THE OTHER SHOE DROPS: Updates To Previous Posts
† The Incredible Shrinking Candidate: The conventional wisdom has it that businessman Herman Cain’s huge win in the FL straw poll (37 percent of the 2,657 votes cast) was meant as a rebuke of Gov. Rick Perry (TX), who came in a distant (15 percent; former MA Gov. Mitt Romney was right behind at 14 percent). But if Perry got smacked upside the head by voters who were dismayed by his debate performance last Thursday, then Rep. Michele Bachmann (MN) – who came in dead last at 1.5 percent – was bludgeoned. From the moment Perry entered the race five weeks ago, Bachmann’s gone after him hammer and tong in the belief that they were vying for the same voters. But conservatives turned to Cain, not Bachmann, when they lost confidence in Perry – at least this time out.
The Christian Science Monitor poses a series of questions that arise from Cain’s win:
Can he keep up the momentum among his Republican rivals for the 2012 presidential nomination? Will the results of what is essentially a candidate beauty contest make any difference in the national polls, which are a much more accurate gauge of how the rivals are doing compared to each other (and to Barack Obama)? And will it mean sharper scrutiny – and pointed criticism – of his positions and policies in upcoming debates and straw poll maneuvering? …
Most analysts see Saturday’s unscientific Florida poll of 2,657 delegates (party activists who’d paid $175 to participate) as one blip on a long trail of debates and straw polls …
So far, Cain has yet to take off in national polls. The latest Rasmussen poll gives him just 7 percent; the McClatchy-Marist poll has him at 5 percent, as does the CBS News/New York Times poll of Republican primary voters; the Bloomberg News national poll gives him 4 percent; and the CNN/Opinion Research poll puts Cain at 5 percent.
As expected home state advantage propelled Romney to a runaway victory at the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference straw poll Saturday night, winning 51 percent of the 681 votes cast. Perry was again a distant second (17 percent) and Cain was third with 9 percent. Bachmann and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich tied for fourth place at 4 percent.
Mark your calendars: the Values Voter Straw Poll is coming up October 8th, and the IL Republican Straw Poll will be held on November 5th.
† Is This Any Way To Run A Transition?: Even before Barack Hussein Obama was inaugurated (he wasn't using his middle name back then, only "racists" were) Hendrik Hertzberg, a senior editor at The New Yorker, asserted, “Obama’s transition has unspooled in much the same way his campaign did: smoothly, calmly, and on time.” As we all know now, that's not what happened.
Eight months later, green jobs czar Van Jones resigned (the first of several czars who quit or were forced out); when Obama's first year in office had nearly elapsed the Transportation Security Administration and the Customs and Border Protection agency – which were created in response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks – were still being run by acting officials and only 60 percent of the roughly 500 top-tier West Wing positions remained vacant; and as of April 2010, 93 U.S. Attorney posts were still vacant and as of the following month, 20 percent of federal inspectors general, auditor or whistleblower protection jobs are unfilled or being covered by placeholders.
Liberal pundits and historians gushed that Obama had "assembled one of the brainiest and most experienced White House teams in U.S. history - populated with a Nobel laureate, four-star generals, a former Fed chairman, a former Treasury secretary, two governors, three senators and enough Ph.D.s and top academics to staff a small university."
So what were Obama's "Lincolnesque cabinet of rivals and strong personalities" doing all that time? Fighting amongst themselves, according to Pulitzer Prize winning journo Ron Suskind, as detailed in his new book "Confidence Men." Here, a few revealing excerpts from a Washington Post book review:
Suskind chronicles the first two years of the Obama presidency, from its grand promises — Barack Obama in the fall of 2008: “I am running for president of the United States because the dreams of the American people must not be endangered anymore” — to its grimmer realities. Although Suskind isn’t unsympathetic, he comes down hard on Obama and his administration. “Gaining the trust without earning it,” he charges, “is the age old work of confidence men,” and Suskind uses what he characterizes as the quarreling, dysfunctional group of larger-than-life personalities that Obama chose as his advisers to show how critical policies such as health care and financial services reform turned out to be less than transformative. “Stripped to the bone” is how he characterizes the final health-care bill. …
Of the Obama presidency, Suskind writes: “Presidents are among the few mortals who are sometimes graced with chances to change a culture. Throughout a windswept March, the country had been working to dislodge some of the era’s prevailing certainties about markets being efficient, about people — economically, at least — getting what they deserve,” but “with the eyes of the country on him, Barack Obama ended the month by shielding Wall Street executives against these winds of cultural change.”
It's not like no one saw this coming. In January 2011 American University presidential historian Allan Lichtman warned: "It certainly has the potential for tremendous conflict. It is going to be a big task in terms of management for the Obama administration. He's got such an enormous array of powerful figures with big egos and clashing jurisdictions."
But Obama, being arrogant, encouraged, rather than tamped down, the clash amongst his advisors: "One of the dangers in the White House, based on my reading of history, is that you get wrapped up in 'group think,' and everybody agrees with everything, and there is no discussion and there are no dissenting views."
In hindsight, it was too much to expect someone who "leads from behind" (third item on page) – when he leads at all – to take charge and mold a team that worked towards a common purpose. But considering the hash he’s made of things, one wonders how much more damage Obama could have done had his team been a well-oiled machine doing his bidding. [Shudder.]
† BHO Blooper Reel (updates last item on page): At the Brent Spence Bridge which connects Cincinnati and Covington, KY, last week to tout his “new” jobs plan, President Barack Hussein Obama not only managed to find another "shovel-ready" job that isn't going to put anyone to work, he made another bone-headed gaffe that would have had liberals chortling for days – years, even – had it come from the lips of his predecessor. Andrew Malcolm of the Los Angeles Times explains:
"We’re the country that built the Intercontinental Railroad," Barack Obama.
That's what the president of the United States flat-out said Thursday during what was supposed to be a photo op to sell his jobs plan next to an allegedly deteriorating highway bridge.
A railroad between continents? A railroad from, say, New York City all the way across the Atlantic to France? Now, THAT would be a bridge!
It's yet another humorous gaffe by the Harvard graduate, overlooked by most media for whatever reason. …
No doubt, we'll see a collection of Obama's Best Bombs on 'Saturday Night Live' this weekend, one right after the other. No doubt.
Malcolm also points out that Obama spent four hours making the round trip – costing taxpayers three-quarters of a million dollars – for a 17 minute speech-cum-pep-rally, and that “[t]he real reason he's at the Brent Spence Bridge is because it links the home states of both congressional Republican leaders, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell. So Obama can cutely blame Republicans for holding up his jobs bill, even though it's Nevada Democrat Harry Reid.”
† Me, Myself And I-I-I: On the campaign trail, Barack Obama (he wasn’t using his middle name back then, only “racists” were) had a peculiar verbal tic: he stuttered on the letter “I.” He still does it (“If asking a billionaire to pay their fair of taxes [sic]. To pay the same tax rate as a plumber or a teacher is class warfare, then you know what? I, I, I, I, I'm, I'm a warrior for the middle class.”):
[Hat Tip: RealClearPolitics]
† Take The Veil Off, Or Go Home (updates seventh item on page): A French court has handed down its first fines under a law passed in April that bans concealing ones face in public, The Wall Street Journal reports:
A police court in Meaux, 25 miles east of Paris, ordered Hind Ahmas and Najate Nait Ali to pay fines of €120 and €80 respectively [$162 and $107] after they declined to remove their face veils while standing outside the Meaux town hall in May, said a court official. …
Gilles Devers, a lawyer who represented the two women said … his clients would appeal the decision. "We could eventually take their case to the European Court of Human Rights." …
A violation can result in a maximum €150 [$201] fine as well as citizenship lessons to inculcate French republican values of tolerance and respect for "human dignity."
† SOTU = Stuff Our Taxes Underwrite (updates third item on page): When The Stiletto first wrote this post, she called bullsh*t on President Barack Hussein Obama's claim in the State of the Union speech that government "historically" provided funding for cutting edge scientists and inventors. The Stiletto will henceforth use the SOTU meme to explain why Tea Partiers want those claiming we need more tax money flowing to D.C. to STFU. In this latest example, the federal government has redistributed more than $600 million of taxpayer income to retired or disabled federal employees who had died, according to a report from the Office of Personnel Management's inspector general, Patrick McFarland. The Associated Press reports:
In one case, the son of a beneficiary continued receiving payments for 37 years after his father's death in 1971. The payments - totaling more than $515,000 - were only discovered when the son died in 2008.
The government has been aware of the problem since a 2005 inspector general's report revealed defects in the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund. Yet the improper payments have continued, despite more than a half dozen attempts to develop a system that can figure out which beneficiaries are still alive and which are dead, the report said.
"It is time to stop, once and for all, this waste of taxpayer money," it said.
Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry said Friday that the agency has already adopted 10 of the inspector general's 14 recommendations for stopping the improper payments. …
Berry said the agency is attempting to recoup its losses, including $113 million currently in collection.
Some 2.5 million federal workers receive $60 billion in benefit payments each year.
† Is Obama Already A Lame Duck?: The New York Times reports that “[a] last-ditch effort” by President Barack Hussein Obama to forestall Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas seeking Palestinian membership in the United Nations “faltered” and French President Nicolas Sarkozy “stepped forcefully into the void, with a proposal that pointedly repudiated Mr. Obama’s approach”:
The extraordinary tableau Wednesday at the United Nations underscored a stark new reality: the United States is facing the prospect of having to share, or even cede, its decades-long role as the architect of Middle East peacemaking.
Even before Mr. Obama walked up to the General Assembly podium to make his difficult address, where he declared that “Peace will not come through statements and resolutions at the U.N.,” American officials acknowledged that their various last-minute attempts to jump-start Israeli-Palestinian negotiations with help from European allies and Russia had collapsed. …
The Palestinians have never fully trusted the United States to serve as an honest broker with Israel. But its credibility with the Palestinians has crumbled with the recognition that Mr. Obama may not have the clout to press the Israelis into a peace deal that requires significant compromises. …
After Mr. Obama laid out his defense of the peace process, Mr. Sarkozy took to the same podium in a forceful disavowal of Mr. Obama’s position. “Let us cease our endless debates on the parameters,” he said, calling instead for a General Assembly resolution that would upgrade the Palestinians to “observer status” as a bridge toward statehood. “Let us begin negotiations, and adopt a precise timetable.”
For his part, Washington Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler notes that each time Obama has spoken about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the United Nations, “his vision has gotten narrower and his language less sweeping. Now he is no longer just trying to forge peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but trying to stave off diplomatic disaster as the Palestinians pursue a statehood bid”:
[In 2009] Obama was still an international rock star when he gave his maiden speech, and so — somewhat unusual for a speech from the U.N. podium … [b]ut Obama’s policy on the Middle East was already in trouble … An ill-conceived demand by the administration that Israel halt all settlement activity had led the Palestinians to balk at any direct talks with Israel until settlement expansion was actually ended.
In order to have something positive to say, Obama had pushed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to attend a three-way meeting at the United Nations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the day before giving the speech. “Yesterday, I had a constructive meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Abbas,” Obama announced. “We have made some progress.” [Emphasis, The Stiletto.]
This was actually untrue. … [H]e had little leverage to persuade either the Israelis to immediately freeze settlement growth or the Palestinians to return to the talks. A few months later, the Israelis agreed to a nine-month, partial moratorium on settlements, but the Palestinians rejected it as too little and too late. …
[In 2010] the president tried to rearrange the diplomatic chairs so he could have something to announce at the United Nations. Just weeks before the General Assembly meeting, the president hosted Netanyahu and Abbas at the White House to launch direct talks between the parties.
But the negotiations were already in deep trouble, because Israel planned to lift its settlement moratorium at the end of the month, and the Palestinians had made it clear they would end the talks if the moratorium ended.
Obama put his prestige on the line when he spoke to world leaders, essentially demanding that Israel extend the moratorium. …
Five days after Obama spoke, Israel ignored his plea to maintain the settlement moratorium, and the direct talks the president had touted were dead.
Aside from showing the real-world consequences of having elected a man who is patently unqualified for the presidency and has not even proved himself able to learn on the job, The Stiletto was struck by a pattern in this administration’s MO: Obama wanted to prove his relevance at the U.N. so he pushed the Palestinians and Israelis into talks that not only went nowhere, but turned disastrous. Obama wanted to tout his administration’s efforts to create “green economy” jobs and pushed Department of Energy officials to approve a government-backed loan guarantee to solar panel manufacturer Solyndra and the company declared bankruptcy and fired over 1,000 employees.
Whether its domestic or foreign policy, the entire machinery of government is not being purposed to benefit the American people or to further this country’s strategic geopolitical and national security interests, but to prop up an incompetent fool and make him look good in the eyes of voters and other world leaders. Guess what? It ain’t working.
† Every Bubble Bursts Eventually: You know why President Barack Hussein Obama is attending so many five-figure-per-head fundraisers? Because that’s where the money is – and not just because the well-heeled can afford to pony up sums that exceed the annual salary of many Americans (those lucky enough to have a job, anyway). “[V]oters of moderate means who dug deep for the candidate and his message of hope and change, sending him $10 or $25 or $50 every few weeks or months” have soured on Obama, The New York Times reports:
In interviews with dozens of low-dollar contributors in the past two weeks, some said they were unhappy with what they viewed as Mr. Obama’s overly conciliatory approach to Congressional Republicans. Others cited what they saw as a lack of passion in the president, or said the sour economy had drained both their enthusiasm and their pocketbooks.
For still others, high hopes that Mr. Obama would deliver a new kind of politics in his first term have been dashed by the emergence of something that, to them, more resembles politics as usual.
“When I was pro-Obama in 2008, I was thinking of him as a leader who could face the challenges that we were tackling,” said Adnan Alasadi, who works in behavioral health in Mesa, Ariz. Mr. Alasadi contributed repeatedly to Mr. Obama during his first campaign but says he will not give the president — or anyone else — any more money.
“Now I am seeing him as just an opportunistic politician,” Mr. Alasadi said.
Such defections are not merely symbolic. About a quarter of Mr. Obama’s record haul during the 2008 cycle came from donors giving $200 or less, supporters who could be tapped again and again without hitting federal contribution limits. Many of those same people were also volunteers in his campaign, knocking on doors, calling friends and neighbors and helping turn out the voters that fall. …
[A] vast majority of Mr. Obama’s past donors, who number close to four million, have not yet given him any money at all.
† Living In These Mad, Mad, Madoff Times: With a record number of Americans on food stamps, more businesses have been approved by the USDA to accept them and now Yum! Brands, which includes Taco Bell, KFC, Long John Silver's and Pizza Hut and other restaurants, wants a piece of the pie, USA Today reports:
Federal rules generally prohibit food stamp benefits, which are distributed under the USDA's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), from being exchanged for prepared foods. Yet a provision dating to the 1970s allows states to allow restaurants to serve disabled, elderly and homeless people, USDA spokeswoman Jean Daniel said. …
Four states accept restaurants, with Florida the most recent to begin a program.
"It makes perfect sense to expand a program that's working well in California, Arizona and Michigan, enabling the homeless, elderly and disabled to purchase prepared meals with SNAP benefits in a restaurant environment," Yum! spokesman Jonathan Blum said. …
Kelly Brownell, director of Yale's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, says encouraging more fast-food consumption is not good for people's health. "It's preposterous that a company like Yum! Brands would even be considered for inclusion in a program meant for supplemental nutrition."
"They think going hungry is better?" counters Edward Cooney of the Congressional Hunger Center. "I'm solidly behind what Yum! is doing."
On a related note, Brooklyn rapper Stanley Lafleur (AKA Mr EBT) put out a video that he says mocks food stamp abuses he has witnessed in his neighborhood. In the video (NSFW) he raps about using his sister’s Electronic Benefit Transfer card to buy dope and beer:
"I'm never going hungry, swiping all day y'all. Sandwiches, chips, a big box of Oreos. Cereal, Kix, but I couldn't buy a 40, dog?" he waxes poetically, dancing through store aisles and up to the counter at a McDonald's.
"I wish I could buy some weed with my EBT but the drug dealer fronted me," raps Lafleur.
† AZ Becomes The Epicenter Of Civility: Where are those worthies running the University of Arizona's National Institute for Civil Discourse when you need them -- really, really need them? Here's where they weren't: At the Saddle Ranch bar on the Sunset Strip last week where Bristol Palin was heckled by a patron, The Blaze reports:
Palin unexpectedly found herself in the middle of a heated argument after a heckler yelled “Did you ride Levi like that?“ and ”Your mother’s a whore!” He also goes on to call her mother, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, “the devil.”
In the clip, you’ll see that rather than avoiding the situation, Palin walks over to her heckler and asks that he explain what his issues are with her mother. In a dialogue that Business Insider says “no one comes away … looking very good” in, both parties sound off.
The heckler, Stephen Hanks, tells Hollywood gossip site TMZ that he didn’t realized that he was being filmed, and that it “felt good to get it off his chest” because he thinks the Palins are “dangerous” and “trash from Wasilla.” He added, “Some people may think I crossed the line, some people may think I didn’t go far enough.” Count The Stiletto amongst the former.
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