win confirmation of his "in your face" Cabinet.

It began with a news conference Monday (1/14) so remarkable for mendacity, hypocrisy and churlishness even Dana Milbank of the Washington Post and Maureen Dowd of the New York Times noticed.  Republicans, the president said, "have suspicions about whether government should make sure that kids in poverty are getting enough to eat."  Other cheap shots he took at the GOP are here and here. His lies about budget cuts and the debt ceiling are dissected here and here.

"The next time Mr. Obama holds a press conference, somebody should ask him to identify by name those who want to repeal Social Security, steal food from orphans and cancel science funding," said the Wall Street Journal.

Fat chance of that. "The deeply unethical relationship between the White House and the Washington press corps ensures that nary a statement of Obama’s will be subjected to questioning or scrutiny, much less the mockery that attends just about anything a Republican says," said Michael Walsh. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders names culprits here.

To make certain Zero is asked only softball questions, the White House is freezing out Fox News.

Democracy depends on an independent, investigative, even "adversarial" press, said W. C. Varones. "Journalists have always been left-leaning as a group and overwhelmingly always vote Democrat," he noted.  "But even when Journolist-ing, though they were using unethical tactics to manipulate an election, they could at least rationalize it by the notion that they were opposing those currently in power, i.e. a truly "adversarial" press.  Now that their guy is entrenched in power, they no longer have that fig leaf. Journalism didn’t just die.  It went to work for the enemy."

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The president used children as props for his news conference Wednesday (1/16) calling for new gun control measures. Here’s more on the infantile spectacle. But, said White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, it is "repugnant and cowardly" for the NRA to note his daughters have armed protection.

The fuss over mass shootings is racist, said Cornel West, who thinks just about everything is racist.  But he has a point, says Clayton Cramer. Most murderers and murder victims are black. "If you live in a part of America that is predominantly white, your risk of being murdered is very low," Mr. Cramer said. Western states "have murder rates lower than their restrictive gun control Canadian prairie province neighbors."

Congress should pass laws to ban "military style" assault weapons and to outlaw magazines that contain more than 10 bullets, the president said.  These are "retreads," says John Hinderaker, who explains here why they haven’t worked.

Congress isn’t likely to pass them, because Americans don’t share the media’s enthusiasm for gun control.  Support for it is declining.  If Congress doesn’t act, the president could impose gun control by executive order, Vice President Joe Biden said last week.

"Last week the president was ready to go all in on the executive order scenario," said the Republican Insider. "Confiscation was going to be in play."  Then the backlash came, and he chickened out.  The 23 executive orders "mostly amount to a to-do list for himself and his bureaucracy," said Bryan Preston.  The Everlasting Phelps summarizes here the executive orders and translates them into English.

The full court press for gun control has triggered a spike in gun sales and NRA membership, and made red state Democrats nervous.

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Nothing generated as much posturing, grandstanding, and hypocrisy as Congress’ now all too frequent votes to lift the ceiling on the national debt. 

Time after time, this kabuki dance is danced the same way: The president asks Congress to increase the amount the Treasury can borrow, so he can pay for all the spending Congress has authorized.  Members of the opposition party accuse the president of fiscal irresponsibility.  Lawmakers who voted for all the spending that makes it necessary to lift the debt ceiling vote against raising it so they’ll have a "fiscally responsible" vote to brag about to their constituents. This happens whether the president is a Republican or a Democrat.  Here’s an example:

"The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure," Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill, said in 2006 when President George W. Bush proposed raising the debt limit from $8.1 trillion to $8.9 trillion.  The debt’s doubled since then, but President Obama says now that not raising it would be fiscally irresponsible.

Conservative pundits are giving Republicans conflicting advice on how to proceed.  Examples are here, here, here, here, here, and here. The best advice (other than mine, of course) is offered by Jack Wheeler’s friend Quin Hillyer. 

It would be a mistake to force a government shutdown, Newt Gingrich thinks. He learned that from bitter experience.  Charles Krauthammer agrees. So do I. Bad things – very bad things – are going to happen to the economy. Republicans can’t keep them from happening.  The election guaranteed that.  But when the bad things happen, the GOP must avoid being blamed for them.

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Little illustrates Zero’s "my way, or the highway" attitude better than his choices for his Cabinet.  I wrote about his proposed new national security team here.  Alas, only former Sen. Chuck Hagel may have difficulty winning Senate confirmation.  Probably not even he.  After some posturing, key Democrats fell into line this week.

Jack Lew, slated to replace Turbo Tax Tim Geithner, may be the worst of Obama’s picks.  He has neither the qualifications nor the character to be Treasury Secretary, say Larry Kudlow,  the New York Post, and Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala.

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Whole Foods CEO John Mackey took a lot of grief from his greenie consumer base when he equated Obamacare with socialism.  So he’s clarified his remarks. "Technically speaking, it’s more like fascism," he told NPR.  There’s a new Whole Foods store in my neighborhood. I’ll shop there more now.

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The French have intervened in Mali, where al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb" (AQIM) has established a larger base than al-Qaeda had in Afghanistan.  It’s "a domain covering some 300,000 square miles (about the size of Texas), including military bases, arms dumps, ready made training facilities and airports."

Because this huge terrorist state encompasses a route used to smuggle cocaine to Europe, AQIM can "make money out of its new heartland, as well as using it as a giant recruiting ground and training base," said Con Coughlin, defense editor of the London Telegraph.

"A French general acknowledged that much of the Islamist power in Mali is a direct if unintended consequence of the Libyan intervention in 2011, which allowed Gaddafi’s Tuareg auxiliaries to abandon their paymaster with large stocks of modern arms and return to their ancestral homeland," said Roger Kaplan, who provides background.  Many of the Islamist fighters were trained by U.S. Special Forces, the New York Times reported.

With the French intervention, "the stage is set for another bitter, chaotic al-Qaida defeat," said my friend Austin Bay.  The harshness of Islamist rule will backfire, as it did in Iraq and Algeria, he thinks. But Walter Russell Mead wonders if another Dien Bien Phu looms.  Or another Afghanistan, frets the London Daily Mail.  France lacks the military strength to do more than hold the Islamists at bay, Coughlin said. America does, but President Obama is leading from behind.

 Journalists mocked Mitt Romney for bringing up Mali in the third presidential debate, which goes to prove that only ignorance as massive as their arrogance can sustain liberal snark.

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Speaking of Afghanistan, Zero is abandoning it to the Taliban, says Fouad Ajami.

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"The shortest distance in modern politics is the one between a Republican willing to denounce his party for extremism and the set of a cable or Sunday morning talk show," says Artur Davis,.  Brent Bozell has more on the media’s favorite Republicans. What Colin Powell said on "Meet the Press" Sunday illustrates Davis’ point. Quin Hillyer dissects Powell’s cheap shots here.

 "As disgraceful as Powell’s performance was, Gregory’s was worse," said Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin. "He has made the NBC Sunday morning show into the equivalent of a MSNBC evening show – nothing but slow pitches for the left and the administration’s defenders."

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A teacher in Ohio is suing the Mariemont school district because young kids make her sick.  Maryland idiots suspend kids for playing cops and robbers during recess. Their parents are displeased. A teacher in New Jersey was fired for giving a student a Bible. 

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Allen West is joining PJTV as Director of Next Generation Programming.  My favorite ex-Congressman describes here what he’ll be doing.

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Here’s this week’s news in the "laws are for the little people" department:

*President Obama will not submit a budget to Congress by Feb. 4, the deadline required by law.

*.He made a deal to pay Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev) $600,000 to stop a federal investigation into his business, said Utah businessman Jeremy Johnson, who pled guilty last week to charges of bank fraud and money laundering.  This isn’t the first time Dingy Harry’s been suspected of taking bribes.

*.The EPA is circumventing a court order to disclose the emails former Administrator Lisa Jackson sent and received under the pseudonym "Richard Windsor" to shield those communications from the Freedom of Information Act, says Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who uncovered the scam.

* NBC’s David Gregory won’t be prosecuted for brandishing a 30-round rifle magazine on the "Meet the Press" program Dec. 23.  Army veteran James Brinkley wasn’t so lucky.  He was arrested and jailed while transporting his unloaded Glock 22 to a range with the two standard 15-round magazines that come with the pistol.

Mr. Brinkley’s offense was inadvertent, Mr. Gregory’s deliberate.  But prosecution of the NBC newsman  "would not promote public safety in the District of Columbia," the prosecutor said. How, exactly, did prosecution of Mr. Brinkley promote public safety?

"Can we even speak of the rule of law as a meaningful concept when we combine an explosive regulatory state with near-absolute prosecutorial discretion?" asks David French.  TTPers know the answer to that.

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There aren’t many women in the Obama White House, and they earn about $1,000 less each month than do men. "I have to admit that I’m slightly annoyed by the lack of women around him in those key meetings," an administration official told The Hill newspaper. "It’s especially incongruous that a president who benefited … from the gender gap in November would allow such an imbalance," said the San Francisco Chronicle.

Maybe it isn’t Republicans who are waging a war on women.
 
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More student financial aid is required to keep female college students from becoming whores, thinks Ashley Thaxton, 20, a theater major at New York University.  If they vote Democrat, it’s already too late, Ashley.

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America’s glass will be draining as long as Zero is in the White House, but it’s far from empty.  The thwarting of the gun grabbers means there’s a bit more in it this week. Brian Domitrovic is cheerful:

"President Obama is setting the table for the next Reagan Revolution, if only the Gipper’s heirs are clear-eyed enough to see it."

He’s right. Things are bad.  They’ll get worse.  But we’ll survive.  Then we’ll prevail.  So be of good cheer.  I’m off to the quaint little beer bar at Whole Foods to hoist a microbrewed IPA in honor of my Heroes of the Week — the NRA and John Mackey.  Jack should be back at his post next week.