Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Jennifer Rubin approves of the administration’s snub of the Sochi Olympics.
The Post reports: “The White House announced Tuesday that President Obama, Vice President Biden and the first lady will not attend the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, in February, a pointed snub by an administration that is feuding with Russian leaders on a range of foreign policy and human rights issues. The U.S. delegation will be led by a former Cabinet secretary and a deputy secretary of state, and will include two openly gay athletes — tennis legend Billie Jean King and ice hockey player Caitlin Cahow — in an apparent bid to highlight opposition to Russia’s anti-gay laws.” Well — and you don’t read this often around here — bravo, Mr. President.
I’ve argued for just such a snub for some time, so it pleases me no end that Obama has finally stepped up to the plate on even a small, symbolic issue of human rights. Did we wait too long, letting Europeans take the lead? Sure, but this is Obama we’re talking about, not Ronald Reagan. Did he only see the light when the human rights cause became a favorite cause of the left (gay rights)? You bet. He praised Putin’s stolen election, has been silent about kangaroo court trials and has nary a word to say about the female punk rock band thrown in jail. But you have to start somewhere. …
Jonathan Tobin posts on the president’s affinity for House of Cards.
Nobody should blame President Obama for enjoying the Netflix political thriller House of Cards. Indeed, the show’s millions of fans (including me) probably sympathized with the commander in chief when he pleaded for access to advance copies of the series’ second season that is due out next year when high-tech execs (including the head of Netflix) came to the White House to discuss important issues, like how to build a functional website. But I wasn’t quite so amused by the president’s much-quoted remarks in which he purported to envy the ability of the show’s villain Frank Underwood to do what he likes.
“I wish things were that ruthlessly efficient,” Obama joked at a meeting with tech CEOs on Tuesday, according to a White House pool report.
We’re supposed to chuckle at this comment and regard it as an understandable expression of frustration by the president at the inability of Congress to do its job. But I’m afraid this crack tells us more about Obama’s way of governing that it does about the fact that neither House Speaker John Boehner nor Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid can teach Frank Underwood much about passing legislation. The fact is, for five years Obama has sat in the White House and acted as if he had as little interest in accommodating the positions of his political foes as Underwood does. The problem isn’t that the West Wing and its congressional allies aren’t as “ruthlessly efficient” as the wicked Underwood, it’s that he has as negative an attitude toward the normal business of democracy as the character played by actor Kevin Spacey. …
Peter Wehner thinks 2014 will be worse than 2013 for the administration.
President Obama is ending a miserable year on a down note.
Public opinion polls show Mr. Obama’s approval ratings at their low and disapproval ratings at their high. He’s being tagged by the elite media as a liar and as having had the Worst Year in Washington. His signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act, is a rolling disaster. And the rest of his agenda–on gun control, climate change, immigration, and much else–is dead in the water. As CNN’s John King put it, Obama was “0 for 13” on the policy proposals he advocated at the beginning of the year.
One question, I suppose, is whether 2013 can be written off as simply one bad year–or whether, in fact, the Obama White House will look back to this year as the good old days of the second term.
It’s impossible to know for sure, of course, since politics is rarely linear and events we can’t anticipate are sure to intervene. But all we can do is to assess how things look at any given moment in time–and based on where things now stand, my guess is that 2014 will be even worse for the Obama presidency than has been 2013. …
Marc Thiessen says there’s a new poll with even worse news for the administration.
… But as bad as that news is, it pales in comparison to the new AP-GfK poll on Obamacare that came out earlier this week – because this poll suggests that Obama’s numbers will continue their downward spiral in 2014 as more Americans feel the negative impact of Obamacare.
The administration has taken comfort in the fact that while about six million Americans have seen their health plans cancelled, the “vast majority” of insured Americans have been largely unaffected. But this poll shows that “vast majority” is increasingly unhappy with Obamacare.
The AP reports:
The poll found a striking level of unease about [Obamacare] among people who have health insurance and aren’t looking for any more government help. Those are the 85 percent of Americans who the White House says don’t have to be worried about the president’s historic push to expand coverage for the uninsured.
In the survey, nearly half of those with job-based or other private coverage say their policies will be changing next year — mostly for the worse. Nearly 4 in 5 (77 percent) blame the changes on the Affordable Care Act… Sixty-nine percent say their premiums will be going up, while 59 percent say annual deductibles or copayments are increasing.
Only 21 percent of those with private coverage said their plan is expanding to cover more types of medical care, though coverage of preventive care at no charge to the patient has been required by the law for the past couple of years.
In other words, most of those with employer-based coverage are expecting to see their plans get worse and more expensive next year thanks to Obamacare – and they are not happy. …
John Fund says the staff shake up will only move the white house to the left.
… From this staff shake-up it’s clear there won’t be even a feint to the center. Last week’s budget deal in Congress bypassed Obama. The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward candidly told Fox News on Sunday that the budget deal came together only because “Obama was not part of the negotiations — he is not a good negotiator.” While Republican Paul Ryan and Democrat Patty Murray were hammering out a compromise budget, the Obama White House was desperately issuing retroactive “suggestions” to insurance companies to provide free health care to people who have lost their insurance thanks to Obamacare. You can bet that most insurers will follow the “suggestions,” given the White House’s veiled threats that it will view any non-compliance unfavorably when it comes to taking regulatory actions in the future.
Welcome to Obama’s New Power Grab, where the administrative state takes on a quasi-lawless form as the White House tries every scheme in the book (and some that aren’t in any book) to save Obamacare without having to negotiate changes with Congress — the old-fashioned American way of altering laws.
Certainly, John Podesta, the most well known of Obama’s new aides, will be helpful in this anything-goes strategy. Podesta is ostensibly on board merely for a one-year assignment focusing on climate and energy issues, but few believe he will stick to that knitting.
Podesta was chief of staff to President Clinton when, shortly before leaving office, he issued outrageous pardons to fugitive financier Marc Rich and other criminals. …
Seth Mandel posts on why Podesta was chosen.
The potential impact of President Obama’s decision to bring veteran Democratic figure John Podesta on board to save his floundering presidency continues to be debated, and is the subject of a Glenn Thrush analysis today. But Thrush’s article seems to have fallen victim to the reportorial success of its author, with Thrush having been able to get such a juicy quote out of Podesta that the quote itself has overshadowed the rest of the story.
That’s too bad, because the more important element of the story is not Podesta’s quote, though that’s worth mentioning as well: “[Obama and his team] need to focus on executive action given that they are facing a second term against a cult worthy of Jonestown in charge of one of the houses of Congress,” Podesta told Thrush, comparing the GOP and the large segment of the American public that elected them to the cult movement that ended in infamous mass suicide.
There’s not much surprising about the quote. Now that the moderate wing of the Democratic Party has all but disappeared, unhinged rhetoric and uncontrolled temper tantrums characterize much of the left’s discourse. And the modern Democratic Party has an unhealthy fascination with murder fantasy, from their political ads depicting legislators throwing people off a cliff to their columnists’ attachment to effigy executions. What’s important about the quote is not its morbid conclusion but the first half of it, which is the subject of Thrush’s article:
“This is not just about providing added muscle to a beleaguered and undermanned West Wing staff. According to interviews in recent weeks with an array of Obama insiders and a dozen current and former senior aides, Podesta’s hire is explicitly meant to shake things up inside the White House. In effect, I was told, it represents the clearest sign to date of the administration’s interest in shifting the paradigm of Obama’s presidency through the forceful, unapologetic and occasionally provocative application of White House power. Podesta, whose official mandate includes enforcement of numerous executive orders on emissions and the environment, suggested as much when he spoke with me earlier this fall about Obama’s team. “They need to focus on executive action given that they are facing a second term against a cult worthy of Jonestown in charge of one of the houses of Congress,” he told me. …”
Paul Mirengoff pointed out Jim Jones was a Dem operative.
John Podesta, who is about to join the Obama administration as a top adviser, should fit right in. In an interview with Politico, Podesta stated that the White House “need[s] to focus on executive action given that they are facing a second term against a cult worthy of Jonestown in charge of one of the houses of Congress.”
Jonestown — an avowedly leftist enterprise — was where followers of James Jones committed mass suicide. It is also where a former member of Congress (Leo Ryan) was killed and a current member (Ryan’s aide Jackie Speier) was shot when they tried to find out what the cult was up to. …
Jim Geraghty spotted a Salon article on Jim Jones outlining his attachment to the Democrat party. Salon even has a nice picture of Jones with Jerry Brown.
During the 1976 presidential campaign, Jones wangled a private meeting with Jimmy Carter’s wife, Rosalynn, at the elegant StanfordCourtHotel on Nob Hill, arriving with a security contingent that was larger than her Secret Service squad. Later Jones accompanied Moscone and a group of Democratic dignitaries who climbed aboard vice presidential candidate Walter Mondale’s private jet when it touched down at San Francisco International Airport.
Governor Jerry Brown sang the preacher’s praises. Congressman John Burton, Phil’s brother, lobbied the governor to appoint Jones to the high-profile board of regents, which oversaw California’s sprawling public university system. San Francisco Supervisor – now U.S. Senator — Dianne Feinstein accepted an invitation to lunch with Jones and to tour Peoples Temple.
But no political figures were more gushing in their praise of Jones than Willie Brown and Harvey Milk, San Francisco’s rising tribune of gay freedom.