Obama directed several federal agencies to identify “high-impact, job-creating infrastructure projects” that can be expedited now, without congressional approval.
Doesn’t this go beyond the usual “What if a Bush had said that?”
It may sound like a reactionary take, but, given the last two years of creepy hijinks from this Administration, one is left to wonder where this is all going.
Furthermore, just what is the Administration going to do that won’t cost more money, when there hasn’t been any for some time? Oh, and this is the last month of the fiscal year. What strange, graft-laden mockeries will emerge?
This is the time to go after the nanny state with a cleaver, not expand it. I hope John Boehner tells the good President to talk to the hand, and that the American people back Boehner to the hilt. Enough of this noise.
During the past few months Ron Paul’s fans/supporters have gone out of their way to promote his candidacy at every corner of the web. You’ll find them in the comments of every post about an opponent and they’re very active in message boards and discussion forums.
One of the biggest complaints made by these folks is that some of the more “mainstream” tea party organizations do not give Ron Paul a platform to speak from. They argue Paul is being actively silenced in some parts of the movement and they strongly advocate more opportunity for Paul to speak out through these organizations.
Which brings up a very puzzling situation. You see, the Tea Party Express is rolling through 29 cities right now, some of them being in early/battleground states. Iowa, New Hampshire, Virginia, South Carolina and Florida for example. I’m told that Ron Paul has repeatedly been invited to speak at ANY rally on the tour, yet has not once confirmed he wishes to do so. . . .
Read the whole thing. Unlike some other conservative bloggers, I try not to alienate the Paulistas because (a) I’ve got a pretty serious libertarian streak myself, (b) some of my good friends support Paul, and (c) I’m a gutless weasel who doesn’t need a bunch of crazies attacking me in the comments.
It’s bad enough having to deal with left-wing trolls like Anamika, why should I go out of my way to antagonize libertarians?
During the mid-term election campaign last fall, nearly every GOP congressional candidate was slammed by attack ads accusing them of favoring “tax cuts for companies that ship jobs overseas.” That accusation was made routinely (and misleadingly) against Republicans who had signed a no-new-taxes pledge from Americans for Tax Reform:
But it wasn’t just the DCCC that made that accusation, and it wasn’t just in TV attack ads. It was also President Obama, in his weekly address on Oct. 16, three weeks before Election Day:
“Republicans in Washington have consistently fought to keep these corporate loopholes open. Over the last four years alone, Republicans in the House voted 11 times to continue rewarding corporations that create jobs and profits overseas — a policy that costs taxpayers billions of dollars every year.”
Let’s just pause for a moment to consider the perversity of that accusation: Lower taxes (described as “corporate loopholes”) are a policy that “costs taxpayers billions of dollars every year,” according to the Keynesian-in-Chief. But while accusing the GOP of imposing such costs on taxpayers, Obama described himself as an advocate of lower taxes in the very same speech:
The president said in the coming months he intends to fight for tax breaks for small businesses and manufacturers. “We should reward the people who are helping us lead in the industries of the future, like clean energy,” Obama said. “That’s how we’ll ensure that American innovation and ingenuity are what drive the next century.”
Ohhhh. Now we understand: When Republicans are against raising taxes on corporations, that’s bad. But it’s OK for Obama to advocate special tax breaks for “the industries of the future, like clean energy.”
President Obama faces political catastrophe in the form of Solyndra — a San Francisco Bay area solar company that he touted as a gleaming example of green technology. It has announced it will declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy. More than 1,100 people will lose their jobs.
During a visit to the Fremont facility in spring of 2010, the President said the factory “is just a testament to American ingenuity and dynamism and the fact that we continue to have the best universities in the world, the best technology in the world, and most importantly the best workers in the world.“ . . .
The President was celebrating $535 million in federal promises from the Department of Energy to the solar startup.
The White House caused a ruckus Wednesday by attempting to schedule President Obama for a speech to a joint session of Congress on Sept. 7 — which just happened to be the date, scheduled months ago, of a GOP presidential debate at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California.
Say hello to “separation of powers”: Nobody at the White House had bothered to clear the Sept. 7 date with the Speaker of the House, who suggested moving the date to Sept. 8 and — after some partisan grumbling — the administration was forced to back down:
“Today, the President asked to address the Congress about the need for urgent action on the economic situation facing the American people as soon as Congress returned from recess. Both Houses will be back in session after their August recess on Wednesday, September 7th, so that was the date that was requested. We consulted with the Speaker about that date before the letter was released, but he determined Thursday would work better. The President is focused on the urgent need to create jobs and grow our economy, so he welcomes the opportunity to address a Joint Session of Congress on Thursday, September 8th and challenge our nation’s leaders to start focusing 100% of their attention on doing whatever they can to help the American people.”
Coming soon to a left-wing blog near you: “He caved again.”
It’s as if the administration, unwilling to fight for anything important — or too politically weak to win any important fight — with the Republicans, decided to fight for something trivial. And the fact that they lost even this juvenile pissing match will only further erode the presidential image.
Which means it’s time for the liberal media to produce another story about how dumb Republicans are.
Tonight, in an interview on KMJ’s “The Chris Daniel Show,” Gibson CEO Henry Juszkiewicz confirmed that the US government wanted Gibson guitars to use foreign labor over American labor:
CHRIS DANIEL: Mr. Juszkiewicz, did an agent of the US government suggest to you that your problems would go away if you used Madagascar labor instead of American labor?
HENRY JUSZKIEWICZ: They actually wrote that in a [inaudible].
CHRIS DANIEL: Excuse me?
HENRY JUSKIEWICZ: They actually wrote that in a pleading.
CHRIS DANIEL: That your problems would go away if you used Madagascar labor instead of our labor?
HENRY JUSKIEWICZ: Yes
For decades, campaign buses were populated by hotshots, some of whom covered politics for decades, from Walter Mears to David S. Broder to Jules Witcover. It was a glamorous club, captured and skewered in Timothy Crouse’s best-selling “The Boys on the Bus,” about the 1972 campaign.
Now, more and more, because of budget cutbacks, those once coveted jobs are being filled by brand new journalists at a fraction of the salary. It is not so glamorous anymore.
You can read the whole thing. The point of the article is that economic pressures have forced the industry to resort to this.
Having spent the first dozen years of my career toiling at small-town papers you never heard of, what is shocking to me is that raw kids like this aren’t working at little weeklies out in the sticks. But the downsizing of the industry has wiped out many, many thousands of what used to be entry-level journalism jobs, and all the smart kids go to law school.
It takes a special kind of stupid to pursue a career in journalism nowadays. But maybe that’s always been true.
AOL is up for sale according to many insiders in the know. Sources in the industry claim that AOL has met privately with the mega-law firm Watchell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz and investment bank Allen & Company about putting the former ISP up for sale to the highest bidder.
While AOL is generating significant revenue of at least $1 Billion for the first 6 months of 2011, they are still losing a great deal of money and the purchase of HuffPost hasn’t helped their woes.
The HuffPost purchase, which was valued at $315M was widely criticized by both the press and pundits alike as a poor purchase decision, or at least one that didn’t make sense at those numbers. Since then, the merger of the company into AOL has been reported to have numerous management problems.
Despite HuffPost continuing to grow since its purchase, the advertising sales revenue has not been able to sell inventory at the level needed to support the organization. Part of the problem reportedly is that the sales team, lead by search advertising veterans has been unable to convince advertisers that they need to pay a premium cost to be on HuffPost and other AOL properties. . . . AOL seems to now be desperate to find either a buyer, or at least a long term solution to solve their issues. It is clear that their management, seen by many as top heavy salary wise, is not suited to run a content company that needs to focus on cost cutting.
Look: Online advertising is a hard dollar. Advertisers either pay for page-views or pay for click-throughs, and they’ve got software to measure the actual performance of each ad buy. The idea that HuffPo readers are somehow special, so that advertisers should pay a “premium” to have access to those readers . . . well, why?
There is no plausible answer, nor is there any plausible answer for why a value-oriented investor would have paid anything like the $315 million AOL paid for HuffPo. That deal never made sense.
