Yet another suprise

Obama breaks five-day pledge

By CARRIE BUDOFF BROWN | 2/5/09 6:21 AM EST | Politico.com


President Barack Obama kept one campaign pledge Wednesday afternoon and at the same time violated another when he signed into law the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, which extends health care coverage to 11 million low-income children.

The White House views the SCHIP legislation as a down payment on Obama’s pledge to provide universal health care by the end of his first term. The bill ran into some partisan resistance because it allows states for the first time to use federal money to cover children and pregnant women who are legal immigrants.

But Obama’s 5 p.m. signing came barely three hours after the House approved the bill, breaching Obama’s promise to have a five-day period of “sunlight before signing,” as he detailed on the campaign trail and on his website.

“Too often bills are rushed through Congress and to the president before the public has the opportunity to review them,” the Obama-Biden campaign website states. “As president, Obama will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days.”

Obama signed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act only two days after it received final passage last week, and it wasn’t posted on the White House website until after it became law.

Politifact.com, a project of the St. Petersburg Times that tracks Obama’s campaign promises, says the five-day rule is the only pledge he has broken outright.

On the Ledbetter Act, the website wrote: “We recognize that Obama has been in office just a week, but he was very clear about his plan for a five-day comment period, and we can’t see why this one needed to be rushed. It is somewhat ironic that with the same action, Obama both keeps and breaks a campaign promise.”

A White House spokesman refused to comment on the matter.

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How could this be a surprise to anyone. Of course he's going to sign a bill right away, especially one which is for the children, what great press. Followed by lofty words that this is one which couldn't wait.

Broken Promises Meter:
10 of 10 (sorry this meter is either 0 or 10, you can't half break a promise)

More MSM douchebaggery

Sitting with Obama, Lauer held up a copy of US Magazine, and pointed to how the editors cut him out of the cover photo with his wife and daughters. In the upper right-hand corner of the cover was a photo of a curvier Simpson and the headline: “Weight Battle.”

Did POTUS diss Jessica Simpson?

By CARRIE BUDOFF BROWN | Politico.com


...

“They took you out of it,” Lauer said of the magazine.

“It — it’s — it’s a little hurtful,” Obama said.

“You got replaced by Jessica Simpson,” Lauer said.

“Yeah, who’s losing a weight battle apparently,” Obama said, according to the NBC transcript of the interview. “Yeah. Oh, well.”

The ladies didn’t like that one. Karen Tumulty at Time’s Swampland blog, and others across the blogosphere, schooled the new president.

“Barack Obama may be the most eloquent politician on the scene today, but he laid a big one in yesterday's interview with Matt Lauer,” Tumulty wrote Monday.

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Tsk, tsk, tsk 44. Don't fall into the MSM's traps by answering questions about everyday life, they will allow you to be crucified for it. Women, all those gushing suburban mommies who voted for you, will turn on you quicker that that Rosie O'Donnell at an 'all you can eat' buffet when they tell her they're out of cheese sauce, if you comment about some fatty gaining weight. If you wouldn't say it about your wife, don't say it about anyone else, you're no longer a private citizen!

I am a private citizen, so but down the bucket of chicken and the side of cracklins you white trash fatty.

Scandal meter:
3 of 10

Calling it like it is meter:
10 of 10

Stupidy:
7 of 10

When the Rubber Hits the Road

GOP weapon: Obama earmarks pledge

By LISA LERER & CARRIE BUDOFF BROWN | 1/26/09 8:57 PM EST - Politico.com

As Barack Obama meets with Republicans Tuesday, some in the GOP have enlisted an unlikely ally to derail his $825 billion stimulus plan – Barack Obama.

They’re using Obama’s pledge to keep earmarks out of the massive bill to criticize Democrats in Congress – saying projects like family-planning funding and arts spending in the House version are exactly the kind of pork-barrel spending Obama promised he’d fight.

“Many conservatives are just getting upset that Barack Obama comes into office talking about change and his first big initiative is a massive $800 billion dollar pork barrel project,” said Brian Darling, director of U.S. Senate Relations at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “If he wants to cut wasteful spending the first the thing he should do is veto his own stimulus bill.”

At issue is a list of programs that Republicans say will do little to stimulate economic recovery, including $21 million to sod the National Mall, $50 million to fund the National Endowment of the Arts and $650 million for digital TV coupons. Republicans also have seized on millions that would be spent under the bill to expand family-planning services in the states.

The projects are a fraction of the massive spending bill – and Democrats dispute that they’re pork. But the items have given Republicans a hook to rally opposition to the bill, on conservative talk-radio and elsewhere.

And they’ve put Obama in an uncomfortable spot. He swept into Washington promising to find a new way of doing business in the Capitol, one that would be more focused on bipartisan compromise and less on wasteful special interest earmarks.

(more...)

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Now the bullshit is starting to draw flies. First putting someone in Treasury who doesn't pay his taxes, next clearly breaking your pledge against lobbyist working in your administration, but now, one of the few things which gained you votes among the GOP, cutting pork spend. Are you going to stand up for what you ran on or will you crumble like everyone else? Stand up to Pelosi now or she is going to make you her bitch for the next 4 years.

Heavy is the head which wears the crown

CURL: Obama press aide gets bashed in debut

Joseph Curl (Contact)

Friday, January 23, 2009- Washington Times.com

The White House press operation got off to a fumbling and stumbling start Thursday, with the day's opening briefers insisting on being identified only as "senior administration officials," followed swiftly by the new president's spokesman accidently outing one of the secret aides less than two minutes into his first White House briefing.

Although President Obama swept into office pledging transparency and a new air of openness, the press hammered spokesman Robert Gibbs for nearly an hour over a slate of perceived secretive slights that have piled up quickly for the new administration. It wasn't pretty.

"Why did the administration believe it was important for the American people not to know the name of the two senior administration officials who briefed us this morning on Guantanamo?" one reporter asked in the packed and steaming hot briefing room just off the White House West Wing.

"I hope that you all found the exercise that we did this morning helpful," Mr. Gibbs offered helpfully.

"Do you know," the reporter followed, "that you've used ... one of those senior officials' first names several times in this briefing?" A very long pause ensued.

"I do," the spokesman said, his cornflower-colored tie suddenly looking a bit too tight. "Are we allowed to repeat that name?" Mr. Gibbs answered by citing as precedent of Brazilian soccer stars being known only by a single name - sure to one day be a classic White House non-answer.

Then it got uglier.

"How is it transparent," another reporter asked, "when you control the only image of the re-swearing - there's nobody in there but four print reporters, there's no stills, there's no television? And the only recording that comes out, as I understand it, is one that a reporter made, not one that the White House supplied."

(More...)

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It's not so easy, now is it? Better give the press everything it wants from you or they will turn on you quicker than snakes on a plane.

Good news, Princess Caroline has realized that only one tax dodge can make it into government at a time, especially if you are a political lightweight. Don't know or care who will take up the post but I am very glad it's not a Kennedy with no credentials. Now if only Minn. could get it double-counting head out of its ass we can get the show started.

Hypocrisy meter:
5 of 10, should be higher as its so soon into the administration but I am feeling generous.

Journalist a just a bunch of breening, self-absorbed, anti-thinkers...kind of like bloggers

Obama's 'first mistakes' mount

By ANDIE COLLER | 1/8/09 5:01 AM EST - Politico.com

Team Obama has made its first mistake — again.

When Gov. Bill Richardson withdrew his nomination as commerce secretary earlier this week, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell declared it “the Obama team’s first misstep.”

But Mitchell had been scooped.

On Nov. 7 — just three days after the election — Los Angeles’ KNBC said Obama’s flubbed joke about Nancy Reagan and séances was his “first misstep.”

On Nov. 14, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban wrote a Huffington Post piece on Obama’s economic advisory team titled “President-Elect Obama’s First Big Mistake.”

And on Nov. 19, Michael Goodwin of the New York Daily News said Obama’s secretary of state dealings with Hillary Clinton might just have been “his first big mistake.”

First-flub spotting has become something of a national pastime since Nov. 4, with the press floating trial balloons as the first victory balloons hit the ground.

On Nov. 5, the American Prospect wondered whether reports that Obama was considering Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Environmental Protection Agency might qualify as his “first mistake.”

The “first mistake” stories kept trickling in until the week before Christmas, when Obama decided to ask Pastor Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation. Everyone from the Washington Blade to Fox News piled on with versions of the first-big-blunder story.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow called Obama’s choice “the first big mistake of his post-election politicking.”

“Mr. Obama’s First Misstep?” the Hartford Courant asked.

“Obama’s first mistake!” the blogosphere answered.

While the Blagojevich scandal prompted a few more “first mistake” rumblings, the press seemed to have decided that the president-elect’s first mistake had come and gone — until Monday, when NBC gave Team Obama another mulligan.

It is not hard to understand why members of the media are interested in catching the incoming administration’s first real gaffe. “It is the business of the media to find error and point it out — there’s nothing wrong with that,” says Stephen Hess, senior fellow emeritus in governance studies at the Brookings Institution.

Besides, Obama — credited with running a nearly mistake-free presidential race — seemed long overdue for one.

(More...)

For a guy who held a press conference everyday after being elected, someone is pretty quite now

BLANKLEY: Being president 101

Early lessons for the incoming administration

....

WashingtonTimes.com

What history may judge more harshly is Mr. Obama's silence (as I write this column) on the Israeli/Hamas war. Even if he speaks by the time this column is published, he has badly mismanged his "Muslim outreach" initiative, which he described during the campaign as important, asserting that he wanted to "reboot" America's relations with the 1.4 billion Muslims. (The term "reboot" itself was an unfortunate choice - given the Muslims' disdain for the human shoe.) He went to Israel during the campaign and said - referring to Hamas rockets hitting Israel - that if such a thing happened to his daughters there is nothing he wouldn't do to stop it. That statement was clearly seen as a green light for Israel to defend itself - whether Mr. Obama intended it that way we will never know.

Then, when Israel took actions two weeks ago, Mr. Obama remained silent. The result in the Middle East was well described by the British Guardian newspaper this weekend: "Obama is losing a battle he doesn't know he's in. The president-elect's silence on the Gaza crisis is undermining his reputation in the Middle East. Barack Obama's chances of making a fresh start in US relations with the Muslim world, and the Middle East in particular, appear to diminish with each new wave of Israeli attacks on Palestinian targets in Gaza. That seems hardly fair, given the president-elect does not take office until January 20. But foreign wars don't wait for Washington inaugurations." Now I, and many other conservatives, always thought Mr. Obama was being unforgivably naive in thinking he could talk us out of the clash of civilizations between radical Islam and the West.

But my views notwithstanding, given Mr. Obama's intentions, his first gratuitous words (in Israel) followed now by his loud silence seem rather obviously destined to undercut his own intentions. If he intends to shrewdly lead the world, he should understand that images of him golfing in Hawaii while saying nothing as Palestinians are being bombed to death are going to be both seen and condemned in the Middle East that he aspires to lead to better days.

Perhaps, like Jack Kennedy's Bay of Pigs fiasco, this will be an early lesson for Mr. Obama in being president 101.

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Hey 44, you talked almost everyday since being elected, where are you now when there is a tough call to make?

Scandal Meter:

3 of 10 | Not so much a scandal but the lack of leadership is making people start to people notice.

Team Obama dabbles in drama

By ROGER SIMON | 1/6/09 4:24 AM EST (POLITICO.COM)

For an outfit known for its lack of drama, Team Obama has become a downright thrill show.

Bill Richardson! Rick Warren! Rod Blagojevich! Roland Burris! Talk about a ride through the fun house.

President-elect Barack Obama doesn’t bear responsibility for all these speed bumps on the road to a better, happier, more respected America, but he certainly bears responsibility for some of them.

Obama’s selection of Bill Richardson for secretary of commerce didn’t seem like an awful idea. Richardson certainly has accomplished some things in his life, and he wanted an administration job really, really badly. He wanted to be vice president and didn’t get it. He wanted to be secretary of state and didn’t get it. So he lowered his sights to “Anything in the Cabinet Whatsoever,” and he got it.

Exactly why Obama felt he had to give Richardson something is unclear. Maybe it was an act of compassion. Maybe Richardson had threatened to hold his breath until he turned blue. In any case, he got the nomination.

But Richardson clearly did not get the vetting that is supposed to go along with it.

(more from Politico)

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Vetting process are hard, everybody has skeleton in the closet, but when your new boss has asked for full disclosure if they can't make it to the light of day don't step up to the plate.

You have to assume that Transition Team 44 just thought that since Richardson ran for President all the dirty laundry would have already come out...really can you blame them. Not much of a scandal but looks bad for Dems.

Scandal Meter:
44 - 2 of 10
Dems - 6 of 10

Let's antagonize the G&L crowd

Obama sends message with Warren invitation

Selecting the evangelical pastor to deliver the inaugural invocation upsets gay-rights supporters

BY MARY RAE BRAGG TH STAFF WRITER

The interest and opinions surrounding Barack Obama's choices for his new administration make for great political chatter, but none more interesting than his selection of Pastor Rick Warren to deliver the inaugural invocation.

Warren, founder of the evangelical Saddleback Church, in Lake Forest, Calif., and author of the best-selling nonfiction "The Purpose Driven Life," hosted a televised forum featuring Obama and the Republican nominee John McCain during the presidential campaign.

Known for urging his followers to address social issues such as poverty, disease and global warming, Warren also supports traditional evangelical positions on abortion and gay marriage, most recently calling for passage of California's Proposition 8 that outlaws marriage between homosexuals.

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Smart move, reach out to a large portion of the GOP base to have them think maybe you might be on their side while at the same time letting the GLAD crowd you aren't going to bend over for them each time they start to whine. Make you look inclusive but only by slightly excluding some.

Scandal Meter:

2 of 10 (sorry but pissed off constituents at the expense of sucking up to fundies merits something)

Dirty Deals from Illinois

Blagojevich arrested on federal charges

December 9, 2008 at 2:11 PM - Chicagobreakingnews.com

Gov. Rod Blagojevich and his chief of staff, John Harris, were arrested today by FBI agents for what U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald called a "staggering" level of corruption involving pay-to-play politics in Illinois' top office.

Blagojevich is accused of a wide-ranging criminal conspiracy, including alleged attempts by the governor to try to sell or trade the U.S. Senate seat left vacant by President-elect Barack Obama in exchange for financial benefits for the governor and his wife. Blagojevich also is accused of obtaining campaign contributions in exchange for other official actions.

Blagojevich was taken into federal custody at his North Side home this morning--one day shy of his 52nd birthday.

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Christmas comes early! After living in Chicago for more than 8 years, it is not suprising to find out when they are dirty, 44 has to be one of the cleanest to have made it out of there since Abe. GOP/DEM...they are all crooked as Capone but it doesn't get sweeter than this. Blago, who knew he was under investigation, was thicker than Gary Hart. I am just glad this means that JJJ, no not Jay Jonah Jameson, won't get the post.

Scandal Meter:

44 - 5 of 10 | Though he's not directly involved, 44's chief of staff took the concressional seat of the governor, and it's his senate seat...there's going to be a link.

Chicago Dems : 2 of 10 | Come on, this is nothing in their slime pit