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John Podhoretz on the electorate’s repudiation of the president.
… So why did the anti-Obama focus fail in 2012 but win in 2014? The president wants to believe it’s because he’s being blamed for Washington’s dysfunction. But consider just a partial list of horribles the American people have had to face since 2012.
ObamaCare went live in October 2013, and the billion-dollar website that was supposed to guide people through their choices died. Americans learned that the Veteran’s Administration had been falsifying data to hide its dreadful record of failed care. Border states were flooded with tens of thousands of children who had been led to believe that they (and eventually their parents) would be legalized after their horrific journeys. The Internal Revenue Service acknowledged that it had targeted groups hostile to the president, then denied it, and then claimed the emails detailing the actual events had somehow vanished. Americans were given contradictory and confusing details about how authorities were going to prevent the spread of Ebola inside the United States. After we were told the war on jihadist terror was basically a thing of the past, there came the rise of ISIS. The president erased his own “red line” when it came to Syria’s use of chemical weapons. Vladimir Putin took a bite out of a neighboring country and is getting ready to take another. That is quite a record to take to the electorate.
No one believes that the Republican Party is popular. And yet, on Election Day, Republicans won eight new Senate seats (with a ninth on the way). The party will have its largest majority in the House of Representatives since 1946. Republicans reside in 31 of the nation’s 50 governor’s mansions, by far the highest number in modern times. In 24 states, the GOP holds the governorship and both houses of the state legislature; Democrats are in the same position in only six states. Republicans will now control 67 of the nation’s 98 state legislative chambers, up from 59. And all this despite the fact that no one believes that the Republican Party is popular.
The New York Times reported on election night that the president did not feel “repudiated.” At his press conference, Obama said the Republicans had had a “good night.” They had indeed, but only because he had been repudiated.
As the president sneaks up to his immigration move, Ross Douthat asks if he will go ahead and disgrace himself.
In the months since President Obama first seem poised — as he now seems poised again — to issue a sweeping executive amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants, we’ve learned two important things about how this administration approaches its constitutional obligations.
First, we now have a clear sense of the legal arguments that will be used to justify the kind of move Obama himself previously described as a betrayal of our political order. They are, as expected, lawyerly in the worst sense, persuasive only if abstracted from any sense of precedent or proportion or political normality.
Second, we now have a clearer sense of just how anti-democratically this president may be willing to proceed. …
… we do seem to be in an era whose various forces — our open-ended post-9/11 wars, the ideological uniformity of the parties — are making a kind of creeping caudillismo more likely.
But if that evil must come, woe to the president who chooses it. And make no mistake, the president is free to choose. No immediate crisis forces his hand; no doom awaits the country if he waits. He once campaigned on constitutionalism and executive restraint; he once abjured exactly this power. There is still time for him to respect the limits of his office, the lines of authority established by the Constitution, the outcome of the last election.
Or he can choose the power grab, and the accompanying disgrace.
The Lid posts on CNBC telling anchors to go easy on the president and the healthcare act.
During her Friday program on the “Fox Business Network,” Melissa Francis made a truly scandalous revelation. “when I was at CNBC, I pointed out to my viewers that the math of Obamacare simply didn’t work. Not the politics by the way; just the basic math. And when I did that, I was silenced.” Francis eventually brought on Charlie Gasparino another FBN employee who used to work at CNBC who told of the time the network’s anchors where called into Jeff Immelt the head of GE’s office (GE owned CNBC at the time) for a discussion whether or not the network was being fair to President Obama and his economic policies.
Francis began her program with two of the recent Jonathan Gruber videos where he talks about in crafting Obamacare, he picked verbiage that would fool the stupid Americans. Francis who has a degree in economics from Harvard, followed the clip with her account of being taken out to the woodshed at CNBC explaining that the basic math of Obamacare didn’t make sense”
“Straight from the horse’s mouth, Jonathan Gruber telling you that the architects of Obamacare think you’re stupid and most importantly, they are absolutely counting on your lack of economic understanding. They aren’t the only villains in this story though. They are also depending on the liberal media to help them cover up the truth. So far NBC, ABC, The L.A. Times” and Associated Press and others, have been only too happy to comply. Those outlets have not even mentioned the video evidence, from Jonathan Gruber. It is shocking.” …
The Wall Street Journal reports on areas in the country populated by investment brokers with issues.
DELRAY BEACH, Fla.—At Burt & Max’s Bar and Grille one day this summer, stockbroker Rafael Golan gave a group of elderly people a financial seminar. After his hourlong talk on topics from real estate to annuities, the free food arrived.
Dinners like this have landed him clients before. Some later lodged complaints against him, making him part of a cluster of brokers with troubled regulatory records that a Wall Street Journal analysis identified in this corner of Florida.
Among those clients were Pinny and Rebecca Slotnick, octogenarians who became Mr. Golan’s customers in 2003 after a dinner and later filed a complaint with regulators alleging he mishandled their accounts. He paid them a $125,000 settlement this year. He denies any wrongdoing in this or any other case.
A Wall Street Journal investigation, analyzing the records of about 550,000 stockbrokers, identified 16 U.S. hot spots like this one where troubled brokers tend to concentrate. Parts of New York’s Long Island and South Florida, long notorious for “boiler room” operators, made the list. But so did areas around Detroit, Las Vegas and California cities not known for problem brokers.
Within 10 miles of Mr. Golan’s office here were about 3,000 brokers. One in 17 had three or more disciplinary red flags over their careers that they are required by regulators to report—an industry measure of a troubled broker. That is three times the national average.
Mr. Golan, whose record has five such flags, is what some in the industry call a “plate-licker,” a broker who trolls for clients with dinners in a tactic Wall Street’s self-regulator has warned can involve excessive sales pressure. …