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Jonathan Tobin notices some hypocrisy.
One of the keynotes of President Obama’s foreign policy throughout his first term has been an attempt to pay lip service to the Arab Spring protests against authoritarian regimes throughout the Muslim world. Those sentiments were not matched with strategies that were designed to enhance the efforts of those who were advocating more freedom or even to ward off the unintended consequences of the unrest, such as the rise of Islamist parties like Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. Yet in spite of those failures the president has never stopped trying to pose as a friend of Arab liberty even if he did nothing to help that cause. But the recent demonstrations in Turkey have exposed Obama’s policies in a way that perhaps no other development has done.
By continuing to support the Turkish ruling party, as it now becomes the subject of anger from its citizens, the administration is showing its true colors. If Obama is not prepared to criticize his friend who heads up the government in Ankara the way he has done other regimes that came under fire, then it shows that the talk about democracy was just so much hot air and that when push comes to shove, the president would rather befriend an Islamist ruler than embrace the pleas of the Turkish people for change. …
Jennifer Rubin posts on the new job for Susan Rice – national security adviser. Pickerhead thinks this is a good thing. She can be on the lookout for any more videos that might inflame the arab street.
Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, who leapt from dishonest talking points to out and out falsehoods (it was a spontaneous attack sparked by an anti-Muslim narrative!) on the Benghazi attack, gets her reward today — a promotion to national security adviser. She’ll not need Senate confirmation, but her appointment should not halt efforts to subpoena her for her conduct as ambassador to the U.N. It is noteworthy that President Obama did not have the nerve to nominate her for secretary of state, where she would have faced an onslaught of questions about her infamous Sunday talk show performance
The move is an in-your-face insult to Congress, to the Americans killed in Benghazi and their families and another instance of utterly incompetent, dishonest loyalists getting the really big jobs (e.g. Chuck Hagel). Rice was, of course, front and center in the do-nothing approach to the Rwandan genocide during the Clinton administration. She delivered a blistering diatribe against Israel after being obliged to veto a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel for housing construction. In other words, she is the perfect choice for a president who has misread almost every foreign policy dilemma, has had a prickly relationship with Israel and doesn’t give a fig about genocide in Syria. …
Megan McArdle takes on the subject of all the IRS head’s visits to the white house.
Last week, conservatives were saying that former IRS head Douglas Shulman had been to the White House 118 times, while his predecessor had visited the Bush era White House only once. I didn’t write about it because I idly assumed that this reflected some underlying change in administration management style or legislative priorities; perhaps, for example, he’d been there talking about Obamacare implementation and changes in tax enforcement.
But the Daily Caller has now compiled a list of White House visits by various administration officials, and Shulman sure does seem to visit a lot more than other folks.
If Obamacare was driving this, I’d expect to see Kathleen Sebelius had had more visits than Shulman. (Interesting that, in fact, the Commerce Secretary goes to the White House more than the Secretary of HHS.) If it was tax policy, I’d expect to have seen Geithner there more often.
I think the administration needs to explain this. Not because I think that Obama called Doug Shulman into his office to tell him to persecute the Tea Party. That explanation is unlikely for all sorts of reasons: …
John Hayward comments in Human Events.
In the early days of the IRS scandal, Douglas Shulman – who was IRS Commissioner during the period when the abuses of power against conservative and Tea Party groups began – was asked why he spent so much time at the White House. With the arrogant condescension we’ve all grown to know and love from his corrupt agency, Shulman claimed it had a lot to do with the White House Easter Egg roll.
In a more serious vein, Shulman also mentioned consulting with the White House about tax policy changes, the IRS budget, and other sundry matters… none of which goes very far toward explaining why he felt the need to visit the White House over a hundred times.
At the time, it was thought Shulman had visited the White House 118 times over the course of two years, which is probably more work than the Easter Bunny puts into planning for Easter eggs. But now the Daily Caller has gone through the White House visitor logs and discovered Shulman made a total of 157 visits during the Obama Administration, which is far more than the number of recorded visits from any Cabinet official. For example, Shulman’s boss, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, only made 48 recorded visits.
And there might be even more Shulman visits to the White House yet to be revealed, because not all of the records covering his tenure as IRS commissioner have been released yet.
This is not normal for IRS commissioners. Shulman’s predecessor, Mark Everson, only visited the Bush White House once during four years. What, no Easter Egg roll? No extensive discussions of tax policy changes?
We’ve had many occasions to play the “what if a Republican did it?” game throughout the Obama years, but this time it’s really mind-blowing to reverse the political polarity of the scandal and imagine the reaction. Suppose the IRS was caught giving rough treatment to liberal groups – let’s say liberal minority groups – right before an election where the defeated Democrat challenger’s base didn’t show up in the expected numbers. Suppose we had powerful congressional Republicans on the record urging the IRS to go after these groups. Imagine the IRS commissioner was found to be making incredibly frequent visits to the White House throughout the scandal.
J. Christian Adams spotted another frequent visitor.
The big news today is that IRS head Doug Schulman visited the White House a stunning 157 times during the time a policy targeting the Tea Party was developed. But Schulman isn’t the only non-cabinet member from administration to visit the White House an extraordinary number of times. So did truth-challenged and Senate-stalled Labor Department nominee Tom Perez.
The Daily Caller study of the White House visitor logs demonstrates that Perez was the third overall most frequent visitor to the White House, just behind Deputy Commerce Secretary Rebecca Blank. Perez visited the White House 83 times during a period in which he overrode the recommendations of career Justice Department lawyers to preclear South Carolina voter ID under the Voting Rights Act and blocked Texas Voter ID.
During the same period, Perez allowed the nation’s voter rolls to become bloated with millions of dead voters by refusing to bring any cases under Section 8 of the Motor Voter law. This federal law requires states to maintain clean voter rolls before federal elections. Instead, millions of dead and ineligible voters were allowed by Perez to remain on the rolls for the November 2012 election because his radical ideology prevented him from enforcing the law.
The Perez nomination is currently stalled in the Senate with Republicans vowing to block the nomination for multiple reasons, including Perez’s inability to tell the truth under oath, a defect shared by his boss Eric Holder. …
Walter Russell Mead on the further collapse of Detroit.
Desperation has hit a new low in Detroit.
Last week, Emergency Manager (and bankruptcy lawyer) Kevyn Orr decided to list the holdings of the Detroit Institute of Arts among the city’s assets in preparation for a possible bankruptcy. If the city goes through with it, it could be forced to sell off any of its assets—which now include the museum’s collection.
Museum administrators are outraged, but the choice may be keeping the art or paying for vital public services. According to Orr, the city has “long-term obligations of at least $15 billion, unsustainable cash flow shortages and miserably low credit ratings that make it difficult to borrow.” But as the WSJ reports, the city may not have a choice: …
P. J. O’Rourke had an item in the Weekly Standard about the decline of NASA. It was titled “Obama’s Asteroid’ and it is 2,300 words. Too long for us today, but you needed to see this about the value of space exploration. Follow the link if you wish to read it all.
… The words “Space Age” have a quaint, nostalgic tone—sitting on midcentury modern furniture watching The Jetsons. But get out of the butterfly chair and fold the rabbit ears on the Philco—you’re living in the Space Age.
Without the space industry all those dishes hanging off window sills, receiving HD television reception and providing high-speed Internet connection in even the most remote corners of the world, would be just so many woks gone wrong.
Without the space industry, the only way you could use your satellite phone to communicate with someone would be by bonking him on the head with it. And satellite phones aren’t even big enough anymore to be very useful for that.
Meteorological predictions would be Grandpa’s mutterings about how his joints ache. There would have been no forewarning of Superstorm Sandy, and former members of the Jersey Shore cast might have been blown all the way to Canandaigua. What a natural disaster that would have been for New York’s Finger Lakes region.
Your GPS would be an old coot perched on your dashboard, chewing a stalk of hay. “Git on over to Old Pike Road. ’Cept they call it County Route 738 nowadays. An’ turn left where the Hendersons’ barn burned down in ’63.”
Air traffic control is largely satellite dependent. Absent satellites, when you’re squeezed into the middle seat on a flight to Orlando, you might not just wish you were dead, you might get that way.
And you couldn’t go to Google Earth to find out whether your neighbors are raising pigs in a backyard pen. You’d have to take a stepladder and peek over the fence. Nope, just dirty kids and a very dilapidated swing set. …