Meeting on the 29th with 'about 20 Conservative Jewish community leaders', the President not only demonstrated why so many call him the 'Narcissist in Chief', but a characteristically obnoxious 'chutzpah' towards having 'discussions' with those who have a fundamental disagreement with his actions and policies.
The Weekly Standard has this report on the meeting....
President Obama met yesterday with "about 20 Conservative Jewish community leaders, thanking them for the work they do to improve communities around the country and discussed their shared commitment to rebuilding the U.S. economy," Haaretz reports.Knows more about Judaism than the Jewish community leaders - including probably some Rabbis. And because many of his friends in Chicago (most being more devout towards socialism / political ideology than religious ideology), he's an expert? Particularly when compared with the actual policies and actions of his Administration towards the State of Israel which is the key area of concern for many - Jew and Gentile.
In the meeting, Obama reportedly boasted about his knowledge of Judaism, telling the leaders that he thinks he knows more "about Judaism" than all past presidents. He said he gained this knowledge of Judaism from reading.
"Obama ... stressed he probably knows about Judaism more than any other president, because he read about it," Haaretz reports. "[He] wondered how come no one asks Speaker of the House of Representatives John Boehner or Senate minority leader Mitch McConnel [sic] about their support to Israel."
Similarly, he said to the group, "I [am] not going to tell you again how I even feel about Israel, but why [are] we still talking about it?"
He then suggested that he should not be questioned about his commitment to the Jewish state because "all his friends in Chicago were Jewish - and at the beginning of his political career he was accused of being a puppet of the Israel lobby," Haaretz reports.
As for the President's Chicago friends like Valerie Jarrett, Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Eric Whittaker, Tony Rezko, and Jeremiah Wright - along with others that aren't named, the National Review suggests this election we all should put a little more effort vetting the President and First Lady's friends from Chicago than was done in 2008.
The other major gaffe made by the President this week came at the expense of Poland and the Polish people.
Poland’s prime minister said Wednesday that remarks by President Barack Obama erroneously identifying a Nazi death camp as Polish had hurt all Poles and he expected more from the US than “regret”.
“I am convinced that our American friends can today allow themselves a stronger reaction than a simple expression of regret from the White House spokesman — a reaction more inclined to eliminate once and for all these kinds of errors,” Donald Tusk told reporters in Warsaw.
Obama on Tuesday mistakenly called a Nazi facility used to process Jews for execution as a “Polish death camp.” The White House later said the president “misspoke” and expressed “regret”.
The linguistic faux pas overshadowed his posthumous award of America’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, to Jan Karski, a former Polish anti-Nazi underground officer who provided the Allied powers with early eyewitness accounts of the Germany’s Holocaust against Jews.
Blogger Ann Althouse compares this gaffe regarding Poland to the one made in a campaign debate in 1976 by President Gerald Ford which played a role in his defeat by Jimmy Carter in that year's Presidential election.
Economic news continues to dominate. Friday will see a new update on the jobs numbers - and while some growth is expected, it is also expected to be very modest and well below the amount needed to make a real impact on the unemployment numbers - and conditions across the country.
This week, the American consumer reaffirmed their vote of no confidence in President Obama's economic policies and agenda.
Consumer confidence took a "surprise" tumble in May, as home prices hit 10-year lows. Tell us again why economists keep calling bad economic news about Obama's so-called recovery "unexpected"?
Analysts had predicted the Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index would climb to 70 in May. Instead it dropped more than four points to 64.9, the biggest drop since last fall.
It's the latest in another round of disappointing numbers. Just a few weeks ago, new jobs came in "unexpectedly" low.
And before that, GDP data disappointed.
Underperforming economic indicators have been so common under Obama that the only mystery is why the experts keep getting caught off guard.
Disappointing GDP data? Unfortunately, it's not just that as the entire 'Obama Recovery' has been not only subpar, but the worst since the Great Depression.
GDP growth: The Obama recovery has also performed far worse than average when it comes to GDP growth. After 11 quarters, the economy is still only 6.8% bigger than it was when the recession ended. In contrast, GDP was 16% bigger, on average, by this point in the previous 10 recoveries, the Minneapolis Fed data show.
The current recovery is so slow, in fact, that it just barely beats GDP growth 11 quarters after the 1980 recession ended — even though there was the intervening long and painful 1981-82 recession. And unless GDP shoots up in Q2, the current recovery will soon be the absolute worst since the Great Depression.
Had the Obama recovery tracked the average GDP growth in the 10 previous recoveries, the economy would be almost $1.2 trillion bigger today.
6.5 million fewer jobs created....
An economy $1.2 trillion smaller than if the recovery was only the average of the last 10 post-World War 2 recoveries...
Over $5 trillion added to the national debt in 39 months, and on pace to add $6.4 trillion to the national debt in 48 months - this 'recovery' is proof positive of the failure of Keynesian economics.
Then there are several peripheral stories that will have an impact on this year's Presidential election that can not be directly attributed to 'unforced errors' of the President - but towards repercussions of his policies and agenda.
President Obama has already touted his 'saving' of the US auto industry as one of the major 'benefits' of his policies with the government bailout of General Motors and Chrysler. However we are now seeing an 'unintended consequence' from the government take-over / bailout of General Motors as the companies attorney's are claiming immunity from punitive damage claims in litigation because of the government bailout - even though we've been told that the bailout doesn't bar plaintiffs from going after punitive damages on litigation over incidents prior to the 'new' Government Motors.
The dispute highlights questions now arising over how much legal protection GM and Chrysler Group LLC have in certain product liability cases following 2009 government rescues that exceeded $70 billion. A bankruptcy judge allowed Chrysler to immunize itself from new punitive-damage claims arising from alleged manufacturing defects in vehicles sold before its restructuring. Chrysler's immunity was the subject of a Page One article in The Wall Street Journal on April 5.The Wall Street Journal highlights that the Obama Administration, through the Department of Education, has given waivers on 'No Child Left Behind' to 19 of the 50 states of the union.
The skirmish in the widow's case raises complex legal issues involving federal bankruptcy rules that sometimes allow companies to discard product liability or other risks, overruling state laws that give consumers rights to sue for damages.
GM received a $50 billion government rescue at the height of the financial crisis and then sold its best assets to the U.S. Treasury in a 2009 bankruptcy sale--making it a new auto maker legally divorced from the company that manufactured the U-Haul and millions of other vehicles.
Rather than repeal or amend the No Child Left Behind Act, the Administration has decided to do here what it has in a number of other major areas of legislation (Immigration, DOMA, etc) - selectively enforce the law.
What makes this even worse, is that these actions are being done to appease the Teacher's Unions who oppose the testing standards of this Act in addition to the fact that these testing standards makes it now possible for parents to see which teachers and schools are successful and which teachers and schools are not.
The other aspect of this that is unseemly is that to qualify for the waiver, the state has to sign fully onto the policies and agenda of the Obama Administration which are being implemented without the benefit of legislative authority - despite the fact that the Administration enjoyed a super majority control of Congress in 2009 and 2010.
This is more federalism run amuck - with Federal government micromanagement of something that belongs locally and at the state level, not the Federal level.
The waiver program here is as political and skewed as the waiver program being run out of HHS for Obamacare - benefiting primarily the union base of the President, not the ordinary middle class citizen that this is supposed to benefit.
Planned Parenthood is again getting unwanted attention in the press - and again as a result of an undercover video sting which exposes its continued embracement of its background and history at the forefront of the eugenic movement. This video has a Planned Parenthood employee in Austin, Texas urging a woman to seek an abortion based on the gender of the child - abort if it is a girl.
The video shows a Planned Parenthood staffer encouraging the woman to obtain a late-term abortion because she was purportedly carrying a girl and wanted to have a boy. The video is first in a new series titled “Gendercide: Sex-Selection in America,” that Live Action tells LifeNews will be exposing the practice of sex-selective abortion in the United States and how Planned Parenthood and the rest of the abortion industry facilitate the selective elimination of baby girls in the womb.
“I see that you’re saying that you want to terminate if it’s a girl, so are you just wanting to continue the pregnancy in the meantime?” a Planned Parenthood counselor named “Rebecca” offers the woman, who is purportedly still in her first trimester and cannot be certain about the gender.
“The abortion covers you up until 23 weeks,” explains Rebecca, “and usually at 5 months is usually (sic) when they detect, you know, whether or not it’s a boy or a girl.”
PP gets half a billion dollars of taxpayer's funds every year courtesy of the federal government. Repulsive totalitarian regimes, like China, and North Korea, practice eugenics and support the abortion of fetuses based on their gender (being girls). There's no reason why the federal government should fund an organization that promotes this same vile mindset. If the progressives and supporters of eugenics in this country want to fund this organizations support of gender based late term abortions, then they should do so with their own direct contributions - not with funds flowing from the federal government.
Then I have to ask those progressives about how this organizations embracing of eugenics and aborting girls because of their gender fits into their desire for 'fairness' and 'social justice'?
One of the common themes coming from the President's reelection message is that the policies advocated by likely GOP candidate Mitt Romney are little more than a repeat of the same policies of George W. Bush and the conservatives which 'created the 2008 financial crisis'. The problem is, the tax cuts and economic policies of former President George W. Bush didn't create the crisis of 2008 or result in the stagant recovery.
A recurring theme in President Barack Obama’s attacks on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his tax policies is: “We can’t go back to the same policies that got us into this mess.”Assisting the President to try to press the meme that everything bad we are experiencing today is because of the previous Administration are large elements of the mainstream media. Politico, which started as a bi-partisan and fair online political reporting organization, is now fully in the tank with spinning / advocating for Barack Obama.
President George W. Bush’s tax cuts did not cause the fiscal crisis of 2008. Our economic calamity came in a housing meltdown — the result of years of administrations of both parties encouraging variable-interest, no-interest, little or no down payment, and no-document or liar loans that flooded people into homes they couldn’t afford under traditional mortgage lending practices.
To its credit, the Bush administration twice advanced reforms to rein in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, major players in pushing bad loans. Each time it was blocked by powerful Democrats, Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut. Frank famously said he wanted the two quasi-governmental agencies “to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidizing housing.” Even after the home-ownership explosion was starting to be revealed to be a house of cards, Dodd declared, “These two institutions are fundamentally, fundamentally strong.”
So far, “rolling the dice” on the two “fundamentally strong” agencies has cost the taxpayer $150 billion. No wonder the Wall Street Journal calls Fannie and Freddie the “toxic twins.” The irony is that Frank and Dodd not only escaped responsibility for their roles but they foisted blame for the housing bust on high finance and authored a 2,000-plus-page bill to pile new regulations on banks and other financial institutions.
Earlier this week I highlighted the question that the President himself raised in comparing his record in 'public equity investing' to that of Mitt Romney during his tenure at Bain Capital and 'private equity investing'. Politico is now advancing the story - 'Mitt Romney Hopes Solyndra Will Trump Bain' - implying that the only reason that the Romney and a conservative super PAC are highlight the President's crony capitalism around investing billions of taxpayer funds in favored companies regardless of the viability of their business model is to deflect from his own experience at Bain.
On the other side of the media equation, we have some internal discipline likely forthcoming inside Fox News after a producer on the network's morning program, Fox and Friends, produced this video which highlights (negatively) the record of President Barack Obama.
Reports are that this video did not get the vetting that normally takes place - and the senior management of the network are hinting that disciplinary action could take place against those involved in the development and airing of the video. Quite a difference from elements like Politico, the New York Times, or the Washington Post.
Hot Air highlights some info from the latest Washington Post / ABC News poll which is showing that Mitt Romney is rebounding among women. They note that no internals are available yet from this poll - which is a major issue as the last two times out, the internals showed a major oversample of Democrats which skew the poll results. Among the interesting aspects of the Hot Air analysis of this poll....
The campaign spent most of May hammering Romney on Bain Capital, which didn’t move the needle at all among Democrats, and may have damaged him among moderates (+28 in April to a +21), and certainly did with independents, as noted above. The only other major line of attack was the so-called War on Women, and the numbers among unmarried women in this series shows how well Team O’s generals have performed in that attack. Instead of being attracted by the creepy “Life of Julia,” it looks like Obama has repelled more than a few.Why Tom Barrett is toast in the Wisconsin recall election against incumbent Scott Walker?
Bear in mind, of course, that we haven’t seen the full sample data, which presumably accompany the full release for their latest polling numbers. It’s possible that the narrowing among women could just be an artifact of improving the partisan balance, which has been ridiculously tilted all year long in this series. That doesn’t explain the momentum shift in unmarried women, though, nor the dramatic turnaround in independents between April and May. If the samples are similar, Team Obama may need to start reaching for the panic button — especially if Friday’s jobs report turns out to be a dud.
Barrett: Which School Districts Have Been Hurt By Scott Walker's Reforms...? Hmm. Hm. Hey, You Know What, I'll Run An Analysis And Get Back To You About ThatHeh...
I'm not making that up. He cannot name any school districts harmed by the Act 10 reforms, and appears to agree with the proposition that it's helped many (in as much as he does not dispute this part of the question).
He then says he'll "run an analysis" to find some schools he think were hurt, and get back to the reporter at some point before the election (which is six days off).
This is the central issue in this election -- Tom Barrett's failure to identify any schools harmed by Act 10 is therefore a concession that none have.
Between the dreadful polling information regarding the Wisconsin recall election (Walker up between 5 and 10 points) and the President's campaign challenges, MSNBC blowhard Ed Schultz is broaching into full panic mode....
I would venture to say that most of the people that listen to the Ed Schultz radio show are good lefties. Or maybe they just like to hear something different every now and then because we're just inundated with right-wing crap all over the radio dial in America, whatever reason. I guess I'm talking to lefties right now. Not that the rest of you can't listen and we love it when you do.
But it's pretty clear to me what's happening here. They are trying to set it up that if Mitt Romney gets elected, if Mitt Romney gets elected, there will never be a Democratic president again in the history of the United States. The future is just, this is the way it's going to be. There'll never be a Democratic president in our lifetime again. And when I say in our lifetime, I'm talking about long, long, long, long, long time.
This is why Wisconsin's so important. The people of the country need to know that you can defeat it. And this in many respects is doing the country a favor, the way they're operating, the way they're lying, the way they're backing up the worst candidate, the worst governor in the country, his record's horrendous, and who he's a puppet to.
So that's why this is so important. They're trying to make it so Barack Obama doesn't get re-elected and no Democrat ever will be elected into the White House.
Heh - 'There'll never be a Democratic President in our lifetime again...'. Wasn't the election of Barack Obama and the Congressional super majority supposed to lead to decades of Democrat control of the federal government?
When Jimmy Carter was bounced out after his feckless term in office, the Republicans controlled the White House for the next dozen years....and 20 of the next 28 years. President Carter so discredited the Democrat policies and agenda that it took the American people a dozen years and a broken promise on taxes to revisit those policies and agenda items. That will be the legacy of Barack Obama - his embracing of 'Hope and Change' combined with the desire / effort to 'fundamentally change' this country will utterly discredit the progressive movement. Hopefully, the moderates and 'blue dogs' in the Democrat party will be able to take control back from the hard left.
This Day in History
1431 - Joan of Arc is burned at the stake for heresy in the Norman city of Rouen.
1911 - The first Indianapolis 500 race is held. Ray Harroun drives his Marmon Wasp to victory in a field of 40 cars with an average speed of 74.59 mph.
1922 - The Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court and former US President William Howard Taft (the only former President to hold a seat on the Supreme Court), dedicates the Lincoln Memorial on the Washington Mall.
1942 - The Royal Air Force launches a 1,000 plane bombing raid against the German city of Cologne - devastating 600 acres of the city, killing 469, and leaving 45,000 homeless. The chemical and machine tool industries in the city, which were the primary targets, were totally destroyed.
1982 - Spain becomes the 16th NATO member and the first to join the alliance since West Germany joined in 1955.
