Good times....good times...

50 things that Barack Obama has done wrong...

...a trip down memory lane.

Remember "cash for clunkers"?

Surprise!

Obama lied about meeting his uncle.

The White House acknowledged Thursday that President Obama lived with his uncle for a brief period in the 1980s while he was a student at Harvard Law School -- despite previously saying there was no record of the two having met.

"The president did stay with him for a brief period of time until his apartment was ready," White House spokesman Eric Schultz said in a statement. "After that, they saw each other once every few months, but after law school they fell out of touch. The president has not seen him in 20 years, has not spoken with him in 10. "

Onyango "Omar" Obama faced a deportation hearing earlier this week following a drunk-driving arrest. During the hearing, he said that the president had lived with him while he was a student at Harvard.

The Boston Globe reported in 2012, after Omar Obama's arrest, that the White House said he had "never met his famous nephew." The White House now says it only told the Globe that there was no record of the two having met -- not definitively that they hadn't met.

In its report Thursday, the Globe confirmed that the White House initially said that there was no record that they had met. It said the White House never asked for a correction.

White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters at Thursday's White House briefing that, when the issue of Obama’s uncle came up in 2011, the press office "looked at the president’s records, including the president’s book" and found no reference to him.

The Obama Legacy

It ain't good.

In fall 2008, the U.S. suffered its worst financial crisis since the Depression. That wasn't Barack Obama's fault. But five years on, in the fall of 2013, the country's economy is still sick.

Unemployed middle-aged men look in the mirror and see someone who may never work again. Young married couples who should be on the way up are living in their parents' basement. Many young black men (official unemployment rate 28%; unofficial rate off the charts) have no prospect of work.

Washington these days kvetches a lot about what Healthcare.gov is doing to the Obama "legacy." Far worse than ObamaCare, though, is that the 44th president in his second term presides over a great nation that is punching so far below its weight that large swaths of its people have lost heart.

Why didn't Obama choose a staffer to hold his umbrella?

This IBD story seems to capture something about Obama in microcosm:

Another awkward day in the unraveling presidency of Barack Hussein Obama.

Beset by a trio of profound scandals, the Democrat had planned for Thursday's public message to focus on foreign affairs through a joint news conference with Turkey's Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, a NATO ally and fellow conspirator to oust the Syrian regime.

Unfortunately, Obama's advance staff was apparently too busy preparing his next campaign stops to check the Washington weather forecast. It set up the news conference outdoors in the Rose Garden. Wouldn't you know given POTUS' recent luck, it began raining.

Obama did the only thing he would think of: No, he wasn't smart enough to come in out of the rain.

The commander-in-chief ordered two U.S. Marines to bring umbrellas and hold them over the leaders' heads while standing at attention. So, as the two politicians droned on, including translation, the professionals in their dress uniforms got drenched. As did the attending crowd.

Service regulations expressly forbid male Marines from ever carrying an umbrella in uniform. But nothing should ever stop the Real Good Talker from talking at a photo op. Just as oppressive heat and a fainting audience didn't slow his mouth last summer.

At one point Thursday Obama reached over to show the highly-trained Marine corporal how the president wanted the umbrella positioned to keep his face open to cameras.

Speaking of speaking, here's an interesting little revelation from Obama. About the IRS intimidating and harassing conservative political groups, he was asked a straight-forward question:

"Can you assure the American people that nobody in the White House knew about the agency’s actions before your Counsel’s Office found out on April 22nd?"

Here's the relevant part of Obama's long reply:

"I can assure you that I certainly did not know anything about the IG report before the IG report had been leaked through the press."

Do you see what Obama did there? He dodged the real question about anyone in his White House knowing of the years-long illegal IRS operations. And he carefully (and revealingly) chose to answer a much more limited, irrelevant and unasked question about his knowledge of the inspector general's report.

Best analysis ever of ...

...Why.We.Are.So.Boned.


From Moe Lane:

Let me give all of you the basic background, first: Obama has yet to make a decision on the Keystone Pipeline, and he’s more or less going to seriously anger a key block of supporters either way. If he approves the pipeline, he annoys Hollywood celebrities, radical environmentalists, and other scientific illiterates; and if Obama rejects it, he infuriates Big Labor, or at least those parts of it that still do actual work. The result? Barack Obama is… dithering; which pleases nobody. The union workers aren’t working, and the scientific illiterates are justifiably paranoid that the current no-by-default is unsustainable in the long run. So, of course, both sides are now trying to pressure the White House into resolving the situation.
What both sides don’t quite realize is that the problem that the administration is facing a structural problem, not an ideological one. It’s not that the White House doesn’t want to resolve the issue; it just doesn’t know how. 

This next part is unavoidably geeky, but necessary: because it’s there where you can find the specialized jargon that can describe the Obama administration. To sum it up for the gaming geeks who are reading this: Barack Obama is a munchkin mini-maxer who has put all of his points into “winning elections” because he found an exploit that made him President early. And now he’s trying to solve everything else via The Gun Is My Skill List and/or button-mashing, with predictable results. 

…No, seriously: if you have a very specific background that entire paragraph makes crystalline sense. But I will happily translate. 

To begin with: a munchkin (or power gamer, or mini-maxer, or a bunch of terms that cannot be repeated here) is a type of gamer (roleplaying, computer, roleplaying-computer) who looks for loopholes in the rules – because games have rules, and there isn’t a ruleset in the world that cannot be manipulated by somebody with enough motivation/obsession. And it turns out that the American Democratic primary system was full of such loopholes, which is why Barack Obama won the nomination in 2008 despite losing almost all the big Democratic primary states (and arguably the popular vote, depending on how you score Michigan). And it also turns out that the intersection of our electoral system with our rapidly-expanding online culture can produce what computer gamers call “exploits:” which is to say, a glitch in the system that gives someone an unintended benefit (if it just crashes the system, it’s a bug). Strictly speaking, the system is not designed to elevate a state Senator to the Presidency in five years – for what turned out to be very good reasons – but it can be done. 

The problem, though, is that Barack Obama (and I should note that I am lumping his election team in with him here, as Obama largely does not really have much of an independent personality himself) has what the gaming community calls “mini-maxed” himself. Let me explain that one a bit more: lots of video games allow for the player to control a character that gets better at the game as he or she goes through the various game ‘boards.’ Special abilities, improved combat techniques, cool-looking items: if you’re playing a game that is something else besides a straight combat game, you can usually improve how you interact with computer-generated characters (“NPCs”) in the game, or learn how to make your own cool items, or whatever else the game designers thought that you’d like to do. Since gamers like to have unique characters (this is very much the young adult male equivalent to playing dress-up with dolls) there’s usually a way to customize your character, which is to say: people get to choose how and where the character improves. 

Mini-maxing is when a player designs a character that is fantastically good at one thing, at the expense of everything else. So you could end up with a character who is, say, obscenely good at hitting things with a sword – but can’t convince a bunch of sailors to drink free beer. The mini-maxer doesn’t mind; he’ll just go around the game trying to resolve as many problems as he can by hitting them with a sword (tabletop gamers – err, “D&D players” – often call this The Gun is My Skill List, although obviously substitute a sword for a gun in the name). The problems that the mini-maxer can’t resolve that way he’ll either ignore until later, or else flail about on the screen while hitting the buttons quickly and/or at random (“button-mashing”), in the hopes that eventually the laws of probability will allow him to bull on through anyway.
And that’s where we are now. 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. Barack Obama certainly doesn’t know how to govern effectively; take away a Congress that will rubber-stamp the Democratic agenda and he flails about. He’s so bad at this, in fact, that when confronted with a situation where all he had to do was do nothing to fulfill a campaign promise (the tax cuts) we somehow ended up with a situation where Obama gave in on 98% of those tax cuts and voluntarily signed up to take the blame for the AMT fix. In short: Obama was woefully unprepared for the Presidency, and he hasn’t really spent the last four years trying to catch up. Instead, he goes from situation to situation either trying to recast the problem in ways that he does have some skill in (permanent campaigning for office), or else… flail about on the scene while hitting people’s buttons quickly and/or at random, in the hopes that eventually the laws of probability will allow him to bull on through anyway. 

If none of this sounds like any way to run a railroad – or lay a transcontinental energy pipeline – well. It’s not, particularly. Unfortunately, we’re stuck with the guy until January 2017. Sorry about that: I did what I could.

They said that if I voted for Mitt Romney, the government would dismantle our right of free speech...

...and they were right!

The Rioter’s Veto - Can violence in the Middle East justify censorship in the United States?

 

On September 6, the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) signed a contract to buy space for this message from the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), which had concluded that the First Amendment required it to accept the controversial ad. Less than two weeks later, WMATA declared that AFDI’s advocacy was not constitutionally protected after all, pointing to violent Middle Eastern protests blamed on Innocence of Muslims, an online video mocking the prophet Muhammad.

The idea that riots in other countries justify censorship in the U.S. represents a new form of heckler’s veto, making freedom of speech contingent on the predicted responses of the touchiest listeners anywhere in the world. Such a policy is dangerous to freedom of expression, providing a license to suppress speech deemed provocative, and to public safety, encouraging violence aimed at eliminating offensive messages.
 

WMATA's decision was sensibly overturned by a District Judge, but it shouldn't have been necessary.

It was necessary, however, because the Obama administration and Obama himself had gone to the extra-ordinary length of lying to the American and world public in order to blame free speech in America for violence in Libya. 

Even if it had been true - which it obviously wasn't - that tactic would still have been inexcusable as an effort to trade American freedoms for foreign sensibilities. It has to represent a major blot on Obama's record as steward of the Constitution.

After nearly four years in office, Obama still doesn't know that there is a Department of Commerce...

...or, it seems, what the Department of Commerce is for.

Obama's big new - desparate - suggestion is to establish a "Department of Business" to do what the Department of Commerce does.

Apparently, his confusion may be caused by the fact that he hasn't appointed a Secretary of Commerce since the last one resigned in June.

*Sheesh*

Joe Biden is an "egomaniacal autocrat” “determined to manage his staff through fear”...?

And Obama and Biden are "financial illiterates"?

Who would have guessed.

Former Biden aide writes "tell all."

Adding another wild-card to the 2012 campaign’s final days, a former aide to Vice President Joe Biden has written a tell-all Washington memoir in which he lacerates the former Delaware senator as an “egomaniacal autocrat” who was “determined to manage his staff through fear.”

The book is hardly an objective study of the vice president, however. Author Jeff Connaughton, a Biden Senate staffer turned lobbyist, is by his own admission deeply disillusioned with the capital and embittered about his experience with the man who inspired him to enter politics.

Connaughton wrote “The Payoff,” which came out last month, in the fashion of guilt-racked whistle-blower: he was a party to a corrupt system and now wants to blow the lid off the game.

“I came to D.C. a Democrat and left a plutocrat,” he confesses.

As chief of staff to former Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-Del.), Biden’s successor, Connaughton was radicalized by his unsuccessful experience trying to get an amendment to the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill that would have broken up the country’s largest banks. So he left Washington politics and wrote what he believes is the unvarnished truth about the country’s political system. The big reveal: Big banks control both parties.

“It’s time people understand why – and how – Wall Street always wins,” Connaughton writes at the outset of his book.

He is harshly critical of his own party and the Obama administration, arguing that the president is no different than most other Washington Democrats in his willingness to kowtow to Wall Street.

President Obama and Biden, he writes, are “both financially illiterate.”

From the "Our Country is in the Best of Hands" file - Obama lies...

...worse still, he lies to whip up racial resentment.

Thomas Sowell writes about the recently released 2007 video:

Departing from his prepared remarks, he mentioned the Stafford Act, which requires communities receiving federal disaster relief to contribute 10 percent as much as the federal government does.

Senator Obama, as he was then, pointed out that this requirement was waived in the case of New York and Florida because the people there were considered to be "part of the American family." But the people in New Orleans -- predominantly black -- "they don't care about as much," according to Barack Obama.

If you want to know what community organizers do, this is it -- rub people's emotions raw to hype their resentments. And this was Barack Obama in his old community organizer role, a role that should have warned those who thought that he was someone who would bring us together, when he was all too well practiced in the arts of polarizing us apart.

Why is the date of this speech important? Because, less than two weeks earlier, on May 24, 2007, the United States Senate had in fact voted 80-14 to waive the Stafford Act requirement for New Orleans, as it had waived that requirement for New York and Florida. More federal money was spent rebuilding New Orleans than was spent in New York after 9/11 and in Florida after hurricane Andrew, combined.

Truth is not a job requirement for a community organizer. Nor can Barack Obama claim that he wasn't present the day of that Senate vote, as he claimed he wasn't there when Jeremiah Wright unleashed his obscene attacks on America from the pulpit of the church that Obama attended for 20 years.

Unlike Jeremiah Wright's church, the U.S. Senate keeps a record of who was there on a given day. The Congressional Record for May 24, 2007 shows Senator Barack Obama present that day and voting on the bill that waived the Stafford Act requirement. Moreover, he was one of just 14 Senators who voted against -- repeat, AGAINST -- the legislation which included the waiver.

President Narcissus.

He also doesn't seem particularly concerned about the down-grading of the nation's credit.

Obama 'believed he had BEATEN Romney' in Denver debate - after ignoring advice of top aides on preparation

When President Barack Obama stepped off the stage in Denver last week the 60 million Americans watching the debate against Mitt Romney already knew it had been a disaster for him.

But what nobody knew, until now, was that Obama believed he had actually won.

In an extraordinary insight into the events leading up to the 90 minute showdown which changed the face of the election, a Democrat close to the Obama campaign today reveals that the President also did not take his debate preparation seriously, ignored the advice of senior aides and ignored one-liners that had been prepared to wound Romney.

And:

Obama also decided to take a break to visit the Hoover Dam. 'Its spectacular, and I've never seen it before,' he told reporters during the visit, which came about because an aide had mentioned the dam was nearby. I said, 'Well, we've got to go check it out".'

Even before the debate, some advisers were worried that Obama, who had been distracted and detached during some of the sessions in which Senator John Kerry had played Romney, would have an off night.

But in his closing statement in Denver, Obama said that it had been 'a terrific debate and I very much appreciate it' - an upbeat comment that reflected his view that he had at the very least held his own against Romney.

But he then delivered a line that bemused his advisers: 'You know, four years ago, I said that I'm not a perfect man and I wouldn't be a perfect president. And that's probably a promise that Governor Romney thinks I've kept.'

The Democrat said: 'It was as bad as "likeable enough". The President thought he was being bitingly sarcastic about what he saw as Romney's overly-aggressive performance. But to your swing voter it was as if he was waving the white flag of surrender.'

His 'likeable enough' allusion was a reference to a Democratic primary debate in 2008 when Obama had said to his rival Hillary Clinton: 'You're likeable enough, Hillary'. At the time, Obama felt he was being light-hearted and casual but viewers saw it as Obama being arrogant and condescending.

Obama is willing to break the law and waste your money to win this election.

Obama administration is promising to pay contractors fines if they don't notify workers that they may be laid off after the election:

Companies with more than 100 employees are required by law to warn workers of potential layoffs 60 days in advance. If the sequester goes into effect, workers will get laid off. Which means that unless something is done, layoff notices may go out to thousands of defense contractor employees right around election time.

Naturally, the administration would prefer that this not happen. So they’ve offered to pay the legal costs of any firm that doesn’t send out the notices.

The Obama administration has sought to quell the fear of mass defense layoffs in presidential battlegrounds like Virginia, where letters sent in early November warning about the possibility of job losses could discourage thousands of defense workers from backing the incumbent.

The government’s guarantee to foot the bill for legal problems, as long as contractors heed OMB’s advice to refrain from warning about lob losses, is unusual.

“I don’t know of any situation where the government has done this in the past,” said William Gould, a labor professor at Stanford Law School.

Presumably the purpose of the law is not to create legal fees; it is to give employees notice of potential layoffs so that they can arrange their finances and otherwise plan for the hard times that may be coming down the road. If the Obama administration does not think that employees should have notice of these potential dangers, then it should say so forthrightly, and try to get this very bad law repealed. On the other hand, if it thinks that maybe it’s a good thing for employees to have advanced notice that they might soon not have a paycheck, then it seems odd to first, pressure contractors not to send those notices, and second, offer to help the contractors avoid paying any legal damages that their failure might have incurred.

And why is there a possibility of a sequester?

Because Obama and the Democrat-controlled Senate don't want to do their jobs!

Harvard assigns Obama's speech as part of its required Freshman reading.

This seems eerily familiar to the Communist party's practice of assigning the collected speeches of the Great Leader to students.

The Cult of Obama.

Investor's Business Daily asks:

Last week, the Obama campaign started selling a refashioned American flag with its logo replacing the stars, and then urged Americans to pledge allegiance to Barack. Did we just wake up in Mao's China?

And:

It's one thing for Obama to encourage all this — which he obviously does. After all, this is a guy who promised he would heal the planet and keep the oceans from rising, and made himself the subject of his only two books.

He's the guy who ran around during his first campaign with a fake presidential seal that replaced the stars and stripes on the eagle's shield with, naturally, the Obama logo. And he's the guy who gave his first acceptance speech in front of a bunch of faux Greek columns.

He's the guy who, when Neil Armstrong died, saw fit to commemorate that event by tweeting a picture of himself, and the guy who'd rather talk with David Letterman and party with Jay-Z than work with Benjamin Netanyahu to stop Iran from going nuclear.

But the question is, why are so many Americans so willing to voluntarily buy into Obama's personality cult?

Remember that will.i.am video from Obama's first campaign?

Or the equally creepy video of elementary school students signing Obama's praises:

"Mmm, mmm, mmm!

Barack Hussein Obama

He said that all must lend a hand

To make this country strong again

Mmm, mmm, mmm!

Barack Hussein Obama."

Or how about the endless news photos of Obama with his head centered in the middle of a circle in the background, giving him the appearance of being surrounded by a halo.

Anyone want to guess how many times a press photographer decided to snap a picture of Reagan like that?

In totalitarian countries, leaders can force their greatness on unwilling subjects because they own the press, they own the entertainment industry and they own all the schools.

But here in the U.S., we don't worship our presidents. We hire them to do a job for us. And we only pledge allegiance to the flag — the one with 50 stars and 13 stripes.

Could you imagine how liberals would mock any Republican with these kinds of pretensions?

And they'd be right to do so.

Obama doesn't know the amount of the national debt... ...he claims on Letterman. It's amazing how quickly Obama folds when he's pressed by tough inteviewers like Dave Letterman!

Obama responded with a recent history of government spending. Then Letterman went back to the tally: “Now, do you remember what that number was? Was it $10 trillion?” Then came the payoff, as the president made clear that he really didn’t want to utter the word “16”: “I don’t remember what the number was precisely.”

Well, with all the vacations and golfing, that's not really surprising. This country is in the best of hands.

This is one way to stay even in the polls...

...Justice Dept. Gallup lawsuit came after Axelrod criticized pollsters:

Internal emails between senior officials at The Gallup Organization, obtained by The Daily Caller, show senior Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod attempting to subtly intimidate the respected polling firm when its numbers were unfavorable to the president.

After Gallup declined to change its polling methodology, Obama’s Department of Justice hit it with an unrelated lawsuit that appears damning on its face.

TheDC is withholding the identities of the Gallup officials to protect them from potential retaliation from Obama’s campaign and his administration. (SEE ALSO: DOJ still hasn’t served Gallup with lawsuit)

In April, Axelrod tweeted that a poll showing Mitt Romney with a 48-43 percent lead over Obama was “saddled with some methodological problems,” directing his Twitter followers to read a National Journal story criticizing Gallup polls showing a Romney lead.

It's the Chicago Way.

In this regard, he is not very different from many people.

Knowledge is boring; it's the narrative that matters.

Thomas Sowell remarks on Obama's erudition:

As Professor Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago Law School has pointed out, Obama made no effort to take part in the marketplace of ideas with other faculty members when he was teaching a law course there. What would be the point, if he already knew the truth and knew that they were wrong?

This would be a remarkable position to take, even for a learned scholar who had already spent decades canvassing a vast amount of information and views on many subjects. But Obama was already doctrinaire at a very early age -- and ill-informed or misinformed on both history and economics.

His statement in "Dreams from My Father" about how white men went to Africa to "drag away the conquered in chains" betrays his ignorance of African history.

The era of the Atlantic slave trade and the era of European conquests across the continent of Africa were different eras. During the era of the Atlantic slave trade, most of Africa was ruled by Africans, who sold some of their slaves to white men.

European conquests in Africa had to wait until Europeans found some way to survive lethal African diseases, to which they lacked resistance. Only after medical science learned to deal with these diseases could the era of European conquests spread across sub-Saharan Africa. But the Atlantic slave trade was over by then.

There was no reason why Barack Obama had to know this. But there was also no reason for him to be shooting off his mouth without knowing what he was talking about.

And so it goes with so many of Obama's mistakes, such as "corpse-man," "Austria is a language," and this classic, queing the band to play during the middle of his toast to the Queen of England:

Mistakes happen, and they happen if you think that you are as good as your press clippings say you are. Sowell concludes:

Barack Obama is one of those people who are often wrong but never in doubt. When he burst upon the national political scene as a presidential candidate in 2008, even some conservatives were impressed by his confidence. But confident ignorance is one of the most dangerous qualities in a leader of a nation. If he has the rhetorical skills to inspire the same confidence in himself by others, then you have the ingredients for national disaster.

The Insight of of the Philosopher-King of Generation Narcissus.

Roger Kimball notes:

I admit it, when it comes to Barack Obama, I think pretty low. But not, apparently, quite low enough. This exchange, from an interview with Cathleen Falsani of the Chicago Sun-Times, took even my jaded breath away:

Falsani: Do you believe in sin?

Obama: Yes.

Falsani: What is sin?

Obama: Being out of alignment with my values.

Have you ever found a pithier summary of the narcissistic core of today’s “progressive” Left-liberal ideology? I’m not sure I have.

This is what happens when you're used to having the media protect you...

...you give your opposition all the ammunition it needs.

Apparently stung by Clint Eastwood's schtick at the RNC, Obama tweeted "this seat is taken" with this picture:

Which inspired this:

And this:

All too easy.

Our pro-infanticide President.

Audio: Obama Says "That Fetus or Child" Was "Just Not Coming Out Limp and Dead"

For Obama it seems that the policy of abortion outweighs the policy of extending legal protection to the weakest and most vulnerable of human being, newborns.

It's not exactly Marius running for counsel a second time...

...but complying with unwrtten rules, customs and gentleman's agreements is a critical way that society keep political disagreements from escalating.

So, naturally, the Democrats intend to break the "convention week courtesies."

Bucking protocol, President Obama and the Democrats are planning a full-scale assault on Republicans next week during their convention.

Presidential candidates have traditionally kept a low profile during their opponent's nominating celebration, but Democrats are throwing those rules out the window in an attempt to spoil Mitt Romney’s coronation as the GOP nominee.

President Obama, Vice President Biden and leading congressional Democrats have all scheduled high-profile events next week to counter-program the Republican gathering in Tampa, Fla.

Even first lady Michelle Obama is in on the act, scheduling an appearance on the “David Letterman Show” smack in the middle of Romney's nominating bash.

Marius wasn't Caesar, but Marius began a cycle of breaking the unwritten rules that resulted in Caesar.