The only way President Obama can win public relations battle over the fiscal cliff is with media cover

And CNN seems to be doing just that.  Anchor Joe Johns began the “Situation Room” earlier today, almost reading from the Administration talking points, “Happening now: President Obama says he’s keeping a list of who’s naughty and who’s nice in the fight to keep middle-class taxes from going up and is asking the public for help in getting through to the ones he sees as naughty.”

So, they present Obama’s fight as one to “keep middle-class taxes from going up”.

“For his part,” Johns added. President Obama is trying to break that stalemate by asking voters to put more pressure on the Republicans.”  He may be trying to put pressure on Republicans, but he’s not putting forward a serious proposal.

The network’s Chief White House Correspondent did acknowledge that the president’s proposal “was sort of a Democratic wish list”.  But, after paying lip service to criticism of Democrats, she went on to trash Republicans, “And so Democrats have sort of put out the ideal Democratic version of a starting position and are asking Republicans to come up with a response. And instead of listening — response, Republicans are going — sort of balking at it.”

Of course, they’re balking.  The proposal, by failing to rein in federal spending. doesn’t address the problem.  Miss Yellin makes it seem like Republicans are the ones responsible for the statement.

The real culprit, however, is the president. Obama may contend that he’s pressing Congress to avoid the fiscal cliff, but he hasn’t signed onto any plan to address the nation’s burgeoning federal debt.

The issue is not Republican intransigence, but Obama’s failure to negotiate in good faith.  It would be nice if our friends in the legacy media pointed out that the Democrat hasn’t put forward a proposal which meets his own criteria for a “balanced” approaching, cutting spending and raising taxes (on the wealthy).

*crickets*

-Bruce (@GayPatriot)

To understand why many on the right are upset by the reelection earlier this month of Barack Obama as President of the United States, all you need do is look at his administration’s supposedly “balanced” approach to facing the fiscal cliff.

Simply put, it is not a serious proposal and shows (once again) that the Democrat is not serious about governing.  At a time of fiscal crisis, with annual deficits topping $1 trillion for four successive years, instead of coming out with spending cuts, the Obama team is proposing spending increases.

And we could have told you what was coming.  Despite his 2008 campaign talk of a “net spending cut” and his promise once in office to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term, Barack Obama has shown no commitment to reducing federal spending — or to cutting the debt.  As Doug Powers wrote yesterday, when learning of the White House’s latest proposal, “there’s one thing I take comfort in with this bunch, it’s their predictability“.

And we conservatives are left here, saying, “Well, we told you so.”

To celebrate the anniversary of the birth of the greatest man of the century immediately preceding this one, I repost the piece I wrote three years ago to make the occasion as I revised it two years ago.

Today marks the 138th anniversary of the birth of the greatest man of the century concluded just about a decade ago. On November 30, 1874, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born at Blenheim Palace. His father was Lord Randolph Churchill, his mother the former Jennie Jerome, the second daughter of the American financier Leonard Jerome. His very parentage thus embodied the special relationship between the United States and United Kingdom.

Indeed, it was Churchill himself who coined the term to describe the relations between the two powerful Anglophone democracies.

Like a red head born almost exactly 134 years after him, Churchill was two months premature. (The combination of those two characteristics must be a sign of greatness!) Like that young Californian, the great Briton had trouble sitting still, traveling to Cuba, India, Sudan and South Africa to fight for his country (and sometimes dubious causes) before his 30th birthday. He would write about his experiences; his books would earn him fame and fortune.

First elected to parliament in 1900 as a Tory, he broke with his party over tariffs, preferring free trade and the Liberals. He would rejoin the Conservative Party in 1925, staying with the Tories, through his two terms as Prime Minister and until the end of his life. Noting that Churchill “stood for Parliament under six labels,” one of his biographers, Paul Johnson wrote that “He was not a party man. . . . His loyalty belonged to the national interest, and his own.”

And Churchill saw the British national interest clearly linked to that of the United States and Western democracies.

While forever associated with the two great wars of the last century, the man himself may well have enjoyed the thrill of battle, but he was well aware of the horrors of war and did his utmost to prevent it. A warmonger he clearly was not, though he did understand that war was sometimes necessary to prevent even worse evils. (more…)

President Obama, as Fred Barnes reports in the Weekly Standards, has touted his “‘balanced’ approach to averting the fiscal cliff“, that is, a package which includes tax hikes as well as spending cuts.

Yet, the proposal Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner showed to House and Senate leaders failed to include any significant cuts, but did, in addition to higher taxes on “on wealthy Americans as well as higher taxes on capital gains and dividends“, it also included a “multiyear stimulus package with at least $50 billion for the 2013 fiscal year.” (The proposal even includes $600 billion in revenue “from unspecified revenue sources.”)  Among the other proposal, there is a promise, at some future date, to try to find $400 billion in savings from Medicare and other social programs.

In short, it includes no specific spending cuts.

No wonder Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell “burst into laughter” when Geithner outlined the proposal.  He said “nothing good” was “happening” in the negotiations because Obama was unwilling to “embrace serious spending cuts.”

As Charles Krauthammer put it, “there not only are no cuts in this, there’s an increase in spending with a new stimulus” (at 0:28 in the video at the link).

And they called Obama the grown-up in the room?  He — and his team — are not behaving like grownups.  They’re not putting forward a serious plan to address the nation’s debt problem.

Will the legacy even report how laughable this proposal is–at a time of record deficits and the president paying lip service to spending cuts, he offers a plan that increases federal spending?

He seems to be counting on something which carried him through the presidential campaign — media cover.  Don’t count on it.   (more…)

The title is a paraphrase from an interview the fetching Stephen Green conducted with writer Sarah Hoyt:

BTW, I recently had the chance to read an advance copy of her book A Few Good Men, to be released next March 5 (it’s not too early to pre-order though) and it is fast-paced and well worth your time, with a theme and story elements certain to appeal to gay patriots.

California named worst-run state in the nation