Second-Term Reckonings

PJMedia/ Victor Davis Hanson

newyorker.com

A rule of the modern age: all confident, reelected presidents trip up in the second term. LBJ was sunk by Vietnam. Reagan faced Iran-Contra. Bill Clinton had his comeuppance with Monica. George W. Bush was overwhelmed with the Iraqi insurgency and Katrina. And Obama will have his as well, obsequious media or not.

Supposedly fundamental partisan swings of an era usually prove transitory: LBJ’s landside led to Nixon four years later, whose landslide then led to Carter in 1980, whose supposed new politics of humility and apology led to Reagan, whose small government-paradigm shift nonetheless by 1992 gave us Clinton, whose “middle way” after only eight years gave us Bush, whose “compassionate conservative realignment” ended with Obama. And so on until the end of the republic.

Why these second-term reckonings? Partly, presidential hubris leads to a natural correction, as Nemesis kicks in; partly, one can dodge mishaps for four years, but the odds catch up after eight; and partly, the media and voters grow tired of a monotonous presidential voice, appearance, and manner, and want change for the sake of change. To the degree a president walks softly, understands his second-term dilemma, and reaches out, he is less vulnerable.

But Obama either has misread his reelection as a mandate (e.g., Republicans maintained control of the House and the majority of state governorships and legislatures; Obama, unlike most second-term presidents, received fewer votes than in 2008, fewer in fact then John McCain received), or he believes that his progressive legacy lies in ramming through change by any means necessary to obtain results that are neither possible through legislative compromise nor supported by majorities of the American people.

Consider the reckoning Obama will soon have in the following areas:

Guns

Americans are as outraged over the Newtown shootings as they are baffled by how to stop such mass murders — given the difficulty of legislating away human evil. They have a vague sense both that someone should not be able to fire off 30 rounds in seconds, and yet that prior assault-weapons bans and comprehensive gun control have not done anything to curtail the incidents of gun violence. The more the Obama legions try to push curtailments of the Second Amendment, the more pushback they will encounter. Voters sense rightly that ultimately Obama is angry not so much at the “clingers” and their guns, but at the Second Amendment itself.

And yet they sense that Obama himself — and most celebrities — quite rightly count on the guns of their security guards to protect them from evil.

James Madison did not write that amendment just as a protection for hunters or to ensure home defense, but rather as a warning to an all-powerful federal government not to abuse its mandate, given that the citizenry would be armed and enjoy some parity in weaponry with federal authorities. That is why a militia is expressly mentioned, and why the Third Amendment follows, emphasizing further checks on the ability of the federal government to quarter troops in private homes (made more difficult when, thanks to the Second Amendment, they are armed).

For Obama to win over public opinion following Newtown, he would have to make arguments that strict gun control leads to decreased shootings in places like Chicago, or that a prior assault weapon ban stopped Columbine, or that Connecticut’s strict gun control mitigated the effects of Newtown. The president would also have to explain, if he were to go ahead with executive orders curbing gun access, why not equally so with knives — which are used in more killings than assault weapons — or ammonium nitrate fertilizer that can lead to something like Oklahoma City. And he must demonstrate that playing a sick video game for hours in a basement, or being part of a pathological culture that produces schlock like Natural Born Killers, or expanding the First Amendment to such lengths that the violently insane cannot be forcibly hospitalized are minor considerations in comparison to the availability of semi-automatic weapons.

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Conspiracy Operation Betrayus: From Benghazi to Brennan

corbettreport

The shockwaves of the Petraeus affair are still being felt in Washington. Predictably, the media focus is on the prurient nation of the scandal, but this is no ordinary sex scandal. Join us tonight on the program as we look at some of the implications of the affair from "access" journalism to blackmail to Benghazi and CIA secret prisons and the question of who will step in to fill his shoes.

Boehner: 'Mr. President, Why Have You Given Up On the Country and Decided to Campaign Full-Time?'

 

AP

By Tina Korbe, Hot Air

John Boehner, calling it like it is. At the same time that the president took to the podium to chastise members of Congress for purportedly putting politics before country, the House Speaker expressed his own frustration with the president’s unwillingness to actually negotiate:

    “Mr. President, why have you given up on the country and decided to campaign full-time?” Boehner asked at the Washington Ideas Forum, at the same time that the president was holding his own press conference at the White House. …

    Working with the president has at times been frustrating, especially in efforts to come up with a “big deal” in budget and deficit negotiations, Boehner said.

    “I can tell you I put every ounce of effort that I can to come up with some agreement,” he said. “I could never get the president to the point where he would say yes to real changes in entitlement programs.… It takes two to tango, and the president would never say yes.”

Read more: http://nation.foxnews.com/john-boehner/2011/10/06/boehner-mr-president-why-have-you-given-country-and-decided-campaign-full-time?cmpid=NL_FiredUpFoxNation_20111007#ixzz1a7e4URpn

U.S. Government Used Taxpayer Funds To Buy, Sell Weapons During 'Fast And Furious'

THE FREEDOM POST 

U.S. Government Used Taxpayer Funds To Buy, Sell Weapons During 'Fast And Furious,' Documents Show | Fox News: "Not only did U.S. officials approve, allow and assist in the sale of more than 2,000 guns to the Sinaloa cartel -- the federal government used taxpayer money to buy semi-automatic weapons, sold them to criminals and then watched as the guns disappeared.

This disclosure, revealed in documents obtained by Fox News, could undermine the Department of Justice's previous defense that Operation Fast and Furious was a "botched" operation where agents simply "lost track" of weapons as they were transferred from one illegal buyer to another. Instead, it heightens the culpability of the federal government as Mexico, according to sources, has opened two criminal investigations into the operation that flooded their country with illegal weapons. "

Ajuste cubano, he ahi al enemigo/ Andrés Pascual

Secundario quiere decir no de importancia relevante, asunto de segunda mano que puede esperar y, el que se ponga bravo, que se vaya…

      Posiblemente el “affaire” Cuba sea un “asunto secundario” para la política internacional americana y nadie debe ponerse bravo, porque este país tiene que ver hasta con un jarro que se perdió ayer en una casa de un barrio de Estocolmo: sin robárselo, están demandándolos para que paguen por la vasija. Así está organizado el mundo de hoy, Estados Unidos con todos los deberes del mundo y sin derecho ni a protestar ante su principal enemigo en bloque, la ONU.

     Sin embargo, el enfoque cubano de acuerdo a cómo se maneja por cada uno de los dos partidos de alto rango, nos ha permitido identificar al enemigo político dentro de la estructura de gobierno americana: los republicanos no han tumbado a la tiranía; pero los demócratas van más lejos y nos traicionan por su rara amistad con quienes los odian, dicen, a muerte.

     Kennedy abandonó a la 2506 y Johnson ideó la Ley de Ajuste Cubano, verdad que nadie podía imaginarse en 1966 cuál era el objetivo del Caballo de Troya castro-demócrata a 28 años de distancia (Guantánamo 1994), nadie menos los enemigos de la libertad de Cuba, propios y extraños, que estaban advertidos; pero, ¿Qué puede esperarse si hasta los “buenos” han vuelto la vista hacia otros horizontes, posiblemente menos peligrosos para la seguridad nacional americana?

     Me contaron en la prisión que, en 1978, un barco americano llegó a La Habana con Kris Kristofferson, Rita Coolidge, Billy Joel, la Orquesta Fania All Stars y otros músicos, para una sola actuación en el Blanquita que tuvo como asistentes invitados solo a dirigentes y a sus hijos.

     Estaba Jimmy Carter entregándole Nicaragua a Castro y a la Unión Soviética; preparándole la Revolución Islámica al Shá y firmando el concesivo SALT-II con Brezhnev.

     Etiopía y Angola campeaban por su respeto y Pol Pot y Ieng Sari se daban banquete…

     En ese marco de entrega de la influencia geopolítica inició el Manisero de Georgia los intercambios culturales con la tiranía: el gesto del barco con Billy Joel y familia fue respondido con el de mejor voluntad por la actuación de la Aragón, los Papines, el Folklórico Nacional, Elena Burke… ¿Dónde?, en Nueva York, cuartel general de los amplios intereses liberales y filo-comunistas como también Chicago, Los Angeles, o Baltimore. El Lincoln Center se puso a los pies del “cha-onda” de Alejandro Tomás Valdés, Tomasito, gusano a matarse, hijo de la Casa de Beneficencia y mi amigo q.e.p.d

       Con actuar en Miami no podían soñar, aquí no podían provocar porque la plaza, con excepciones como Aruca, Bernardo Benes, Max Lesnick, el cura Espinosa y un par de gatos más, le pertenecía a Cuba por medio del exilio, tan militante y activo como hoy, pero menos débil en el orden mediático y económico, además de mayoría abrumadora.

       El que quiera hacerle creer que el Ajuste Cubano no ha actuado como el Caballo de Troya contra el exilio, preparado así desde que se elucubró posiblemente y no soy radical en esto, pregúntele por qué ayer, cuando eran autorizados por la presidencia demócrata a actuar en este país, los artistas de Castro no venían a Miami, mientras que hoy tienen como parada principal esta ciudad.

       El crecimiento descontrolado del entrante económico del castrismo desde 1994, casi epidémico, ha sido lo que posibilita no solo el intercambio, sino que, por supuesto, escojan a Miami como objeto de la provocación, porque a ningún elemento de la tiranía le importa la música de Pablo Milanés ni de la Orquesta Aragón, mucho menos le ríen los pujos a un elementajo que dicen que es comediante, que se llama Robertico y que el Dade Couny Auditorio va a presentarlo con mas bombo y platillos que a Alvarez Guedes, pero provocar aquí, dividir aquí, destruir esto sí es de su completa incumbencia…y lo están haciendo y ¿Quién sabe lo que queda por ver de esta película? Todo está en que reelijan a Obama y ya verán.

Cool Obama Starting to Sweat

 

AP

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor told Fox News that President Obama became agitated and abruptly walked out of today’s debt talks at the White House – allegations that Democratic sources strongly deny.
“He (the president) became very agitated,” Cantor told Fox News. “He said ‘Ronald Reagan wouldn’t sit here. You either have to compromise on the dollar figure or the grand bargain’…He said ‘Don’t call my bluff. I’m going to the American people on this.’”
Cantor said Obama shoved back and said, ‘We’ll see you tomorrow’ – noting the meeting “ended with (the) President abruptly walking out of the meeting.”
However, a senior Democratic aide told Fox News that Cantor’s version of the meeting is not accurate.
“Congressman Cantor is the last guy who should complain about people abruptly walking out of meetings,” the unidentified aide told Fox.
Another House Democratic source, familiar with the meeting, called this Cantor’s “Gingrich back-of-the-plane” moment.
“Obama was concluding the meeting, giving the closing remarks and talking about meeting tomorrow,” the source told Fox. “Cantor interrupted him and raised for the third time doing a short-term (so after it had already been addressed twice), and Obama shut him down. Cantor was playing the role he’s played throughout this whole thing – being not productive.”
Yet another, congressional aide said that President Obama “dressed down” Cantor.
“The President spoke for several minutes uninterrupted about how he would not be deterred in doing what is best for the country,” the aide said. “The meeting ended with Cantor being dressed down while sitting in silence.”
Cantor told Fox News today’s meeting “was the most tense meeting of the week.”
President Obama was quoted as saying, "This may bring down my presidency, but I will not yield on this."

Read more: http://nation.foxnews.com/debt-meetings/2011/07/13/agitated-obama-storms-out-debt-meeting?cmpid=NL_FiredUpFoxNation_20110714#ixzz1S6fmmRZ0

Government Tests Limits of American’s Tolerance in Emerging Police State

John W. Whitehead|NJToday
The transition to a police state will not come about with a dramatic coup d’etat, with battering rams and marauding militia. As we have experienced first-hand in recent years, it will creep in softly, one violation at a time, until suddenly you find yourself being subjected to random patdowns and security sweeps during your morning commute to work or quick trip to the shopping mall.
Perhaps you have yet to experience the particular thrill, and I use that word loosely, of being manhandled by government agents, having your personal possessions pawed through, and your activities and associations scrutinized. If so, not to worry. It’s only a matter of time before more and more Americans will experience such a military task force knocking at their door. Only, chances are that it won’t be a knock, and they might not even be at home when government agents decide to “investigate” them. Indeed, as increasing numbers of Americans are discovering, these so-called “soft target” security inspections are taking place whenever and wherever the government deems appropriate, at random times and places, and without needing the justification of a particular threat. Worse, not only is this happening with the blessing of the Obama administration but at its urging.
What I’m describing–something that was once limited to authoritarian regimes–is only possible thanks to an unofficial rewriting of the Fourth Amendment by the courts that essentially does away with any distinctions over what is “reasonable” when it comes to searches and seizures by government agents. The rationale, of course, is that anything is “reasonable” in the war on terrorism. And by constantly pushing the envelope and testing the limits of what Americans will tolerate, the government is thus able to ratchet up the level of intrusiveness that Americans consider reasonable.
The latest test of our tolerance comes from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the same agency that continues to make headlines with its intrusive airport searches of travelers. Thanks to TSA Chief John Pistole’s determination to “take the TSA to the next level,” there will soon be no place safe from the TSA’s groping searches. Only this time, the “ritualized humiliation” is being meted out by the Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR) task forces, comprised of federal air marshals, surface transportation security inspectors, transportation security officers, behavior detection officers and explosive detection canine teams.
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What Were The Eleven Words the Government Intended to Censor from the Pentagon Papers

The National Security Archive

www.nsarchive.orgby Nate Jones

Available to the public since 1971

The Pentagon Papers have been available to the public for 40 years.  Despite this, the federal government recently spent substantial human and monetary capital reviewing and re-reviewing every page, line, and word, of the Pentagon Papers, which Daniel Ellsberg originally leaked in 1971.
Earlier this summer, the National Archives announced that it had finally finished its review of the Papers, and that only eleven words needed to remain redacted.  At a Public Interest Declassification Board Meeting, the Archivist of the United States, David Ferriero, even joked that historians could “play Mad Libs” with the missing eleven words.  (This reference has since been scrubbed from Nara’s blog, but not from Steve Aftergood’s “Secrecy News.”)
In response, I joked at the meeting that I would simply check the already available Gravel edition of the papers and –not wanting to get in trouble– fill in the Mad Lib with the 90-year-old invisible ink recipe the CIA had just declassified.  My “secrecy humor” got just a tepid response from the crowd.
And I was only partially correct.  The eleven words were actually published in the House Armed Services edition of the papers –which had been reviewed and redacted by the DOD in 1972– not the Gravel edition.  (See here for an analysis of the different releases of the Papers.)  Just before the Paper’s “official” publication, an alert archivist at the Johnson Presidential Library discovered that the eleven-word “needle” in the “haystack” of the Pentagon Papers had actually already been declassified.  John Prados of the National Security Archive, another archivist wrote in an email, would quickly find the eleven words and “parade this discovery like a politician on the 4th of July.”  It looks like that expansive (and expensive) declassification review was unnecessary, after all.

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Obama Top adviser: "Free market-Non sense"

• by Naked Emperor News 

Back in 2009, the Glenn Beck program was the first major media outlet to air a clip of Ron Bloom, the Obama Administrations Car Czar, praising the violent tactics of Mao Zedong . Bloom is a senior official in the Obama Administration. No lightweight, his current duties include serving as Senior Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury, director of the President’s Task Force on the Automotive Industry and also the Administration’s Senior Counselor for Manufacturing Policy. Mr. Bloom has a long past as a labor negotiator and union lawyer working for the United Steelworkers union since the mid nineties. Early in his career he also worked for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

So when the video surfaced of this top White House official praising the Chinese communist, Beck used the clip to help build the growing narrative of Obama officials admiration of aggressive and oppressive governments. Of course it can often seem that these reveling details are lost in the fast moving news cycles and giant machinery of the bureaucratic system. Until recently when Congressman Connie Mack (R-FL 14) brought a little poetic justice to our political process during a late June hearing for Stimulus Oversight and Government Spending by asking Mr. Bloom a tough series of questions about the remarks he made in the video. Mack played the clips for Bloom as he awkwardly tries to explain them away.

Gov’t Muslim ‘Outreach’ Jeopardized Active Terror Investigations

From  Stopping the spread of Sharia in America

UPDATE: On the heels of last week’s article by Patrick Poole, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) has sent a letter to Eric Holder this morning demanding answers as to why the Department of Justice decided not to prosecute CAIR, its co-founder Omar Ahmad, and others regarding the Holy Land Foundation case.
The nearly six-hour interview I conducted earlier this year with a top Department of Justice official on the condition of anonymity brought forth a number of revelations about serious problems within the U.S. government’s homeland security and law enforcement community.
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National Archives (NARA) Releases #Pentagon Papers!

Edited By John Prados

Washington, DC, June 13, 2011 - The complete version of the Pentagon Papers released today by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) includes a substantial amount of information not previously published. Approximately 34% of the report is available for the first time, according to NARA.

The public release today of the full Pentagon Papers—40 years after their leaked publication in the media—is a welcome event on many levels: including closing a bizarre chapter in the annals of U.S. government secrecy practices while opening another window into one of the pivotal episodes of modern world history, the Vietnam War.  The Pentagon Papers are a milestone document in American political history both for their contents and for the legal and political battles that raged over the principles involved in their revelation and the tactics to which the Nixon administration resorted in its efforts to neutralize the leak. In addition, in and of themselves, the contents of the Pentagon Papers have informed histories of the American war in Vietnam for two generations and are likely to return to the fore today with the opening of material previously suppressed in the study

To mark today's public release, the National Security Archive here posts important background materials that users of the newly declassified portions of the Pentagon Papers—formally known as United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967—will find helpful.

Full story...

El principal asesor económico de Obama deja la Casa Blanca

Cuando la economía estadounidense vuelve a tambalearse después que el paro haya vuelto a aumentar y en mayo se hayan creado tan solo 54.000 puestos de trabajo, Austan Goolsbee, el asesor económico de mayor rango del presidente de Estados Unidos, Barack Obama, y de los últimos economistas que quedaba en su círculo más cercano, ha anunciado que dejara la Casa Blanca antes de septiembre para retomar su antiguo trabajo en la Universidad de Chicago. Su marcha deja deja como último miembro del equipo económico original de Obama al secretario del Tesoro Timothy Geithner.

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Obama's Nominee For Commerce Secretary Is An "Eco-Terrorist"

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/juan-williams-eric-bolling-obama-gas-prices-terrorism-video--011-6#ixzz1OGdrj8bu

15 Companies That Will Get Crushed When The Government Stops Spending

You can probably guess who got $36 billion in contracts last year.  Read »

The Obama Administration’s ‘Sidam Touch’

By Tom Blumer

According to the Urban Dictionary, a person with “the Sidam Touch” has an ability that is “[t]he opposite of The Midas Touch, which turns everything to gold.” A person with the Sidam Touch “breaks and/or ruins everything.”

To say that President Barack Obama and his administration, especially what’s left of his economic team, have the Sidam Touch is the understatement of the 21st century.

In early February 2009, in the run-up to the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), known to most as “the stimulus,” the newly sworn-in Obama flexed his Sidam Touch muscles, repeatedly telling the nation: “Doing nothing is not an option.” Fittingly, Obama flew Ohio’s Sherrod Brown in on a government plane from the funeral of Brown’s mother so that the Buckeye State senator could cast the deciding vote.

So how has it worked out? In December 2010, James Cogan and John Taylor at the Hoover Institution overestimated the impact of the stimulus plan by saying that it accomplished “zero.” On May 12, Professors Timothy Conley and Bill Dupor released more precise results demonstrating that ARRA really “created/saved 450 thousand government-sector jobs and destroyed/forestalled one million private sector jobs.” For the math-challenged, that’s a net loss of 550,000 jobs. A bit over two years later, it is abundantly clear that doing nothing would have been vastly preferable.

It may be lip service, but the president and his advisers continually tell us that private sector growth is important. On May 10, White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee said: “You want the private sector to be the source of growth because that’s where the sustainable job creation is.” That’s interesting, because, as seen below, after almost three years, largely thanks to the Sidam Touch employment results just noted, the private sector’s inflation-adjusted size is barely back to where it was before the recession as normal people define it began, while the federal component of gross domestic product (GDP) has grown by 12%:

FULL STORY...

Audrey Tomason: Situation Room Mystery Woman

By Daniel Stone, The Daily Beast/Newsweek

The photo has been seen on front pages around the world: President Obama in the White House Situation Room watching the Osama bin Laden raid with the most recognizable faces in American government and counterterrorism.

Except one.

Who's the woman peeking her head from the back? A White House caption for the photo identifies her as Audrey Tomason with title "Director for Counterterrorism." But in a room full of oft-cited and quoted people, there's fleetingly little published information about who she is or what she does for the administration.

RELATED: Osama bin Laden's family tree includes ... a pop star?

The presence of Tomason is notable for a few reasons. Next to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, she's the only other woman pictured in the testosterone-filled room. And she appears to be the only person under 40. But what matters most is that she is standing just a few feet from the president, who is otherwise surrounded by his closest advisors, as they watch one of the country's highest-stakes operations in decades as it occurs in real time.

When the Daily Beast asked the White House press office about Tomason, an official said she worked with the National Security Council, a White House agency closely involved with the intelligence that led to bin Laden. The official intimated that the White House generally doesn't discuss personnel at any of the government's covert or intelligence agencies. Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the NSC, confirmed she worked with the agency. When asked why she had never been identified or mentioned before, Vietor responded "Well, we've never killed bin Laden before."

RELATED: The best Osama/Obama memes around the Web

There are trace details floating around the internet about Tomason; trying to figure out who she is has become a sort of web parlor game She is said to have gone to Tufts University and earned her masters at Harvard's Kennedy School. (Harvard and Tufts did not immediately respond to inquiries but we'll update the story as soon as we hear back.) One corner of the Internet suggests she is 34, but the number couldn't be confirmed. She also didn't appear to be active on any major social networks. When the Beast tried to reach her Tuesday afternoon, no one answered the phone.

The image shows a white-knuckle moment: a resolute and stone-faced President Obama and a level of organization and discipline among his team. But could it have outed a sensitive national security employee? "You can make a reasonable deduction that she's a member of the intelligence community," says Michael Barrett, a national security expert and principal at strategy firm Diligent Innovations. "Is that a story [the White House] wants to put out there in public? The fact that we can see her face could potentially jeopardize her career."

Daniel Stone is Newsweek's White House correspondent. He also covers national energy and environmental policy.

#EEUU - Leon Panetta al Pentágono, David Petraeus a la CIA

REUTERS 

David Petraeus (a la izquierda) y Leo Panetta

El actual director de la CIA, Leon Panetta, sucederá a Robert Gates al frente del Pentágono, mientras que el general David Petraeus, comandante de las fuerzas estadounidenses y de la OTAN en Afganistán, pasará a ocupar la dirección de la Agencia Central de Inteligencia.

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Deal Reached to Avoid US Government Shutdown

From Associated Press:

Civil War in US as a consecuence of Goverment Shutdown?

ALERT: US Government shutdown appears imminent