Archive for 2011
The Osama Story and Photo
President Obama probably wishes his PR team worked as smoothly as the SEAL team that killed Osama and the intelligence team that found him. The White House fuzzed up the triumph by rushing to put out information that later proved to be wrong. Here’s a guess about why that happened: The White House…
Read MoreJohn of Arabia
First we got into another ‘short war’ (over in Libya) then the war turned into a logjam then one morning I opened the newspaper and there was John McCain traipsing around Benghazi saying we ought to dive in deeper to break the logjam and next the Obama administration was sending the ‘rebels’ $25 million. …
Read More18,000 Teachers
For two years Governor Perdue’s been face to face battling an enemy (let’s name her enemy ‘Problems’ – meaning she’s been fighting with faceless abstractions like deficits, unemployment and recessions rather than flesh and blood people) and she’s been losing at every turn. But now she’s face to face with a new enemy: Republicans. And…
Read MoreThe Gang of Five
Governor Perdue says you can “take it to the bank” that the five Democrats who voted for the House budget will be with her in a veto fight. She should be right. And this will be a test of her political muscle. I ask myself: What would Jim Hunt do? Back in the…
Read MoreNot Set in Stone…
Last election President Obama’s Job Approval Rating defined how people voted – if you thought Obama was doing just fine (or sort of fine) you voted Democratic, if you didn’t think he was doing so fine you voted Republican (unless you were an independent or Democrat who’d voted for Obama in 2008 – then, most…
Read MoreSacred Cows
“All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” – George Orwell, Animal Farm Legislative leaders said everything would be on the table for budget cuts. But a Democratic TAPster sent these “quick, back-of-the-envelope numbers” on how deeply the House budget cut agencies headed by Republicans: Department of Labor cut…
Read MoreThe Obama Bump
A caution for giddy Democrats who think the killing of bin Laden will reelect President Obama: This too shall pass. Remember President George Herbert Walker Bush. Eighteen months before the 1992 reelection, right after the four-day Iraq war, his approval ratings were at an astronomical level, near 90 percent. A friend reminded…
Read MoreLafayette Park
Osama’s dead and let’s hope Al Qaeda passes with him (or at least falls apart without him) but there’s one bit of grit in the gears that says maybe we paid a price for his villainy we hadn’t reckoned on. It’s the celebrating. The way we – especially our young people – seem…
Read MoreMorning in Young America
The media and political elites’ reaction to Osama’s killing was predictable. Not so that of Real America. Especially Young America. Democrats – understandably – were all but gloating that it was President Obama, the supposed Muslim Manchurian Candidate, who “got” bin Laden. MSNBC endlessly reminded us that President Bush had minimized the importance of…
Read MoreIt’s Not a Tax…
Today’s new breed of politicians are a lot more versatile than the old-timers most of us grew up with. In the old days when Democratic politicians raised ‘fees’ – like the fee you pay for your car registration – they’d argue stubbornly it was not a tax increase and Republican politicians would argue back,…
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