Obama's Lawless Presidency Close To Totalitarianism

Obama's Lawless Presidency Close To Totalitarianism
Tue, Jun 19 2012 00:00:00 EA12_ISSUES

The Obama Record: The chief executive who swore to faithfully execute the nation's laws picks those he'll ignore and makes up others through regulation and executive order. He sees no need for a Congress or Constitution.

Maybe it's because Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts stumbled a bit in leading President Obama through the oath of office that the president doesn't feel bound by it.

But through the awkwardness these words were heard: "I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

It would not take Obama long to make clear he meant his interpretation of the Constitution, not the Supreme Court's, a principle established in Marbury v. Madison, the 1802 case that formed the basis for the exercise of judicial review in the U.S. under Article III of the Constitution.

In his State of the Union address a year later on Jan. 27, 2010, he shamefully scolded the justices on national television for "having reversed a century of law" in the Citizens United ruling in which the court was protecting the freedom of political speech enshrined more than two centuries ago in the First Amendment. We agree with Justice Samuel Alito's eloquent rebuff of the president, in which he was seen mouthing the words "Not true."

Then came ObamaCare, which would prove to be a monumental assault on the First and 10th Amendments to the Constitution. Virginia, along with other states, filed suit challenging the landmark health care reform law on the grounds the law's requirement that its residents have health insurance violates the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. Never before had a citizen of the United States been required to purchase a product just for being a citizen of the United States.

The Constitution according to President Obama also requires a suspension of the First Amendment guarantee that Congress shall make no laws restricting the free exercise of religion. Arguably, the Congress did no such thing in passing ObamaCare. But it left the door open when it replaced "We The People" of the Constitution with "the Secretary shall determine," a phrase that appears in the bill a mind-boggling 1,563 times.

One of the things Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius determined was that religious institutions be required to provide health coverage in violation of their faith and religious conscience. HHS argues that churches are exempt, but the 43 Catholic institutions that filed suit argue the government has no right to define what a church is and that acting on their faith through everything from hospitals to colleges to soup kitchens is constitutionally protected.

The role of the president, according to Article II, Sec. 3 of the Constitution, is to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." Laws were intended by the Founders to be passed by Congress and signed by the president. Obama finds this a mere inconvenience.

"Whenever Congress refuses to act, Joe and I we're going to act," Obama said in February at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, with Vice President Joe Biden off to the side. "In the months to come, wherever we have an opportunity, we're going to take steps on our own to keep this economy moving."

Obama took that opportunity regarding immigration when he announced he was unilaterally suspending the deportation of some young illegal aliens and allowing others to apply for green cards, essentially implementing the provisions of the so-called Dream Act he has been unable to get through Congress, including one in his first two years dominated by his own party.

Article 1, Sec. 8 of the Constitution, which enumerates the power of Congress, states that "Congress shall have the Power To ... establish an (sic) uniform Rule of Naturalization." Congress has passed numerous laws pertaining to immigration and naturalization, including laws requiring the deportation of illegals. Congress? Obama don't need no stinkin' Congress.

Can't get cap-and-trade or the Kyoto Protocol through Congress? Let the EPA implement through regulations and then ignore the courts when they think your energy policy has crossed the legal line.

Louisiana Federal District Court Judge Martin Feldman found the Obama Interior Department in contempt of his ruling that the offshore oil drilling moratorium, imposed by the administration in 2010, was unconstitutional. After Feldman struck down the initial drilling ban, the Interior Department simply established a second ban that was virtually identical.\

In January, the president illegally appointed a director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, along with three appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, all without the approval of a Senate still legally in session, as the Constitution requires.

The president also selectively decides which laws he'll enforce and which he won't. Regarding education, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently granted waivers to 10 states, freeing them from the strict requirements of the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act.

In February 2011, the Justice Department announced it would not defend the Defense of Marriage Act against court challenges. Last August, Obama's DHS announced it would no longer deport the noncitizen spouses of gay Americans — a direct contradiction to DOMA as well.

Maybe all this works in Venezuela, but it won't wash here. We still have free elections, and there's one in November when we can fundamentally restore respect for the law and the Constitution.
http://news.investors.com/article/615239/201206181904/obama-is-dangerously-close-to-totalitarianism.htm?p=full

Dubious donations (gangster government edition)

Dubious donations (gangster government edition)

by Scott Johnson in 2012 Presidential Election, Obama Administration Scandals

We have published a series of posts on Obama’s “dubious donations” — i.e., the Obama campaign’s invitation of fraudulent and illegal giving through the disabling of basic credit card/debit card verification devices. I wrote about the Obama campaign fundraising operation in the October 2008 New York Post column “Dubious donations.” The Post subhead observed: “Bam’s Web site invites fraud.”

The Washington Post reported on the matter two days later in the story “Obama accepting untraceable donations,” by Matthew Mosk. Mosk quoted Obama campaign officials on their practices. According to them, everything was copacetic.

It having worked so well the first time around, and it having aroused so little interest among the mainstream media, Obama is doing it again. So we have reported in the series of posts beginning with “Dubious donations (2012 edition).” There is a story here, but you’d never know it if you get your news from the mainstream media.

In his Washington Examiner column today, also posted here at NRO, Michael Barone picks up where we left off:

It has been reported that the Obama campaign this year, as in 2008, has disabled or chosen not to use AVS in screening contributions made by credit card.
That doesn’t sound very important. But it’s evidence of a modus operandi that strikes me as thuggish.
AVS stands for Address Verification System. It’s the software that checks whether the name of the cardholder matches his or her address.
If a campaign doesn’t use AVS, it can wind up accepting contributions from phony names or accepting contributions from foreigners, both of which are illegal.
The 2008 Obama campaign pocketed money from “John Galt, 1957 Ayn Rand Lane, Galts Gulch CO 99999″ and $174,000 from a woman in Missouri who told reporters she had given nothing and had never been billed. Presumably she would have noticed an extra charge of $174,000.

Barone continues:

The Obama campaign is evidently happy to pocket the money. After all, this is the president who, according to political scientist Brendan Doherty, has appeared at more fundraisers in three and a half years than his six predecessors did in 35 years.
Obama has been to at least two fundraisers just in my apartment building. I often see police and Secret Service blocking traffic for a block around Washington’s posh Jefferson Hotel at 16th and M streets.
Obama talks a good game on transparency and openness, but he’s ready to flout the law by avoiding AVS and to break his high-minded campaign promises.
In the 2008 campaign cycle, he promised to take public financing for the general election. He broke that promise when it became apparent he could raise far more money on his own.
During much of this cycle, he’s been criticizing Republican super-PACs as a perversion of the political process. But when he saw that Republicans might be able to raise as much money as Democrats, he broke that promise too and authorized Cabinet members to appear at fundraisers for the super-PAC headed by his former deputy press secretary.
Democrats outraised Republicans in 2004 and 2008. Evidently Obama considers it grossly unfair that they might not do so this year. That’s not how things work in Chicago.

Barone being Barone, he assimilates Obama’s dubious donations to a larger theme. The theme is that of Obama’s Chicago-style politics. Barone himself dubbed it “Gangster Government” in a May 2009 column that I can’t find online at the moment.

He concludes today’s column with a return to the dubious donations: “Other campaigns have not disabled their AVS systems. But then their candidates are not from Chicago. Obama likes to talk about the need for civility. He just doesn’t like to practice it.”

UPDATE: Reader Jeryl Bier of Speak With Authority forwards the link to the May 2009 Examiner column in which Barone first identified the Obama administration’s practice of “Gangster Government.”
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/05/dubious-donations-gangster-government-edition.php

3 Fallacies in Obama's Public-Sector Stimulus Strategy

3 Fallacies in Obama's Public-Sector Stimulus Strategy

Paying people to do busy work won't revive the U.S. economy.

Shikha Dalmia

Poor President Obama. Life under the White House klieg lights must seem soooo unfair. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has been saying since last year that although“private-sector jobs have been doing just fine,” public-sector jobs need help with another $35 billion in stimulus spending, without raising an eyebrow. But the president regurgitates the same line and all hell breaks loose: The blogosphere chortles mercilessly; Twitter chatter roundly lampoons him; and Mitt “I Like Being Able to Fire People” Romney accuses him of being out of touch with ordinary Americans.

Truth is, though, that Obama was asking for it. His statement might be conventional wisdom in his party’s circles. But it nonetheless manages to pack in virtually every “progressive”economic fallacy—and then some.

For starters, his claim that private-sector job growth is hunky-dory is hooey. It is true that private companies have added 4.3 million jobs since February 2010. However, this represents a 2.8 percent rate of job growth compared to the 8 percent average after previous recoveries—despite (or perhaps because of) $800 billion in stimulus spending.

But instead of asking whether the effects of his own policies—like uncertainty over the extension of the Bush tax cuts and the compliance costs of ObamaCare—might be choking the private sector, Obama wants to apply his stimulus therapy to the public sector. This won’t produce overall growth. Indeed, more government spending means a shrinking private sector, and there are three main reasons why.

One. Obama’s talk of a public-sector stimulus is guided by the Keynesian conviction that what’s necessary to restore overall economic growth is large aggregate demand. If local governments are handed money to hire more public workers—teachers, cops, librarians, social workers—these people will consume more goods and services, which will stimulate other industries. Every dollar pumped into their pockets will magically multiply into several more.

It’s a neat theory—but fanciful.

If boosting aggregate demand is what’s needed, why bother creating jobs? Uncle Sam can simply send every unemployed person a generous check with the proviso that it can’t be saved. It must be spent on TVs, cars, dresses, and shoes (that’ll get the female vote). Call it the “Stay at Home and Pamper Yourself”economic recovery plan.

Obviously, this would be absurd. But is paying people to do governmental busy-work any less absurd than paying them to do no work? No.

Every (unsubsidized) job in the private sector exists because it generates more in wealth or value than it consumes in resources—and hence grows the economic pie. That’s not the case with the public sector.

For example, between 1970 and 2010, public school enrollment went up by 8.5 percent—while public-school employee rolls swelled a mind-boggling 96.2 percent. This cost the country $210 billion and failed to produce one iota of improvement in student achievement. Was this money well-spent because the teachers who received it could spring for nice houses and vacations? Or was it a waste of precious resources that could have been better deployed elsewhere?

Since public-sector jobs don’t pay for themselves, they have to be financed either through taxes or borrowing or inflation (printing money), all of which divert resources from productive private endeavors and hurt overall growth.

Two. But suppose that “free” money appeared like manna from heaven to finance the stimulus spending Obama craves. Then boosting aggregate demand would complement private-sector activity and boost overall growth, right? Wrong.

Harvard Business School researchers Lauren Cohen, Joshua Coval, and Christopher Malloy published a fascinating study last year examining the impact on a state’s economy after its senators or representatives secured powerful committee appointments on Capitol Hill and sent home more federal funds through earmarks, transfers, and government contracts.

They found that this money produced not private-sector growth but retrenchment. Indeed, in every state, virtually every affected firm—large and small—cut payroll, investment, and other expenses. Why? As publicly funded enterprises grew, they crowded out demand and resources from private ones.

Coval’s advice in the wake of his finding? “[Policymakers] should revisit their belief that federal spending can stimulate private economic development.” Amen!

Three. The public sector doesn’t just indirectly crowd out private job growth but directly clobbers it as well. That, in fact, is why the regulatory state—the main public-sector enterprise—exists. You can argue that its key products (red tape and mandates) are necessary for public safety, but you can’t argue that they lead to job growth. As the regulatory state grows, the private economy shrinks—and that’s exactly what’s been happening on President Obama’s watch.

Investor’s Business Daily writer John Merline points out that since the post-2008 stimulus, the combined budget of America’s regulatory agencies has grown a healthy 16 percent, topping $54 billion. The overall economy? A paltry 5 percent. Employment at federal regulatory agencies has climbed 13 percent since Obama took office. By contrast, employment shrank by 5.6 percent in the private sector.

Can anyone seriously argue that handing more stimulus funds to more regulatory agencies—something that would inevitably happen given that money is fungible—to hire more bureaucrats to write more regulations will mean more net job growth?

That President Obama can’t see this and naively preaches the stimulus gospel speaks volumes about the liberal bubble that he inhabits. A little ridicule—even by Mitt Romney—is just what he needs.

Shikha Dalmia is a Reason Foundation senior analyst and a columnist at The Daily, where this column originally appeared.
http://reason.com/archives/2012/06/19/three-fallacies-in-obamas-public-sector/singlepage

Fast and Furious and OCDETF--Whom is executive privilege protecting?

Fast and Furious and OCDETFWhom is executive privilege protecting?

By Andrew C. McCarthy

 

Eric Holder testifies before Congress on May 3, 2011.

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Andrew C. McCarthy

The media commentary about “executive privilege” makes your eyes glaze over. That’s intentional: When you are throwing sand in the public’s eyes, as the administration is in the Fast and Furious scandal, you want the talking heads droning on about the jurisprudence of “presidential communications” and “deliberative process.” Blather about the legal contours diverts your attention from the only question that really matters: Why?

Why is President Obama denying Congress and the public access to critical information about his administration’s part in a shockingly ill-conceived investigation that resulted in the murder of Brian Terry, a heroic federal Border Patrol agent and veteran U.S. Marine. And when I say “his administration’s part,” that, too, is intentional.

When the president intervened with an eleventh-hour privilege assertion as the House committee verged on citing his obstructive attorney general for contempt, the Obamedia storyline, naturally, was that Obama was protecting Holder. But if we know anything after a half-decade of closely watching Barack Obama, it is this: The One is in it for The One. The president invoked executive privilege because he is protecting himself.

On March 22, 2011, in an interview on Spanish-language television, President Obama, unbidden, brought up Fast and Furious in what were obviously considered remarks. He declared:

There have been problems, you know. I heard on the news about this story that — Fast and Furious, where allegedly guns were being run into Mexico, and ATF knew about it, but didn’t apprehend those who had sent it. Eric Holder has — the attorney general has been very clear that he knew nothing about this.

By the time the president volunteered these words, a cover-up was already well underway within his administration. Weeks earlier, on February 4, 2011 — nearly two months after Agent Terry was murdered — Holder’s Justice Department sent Congress a letter flatly denying that it had facilitated the illegal transfer of weapons to Mexico and insisting that its agencies always make “every effort to interdict weapons that have been purchased illegally and prevent their transportation to Mexico.” These representations, we now know, were outrageous falsehoods. But what is not well understood is just how outrageous.
In point of fact, top Justice Department officials certainly knew about the Fast and Furious investigation’s use of the fateful “gunwalking” tactic for many months before this letter was submitted — probably for over a year. They were banking on Fast and Furious as a great success story. But when Agent Terry was killed, they abruptly changed tack, first denying that gunwalking had happened and, when that failed, scrambling to distance the Justice Department’s political appointees and the White House from the inevitable murder and mayhem the gunwalking has caused — and will continue to cause. That was the burden of the president’s unsolicited comments: to maintain that “ATF knew” about the gunwalking but Holder did not . . . and Obama did not.

Indeed, on May 3, 2011, in astounding House testimony, Holder claimed that he’d only heard about Fast and Furious “for the first time probably over the last few weeks.” This not only contradicts Obama’s account, which has Holder discussing the case (and denying knowledge of its tactics) two months earlier; it defies everything we now know, including that Holder was planning to attend a triumphant Fast and Furious press conference back in 2010 — before Agent Terry’s death sent the Obama administration reeling.

1 2 3 4 5 Next > (do go to the rest of the pages of this chilling analysis by one of the best):

 

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/303808/fast-and-furious-and-ocdetf-andrew-c-mccarthy?pg=1

Pelosi Explains Her 16 Words, Digs Hole Deeper

Pelosi Explains Her 16 Words, Digs Hole Deeper

by Steven Hayward in Annals of Government Medicine, Obama administration

The British politician Denis Healey is generally credited with “the First Law of Holes,” which goes: If you’re in one, stop digging.

Nancy Pelosi has apparently never heard of Healey’s First Law of Holes.

Courtesy of Jonathan Capehart at the Washington Post, Pelosi is trying to explain her infamous 16 words from 2010 about the Obamacare bill: “But we have to pass the [health care] bill so that you can find out what’s in it….”

During a lunch in the Capitol with opinion writers today, House Minority Leader Pelosi was asked about those infamous words. “It’s because we didn’t have a Senate bill,” Pelosi said forcefully before Eleanor Clift of Newsweek even finished asking her a question about the statement’s context. “We were urging the Senate to pass a bill.”
Those ten seconds, immortalized by Fox News leave out what Pelosi said in the lead-up to those infamous words:

“You’ve heard about the controversies within the bill, the process about the bill, one or the other. But I don’t know if you have heard that it is legislation for the future, not just about health care for America, but about a healthier America, where preventive care is not something that you have to pay a deductible for or out of pocket. Prevention, prevention, prevention—it’s about diet, not diabetes. It’s going to be very, very exciting.”

The key line is the first one. It’s easy to forget the tumult of that time. There was a lot of frustration with the Senate version of the health care reform bill and consternation over the proposed process to get it through the chamber with minimal Republican votes, reconciliation.

“In the fall of the year,” Pelosi said today, “the outside groups…were saying ‘it’s about abortion,’ which it never was. ‘It’s about ‘death panels,’’ which it never was. ‘It’s about a job-killer,’ which it creates four million. ‘It’s about increasing the deficit’; well, the main reason to pass it was to decrease the deficit.” Her contention was that the Senate “didn’t have a bill.” And until the Senate produced an actual piece of legislation that could be matched up and debated against what was passed by the House, no one truly knew what would be voted on. “They were still trying to woo the Republicans,” Pelosi said of the Senate leadership and the White House, trying to “get that 60th vote that never was coming. That’s why [there was a] reconciliation [vote]” that required only a simple majority.

“So, that’s why I was saying we have to pass a bill so we can see so that we can show you what it is and what it isn’t,” Pelosi continued. “It is none of these things. It’s not going to be any of these things.” She recognized that her comment was “a good statement to take out of context.” But the minority leader added, “But the fact is, until you have a bill, you can’t really, we can’t really debunk what they’re saying….”

Now, I know that Pelosi is among the most incoherent and inarticulate Speakers of the House ever, but this is beyond comically unpersuasive. Really–it took her two years to come up with this? It is beyond unpersuasive—it is unserious.

As I argued here a long while back, Pelosi’s original 16 words are actually among the most intelligent things she ever said (yes, that’s a low bar for her to reach, like being the tallest building in Wichita, but still. . .), because it expressed the fundamental truth of modern legislation. Even at 2,700 pages, the Obamacare bill represents a massive delegation of power to the administrators to figure out “what’s in the bill.” I believe the regulations to implement Obamacare—the real “law” that affects the health care sector—are up to 18,000 pages and counting. Pelosi surely grasps this, and we should be grateful to her for speaking the “effectual truth” of the matter, as Machiavelli put it. This latest explanation is just squid-ink.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/06/pelosi-explains-her-16-words-digs-hole-deeper.php

The Coming DNC Disaster

The Coming DNC Disaster

• 
• Michelle Malkin
  

There aren't Greek columns tall or wide enough to camouflage Barack Obama's impending North Carolina catastrophe. In September, the campaigner-in-chief will travel to Charlotte for his party's presidential nominating convention. For once, the incurable jetsetter may wish he had stayed home.
Obama's stage managers envision a triumphant, unifying coronation reminiscent of their 2008 DNC production in Denver. But the southern swing state is turning into a Democratic disaster zone.

Start with the North Carolina Democratic Party. At the state party convention last week, Obama for America was AWOL. The glaring absence of high-level national Obama surrogates was noted "as odd," according to the Charlotte News and Observer. There's good reason to steer clear. The party is embroiled in a sordid sex scandal that won't go away.

Earlier this year, former party communications staffer Adriadn Ortega, 26, accused former NCDP executive director Jay Parmley of repeated sexual harassment and physical groping. Documents leaked to the conservative Daily Caller news site revealed a hush-hush financial settlement involving the two men. Ortega was fired; Parmley resigned; state Democrats went into panic mode.

"If this hits the media, the Democratic Party, our candidates and our credibility are doomed in this election," a local candidate complained to NCDP chairman David Parker. A defiant Parker resisted statewide calls (including a desperate request from outgoing Democratic Gov. Beverly Perdue) to resign. Ortega filed a defamation suit against Parker and the NCDP last week. The White House, which has trumpeted its stand against workplace harassment, has been mute on the story.

Other Democrats are boycotting North Carolina to avoid an entirely different taint: the scandal-plagued president himself. By TheDaily.com's count, at least seven Democratic officials will skip Obama-palooza: New York Democratic Reps. Bill Owens and Kathy Hochul; Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. Mark Critz; three endangered Democratic politicians from West Virginia, Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin, Sen. Joe Manchin, and Rep. Nick Rahall; and Utah Democratic Rep. Jim Matheson.

The Democratic boycotters have dinged Obama on everything from his election-year illegal alien amnesty power grab to his failed jobs programs to his destructive war on coal. While "Forward!" may be the official Obama campaign slogan, "Back Away!" is quickly becoming the dissenting Democrats' rallying cry.

Moderate Democrats aren't the only ones refusing to put on the party hats and sing "Kumbaya." North Carolina is riling Obama's left flank, too. And national media outlets are noticing. In a piece on the DNC "going awry," Bloomberg News reported:

"Voters just approved a state constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, which conflicts with Obama's view on the issue. Convention fundraising has been slow, and labor unions tapped to fill the financial gap are angry the convention will be in a city -- Charlotte -- with no unionized hotels and in a state where compulsory union membership or the payment of dues is prohibited as an employment condition."

Thousands of anarchists, socialists and professional agitators also plan on protesting in Charlotte.

After giving Mr. Hollow Hope and Change a first-term pass, self-declared progressives can't ignore Team Obama's in-your-face decision to deliver his presidential nomination acceptance speech at bailed-out Bank of America Stadium. As I've reported previously:

--The financially troubled bank snagged a middle-of-the-night, taxpayer-funded $45 billion banking bailout in 2008 and an estimated $931 billion in secret federal emergency loans.

--In 2008, B of A's political action committee gave its biggest contributions to Obama totaling $421,000.

--After purchasing junk mortgage company Countrywide, BofA agreed to pay $50 million in restitution payments for Countrywide subprime loan fraudster and Democratic fat cat Angelo Mozilo and one of his underlings.

Disgruntled leftists. Disgruntled centrists. Disgruntled unions. Disgruntled corporate donors. Sexual harassment scandal. Fundraising woes. And to top it all off: unrepentant class-warfare hypocrisy packaged as "The People's Convention" and brought to you by Bank of America. The DNC promises to be a public relations nightmare for Obama's optics geniuses. Too bad he can't send his autopen instead.
http://townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/2012/06/22/the_coming_dnc_disaster/page/full/

Why Would Anyone Trust Eric Holder?

Why Would Anyone Trust Eric Holder?

by John Hinderaker in Obama Administration Scandals

I wrote yesterday that the Obama administration’s assertion of executive privilege with respect to Fast and Furious documents that have been subpoenaed by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is frivolous. If you haven’t already read it, you can check out that post to see why. In addition, I pointed out that lawyers only assert lousy claims of privilege when they have something to hide.
So the presumption that there is damaging information in the documents the administration refuses to produce is very strong. In his defense, Eric Holder merely asks that we trust him. But why should we? The administration’s track record with respect to Fast and Furious–and Eric Holder’s, in particular–is one of serial attempts to deceive. Let’s itemize three instances.

First was DOJ’s letter to Senator Charles Grassley dated February 4, 2011. The letter was signed by Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich, but undoubtedly was approved by Holder. Weich denied that the Obama administration had deliberately allowed firearms to be delivered to Mexican drug cartels as part of the Fast and Furious program. This was the key language:

ATF makes every effort to interdict weapons that have been purchased illegally and prevent their transportation to Mexico.

That statement, which goes to the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal, was false. On December 2, 2011, the department took the extraordinary step of withdrawing its February 4 letter and admitting that the assurances it contained were untrue. In fact, as DOJ belatedly acknowledged, the whistle blowers had been telling the truth, and Fast and Furious was different from any weapons-related program that preceded it precisely because ATF deliberately refrained from making arrests, and, having planted guns in the hands of straw purchasers, allowed those guns to cross the border into Mexico so that they could be delivered to drug gangs. Therein, of course, lies the scandal.

Second was Eric Holder’s claim that his predecessor, Attorney General Michael Mukasey, was briefed about gunwalking in connection with a different program called Wide Receiver. On June 14, Holder testified under oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee:

If you want to talk about Fast and Furious, I’m the Attorney General that put an end to the misguided tactics that were used in Fast and Furious. An Attorney General who I suppose you would hold in higher regard was briefed on these kinds of tactics in an operation called Wide Receiver and did nothing to stop them – nothing. Three hundred guns, at least, walked in that instance.

Senator Grassley followed up by questioning the veracity of Holder’s claim and asking for evidence to back it up:

This is a serious charge. However, as far as I’m aware, the Justice Department has produced nothing to date that indicates any former Attorney General was briefed on Operation Wide Receiver.
I am aware that the Justice Department produced a memorandum to Attorney General Mukasey in preparation for a November 16, 2007, meeting with Mexican Attorney General Medina Mora. At no point does this memo mention Operation Wide Receiver, in which over 300 guns were allowed to walk to Mexico. Instead, the memo appears to refer to a case called Hernandez, which involved a planned controlled delivery – not intentional gun walking.
Documents the Justice Department has produced have indicated that the gunwalking in Operation Wide Receiver was brought to the attention of Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer in April 2010 by his deputy, Jason Weinstein. Breuer’s response, according to a contemporaneous e-mail from Criminal Division Gang Unit Chief James Trusty, was simply that he “want[ed] us to meet with [ATF] at some point so they know the bad stuff that could come out.”

Holder responded to Senator Grassley’s request by admitting that he had fabricated his smear of Attorney General Mukasey:

During a hearing last week, Attorney General Eric Holder claimed that his predecessor, then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey, had been briefed about gunwalking in Operation Wide Receiver. Now, the Department is retracting that statement and claiming Holder “inadvertently” made that claim to the Committee. The Department’s letter failed to apologize to former Attorney General Mukasey for the false accusation.

Holder “inadvertently” lied about his predecessor? How dumb does he think we are?

Third is the bizarre scene that I wrote about here, when Holder denied that an email thread that talked about “Fast and Furious” referred to Fast and Furious. Holder claimed “superior knowledge” of the facts. As far as I know, Holder has not yet retracted his arrogant falsehood. This is a portion of the email thread:



And this is Holder’s weird attempt to deny reality: (use link to view video)

So with respect to Fast and Furious, we have a pattern of repeated falsehoods by the Obama administration in general and in particular by Eric Holder. Holder has repeatedly demonstrated himself to be a dishonest witness; to be blunt, a liar. He has displayed a level of mendacity that is not often seen, even in Washington. So why, exactly, would anyone believe him when he now tries to tell us that there is nothing significant in those documents he desperately wants to prevent us from seeing?

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/06/why-would-anyone-trust-eric-holder.php

Who is Barack Obama and why has he been saying those untrue things about himself?

Who is Barack Obama and why has he been saying those untrue things about himself?

By Paul Mirengoff in Barack Obama

Does anyone remember Josh Steiner, the young Treasury Department who, when it turned out that his diary entries were damaging to the Clinton administration regarding Whitewater, testified that he lied to his diary? I suppose that lying to one’s autobiography isn’t as unusual as lying to a diary. Where’s the gain in deceiving a document no one is likely to read? But it’s not healthy to lie to either.
David Maraniss’ new biography of Barack Obama makes clear that our president lied to his autobiography to the point that the book is “literature and memoir, not history and autobiography.” Maraniss adds that “The character creations and rearrangements of the book are not merely a matter of style, devices of compression, but are also substantive.”

But Obama presented Dreams From My Father as autobiography, not literature. The book does contain a disclaimer. Obama wrote that the dialogue in the book is “an approximation” and that some of the characters in his book had been compressed or combined. But he did not disclose that his character creations and other “rearrangements” altered the substance of his life story.

Maraniss is a smart guy. He must have known early on in the project, and maybe even before he commenced it, that Dreams From My Father would not hold up as an accurate account of Obama’s life. Thus, Maraniss had plenty of time to find excuses for the president.
Here is what Maraniss came up with:

In an interview Tuesday morning on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program, Mr. Maraniss said the president did not set out to write a factual history of his life and was “trying to see everything through a racial lens. That was the original purpose of that book.” Mr. Maraniss added that “I don’t think it’s a venal reason. I think it says more about a writer’s pressures to try to tell a story than anything about his larger character.”
Mr. Maraniss attributes some of the differences to the kind of family lore that is often exaggerated. He notes that the story about the death of Mr. Obama’s step-grandfather — allegedly killed while fighting Dutch troops in Indonesia — was “a concocted myth in almost all respects.” Mr. Maraniss writes that he died trying to hang drapes.

In other words, Obama didn’t lie for personal gain; he lied in the name of racial politics. It was the pressure of fitting his life story into a predetermined racial narrative that caused Obama to change and distort the facts.

I wonder whether Maraniss realizes that he is only making matters worse for the president. It’s one thing for a politician, or future politician, to engage in a little old-fashioned personal puffery. For example, if Obama had exaggerated his role on his state championship basketball team, there wouldn’t be anything in it.

Distorting the facts of one’s life experiences in the name of ideology is a more serious matter. And this is particularly true when it comes to a subject as important as race.

But Obama was having it both ways. Not only did he make his political point, but he also puffed himself into appearing as a more “authentic” Black than his real life story would support.

Obama was a young man when he wrote Dreams From My Father. But his penchant for “lying to his autobiography” in order to make political points does not appear to have abated. As Jonathan Tobin points out, during the health insurance debate, Obama falsely claimed that, in her last months, his mother fought with her health insurance company over reimbursement of medical expenses. A book by Janny Scott of The New York Times found that this isn’t true.

There seems to be no limit to the political uses to which Obama will put his ancestors. The mother who is a false object lesson in the need for Obamacare; the grandmother who is an object lesson in the pervasiveness of white racism (is there any reason to believe that Obama has depicted her accurately?); the martyred Indonesian freedom fighting step-grandfather who really died hanging drapes; the Kenyan grandfather who Obama says was arrested and tortured by the British, but who very likely was not.

Apart from the damage Obama is doing to honest political discourse, there’s the question of whether, after years of distorting his life story, Obama really knows who he is. I discussed this problem in a post called “The long shadow of Barack Obama’s identity crisis.”

What we can say with certainty is that Obama isn’t the person he tells us he is. And he isn’t “no drama Obama.”

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/06/who-is-barack-obama-and-why-has-he-been-saying-those-untrue-things-about-himself.php

The Rise, Fall and Epic Fail of the Hope and Change Presidency

The Brief Against Obama: The Rise, Fall and Epic Fail of the Hope and Change Presidency

• 
• Hugh Hewitt

The Brief Against Obama: The Rise, Fall and Epic Fail of the Hope and Change Presidency is my new book, and new books mean book tours, both real and virtual. Thus I began the week in Las Vegas, moved to New York City and am headed to Phoenix Thursday, promoting the book and the website as I go, dashing between television studios and dialing radio stations spread across the country.

You learn things from the question sets posed on such a tour. "The Brief Against Obama" is intended as a comprehensive guide to the promises, predictions, platitudes and polemics President Obama has issued since he began his campaign for the Oval Office five years ago. It rejects personal attacks and dismisses the absurd rhetoric on the president's citizenship and his religion which have never been representative of even a sliver of the conservative movement.

It isn't a book about what other people have said about the president. It is a record of what he himself has said and done.

Each of the book's 25 chapters begins with a set of presidential quotes, such as the president's pledge before the American Medical Association on June 15, 2009:

"And that means no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise: if you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like you health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health-care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what."

Such details of this and his many other abysmal failures and broken promises are more than fair game, of course, and in fact ought to be the central issues for every voter. The book is aimed not just at conservatives but at independents and even at the growing number of "Romney Democrats" who are staring at the smoldering heap of expectations they indulged four years ago and wondering what happened.

It is for your annoying brother-in-law who cannot be bothered with the facts, for the co-worker with the Obama bumper sticker still on her Prius, for your fellow church-goes who thinks the president cares more for the poor than the GOP.

Here is the most often asked question after the first dozen interviews: Is the president merely incompetent, or was this wreckage intentional?

I was at first surprised by this question and then came to realize that many people are asking themselves if the president has some grand plan that would make sense of the chaos of his 40 months in office. This desire for an explanation is really the desire for some excuse to cover the wild gamble that a majority of voters indulged in four years ago. If the president is operating off of some secret Alinksyite playbook, the folks he fooled can comfort themselves that they were conned.

The president is an Alinskyite, but that doesn't mean he intended to wreck the economy. It means he believes in massive expansion of government, confiscatory levels of taxation and an enormous regulatory reach.

He didn't intend for the mullahs of Iran to play him for a fool, or for Egypt to be lurching towards an Islamist theocracy or Syria to be convulsed by mass slaughter.

The president didn't intend for unemployment to be at 8.2% and rising as he rounded the turn into November, but he did intend for a lot of the new jobs in America he thought would be coming to be government jobs supported by much higher levels of taxation than prevailed in the country from 1980 to the present.

He didn't intend most Americans to be receiving shocking rate hikes for their health insurance or for their pump price to be at $4 a gallon --at least not before his re-election.

He didn't intend for Solyndra to be bankrupt, for "Fast and Furious" to be shorthand for cover-up, or for Dodd-Frank to be the obvious job-killer it has become.

But the president did demand and adopt the policies that have produced these consequences. He's the architect, the contractor and the owner of this mess of an economy and this circus of corruption and scandal.

"The Brief Against Obama" is a collection of the president's words, not those of his critics, and a compilation of the hard, cold facts of his failures.

This is why Mitt Romney will win in November: Barack Obama has failed, and in spectacular fashion. There is no reason to believe a second term would be anything accept a replay of the first, and the consequences of that are too dismal to contemplate.
http://townhall.com/columnists/hughhewitt/2012/06/20/the_brief_against_obama_the_rise_fall_and_epic_fail_of_the_hope_and_change_presidency/page/full/

The Climate Humpty-Dumpty: All the King’s Horses. . .

The Climate Humpty-Dumpty: All the King’s Horses. . .

by Steven Hayward in Climate

The so-called “climate consensus” continues to fall apart. Fritz Vahrenholt, a prominent German green energy investor and formerly full-throated climateer, has announced his defection. Writing in the Telegraph, Vahrneholt says:

For many years, I was an active supporter of the IPCC and its CO2 theory. Recent experience with the UN’s climate panel, however, forced me to reassess my position. In February 2010, I was invited as a reviewer for the IPCC report on renewable energy. I realised that the drafting of the report was done in anything but a scientific manner. The report was littered with errors and a member of Greenpeace edited the final version. These developments shocked me. I thought, if such things can happen in this report, then they might happen in other IPCC reports too. . .

[T]he IPCC’s current climate models cannot explain the climate history of the past 10,000 years. But if these models fail so dramatically in the past, how can they help to predict the future?

James Lovelock, Gaia-Rights Advocate

The other notable defector is James Lovelock, the originator of the much-beloved (by the greens) “Gaia-hypothesis,” which in general terms means the entire Earth should be conceived as one big closely interconnected ecosystem. As The Guardian reports, “Lovelock predicted in 2006 that by this century’s end ‘billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable’.” Now, he’s striking a different note, as reported in the Daily Mail:

He was once a guru to environmentalists, claiming climate change would kill billions of humans by the end of this century.
But it seems James Lovelock has had a change of heart.
On the eve of a major environmental summit, he has attacked the modern green movement – declaring its theories ‘meaningless drivel’.
Almost half a century after he revealed his Gaia theory, which inspired a generation of activists, the former Nasa scientists said he believed that rising sea levels were not a problem and that wind turbines were ‘useless’.

The 92-year-old described the modern green movement as a ‘religion’, which used guilt to gain support.

Speaking about climate change, he said: ‘I’m not worried about sea-level rises.’

He added: ‘At worst, I think it will be 2ft a century.’

Slamming environmentalists, he said: ‘It just so happens that the green religion is now taking over from the Christian religion.

 http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/06/the-climate-humpty-dumpty-all-the-kings-horses.php

The godfather of global warming lowers the boom on climate change hysteria

Green ‘drivel’: The godfather of global warming lowers the boom on climate change hysteria

By Lorrie Goldstein ,Toronto Sun

James Lovelock is a world-renowned scientist and environmentalist.

Two months ago, James Lovelock, the godfather of global warming, gave a startling interview to msnbc.com in which he acknowledged he had been unduly “alarmist” about climate change.
The implications were extraordinary.

Lovelock is a world-renowned scientist and environmentalist whose Gaia theory — that the Earth operates as a single, living organism — has had a profound impact on the development of global warming theory.

Unlike many “environmentalists,” who have degrees in political science, Lovelock, until his recent retirement at age 92, was a much-honoured working scientist and academic.

His inventions have been used by NASA, among many other scientific organizations.

Lovelock’s invention of the electron capture detector in 1957 first enabled scientists to measure CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) and other pollutants in the atmosphere, leading, in many ways, to the birth of the modern environmental movement.

Having observed that global temperatures since the turn of the millennium have not gone up in the way computer-based climate models predicted, Lovelock acknowledged, “the problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago.” Now, Lovelock has given a follow-up interview to the UK’s Guardian newspaper in which he delivers more bombshells sure to anger the global green movement, which for years worshipped his Gaia theory and apocalyptic predictions that billions would die from man-made climate change by the end of this century.

Lovelock still believes anthropogenic global warming is occurring and that mankind must lower its greenhouse gas emissions, but says it’s now clear the doomsday predictions, including his own (and Al Gore’s) were incorrect.

He responds to attacks on his revised views by noting that, unlike many climate scientists who fear a loss of government funding if they admit error, as a freelance scientist, he’s never been afraid to revise his theories in the face of new evidence. Indeed, that’s how science advances.
Among his observations to the Guardian:

(1) A long-time supporter of nuclear power as a way to lower greenhouse gas emissions, which has made him unpopular with environmentalists, Lovelock has now come out in favour of natural gas fracking (which environmentalists also oppose), as a low-polluting alternative to coal.
As Lovelock observes, “Gas is almost a give-away in the U.S. at the moment. They’ve gone for fracking in a big way. This is what makes me very cross with the greens for trying to knock it … Let’s be pragmatic and sensible and get Britain to switch everything to methane. We should be going mad on it.” (Kandeh Yumkella, co-head of a major United Nations program on sustainable energy, made similar arguments last week at a UN environmental conference in Rio de Janeiro, advocating the development of conventional and unconventional natural gas resources as a way to reduce deforestation and save millions of lives in the Third World.)

(2) Lovelock blasted greens for treating global warming like a religion.

“It just so happens that the green religion is now taking over from the Christian religion,” Lovelock observed. “I don’t think people have noticed that, but it’s got all the sort of terms that religions use … The greens use guilt. That just shows how religious greens are. You can’t win people round by saying they are guilty for putting (carbon dioxide) in the air.”

(3) Lovelock mocks the idea modern economies can be powered by wind turbines.

As he puts it, “so-called ‘sustainable development’ … is meaningless drivel … We rushed into renewable energy without any thought. The schemes are largely hopelessly inefficient and unpleasant. I personally can’t stand windmills at any price.”

(4) Finally, about claims “the science is settled” on global warming: “One thing that being a scientist has taught me is that you can never be certain about anything. You never know the truth. You can only approach it and hope to get a bit nearer to it each time. You iterate towards the truth. You don’t know it.”

http://www.torontosun.com/2012/06/22/green-drivel

The Obama Doctrine and the Rule of Law

The Obama Doctrine and the Rule of Law

by John Hinderaker in Liberals, Obama Administration Scandals

Remember the good old days when Democrats cared about the rule of law? Or pretended to, anyway. That was during the Bush administration, even though most if not all of the policies that prompted “rule of law” complaints from the left were in fact supported by good legal authority. That was then, and this is now: the Age of Obama is, among its many other faults, an age of lawlessness. I won’t attempt anything like a complete catalog, but let’s just recall a few–the cramdown of bondholders’ rights that first caused the label “Gangster Government” to be applied to the administration; the circumvention of administrative procedures to speed up cash flow to the administration’s “green energy” cronies; the illegal funneling of weapons to Mexican drug cartels; the attempt to dictate religious doctrine to the Catholic Church in violation of the First Amendment; and the president’s targeting of Mitt Romney’s financial supporters with vicious smears, including falsely accusing them of being criminals.

Now we have President Obama announcing that he will selectively stop enforcing the nation’s immigration laws, where he thinks that such non-enforcement will be politically advantageous to him. What is remarkable about this particular instance is that Obama has previously stated that he has no legal authority to do what he did last week. No matter. Rule of law? That’s for the Republicans. Jennifer Rubin has more on this topic, as does Michael Ramirez:



Do Democrats mind seeing the United States turned into a banana republic? Not particularly.
Evidently, their only concern is their guy’s re-election. Still, at least a few of them must have pondered what the Obama Doctrine will mean under a Republican administration. The president’s campaign says that Mitt Romney wants to pursue a policy of radical deregulation. I hope they are right; and, of course, the president can effect significant changes in the regulatory climate through his policies and appointments. Thus, in a Romney administration the EPA presumably would stop making war on the American economy. And, of course, law enforcement always involves establishment of priorities.

But the Obama Doctrine goes much farther than that. The Obama Doctrine holds that the president need not “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” as the Constitution says, but rather can effectively repeal or amend statutes by publicly declining to enforce, or selectively enforcing, them. How might the doctrine be applied in a Republican administration? To take just one of countless examples, most Republicans think that Dodd-Frank is a bad law. Under the Obama Doctrine, if there aren’t enough votes in Congress to repeal the law, President Romney will be able to accomplish the same result by announcing that henceforth, the federal government will make no effort to enforce it. Perhaps Romney could cut taxes unilaterally, too, simply by decreeing that the IRS will not prosecute tax evasion above certain percentage levels.

Given that I expect that we will have a Republican president in seven months, the Obama Doctrine has a certain appeal. Still, we conservatives actually believe in the rule of law. So when President Obama is shuffled out of office, the Obama Doctrine no doubt will find itself on the ash heap of history along with so much else that our president has wrought.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/06/the-obama-doctrine-and-the-rule-of-law.php

White House asserts executive privilege claim to further DOJ’s Fast and Furious cover-up

White House asserts executive privilege claim to further DOJ’s Fast and Furious cover-up

By Paul Mirengoff in Fast and Furious, Holder Justice Department, Obama Administration Scandals

With the House of Representatives poised to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt, President Obama has granted Holder’s request to assert executive privilege in refusing to turn over documents to Congress related to the Fast and Furious scandal. This won’t insulate Holder from being held in contempt. Rather, the White House presumably hopes the assertion will improve Holder’s position if/when his dispute with the House reaches the judicial system.

In requesting that Obama assert executive privilege, Holder said he is “very concerned that the compelled production to Congress of internal Executive Branch documents generated in the course of the deliberative process concerning its response to congressional oversight would have significant and damaging consequences.” This, he added, “would raise substantial separation of powers concerns and potentially create an imbalance in the relationship” between Congress and the White House.”

Holder has reason to be concerned. Rep. Issa’s Committee wants to find out whether, as part of its “deliberative process,” the Department of Justice engaged in a cover-up, including knowingly making false statements to the Commmittee, about the scandalous Fast and Furious program. To the extent that DOJ is discovered through its own documents to have done so, Holder and the administration would face significant and damaging consequences.

Whether these consequences and concerns form the basis for a valid assertion of executive privilege is another matter. I’m no expert on the subject, nor do I know all of the ins-and-outs of the dispute between Holder and Issa’s Committee. However, when Congress has a sound basis for believing that the Executive branch lied to it over material matters as part of a coverup in the course of a legitimate congressional oversight investigation, regard for a proper balance in the relationship between Congress and the Executive argues strongly in favor of enabling Congress to obtain all documents relevant to the coverup, including those generated during the process through which the cover-up is reasonably believed to have occurred.

That appears to be the situation here.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/06/white-house-asserts-executive-privilege-claim-to-further-dojs-fast-and-furious-cover-up.php

Daily Presidential Tracking Poll (DP: note that 1 in 6 Dem voters must be a racist to vote Romney)

Daily Presidential Tracking Poll

in Politics

Friday, June 22, 2012

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Friday shows Mitt Romney attracting 48% of the vote, while President Obama earns 43%. Six percent (6%) prefer some other candidate, and another three percent (3%) are undecided.

The president picks up support from just 35% of white voters overall. That’s eight points below the 43% of the white vote he won in 2008. Among white Democrats, 17% currently plan to vote for Romney.

Just 33% now believe the president is doing a good or excellent job when it comes to the economy. That’s down from 41% at the beginning of May.

Matchup results are updated daily at 9:30 a.m. Eastern (sign up for free daily e-mail update). See tracking history.

With speculation about Romney's vice presidential nominee running high, Scott Rasmussen contends in his latest weekly syndicated newspaper column that “more important than the process of selecting the nominee will be the way the choice is rolled out to the public.” Most Americans, he explains, "will learn all they know about the new name on the ticket during the week the candidate is introduced.”

Forty-five percent (45%) believe that America’s best days have come and gone. Just 37% believe they are in the future.

New polling shows the president ahead by five in the swing state of New Hampshire. Obama also leads in Pennsylvania and Michigan. Romney leads in North Carolina and Missouri. The race is a toss-up in Wisconsin, Iowa, Ohio, Virginia, Florida and Colorado.
(Job Approval Data Below)


A president’s Job Approval rating is one of the best indicators for assessing his chances of reelection. Typically, the president’s Job Approval rating on Election Day will be close to the share of the vote he receives. Currently, 44% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the president's job performance. That matches the president’s lowest approval rating of 2012. Fifty-four percent (54%) at least somewhat disapprove (see trends).

Just 30% believe the United States is generally heading in the right direction. Only 16% believe today’s children will be better off than their parents.

To help the economy, 24% believe the government should increase spending, while 66% think spending cuts are a better remedy.

Eighty-one percent (81%) believe members of Congress listen more to party bosses in Washington than they do to voters. Most (57%) believe legislators routinely get reelected because the process is rigged to benefit incumbents.

If you’d like Scott Rasmussen to speak to your organization, meeting, or conference, please contact Premiere Speakers. The Wall Street Journal has called him “America’s leading insurgent pollster,” and The Washington Post says Scott is a “driving force in American politics.”

To get a sense of longer-term Job Approval trends for the president, Rasmussen Reports also compiles our tracking data on a full month-by-month basis.
(Approval Index data below)


Intensity of support or opposition can have an impact on campaigns. Currently, 23% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Obama is performing his role as president. Forty-five percent (45%) Strongly Disapprove, giving him a Presidential Approval Index rating of -22 (see trends).

During midterm elections, intensity of support can have a tremendous impact on turnout. That was demonstrated in 2010 when Republicans and unaffiliated voters turned out in large numbers to express opposition to the Obama administration’s policies. However, in presidential election years, there is a smaller impact on turnout.


Rasmussen Reports is a media company whose work is followed by millions on a wide variety of platforms. We regularly release our results at RasmussenReports.com, through a daily email newsletter, a nationally syndicated radio news service, an online video service and a weekly newspaper column distributed by Creators Syndicate. A nationally syndicated TV show--What America Thinks --is scheduled for launch in September 2012.

Our firm has been a pioneer in the use of automated telephone polling techniques, but many other firms still utilize their own operator-assisted technology (see methodology). Pollsters for Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton have cited our "unchallenged record for both integrity and accuracy."

During Election 2008, Rasmussen Reports projected that Barack Obama would defeat John McCain by a 52% to 46% margin. Obama was 53% to 46%. In 2004, Rasmussen Reports was the only firm to project the vote totals for both candidates within half a percentage point. Learn more about the Rasmussen Reports track record over the years.

Daily tracking results are collected via telephone surveys of 500 likely voters per night and reported on a three-day rolling average basis. To reach those who have abandoned traditional landline telephones, Rasmussen Reports uses an online survey tool to interview randomly selected participants from a demographically diverse panel. The margin of sampling error for the full sample of 1,500 Likely Voters is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Results are also compiled on a full-week basis and crosstabs for full-week results are available for Platinum Members.

Like all organizations that conduct public opinion polls, Rasmussen Reports weights its data to reflect the population at large (see methodology). It is important to remember that the Rasmussen Reports job approval ratings are based upon a sample of likely voters. Some other firms base their approval ratings on samples of all adults. Obama's numbers are almost always several points higher in a poll of adults rather than likely voters. That's because some of the president's most enthusiastic supporters, such as young adults, are less likely to turn out to vote.

Among other targets, Rasmussen Reports weights data by political party affiliation using a dynamic weighting process. While partisan affiliation is generally quite stable over time, there are a fair number of people who waver between allegiance to a particular party or independent status. Our baseline targets are established based upon separate survey interviews with a sample of adults nationwide completed during the preceding three months (a total of 45,000 interviews) and targets are updated monthly. Currently, the baseline targets for the adult population are 35.7% Republicans, 33.4% Democrats, and 30.8% unaffiliated. Likely voter samples typically show a slightly larger advantage for the Republicans.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/obama_administration/daily_presidential_tracking_poll

Obama, Obama, he’s our man; if he can’t do it, no one can

Obama, Obama, he’s our man; if he can’t do it, no one can

by Paul Mirengoff in Barack Obama, Media Bias, Obama administration

Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post frets that it may not be possible for any president to succeed in the modern world of politics. Did Cillizza raise this question when George W. Bush’s presidency encountered serious difficulty? I don’t recall him doing so.

But then Bush wasn’t as gifted as Obama, in the estimation of Cillizza and pretty much the rest of the MSM. When a president deemed as intelligent, sophisticated, nuanced, and temperamentally sound as Obama runs into trouble, it’s natural for the MSM to ask whether anyone can handle the job.

And did I mention gravitas? Because Obama possesses mucho gravitas, or so Cillizza assured us during the 2008 campaign, based on some mushy comments the candidate delivered in Jordan. At the time, I called this “wish fulfillment journalism.”

If one leaves the world of wish fulfillment behind, it becomes obvious that a president can succeed in the modern world of politics. Indeed, a president who presides over a well-functioning economy will be hard-pressed not to succeed, if success is defined as remaining reasonably popular.

Even George W. Bush remained popular enough to be re-elected in 2004. He was subject to non-stop media criticism. Moreover, the U.S. had not found WMD in Iraq and our military situation there was trending downwards. But the economy was strong and Bush had struck back hard against al Qaeda.
This was deemed good enough for government work until the situation in Iraq truly deteriorated.

Cillizza argues that the modern president must function in an environment in which “news is being made — and covered — literally every minute of the day across the world” and in which the president “is forced to read and react to virtually all of it.” Couple this constant stream of news “with the fact that Twitter, blogs and cable television turn every slip of the tongue, misstatements or gaffe into a mountain — ‘the private sector is doing fine’ being a prime, recent example — and it’s clear that the idea that the president can drive the hourly, daily or weekly message of his choosing feels outdated.”

Here Cilizza fails to see the forest for the trees that are his stock-in-trade (he also is clearly unhappy that Obama has taken a hit for his ludicrous statement about how the private sector is faring). Sure, plenty of noise surrounds the president. But most voters hear very little of it, and are fully capable of discounting what they happen to hear. When a president commits gaffes, or when mini-scandals arise, in the context of a well-performing economy, voters yawn and partisans moan about “the teflon presidency.” When they occur in an economy like this one, pundits overstate the extent to which they contribute to the president’s woes.

The real problem is that it’s becoming more difficult for presidents to preside over a good economy. Good economic policies can, of course, influence economic performance, though arguably not to a great extent in the short run. But some of the biggest economic drivers consist of forces beyond a president’s control. And these forces are increasingly adverse.

STEVE adds: The historical ignorance of Cillizza and other media chin pullers is astounding. One of our commenters below has some good chestnuts from the Carter era. Here’s my summary of how it played out in The Age of Reagan:

The popular historian Barbara Tuchman expressed the thinking of the intellectual elite: “The job of President is too difficult for any single person because of the complexity of the problems and the size of government. Maybe some form of plural executive is needed, such as they have in Switzerland.” U.S. News and World Report wondered: “Perhaps the burdens have become so great that, over time, no President will be judged adequate in the eyes of most voters.” Columnist Joseph Kraft wrote on election eve: “As the country goes to the polls in the 47th national election, the Presidency as an institution is in trouble. It has become, as Vice President Mondale said in a recent interview, the ‘fire hydrant of the nation.’” Newsweek echoed this sentiment: “The Presidency has in some measure defeated the last five men who have held it—and has persuaded some of the people who served them that it is in danger of becoming a game nobody can win. . . the job as now constituted is or is becoming impossible, no matter who holds it.” Robert Wright and Fred Greenstein wrote that “Recent history offers little cause for optimism about Ronald Reagan’s chances of governing the American people to their satisfaction.” Godfrey Hodgson wrote that Reagan “has aroused expectations that he cannot fulfill. Disappointment will turn into disillusionment, and excessive expectations will curdle into unreasonable resentment. That has happened, in one way or another, to each of the last half dozen presidents. Why should Ronald Reagan be an exception?” Political scientist Theodore Lowi concurred: “The presidency has become an impossible job. . . because the presidency has become too big, even for the likes of FDR.” Elsewhere Lowi wrote that “The probability of [presidential] failure is always tending toward 100 percent.” James MacGregor Burns, author of The Deadlock of Democracy, wrote: “The greatest problem of America in modern times is the despair and disillusion of thoughtful people with the apparent incapacity to solve our problems under and antiquated governmental system, booby-trapped with vetoes, and a purposely designed self-limiting division of power.” Everett Carll Ladd wrote in Fortune magazine that “The experience of recent years strongly suggests that personal ability and character, while vitally important, are insufficient to assure success to a contemporary presidency. For the institutional setting quite simply has become adverse. A kind of ‘vicious circle’ of declining performance has been initiated.” The big question, for Ladd, was: “Can anybody do it?” Surveying the field of candidates who wanted to succeed Jimmy Carter, Ladd thought not, and worried about the implications: “The consequences of yet one more failure in this unique office would impose appalling stress on the whole political system.” Like Tuchman, Ladd thought the office was no longer equal to the times. “The institutional resources available to the President, relative to what he is expected to do, remain seriously deficient.”

 http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/06/obama-obama-hes-our-man-if-he-cant-do-it-no-one-can.php