First they came for the bloggers…
The Daily Caller notes Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin was a guest on “Fox News Sunday,” where he opined, unsurprisingly, that it’s too early to appoint a special counsel to look into the Justice Department’s spying on journalists.
In a move that is way beyond asking the fox to guard the hen house, President Obama has ordered Attorney General Eric Holder to head up an investigation of claims that his Justice Department spied on a Fox News reporter.
The move would have failed the smell test even if Holder had had no involvement in the DOJ’s charge that Fox News Channel’s chief Washington correspondent James Rosen was a “possible co-conspirator” in a leak case.
Yes, you! You’re to blame…
During Barack Obama’s hour-long televised speech on terrorism, he placed the crosshairs of blame squarely on one particular implied “rouge nation”: the United States of America. Toward the end of his comments, delivered at the National Defense University, he said:
So we bring law of war detention to an end, and we are committed to prosecuting terrorists whenever we can.
In what has to be the final triumph in his administration’s whitewashing of its mishandling of the Benghazi scandal, President Obama has announced plans to promote the person who cleansed the talking points of their references to terrorism
That person is Victoria Nuland. At the time, she was a State Department spokeswoman. Now she has been nominated to become an assistant secretary of state.
There is nothing quite so pathetic as a performer who doesn’t know when the curtain is falling. He might be a singer who was once a rising star but is now reduced to taking the stage in smaller clubs, trying to recapture the audience spark by crooning a few old favorites.
That is a reasonable assessment of where Barack Obama is today as opposed to the halcyon days of 2009.
Progressive web sites such as Daily Kos are arguing that it would have been just fine for the IRS to investigate all groups critical of the government, as opposed to just conservative groups critical of President Obama in particular. Thus, if the IRS also investigated non-conservative critics of President Obama, or critics of other politicians, it did nothing wrong, since it was supposedly not engaged in viewpoint discrimination against conservatives. This is an erroneous reading of the First Amendment, as Supreme Court rulings make clear.
It’s hard to get rid of a career bureaucrat, even at the supervisory level. “After you’ve been here for a year, it’s easier to kill you than fire you.” That’s what my co-workers at the Bureau of Labor Statistics would tell me on a sunny day, after we’d used up our lunch hour, but didn’t want to go back to work yet.
Do you remember the controversial John McCain presidential campaign television spot targeted against then-Senator Barack Obama in the middle of the heated 2008 election?
A video of the spot appears after the break. Here’s the script:
Announcer: He’s the biggest celebrity in the world.
But, is he ready to lead?
Another federal appeals court has ruled that President Obama’s so-called “recess appointments” to the National Labor Relations Board were unconstitutional because the Senate was not in recess at the time: “We hold that the Recess of the Senate in the Recess Appointments Clause refers to only intersession breaks.” So ruled the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, in its 2-to-1 ruling in NLRB v. New Vista Nursing and Rehabilitation.
“We are not at war with Islam,” the president has said. Make that “the presidents (plural) have said.” George W. Bush was as clear and unequivocating as Barack Obama in distinguishing between terrorism and the religion of Islam.
But at least Bush understood that his first obligation was to do whatever it took to keep Americans safe from further 911s.