Obama – Page 33 – Chicago Boyz

(insert Prime Minister of Ukraine’s name here)

August 25, 2014March 1, 2014 by Dan from Madison

Over and over President Zero bungles things that are to me, supposed to be slam dunks. I have blogged about this before but it is now getting to the point where it is driving me crazy.

Yesterday on the way home from work, Bloomberg radio broke in on this hastily arranged presser:

Lets just step outside of the fact that I am sure that Putin and the other principals of the situation are laughing (or cringing, as the case may be), knowing that our administration literally has no clue what to do right now.

My main point is that if you are arranging a presser on a matter of importance, I imagine you may want to understand who the major players are in the scenario. At the 2.21 mark, Obama boots the name of the Ukrainian prime minister. As I was sitting in my car I wondered aloud if he was reading off of a teleprompter, or was going off the cuff. I am glad I found the video above, but it doesn’t really answer my question completely.

After looking at it a few times, I am not sure if he was unable to pronounce the name, or if it wasn’t on the cue cards he was reading off of. Either way, he looks like a dunce, and once again, America looks to be a laughingstock to the rest of the world.

With my sooper seekrit ciphering abilities, I was able to find the name and figure out how to pronounce it.

Whether or not Obama’s handlers didn’t have the name on the card or he was unable to pronounce it (at least make a stab at it, Barack!) isn’t really that important in the big picture. What is more important to me is the following.

Are Obama’s handlers this dumb, or is he just blowing them off, or a combination of both? These things like state dinners, quick pressers, and the like that Obama constantly bungles should be no-brainers, and the work should be 100% correct each and every time. No excuses.

Opening the Abscess

February 26, 2014 by David Foster

I’ve previously quoted a passage from the memoirs of General Edward Spears, who was Churchill’s emissary to France in 1940. There was a disturbing amount of defeatism, and in some cases actual sympathy with the Nazi enemy, among certain government officials and other French elites. Weygand’s friend Henri de Kerillis, a Deputy and newpaper editor, had been consistently pressing Prime Minister Daladier to investigate some sinister behavior by members of the extreme Right.

“Il faut de’brider l’abces,” he had said time and time again to the Premier. He had done so again lately and received this strange answer: I have done exactly what you urged, I have opened the abscess, but it was so deep the scalpal disappeared down it, and had I gone on, my arm would have followed.” This was really very frightening, and I said so. “You cannot be more frightened than I am,” said Kerillis.

I was reminded again of this passage by some links concerning the abuse of power by Obama’s IRS. See the below excerpts from a video interview with Cleta Mitchell, an attorney who represents several individuals victimized by IRS misconduct over the past four years:

Part I

Part II

Part III

As Don Sensing says, “The IRS has become an enforcement tool of political hegemony.” I hope he is wrong when he continues:

And what is going to be done about it? Nothing. Obama has already said there is “not a smidgen of corruption” in the IRS, and as far as the news media Ministry of Truth is concerned, that’s the end of the story.It does not matter that this information is coming to light and being made public. From the president on down, the despotism will continue unabated — secretly if possible, in the open if necessary. There is no one in the country who has both the ability and the desire to stop it.The Democrats can stop it, but they are the perpetrators and even the ones who are not actively committing these crimes support them. They have the ability but certainly not the desire.

The Republicans (but by no means even half of them) have the desire but not the ability. They have abandoned the fight anyway.

The national media and the Democrat party are indistinguishable so there will be no protest raised by them.

All of these abuses will repeat in 2016 with the same effect as in 2012: opposition to the ruling party will be smothered and the election will be stolen. Again.

…but I am afraid he may be right. Those Americans who place value on individual freedom and open government had better be very, very active and assertive over the next 3 years, or it is going to be too late, and things are going to be very dark for a long, long time.

The things that we know about paint a very sinister picture of the Obama administration’s operations and intentions…imagine what sorts of corrupt, anti-liberty, and quite likely outright illegal activities lurk among the things we do not know about.

The Depression may be here.

February 4, 2014February 4, 2014 by Michael Kennedy

I have believed for some time that we were entering another Depression. I have previously posted about it.

The Great Depression did not really get going until the Roosevelt Administration got its anti-business agenda enacted after 1932. The 1929 crash was a single event, much like the 2008 panic. It took major errors in economic policy to make matters worse. Some were made by Hoover, who was a “progressive” but they continued under Roosevelt.

I posted that statement earlier and it got a rather vigorous rebuttal. I still believe it, however. I think a depression is coming soon. What is more, I am not the only one. Or even only one of two.

The second article preceded the election of 2012 but is still valid.

When employment hit an air pocket in December, most analysts brushed off the dreadful jobs number as an anomaly, or a function of the weather. They chose to believe Ben Bernanke rather than their lying eyes. It’s hard to ignore a second signal that the U.S. economy is dead in the water, though: on Monday the Institute for Supply Management reported the steepest drop in manufacturing orders since December 1980:

In January, only 51% of manufacturers reported a rise in new orders, vs. 64% in December. Not only did the U.S. economy stop hiring in December, with just 74,000 workers added to payrolls; it stopped ordering new equipment. The drop in orders is something that only has occurred during recessions (denoted by the shaded blue portions of the chart). The Commerce Department earlier reported a sharp drop in December orders for durable goods. In current dollars, durable goods orders are unchanged from a year ago, which is to say they are lower after inflation.

So, the economy stopped hiring, even at the poor pace the past five years have seen, but business also stopped buying.

Greed for Power

January 28, 2014January 28, 2014 by David Foster

Kevin Williamson, writing at NRO, notes that political self-interest is no less selfish than economic self-interest. About Barack Obama, he has this to say:

What could it possibly mean to be lectured on selfishness by a man whose entire career has been dedicated to no cause other than the cause of himself? “Selfishness” has been conflated with materialism and greed, but the literal meaning of the word is excessive devotion to one’s self and one’s interests. To be unselfish is to be ready to give up that which one holds most dear; for some men, that is money, but what is money to a president of the United States, who knows that in retirement he can support himself in ducal style with one day’s work a month at Bill Clinton rates, in princely style with two days’ work, and in imperial style with three? Money is an abstraction to a retired president. But the thing that he really cares about — power — Barack Obama guards in a fashion more miserly than that of any mythical dragon watching his horde. (sic–I think he means “hoard”)

And political power, of course, is always and everywhere convertible into economic wealth. The conversion may be in the form of in-kind benefits…the dachas and special stores made available to the old Soviet elite, the extremely expensive government aircraft made available to Obama’s vacationing family (and even to his dog) as well as to himself…or it may involve the at-least-implicit conversion of influence into money. (Al Gore’s financial net worth in now somewhere around the $200 million level, the Clintons are at roughly the same level. Today’s WSJ mentioned that former Clinton counsel Lanny Davis has been hired by a Chinese company to defend them against charges of violating California law. Lanny Davis may be a good lawyer, but is anyone really so naive as to think that his selection for this job has nothing to do with influence?) And in the celebrity-obsessed culture of 2014 America, the public recognition that comes with political office and power increases still further the ability to turn power into economic wealth. Get the power, the wealth will come…although, of course, for many obsessive power-seekers, the psychic rewards of power itself are the primary motivators.

Obama once remarked “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.” Has he ever considered the possibility that maybe at a certain point he’s accumulated enough power? I doubt it. To a considerable extent, I think, the Democratic harping on inequalities of wealth and income acts as a smokescreen to avoid discussion of the high and increasing inequalities of power.

World War 2.5

January 31, 2014January 26, 2014 by Michael Kennedy

UPDATE: I don’t seem to be the only one worried about a 1914 situation.

China’s current coercion of Japan over the islands is but a symptom of a larger illness in the international system. China has been leveraging its naval modernization to increase its movements through the seas and choke points surrounding Japan to break out into the Pacific. Last November, for example, flotillas of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy destroyers and submarines backed by air power encircled Japan for the first time, as PLA officers bragged about splitting and demolishing the first island chain. China is changing the regional balance with little resistance from the United States. Counter to Chinese public claims of surprise at a U.S. “overreaction,” recent discussions with Chinese officials over Beijing’s December air defense identification zone announcement suggests that the United States’ response was much weaker than the response the Chinese leadership had expected.

This is worrisome.

Last month I posted an observation that another world war may be coming. I noted that this summer is the 100th anniversary of the First World War and that the present situation is similar to that which preceded the 1914 war. I may not be the only one.

I concluded last month’s post as follows: The “two Ps” are Pakistan and the Palestinians. We live in an incredibly dangerous era and we are seeing an American president who does not understand geopolitics. God help us.

A recent column provided from someone attending the Davos Economic Forum discusses yet another potential fuse that is sputtering.

During the dinner, the hosts passed a microphone around the table and asked guests to speak briefly about something that they thought would interest the group.

One of the guests, an influential Chinese professional, talked about the simmering conflict between China and Japan over a group of tiny islands in the Pacific.