Back in October 2010, blogger Tigerhawk recalled what one of his Princeton classmates, who was originally from Romania, said about the nature of life under socialism:

One recurring tool of socialist tyranny is the capricious enforcement of unworkable laws.

He quoted the passage in making a point about the “capricious enforcement” which was an inevitable feature of the unworkable mess better known as Obamacare.

But two and a half years later, it’s evident that observation could just as easily have been applied to our byzantine tax code, our environmental regulations, and even laws pertaining to press freedoms under the Obama administration.  As Dan wrote earlier today, the only folks who are surprised by any of these scandals are the ones who haven’t been paying attention to what has been going with our government since January 20, 2009.

In the case of the Obama administration, though, it’s not strictly capricious enforcement, but selective enforcement, always with a partisan goal in mind.  The IRS targeting of the Tea Party and conservative organizations is appalling, but one would have to be naive not to believe, as ABC’s Trey Hardin noted today, that it wasn’t authorized by someone in the West Wing.  Hardin observed (audio at the link):

I will tell you this on the IRS front. I’ve worked in this town for over 20 years in the White House and on Capitol Hill and I can say with a very strong sense of certainty that there are people very close to this president that not only knew what the IRS were doing but authorized it. It simply just does not happen at an agency level like that without political advisers likely in the West Wing certainly connected to the president’s ongoing campaign organization.

And it’s not just the IRS.  Earlier today it came out that the EPA waived fees for leftist organizations and leftist journalists who requested information, but not for conservative ones:   “Conservative groups seeking information from the Environmental Protection Agency have been routinely hindered by fees normally waived for media and watchdog groups, while fees for more than 90 percent of requests from green groups were waived, according to requests reviewed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.”  Yes, this would be the same EPA that has classified carbon dioxide as a pollutant, making the mere act of exhaling potentially troublesome.

A coincidence?  I think not.  This is the same administration committed to picking winners and losers on most matters.  Hence, it should surprise no one that while oil companies are prosecuted for the deaths of eagles and other protected species, the bird-killing wind farms are naturally given a pass.   Clearly, some energy companies are more equal than others.

It’s the same with journalists.  Just a day after the AP snooping scandal broke, the administration is playing favorites again.  Jake Tapper has gained a reputation as one who can be counted on to ask tough questions of the White House with greater frequency than the reporters at most of the other lamestream news organizations.  Well, today Professor Jacobson at Legal Insurrection is reporting that the White House played Jake Tapper by selectively leaking one e-mail with the apparent aim of creating a diversion in the reporting about the Benghazi cover-up.  Jacobson writes: “Like I said, this entire diversion of leaking a single email out of a chain of emails to Tapper was simply meant to put critics of the administration back on their heels and to provide an excuse for White House defenders to throw around words like ‘doctored.’”

And so what else do we see today?  Well, all of a sudden the administration’s lackeys in the press such as Hilary Rosen are now out expressing their sympathy for poor Jay Carney.  I guess they’re afraid of ending up as the subject of a DOJ snooping scandal or an IRS investigation or a selective leak.

1. It’s a presidential election. It’s not close; the Democrat has way more popular support. A few of his dumb zealots break into Republican headquarters to spy needlessly. No person is injured, but it’s still unacceptable. The more so, because the president and his crew then lie to obstruct official investigations.
2. A Republican president was recently re-elected. A philanderer and “family values” hypocrite, he has an affair with his White House intern. It would have no public significance, except that it becomes a subject of testimony in lawsuits over his other affairs. And he lies about it, under oath. He, the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, has now lied to a court.
3. A Democrat president must deal with a certain Third World dictator who has attacked four neighboring countries over a period of two decades, costing hundreds of thousands of lives. World intelligence agencies, and Republican leaders in Congress, are nearly unanimous that the dictator would be happy to launch yet another war, has been developing nuclear weapons, and may have nukes already. Acting on that consensus, the Democrat president gets legal approvals from Congress and the U.N. to invade (along with 40 other nations) and remove the dictator. The invasion works, but at a cost of several thousand American lives (including the occupation, afterward). It turns out that the dictator only had chemical weapons, plus some nuclear weapons research (no nuclear bombs, yet). That’s embarrassing, but multiple official investigations clear the President of any intentional wrongdoing.
4. A Republican administration pushes thousands of guns into Mexico, causing the deaths of hundreds of Mexicans. Republicans claim the administration only did what the previous Democrat administration did. But that is not true: the previous operations had controls to minimize deaths and maximize the intelligence-gathering on Mexican drug cartels, controls that the Republican effort abandoned (for reasons unknown). The GOP Attorney General does everything he can to obstruct Congress’ investigation, and eventually is found to be in contempt of Congress. He does not resign.
5. It’s a presidential election. It is going to be close; the Republican incumbent, plagued by four years of economic failure, is not way ahead. But he has been successful, he claims, in fighting terrorism. A month before the election, Islamist terrorists attack a U.S. consulate and kill an American ambassador, plus three others. The Republican administration had warnings and permitted the attack to succeed (through negligence or perhaps for reasons unknown). They lie to the American people about it, implying that it was not a terrorist attack, that they could not have stopped the attack, that the attack was somehow really a protest caused by a YouTube video that nobody ever heard of, etc. The lies work: the Republican wins re-election.

(more…)

Perhaps the appeal of Twitter is that often pith makes the point better than a well-crafted, thoughtfully argued essay.  Last night, Glenn Reynolds, whose Instapundit blog, proudly produces pithy commentary on the events of the day linked this tweet from Ari Fleischer:

Irony: Bush Admin accepted CIA talking points on WMD. CIA was wrong. O Admin altered CIA TPs on Benghazi. CIA was right.

Highly doubt we’ll see as much scrutiny of the Obama administration’s altering the talking points than we will of the Bush Administration’s acceptance of such points.

Odd how some accused Bush of lying for accepting the CIA talking points, as if the fault lay in his office and not in the erring agency.

Interesting how so few bother to inquire into the Obama administration’s decision to alert the CIA talking points, as if the fault lay in the ether for the erring administration officials.

Rand Paul’s filibuster ended yesterday, after 13 hours. Neither Bruce nor I were clear on how to turn off GP’s post that was counting it, so…it’s gone. We executed it (so to speak). But where did America end up?

• Before: A poll showed that fully 41% of Democrats think the president should be able to order pre-emptive drone strikes on American soil without review or oversight (that is, “on his own” in the poll’s wording).
• After: The Democrat-led Senate has refused to pass this resolution, “Expressing the sense of the Senate against the use of drones to execute Americans on American soil”.

I think that means: according to the Senate, if Obama decides that you are a “suspected terrorist”, he could execute you and your family in a drone strike on your home. At least, the question is open. Obama’s America, Forward!

UPDATE (from the comments): heliotrope informs us that Senator Paul has just received a letter from Attorney General Holder, writing that the president does NOT “have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on an American soil.” That’s better.

UPDATE: Republican senators McCain and Graham are clueless as ever, while liberal comedian Jon Stewart praises Rand Paul, sort of.

Perhaps like me, you’re enjoying this great new TV show I just found on C-SPAN2 called Mr. Paul Goes to Washington where my favorite Senator is currently filibustering President Obama’s nominee to head the CIA, John Brennan. As I write this, he’s currently about to ring in his sixth hour. The goal of Senator Paul’s soliloquy is, as he has stated several times since I’ve been watching, simply to elicit one thing: A straight-forward answer to the question, (to paraphrase) ‘Does the president believe he has the legal authority to execute through drone strike non-combatant citizens on American soil?’

Brings up a very interesting point: For eight solid years, we heard screeching and gnashing of teeth from the Left about how George W. Bush wants to kill us all and eat our babies and of course shred the Constitution through wars based on lies and the horrible PATRIOT Act. But in the end, who is it who’s actually standing up for these ideals? Well, so far I’ve seen Senator Paul in exchanges with Senators Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Pat Toomey. Odd, don’t you think, that it’d be these ‘Tea Party right-winger knuckle-draggers’ who are actually doing the work that the Bush-haters allegedly wanted done while the leaders of their nominative party are lining up with their president in his expansion of Bush’s ‘unitary executive’ policies?

Clearly it’d be expecting waaay too much for the addlepated adherents to the Bush-is-Satan school of political thought to recognize the irony of the situation, let alone find that realization a great opportunity for self-reflection. Sad, that.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HHQ)

NB: I had originally written the paraphrase of Sen Paul’s question as “power” to execute. Clearly that’s within the president’s power, but I’ve clarified (I hope) by changing my original post to read “legal authority”, which I think is likely more to his point.

Americans aren’t happy with the status quo in Washington and yet what we saw yesterday was America returning to the status quo.  President Obama has been reelected, albeit with fewer votes — and a lower percentage of the popular vote — than he won in 2008.  Democrats appeared to have strengthened their majority in the Senate.  Republicans hold the House.

He owes his more decisive electoral vote majority to his razor-thin victory in Colorado, Ohio, Virginia and (as appears likely at press time) Virginia.  The margin in Ohio is even narrower than it was in 2004 when George W. Bush won the state on his road to reelection.

The incumbent’s biggest legislative accomplishment, Obamacare, remains unpopular.  The debt has increased more in his first term than it had in his predecessor’s two terms.  He ran an aggressively negative campaign and didn’t really focus on any issues.  He does not have the same mandate he had four years ago.

I have to say I’m surprised.  Just watching the president and his opponent these past few days, one seemed energized and confident, the other angry and downbeat.  You would think the more confident man would win.  Mitt Romney drew larger crowds.  The base seemed more energized.

Perhaps, it was as Charles Krauthammer put it last night on FoxNews that Mitt Romney wasn’t the best candidate to articulate the conservative message.  Perhaps, it was that he did not do a good job of outreach to the Hispanic community.  Perhaps, those hundreds of millions of dollars in negative ads really did do the trick.  Or maybe Hurricane Sandy caused wavering Obama supporters to return to their man.  Up until the storm hit, Mitt had the momentum.  And it stopped.

Or perhaps, the legacy media, in failing to cover Obama’s various failures and scandals, won the election for him. (more…)

If the legacy media covered President Obama instead of covering for him, California would be in play in tomorrow’s contest.  Our media simply fail to report so many stories which might tarnish the image of the Democratic incumbent.  Just today, one day before the election, numerous conservative bloggers have noted, in the words of one such blogress, “CBS has just released new footage of Obama declining [on September 12] to call the [Benghazi] attack terrorism when pressed, saying it’s ‘it’s too early to tell’“.

They should have released that clip a lot earlier; it would have given credence to the claim Mitt Romney made in the second debate, a claim that Candy Crowley, the moderator, challenged.

It’s not just Benghazi.  It’s Obama’s telling his supporters that “voting is the best revenge.”  And the media not making that front page news.  It’s the failure to cover Hurricane Sandy like they covered Hurricane Katrina.  It’s their failure to cover the Fast & Furious gunrunning scandal.

They may yet help push Obama across the finish line tomorrow, but at the cost of their own credibility.  Distrust in media has reached an all-time high.  Earlier today in the Daily Caller, Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel called political reporters the real “the loser in this election cycle“:

Reporters who push Obama for actual answers, meanwhile, find themselves scorned by their peers — as we discovered the hard way when our White House reporter dared ask Obama an unapproved question during a presidential statement in the Rose Garden. Months later, longtime Newsweek correspondent Jonathan Alter confronted us on the street and became apoplectic, literally yelling and shaking and drawing a crowd, over the exchange. His complaint: our reporter was “rude” to Obama.

Yep. Good reporters occasionally are impolite, especially to people in power who refuse to answer legitimate questions about their own policies. We don’t hire for table manners. We hire for persistence and toughness and the ability to spot a story among the fluff. We’re traditional that way. It’s the legacy media that have changed. (more…)

Earlier this afternoon, when perusing Instapundit, I noticed how many stories Glenn Reynolds and his co-bloggers were covering that were both damaging to President Obama and have been all but ignored by the legacy media.

In the interest of making people aware of these stories, I share the links below.  Can you imagine the coverage these stories would get if they were about Republicans or a Republican president?

There are advantages to being on an outmoded e-mail system, particularly if you are a conservative.  AOL gives me a constant insight into what the liberal media are covering and this story led the news that comes with your e-mail:

Yesterday, Bruce offered both the details of the attack on our consulate in Benghazi and a list of questions the White House refused to answer, questions, it appears, journalists for the “three major TV new networks” are failing to ask.

Summarizing the three elements of the scandal, John Hinderaker finds it

. . . hard to imagine how any newspaper could ignore, or even try to downplay, a story of this magnitude. Yet, if you rely on the New York Times for information, you know little about the battle of Benghazi, and nothing at all about the explosive account that emerged on Friday, fueled in part by the anger of the father of one of the dead American operatives.

John notes that the so-called paper of record “trying to ignore the charge that the Obama administration rejected calls for help from embattled troops on the ground in Benghazi” and asks if “the Times [is] always so reluctant to cover a foreign policy scandal in the last days of a presidential campaign”.  Read the whole thing.

Given this does seem a perfect image of the White House press corps:

(H/t: Former left-leaning lesbian on Facebook.)

Doing my morning blog-read, found the same article linked on one conservative-leaning web-site (Drudge) and on two conservative/libertarian blogs (Instapundit and Powerline), yet neither AOL nor Yahoo! mentions it.  It’s a story with a similar theme to one which surfaced the last time a Democrat ran for reelection and the Washington Post did pick up on it, but a search (without quotation marks for “Obama fundraising web” and “Obama fundraising internet” yields nothing on their site at 9:20 PST (12:20 GayPatriot blog time).

This morning, the New York Post is running a report about absence of safeguards on the Obama campaign’s web-site:

The Obama re-election campaign has accepted at least one foreign donation in violation of the law — and does nothing to check on the provenance of millions of dollars in other contributions, a watchdog group alleges.

Chris Walker, a British citizen who lives outside London, told The Post he was able to make two $5 donations to President Obama’s campaign this month through its Web site while a similar attempt to give Mitt Romney cash was rejected. It is illegal to knowingly solicit or accept money from foreign citizens.

Walker said he used his actual street address in England but entered Arkansas as his state with the Schenectady, NY, ZIP code of 12345.

“When I did Romney’s, the payment got rejected on the grounds that the address on the card did not match the address that I entered,” he said. “Romney’s Web site wanted the code from the back of card. Barack Obama’s didn’t.” (more…)

Last July, frustrated that our friends in the legacy media shunned scrutinizing the record of President Obama, I created the category, “Where’s the Scrutiny?”  The Democrat has become accustomed to a press which downplays news which threatens the image he has crafted and refrains from asking him particularly tough questions.

The president, Michael Barone observed, “suffered” last night

 . . . from his lack of scrutiny from mainstream media. As I like to say, there is nothing free in politics, but there is some question about when you pay the price. In this first debate Obama paid the price for the hands-off treatment he has received from mainstream media. His talking points, advanced by his spokesmen in the confidence that they will not be seriously challenged, were refuted by an energized and articulated and well-informed Mitt Romney. He stood there petulantly and pathetically, nonplussed by the fact that his flimsy talking points were effectively challenged.

And Romney was unfazed about doing the work the legacy media never does, exposing the president, as Michael Walsh put it

. . .as the Primo Carnera of his day, the mob-owned heavyweight champ who won a series of fixed fights — until he finally found himself in the ring against an opponent who didn’t fear him, and who was more than happy to whale on him, especially once Romney figured out that Obama couldn’t hurt him. Meanwhile, Obama kept looking over at Mitt with a “I can’t believe you know all this stuff” look on his face, while periodically casting beseeching glances at moderator Jim Lehrer, hoping to be saved by a bell that never came.

Mitt Romney, as per this tweet included in William A. Jacobson’s roundup, finally provided, in a national forum, the scrutiny long absent in coverage of this president:

(more…)

The subhead to William A. Jacobson’s post on “The Obama Tape” pretty much summarizes the meaning of this whole kerfuffle as it provides A timely reminder that we still don’t really know Obama.

Barack Obama, report the Daily Caller’s Tucker Carlson and Vince Coglianese in releasing the video that their journal obtained, “gave the speech in the middle of a hotly-contested presidential primary season, but his remarks escaped scrutiny.”  He gave a shout out to the Reverend Jeremiah Wright even after that prejudiced pastor “had told The New York Times that he would no longer be speaking on the campaign’s behalf because his rhetoric was considered too militant.”

Not only does he give a shout out to racist pastor, but he also manifests a patronizing attitude toward the poor:

We can’t expect them to have all the skills they need to work. They may need help with basic skills, how to shop, how to show up for work on time, how to wear the right clothes, how to act appropriately in an office.

Interesting that the Obama camp senses this could be damaging to their man, with Democrats, using “comments from reporters speculating” about the video, “quickly” working to dismiss the story before they  had even seen it.

No wonder.  According to Glenn Reynolds this is “video proof” of what Stanley Kurtz says we already know (but which I would add the legacy media dismiss or downplay):

So here’s Obama proudly advertising his relationship with Reverend Wright, and even imitating Wright’s divisive rhetoric on Katrina. Is anyone surprised? Essentially, every excuse Obama used to explain away his relationship with Reverend Wright during campaign 2008 was a lie. . . . (more…)

In the month of September, the conservative (and Spanish-language) media (and from a few rogue reporters at ABCNews) reported a number of stories about President Barack Obama all showing his disinterest in or ambivalence toward governing. And yet, outside those pockets at ABC and occasionally on CNN), our legacy media all but ignored (or otherwise downplayed) these stories which called Obama’s competence into question.

By the end of the month, a number of pundits and bloggers, including a Democratic pollster, commenting on the media’s negligence, had scored them for promoting the president’s reelection and undermining the national interest, with Charles Krauthammer suggesting the media should just “relocate to Chicago” given that they’ve all but become “‘an auxiliary of the Obama campaign”.

In both interviews with and news reports about Obama, authors, journalists in Spanish-language media, a late night talk show host and those occasional “rogue” reporter, revealed a man more focused on his reelection than on the job to which he was elected four years ago.  And our friends in the legacy spent more time following up on Mitt Romney’s supposed “gaffes” than they did on these very real examples of Obama’s incompetence:

• The release of the Bob Woodward book showed Obama disinterested in the give-and-take that is part and parcel of negotiating with Congress.
• The president jetted off to a campaign event in Las Vegas the day after the attacks on our embassy in Cairo and the murder of our ambassador in Libya.
• In an interview with David Letterman, Obama failed to identify the amount of the national debt.
• He dissembled on immigration reform in the Univision townhall, blaming Republicans for his failure when his party controlled Congress for the time period in question (his first year in office); Obama neither introduced such reform legislation nor did he provide a framework within which Congress should work, nor did he press Congress to act.
• In that same townhall, the Democrat “falsely claimed that the [Fast and Furious] program began under President George W. Bush.”  There has been almost no legacy media followup on the Department of Justice Inspector General’s report on the gunrunning scandal, a report which calls into question the managerial competence of Attorney General Holder and reminds us that some in the administration did not cooperate with investigators. (more…)

“In a different political environment,” laments Allahpundit

if Congress wasn’t back home campaigning for reelection and demands for answers from the top weren’t fated to be met with screeching about how the GOP is “politicizing terror” before the big vote, I think the House would already be moving towards holding hearings about what the White House knew.

Richard Grenell, however, believes Congress should hold hearings immediately:

We should do it immediately, because we’ve already seen the State Department scrubbing some of its information from its website. . . .  The State Department gave a warning that said, ‘We don’t have any intelligence that anything is going to be wrong on 9/11.’ And then they removed that from the website. . . . So we already see a scrubbing from the State Department and it’s really important for congressional committees to quickly get in and figure out what’s going on.

He calls media “completely complicit in trying to make this all about a film, a YouTube video that had been out since June, and the narrative was falling apart.”  He also scores the administration from being oblivious to increasing turmoil in the Middle East: (more…)

Ed Morrissey catches a detail in the lastest Bloomberg poll which suggests that information is getting through the legacy media’s filter.  ”One month after Democrats bragged at their convention that they would pound Mitt Romney on foreign policy and national security,” he observes, “Barack Obama suddenly finds himself at a disadvantage on the issue of terrorism.”*   He cites Uri Friedman’s post on Foreign Policy reporting that 

The foreign-policy results of the new Bloomberg National Poll haven’t gotten much attention yet, but the survey contains some bad news for the Obama campaign. According to the poll, Mitt Romney has a 48-42 advantage over Barack Obama on the question of which candidate would be tougher on terrorism. Romney, in other words, has encroached on one of Obama’s signature strengths.

Polls taken earlier in September and in August, showed Obama leading Romney on the issue, usually by double-digit margins.  If the legacy media had been doing their job this past month, the Republican might have opened up a double-digit lead on terrorism and national security, instead of just edging ahead.

Instead of covering Obama’s foreign policy/national security blunders, the legacy media have been covering for them.  Democratic pollster Pat Caddell wonders why the media have not devoted much attention to the president’s decision to jet off to a fundraiser in Las Vegas the day after the terrorist attack on our diplomatic personnel in Libya:

First of all, we’ve had 9 days of lies…If a president of either party…had had a terrorist incident and gotten on an airplane [after remarks] and flown off to a fundraiser in Las Vegas, they would have been crucified…it should have been, should have been, the equivalent, for Barack Obama, of George Bush’s “flying over Katrina” moment. But nothing was said at all. Nothing will be said. [...] It is [unacceptable] to specifically decide that you will not tell the American people information they have a right to know. (more…)

Last week, while doing cardio, whenever I caught Piers Morgan on CNN, it seemed he was inquiring into a statement by or a release from (i.e., tax returns) Mitt Romney.  He seemed almost oblivious to the fact that Barack Obama is President of the United States, uninterested in scrutinizing the incumbent’s policies.

Do wonder if any of the cable “news” networks (save FoxNews) have run panel discussions on

• Bob Woodward’s new book, The Price of Politics and Barack Obama’s practice of governing
• Obama’s decision to jet off to a campaign in Las Vegas on the day after attacks on our embassy in Cairo, Egypt and our consulate in Benghazi, Libya the latter leaving four Americans, including the Ambassador, murdered
• The report by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General revealing malfeasance by Obama appointees and shoddy management by the Attorney General (also an Obama appointee)
• Obama’s false statement about the origin of the gunrunning program.

Do let me know if you’ve seen any such segments and provide the links (if available).

UDPATE:  Had my first response within ten minutes of posting this, with a reader reporting, “C-SPAN ran Woodward’s presentation and Q & A of his new book at the Washington, D.C., book fair yesterday.  I watched the whole thing.  It doesn’t fit your specifics, so feel free to write it off. ”  It might not precisely fix my specifics, but it’s something.  Maybe CNN will follow C-SPAN’s lead.

Real quick post here before I turn in tonight…

I haven’t had a chance to watch all that much of the president’s awkward-moment-filled appearance on Univision last night (here, here, and here, are a few snippets), but every clip I see makes me want for more.

Watching just the little I’ve seen, and the hard-hitting questions and follow-ups, though, I wonder: Do the reporters who cover the president and his other lickspittle trucklers in the MSM ever feel embarrassed by their sycophancy? I mean really, do they ever, at the end of the day, stop and feel ashamed that they do so poorly at what their job is actually supposed to be: Seeking truth from power?

Just a thought. Every once in a while I end the day not having done much (the military is a big place, and you can’t sleigh a dragon every day). It makes me feel uneasy when that happens. I wonder, seriously, how reporters feel at the end of their day, to see people like Univision’s moderators (and audience members, for that matter, too) doing their jobs so much more competently.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HHQ)

P.S., Notice, too, by the way, that every answer the president gives is about how his problems are somebody else’s fault. I imagine this excuse-roladex he has would grow tiring to hear for the American electorate if he were actually—regularly—asked real questions…you know, the kind that the “Pimp with the Limp” doesn’t tend to ask…

UPDATE (from Dan):  Holy cow, Nick, did you read my mind?  (Or maybe just see my notes on the blog dashboard?)  I had intended to get at the same thing you address in your postscript, particularly about how the president blamed Republicans for his failure to pass an immigration bill.  Good post.

UP-UPDATE (also from Dan):  love how Drudge promotes the interview:

UP-UP-UPDATE (more…)

Last week, i listed three things which showed how ill-suited Barack Obama is to be  President of the United States. Just in the past three days, we have had three reports (of various sorts) showing how he is failing in that office.

1. On the Late Show with David Letterman, not only did Obama show that he was clueless about the size of the national debt, but he also manifested an indifference to its magnitude.  Moreover, he talked about confronting the debt as if he were a candidate running for the presidency, not a man who had already served three years and eight months in office.  He talked about a “balanced” approach to deficit reduction, but has yet to present a budget which reflects such an approach.
2. We learned yesterday that “Nearly 6 million Americans — significantly more than first estimated— will face a tax penalty under President Barack Obama’s health overhaul for not getting insurance, congressional analysts said Wednesday. Most would be in the middle class.“
3. With the release yesterday of the Inspector General’s report on the Fast and Furious gun-running operation, we received further evidence of Eric Holder’s inept management of the Justice Department.  Wondering at the Attorney General’s “implausibly uncommunicative staff,” Jim Geraghty writes, “Time and again, information and warnings about the operation’s enormous risks flow from Arizona to Washington . . . and suddenly, mysteriously stop just short of Holder.” President Obama’s response? He blames Bush.*

One wonders if the legacy media will devote as much attention to any of these stories as it did to the “secret” videotape of Mitt Romney’s inelegant analysis of the electoral landscape.

UPDATE:  Another “report” this week of Obama’s failures: Video: Obama now ducking questions on security failures at Benghazi consulate

* (more…)

If the media were truly even-handed, this clip would get more play than the video of Mitt Romney’s inelegant answer to a question at a Florida fundraiser:

The president who, in his first days in office promised to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term, says he doesn’t know how high the federal debt is today, unaware then that it increased by a greater amount in his three years and eight months in office than it did in his predecessor’s eight full years in office.  Bear in mind that Obama called $9 trillion dollars in debt “irresponsible” and “unpatriotic“.

As per my previous post, this clip comes from John Hinderaker; in his commentary on the video, he called Obama “a world-class liar” adding that “we’d better hope he is a world class liar, because if he really has no idea what the national debt is, we are in even worse trouble.”

It really does seem that these seven words describe the incumbent, An Unserious President In Seriously Perilous Times.

FYI:  Some people think that Obama said that Obama was responding to a question about what the debt was when h took office.  I heard it as Letterman asking about the debt today.*

UPDATE:  Stephen Hayes calls this “one of the most dishonest performances from this president in recent memory, and yet it has generated virtually no attention from a mainstream media.”

Hayes concludes his piece, “There are dozens of interesting questions of Obama and his campaign for reporters curious enough to ask them.” Read the whole thing.  In this post, I mock the president for his cluelessness; Hayes takes apart his argument bit by bit.

UP-UPDATE:  Here’s your answer, Mr. President, $16,015,769,788,215.80. At least that’s what it was two weeks ago: (more…)