Can you imagine an article like this appearing when Bush was president?  No, back then it was considered “patriotic” for the press to disclose classified information,  even when the information was incorrect or false, so the idea of the press reflecting on the Bush administration’s “struggles” with issues of free expression was unthinkable.  But when Obama wants to stomp on press freedoms for any reason, the press decides to be “reflective” and “philosophical” about the issue.  Craven rationalizations for restricting press freedoms under Obama are to be expected.  I particularly like this reader’s comment which I saw when I originally read the article:  “You are surprised Obama is stepping on the 1st Amendment? He tried to stomp on the 2nd Amendment for over a year now! The only Amendment this Administration seems to think is important is the 5th Amendment so they can hide behind it.”

Fox News host Chris Wallace asked Senator Dick Durbin whether Barack Obama’s promise to have Eric Holder look into cases of abuse that he personally approved represents a conflict of interest, but Durbin dodges that question and talks instead about the shield law proposed repeatedly over the last few years as the appropriate Congressional response to the scandal.  However, Durbin asks what exactly “freedom of the press” means in 2013, and wonders aloud whether it would include bloggers, Twitter users, and the rest of the Internet media [Video at the link].

Facebook on Tuesday acknowledged that its systems to identify and remove hate speech had not worked effectively, as it faced pressure from feminist groups that want the site to ban pages that glorify violence against women.

The activists, who sent more than 5,000 e-mails to Facebook’s advertisers and elicited more than 60,000 posts on Twitter, also prompted Nissan and more than a dozen smaller companies to say that they would withdraw advertising from the site.

In a blog post, Facebook said its “systems to identify and remove hate speech have failed to work as effectively as we would like, particularly around issues of gender-based hate.” The company said it would review how it dealt with such content, update training for its employees, increase accountability — including requiring that users use their real identities when creating content — and establish more direct lines of communication with women’s groups and other entities.

The guy who would know, spoke on Morning Joe:

“You were talking earlier about kind of dismissing the Benghazi issue as one that’s just political and the president recently said it’s a sideshow,” said Woodward. “But if you read through all these e-mails, you see that everyone in the government is saying, ‘Oh, let’s not tell the public that terrorists were involved, people connected to al Qaeda. Let’s not tell the public that there were warnings.’ I hate to show, this is one of the documents with the editing that one of the people in the state department said, ‘Oh, let’s not let these things out.’

“And I have to go back 40 years to Watergate when Nixon put out his edited transcripts to the conversations, and he personally went through them and said, ‘Oh, let’s not tell this, let’s not show this.’ I would not dismiss Benghazi. It’s a very serious issue. As people keep saying, four people were killed. You look at the hydraulic pressure that was in the system to not tell the truth…”

Emphasis added.

And, as of this writing: No, the Benghazi e-mails still haven’t been released. Not all; not enough. They held back the most crucial ones, the e-mails from September 12 and 13, releasing only from September 14 on. Why?

UPDATE (from Dan): Jeff, are you anticipating a post I am planning? Or just reading my mind?
UPDATE (from Jeff): Dan, GMTA!

“To believe“, Bruce tweeted last night, “that no one in @BarackObama White House knew about IRS scandal is to, in words of @HRClinton ‘willingly suspend disbelief’.”  Perhaps, I was in too generous of a mood last night when I read that, aware that there was as yet no evidence linking top Obama officials to the scandal.

Though given the information asked of Tea Party groups — and the fact that the IRS was approving liberal groups while leaving Tea Party ones “in limbo”, it is pretty clear that some political appointee had a say in that. Once again, who decided to ask for all this information from the Tea Party folk?

Seems the IRs was interesting not just in gleaning information about the organizations, but also about learning the names of citizens participating in the organizations. Why would they need know the names of all the group’s members and its donors?

Was their goal to get those names? And for what end?

Seems there was more to this than just string out the process.

And now Breitbart is reporting that an Obama campaign co-chair was attacking Romney with leaked IRS documents. (And that co-chiar just happens to be a Mr. J. Solmonese.)

Maybe we should be asking these questions, “What did David Axelrod know? And when did he know it?”

UPDATE: Even the names of high school and college kids?

UP-UPDATE: Sounds like David Axelrod is acknowledging Obama’s incompetence, the president’s unfitness to preside over the executive branch?

UP-UP-UPDATE: The answer could be nothing and never, but one’s gotta wonder how Obama’s political allies manage to get copies of confidential forms his ideological allies filed with the IRS.

Speaking to students at Ohio State University on May 5, President Obama said:

Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems. Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave and creative and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham, with which we can’t be trusted.

Obama said, in effect: Disregard people who worry about tyranny. We can have government do the things that they warn against, without it being tyranny, because we are such wonderful people – so well-intentioned – that it isn’t tyranny, when we do it.

Get it? So, when Obama has his administration lie to Americans so he can win re-election, or when he takes an increasing share of people’s incomes, or requires people to engage in private commerce that he happens to want (Obamacare mandate), or eliminates their rightful choices in the free market, or uses the IRS to obstruct his opponents and violate their privacy, or uses the Justice Department to snoop on reporters, or uses the EPA to extort fees from opponents (that progressive groups don’t have to pay – hat tip V the K), it’s not tyranny. Because it’s Obama doing it, and by his account, he can be trusted.

But the Framers of the constitution thought otherwise. They believed in checks and balances. They *were* those people who “warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner.” They founded America, by “gumming up the works.”

Perhaps Obama doesn’t know that the Framers set up the United States as a republic under a limited government, precisely because they knew that all governments tend to degenerate into tyranny. Or perhaps Obama is unaware of his own party’s President Andrew Jackson, who said that “eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty.”

Obama implies that people who warn us of tyranny are distrustful nihilists. Our only choice, Obama implies, is between continuing the crony-social-fascist gargoyle of a government that he now leads – and harmful anarchy. A typical Obama false choice (flowing from a typical Obama straw man), I’m pretty sure it has the Framers rolling in their graves.

So much for Obama. But there’s more! Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee recently said: (more…)

And he can do simply by insisting officials on his time do what he promised, on his first full day in office, he would do:  by being transparent, by answering the various questions congressional leaders, reporters and pundits have been asking.

As you may know, yesterday, in his joint press conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron, President Obama “dismissed criticism over the White House’s handling of the attack in Benghazi, calling the focus on the issue a ‘sideshow,’ and said any suggestion that the administration is engaging in a cover-up ‘defies logic.’”

There is only one way for the president to show that he’s not covering anything up and that’s to uncover the information about which his critics (and even some of his allies) have questions.

Such questions include:

• Who decided not to provide additional security for our mission in Benghazi despite repeated requests from those on the ground there?  Why?
• Who in the White House and State Department was involved in revising the Benghazi talking points and scrubbing them of terror references?  Was the Secretary of State aware of these revisions?  Was the president?
• Why did the president and Secretary of State rely on these talking points in various public appearances in the weeks following the attack even when there was clear evidence that the protests were neither spontaneous nor were they caused by the video in question?

Perhaps, people might be less cynical about government today if, instead of lashing out at Republicans, President Obama insisted that his appointees answer their questions. (more…)

What if instead of going around the country giving speeches on gun control, President Obama met privately with Senators and Members of Congress to solicit their views on reasonable firearms regulations — and to lobby them personally on expanding federal background checks.

Or would that strategy have defeated his real purpose in pushing the issue?

Your thoughts?

When a Republican Senate candidate in Missouri makes a crazy, ignorant statement about rape in an unscripted interview, it generates a flurry of news stories for days, if not weeks on end.  But, when the Senate Democratic leader makes a crazy, ignorant statement about the most dynamic grassroots political movement to emerge in the Obama era, it generates a headline on Yahoo! for one evening:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Tuesday equated the Tea Party to a non-violent “anarchist” group because, in his mind, Tea Partiers don’t believe in any form of government. He was speaking about the sequester and other financial issues on the Senate floor.

“We have a situation where this country has been driven by the Tea Party for the last number of years,” Reid said. “When I was in school, I studied government and I learned about the anarchists. Now, they were different than the Tea Party because they were violent. But they were anarchists because they did not believe in government in any level and they acknowledged it. The Tea Partykind of hides that.”

Oh, and the Republican later retracted and apologized his statement.  Don’t expect Mr. Reid to acknowledge his own error, be it a deliberate misrepresentation or an ignorant one.

If Mr. Reid had actually taken the time to study the Tea Party movement, he would know that its leaders harken back to the Founders who, far from being anarchists, recognized the need for government.  But, concerned that governments could become destructive to the ends for which they were instituted, the Founders of this nation and the framers of our constitution sought to create a framework limiting its scope and constraining its power.  And many, if not most, Tea Party activists and leaders embrace those ideals and that vision.  You’d expect that our national leaders would at least recognize that.

It’s unfortunate that our new media don’t hold the most powerful Democrat in the Senate to the same standards they hold Republican candidates.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  Roberto wonders “what part of the words limited,’ and ‘small.’ the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid doesn´t understand.” And his failure to understand the difference between the meaning of those two words and the meaning of “none.”

Last week, on National Review’s Corner, Andrew Stiles reported that House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan hadn’t “heard from President Obama since their lunch meeting in early March“:

“Not that I know of,” Ryan said when asked if the president had made any effort to follow up on their meeting, which he noted was “the first time we ever had a conversation” since Obama took office. “I don’t really know him very well.”

Similarly, the president hasn’t made much of an effort to reach out to Senators and federal Representatives after deciding last fall to make a push for gun control.  He seems to think it suffices for him to make a public appearance, give a speech and expect Congress to accept his arguments and act on proposals in line with said arguments.

Yet, just as his speeches don’t seem to persuade the American people of the wisdom of his approach, they also don’t seem to sway Congress.  Despite his push for gun control legislation, few Americans share his priorities:

Few Americans mention guns or immigration as the most important problems facing the nation today, despite the current attention lawmakers in Washington are giving to these issues. The economy still dominates as the top concern, followed by jobs and dissatisfaction with the general way in which Congress and the government work.

Just 4% see guns/gun control as the “most important problem facing this country today”.

Wonder if Obama might be more effective as a leader if instead of trying to demagogue certain issues, he focused on the issues of concern to the American voter.

And maybe he’s been so angry of late because while he has climbed far based on his persona, he hasn’t been able to translate his personal appeal into real accomplishments.

VERY RELATED: America’s Just Not That into Obama

* (more…)

For President Obama’s statement after yesterday’s gun bill failure, see transcript here.

Allahpundit (who has video) is not my favorite, but when he’s right, he’s right:

[Obama] kept his mouth shut nice and tight about guns when it was his own ass on the line last year in purple states; he ignored gun control almost completely when he had 60 Democratic votes in the Senate early in his first term; and as we know from the gay-marriage farce, he isn’t above lying outright to voters about his true positions in the name of getting elected…

Given his record, there’s every reason to believe that what’s really bothering him is the fact that red-state Dems [ed: and Senator Toomey(R)!] denied him an easy chance today to demagogue Republicans as the party of child murder…

I think Obama’s statement is itself an example of demagoguery.

• Obama pulls figures from thin air, like his claim that “90% of the American people” supported the bill.
• Obama calls the Senate cloture rules under which the bill failed, “A continuing distortion of Senate rules.” Huh? How can the actual Senate rules, which Democrats gladly use to stop legislation when it suits them, be a distortion of the rules? Or does Obama mean that the rules should only ever help himself?
• Obama once more tries to play the Gabby Giffords card and the Sandy Hook card. But neither of those shootings would have been prevented by the bill.
• Obama claims “There were no coherent arguments” against the bill, then misrepresents arguments against it[1], revealing the true problem (that he never understood the arguments and never wanted to).
• Obama also plays the Dirty Gun Lobby / Dirty Money In Politics card. But, as Bruce’s post mentions, it was the pro-bill side (if anyone) which may have tried to buy votes with money.

The problem with all gun control legislation is that it burdens the freedom *of the law-abiding*. It’s justifiable only if it will directly hurt law-breakers, a small (if destructive) minority. And, in practice, it usually doesn’t.

Even if it does, there is still the Constitution to consider. As with speech restrictions, property restrictions, measures that would expand home invasion (or search & seizure), etc.: gun control legislation should be difficult to get passed. It should be passed only on cold, slow-moving rationality; never on demagogic falsehoods or appeals to emotion.

[1] For example, Obama says “One common argument I heard was that this legislation wouldn’t prevent all future massacres”; Obama’s insertion of the word “all” making it clearly a Straw Man.

Remember when President Obama told Jay Leno that one thing he wanted to do as the nation’s chief executive was “to break is a pattern in Washington where everybody is always looking for somebody else to blame.”

Doesn’t seem the Democrat has put his money where his mouth was.  According to Mark Felsenthal and Steve Holland of Reuters, Obama blames “shameful” politics for defeat of gun measure:

President Barack Obama, his gun control legislation falling to defeat, lashed out at the U.S. Congress in unusually tough terms on Wednesday as he came to grips with the loss of a key priority after spending months fighting for it.

“There were no coherent arguments as to why we wouldn’t do this. It came down to politics,” Obama said after the Senate failed to muster enough votes to expand background checks for firearms purchases.

Obama accused those opposed to the legislation he supports of being liars, saying, “The gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill“.

Do wonder how many Senators Mr. Obama called or otherwise buttonholed to ask for their support on this issue he made a “key priority” only after willing reelection last fall.

—-

*Or did he just give speeches?

Americans still love the Second Amendment. Obama’s efforts to demagogue gun rights aren’t really working.

UPDATE: I’m also grateful this morning that America is still far from being as bad as Venezuela.

And yesterday, a Reuters article showed that Global Warming hysteria may be starting to recede, even among some climate scienticians:

Some experts say their trust in climate science has declined because of the many uncertainties. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had to correct a 2007 report that exaggerated the pace of melt of the Himalayan glaciers and wrongly said they could all vanish by 2035.

“My own confidence in the data has gone down in the past five years,” said Richard Tol, an expert in climate change and professor of economics at the University of Sussex in England.

UPDATE: In latest news, America is also still not Argentina.

Look up at CNN any time you are working out at your gym or waiting to catch a flight at the airport and you will see Piers Morgan or Anderson Cooper droning out about guns, as if that were the biggest issue on Americans’ minds.

Listen to the president who travels around the country, returning on more than one occasion to Connecticut, to lecture us about the need to act quickly on gun control legislation.  Perhaps, if you watched CNN and listened to the president, until your bills come due, you might forget that personal income is down, gas prices are up and many of your friends are having trouble finding a job commensurate with their abilities and experience.

Seems the president would rather focus on guns than address the real problems facing the American middle class and the fiscal crisis facing the federal government.  The man who, as a candidate warned us that we were “living beyond our means” (with high federal spending) and claimed that adding $4 trillion to the federal debt was “unpatriotic“, has released, as president, a budget that does nothing to address those problems.  According to the Wall Street Journal:

President Obama is pitching his new budget proposal as a fiscal peace offering to Republicans, but the details suggest everyone should expect more conflict. The fiscal 2014 plan he released Wednesday is a very slightly modified version of his previous budgets that reduces the deficit by raising taxes and trading defense cuts for more domestic spending.

The real news is that his budget ratifies much of the spending increase of the first term and tries to lock it in. He wants the feds to spend $3.78 trillion next year ($11,944 per American), which would still be 22.2% of national output nearly four years into an economic recovery. Before the financial panic in 2008, the government was spending about $1 trillion less, or closer to $2.7 trillion a year and an average of 20% of GDP—and President Bush was no slouch as a spender himself.

The editors titled this opinion piece, “The President’s Priorities.”  From his actions these past few months, seems his priorities are speaking about gun control rather than controlling federal spending — or addressing economic insecurity.

Some signs of the times:

35 public educators indicted in a massive cheating scandal. Are they unionized, by any chance? Why, yes they are.

Obama pushes banks to make subprime loans. It was a big part of the earlier housing bubble, folks, that government wanted the banks to abandon prudent lending practices. But lefties don’t need to learn from the past. When our new housing bubble bursts, they’ll just blame the banks’ alleged “greed” again.[1]

Stockton, CA bankruptcy moves forward. Old news, but worth noting. Why Stockton? Picture the busted housing bubble, combined with California-style public employee unions / pensions, mismanagement and unemployment.

Government-funded researchers wanted to prove that whites do more mass shootings – and they fluffed it. As Bob Owens notes, Asians (both Far Eastern and Middle Eastern), Hispanics and blacks are all over-represented in mass shootings, meaning that whites are kind of under-represented. But the white ones get more media coverage, for some reason.

Gun control news:

• Obama will sign a U.N. small-arms treaty, even though the Democrat Senate rejects it. “Constitution, shmonstitution” as the saying goes.
• Biden admits to wanting the whole enchilada.
• Holding Hollywood to account for gun violence still seems like a weird thing to do. In other words, lefties haven’t been doing it.
• Democrats try for indirect gun bans, that is, burdening gun ownership to the point where it will become impractical for many. The proposed mandatory gun insurance would be anti-poor (i.e., regressive).

UPDATE: A guy got a sub-prime auto loan, by giving up his gun. Sub-prime lending as gun control, a leftie wet dream!

([1] Actual greed would be if the bank wanted to be paid back, when it made a loan. Also known as stringent lending. It’s a good thing.)

Remember the ‘sequester’ spending cuts? Per Obama a month or two ago, they were supposed to be The Apocalypse. His administration even rolled out Janet Napolitano to try to fan public fears of terrorist attack (notwithstanding that her budget is still higher this year, after the sequester cuts).

It’s been a month since the cuts kicked in, and it turns out that the reality is ho-hum. The paltry cuts have mostly had small, manageable impacts.

Except, of course, that school kids still can’t go on White House tours. Obama’s administration has held the tours hostage, even refusing patriotic donations that could have restored them. “Nice guy.”

UPDATE: Defense is hit with $41B in cuts, which will cause civilian Defense Dept. employees to be furloughed 14 days this year. Top Defense officials try to help a little, by returning part of their own salaries. Clearly, they aren’t part of the White House.

I must hat-tip John M. Mason at Seeking Alpha for inspiring this post. He weaves some recent news articles into a story which I shall sharpen, with my own viewpoint and commentary.

First, consider that “Recovery in U.S. is lifting profits, but not adding jobs” (says the New York Times). As percentages of national income, corporate profits today are they highest they’ve been since the 1950s, and employee income is the lowest it’s been since the 1960s.

So what are companies doing with their profits?

• “More U.S. Profits Parked Abroad, Saving on Taxes” (says the Wall Street Journal).
• “U.S. Firms Send Record Cash Back to Investors” as dividends, share buybacks and mergers (says the Wall Street Journal).

In other words: Companies just don’t feel that they have many productive opportunities / uses for their money, in the U.S. And do feel that they face unpredictable, yet ever-growing regulation – as well as relatively high taxes. So, they don’t hire (in the U.S.). Instead, they dispose of their profits in ways that accomplish little but to reward their shareholders, thus raising the stock market.

Connect that, folks, to the market’s recent highs. But what does a rising stock market accomplish? Little but to make the wealthiest households feel wealthier.

And so, to the extent that rising consumer spending has contributed something to U.S. recovery, that spending has come more from the wealthier households. “Wealthier Households Carry the Spending Load”, says the Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart and Target, who serve less-wealthy households, have reported slower sales.

This is an economy suffering from the anti-market, anti-growth policies of the Obama administration. Not surprisingly, it is also an economy skewed to the wealthy.

I say “not surprisingly”, because I know that the two things are connected. It is precisely the middle and working classes which (more…)

Just some tasty red meat:

The interview touches on the key issue of Paul’s recent filibuster. In my own words: If the government can execute American citizens, on American soil, pre-emptively (without an active crime or combat situation and without due process), simply by designating them ‘terrorists’ first… well, who’s a terrorist? Please note that:

• Bernard von Nothaus, domestic ‘monetary protestor’ (for lack of a better term), was accused of ‘domestic terrorism’ by his prosecutors.
• Some reports say that the FBI investigated Occupy Wall Street as possible ‘domestic terrorists’.
• A 2011 poll showed that 53% of Democrats considered Tea Party members to be ‘economic terrorists’.
• In 2011, no less a personage (cough) than Vice President Biden allegedly compared Republicans / Tea Partiers to terrorists, over the debt ceiling negotiations.[^^]

With such examples, we see that the Obama – Big Government – Big Banking nexus is indeed prone to labeling its domestic ideological opponents as ‘terrorists’.

Fortunately and as we know, the Obama administration did answer Paul’s filibuster with a clarification of the limits on domestic drone strikes.

[^^I can't recall Biden's GOP counterparts - Vice President Cheney, or VP candidates Sarah Palin and Paul Ryan - ever saying that their domestic, non-violent political opponents were terrorists. If you think any of them did, I invite you to find a solid reference and post it in the comments. Quotes about Bill Ayers won't count, since Ayers was actually violent for awhile.]

UPDATE: Rand is on a roll. “For liberty to expand, government must shrink.” Link is timed to that line, but watch the whole thing.

Take a gander at this headline I just caught on AOL:

Now take a gander at line for the article to which it links:

Senate Democrats plan to offer a counterproposal on Wednesday. The White House has not said when Obama will release his budget.

That has to be the height of cheek, attacking one leader’s attempt to address the nation’s fiscal problems, including the increasing cost of Medicare, yet not putting forward a plan of their own.

Current federal law calls for the president to release his budget proposal at the begining of February. And yet, even the Huffington Post reports that he has yet to release a plan.

Nearly two years ago, Jon Huntsman wrote that critics of Ryan’s “approach incur a moral responsibility to propose reforms that would ensure Medicare’s ability to meet its responsibilities to retirees without imposing an unaffordable tax burden on future generations of Americans.”

The same should apply today.   If the president wishes to criticize Mr. Ryan’s latest proposal, he should first put forward a plan of his own.  And folks in the media should be asking the Democrat why he has neglected his responsibilities.

UPDATE: Just caught this on Yahoo!; the president will submit his budget more than two months after it was due:

The White House says President Barack Obama will likely release his federal budget outline the week of April 8.

That’s more than two months late. Under the law, the president is supposed to submit a budget by the first Monday in February, which fell this year on Feb. 4.

A new story is up this morning at WatchDogWire – Oregon.

Senator Ginny Burdick (D-Portland) has been in the news this week for claiming that acitizen journalist’s video shot near her home is creepy and intended to intimidate her. The irony in this claim is that her legislative chief of staff is the former paid director of opposition research for the Democratic Party of Oregon.

Jeff Fisher has been very open about his tracking and opposition research activities as a paid Democrat operative.

Read the whole thing at WatchDogWire – Oregon!

-Bruce (@GayPatriot)

Four years ago this month President Barack Obama told Jay Leno that one thing he wanted “to break is a pattern in Washington where everybody is always looking for somebody else to blame.”

Seems he was talking to the late night talk show host the way some people talk to a therapist by projecting their own problems onto others.  Not since Nixon have we seen a president so obsessed with his “enemies.”  As the sequester goes into effect, a “combative” Mr. Obama, reports the AP’s Jim Kuhnhenn, “blamed Republican lawmakers Friday for failing to stop automatic spending cuts that were to begin kicking in later in the day, calling the cuts ‘dumb, arbitrary.’”

Barack Obama is always looking for somebody else to blame.  And this week, he is trying to shift the blame for his (and his party’s) failure to control spending (and avert the sequester) onto Republicans.

In his column today, Charles Krauthammer reminds us that the Democratic Senate
hasn’t passed a budget . . .

. . . in four years. And the White House, which proposed the sequester in the first place, had 18 months to establish rational priorities among accounts — and did nothing.

When the GOP House passed an alternative that cut where the real money is — entitlement spending — President Obama threatened a veto. Meaning, he would have insisted that the sequester go into effect — the very same sequester he now tells us will bring on Armageddon.

Republicans need to keep challenging the president to put forward his plans to cut spending (remember that was part of the “balanced approach” he favored to address our nation’s debt crisis*) because nearly every voice in the legacy media seems intent on ignoring the president’s spendthrift record.

The blame here lies with the president and his party.  Instead of working with Republican leaders over the past 18 months to try to reach a compromise on spending, he spent that time demonizing them.  As is doing so today.

Will Americans continue to join him in shifting the blame?

* (more…)

If President Obama were serious about preventing the supposedly draconian cuts in the sequester, instead of demagoguing Republicans in campaign-style events, he wouldn’t be waiting until the after the last minute to sit down with congressional Republicans.

But, as Jim Geraghty reminds us, campaign-style events are this Democrat’s modus operandi:

How did Obama try to pass his stimulus? Campaign-style events. How did Obama try to pass Obamacare? Campaign-style events. How is Obama pushing for amnesty legislation? Campaign-style events. How is Obama pushing for gun control? Campaign-style events. Fiscal cliff? Campaign-style events. This is all separate from his actual presidential campaign.

Geraghty cites Moe Lane who observes that

Barack Obama knows how to do one thing: elect Barack Obama to public office.  And that’s not ‘elect Democrats.’  Or ‘elect liberals.’  Or even ‘elect people that Barack Obama likes.’  It’s just him: his team is trying pretty hard right now to figure out how to use their over-specialized skill more generally, but they don’t have much time to figure it out and the system is actually rigged against them in this case.

Perhaps, Republicans can be more effective in standing up to this Democrat if every time he attacks them, they respond by pointing out the problem and asking for his plan to fix it, in this case, out-of-control federal spending.

They might also remind Americans of Barack Obama’s promise of a “net spending cut” and pledge to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term.