There’s something inherently sleazy and suspicious about an WH administration mouthpiece that unequivocally states that Toyota owners should simply “stop driving” their cars until they’ve taken them to a dealership. In the wake of such an unprecedented fear mongering campaign, the mud slinging began, and within days, Transportation Sec’y Ray LaHood, was softening his harsh blow.

But “just words” matter, and one of the nation’s most popular vehicle manufacturers saw their shares fall as much as 8% on the heels of LaHood’s explosive remarks. Obama’s pet, Goldman Sachs, downgraded Toyota from a “buy” to “neutral”. If you use AutoBlog’s figures, it’s 16.7 % over the past five days.

But the Chicago thuggery style of this WH is abundantly clear when LaHood also revealed that the reason Toyota halted manufacturing and commenced the massive recall was at the insistence of the Obama administration.

Much seems to be overblown considering that the gas pedal sticking has occurred in fewer than 300 vehicles. Or, per an IBD op-ed, “Out of 1.8 million cars manufactured each year in the U.S., Toyota has 100 complaints, a handful of injuries, and in two cases deaths are alleged.”

In fact, the sudden acceleration events in both Toyota and Lexus models in the past decade resulted in 815 crashes since 1999… eleven years, averaged out at 74 annual events. Two resulted in fatalities. Of the 2000 complaints received in the same time, only five percent – or 100 of them – were attributed to gas pedals potentially sticking.

What’s more, NHTSA has conducted eight investigations into Toyota accelerator problems in the last seven years. None have been found to be a faulty sticking pedal as the cause.

“The way the sudden-acceleration problems are occurring in reported incidents doesn’t comport with how this sticky pedal is described,” said Sean Kane, president of Safety Research & Strategies, a Rehoboth, Mass., auto safety consulting firm. “We know this recall is a red herring.”

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According to CBS’s Mark Knoller, Obama’s first year included 411 speeches, comments and remarks, (52 devoted to health care), 42 news conferences, 158 interviews, and 23 town halls. Considering there was a total of 634 appearances within a year consisting of 365 days, the excessive over exposure of the current POTUS becomes obvious… and tiresome.

As we approach that time old, annual tradition of a Presidential State of the Union address, we have to wonder… just what’s left to say? More importantly, are we going to hear anything different? Or just the same Obama campaign agenda, repackaged for more oomph?

The media’s already at work, fantasizing the appearance of a new and improved Obama Wednesday night. According to AP’s Ben Feller, Obama’s message is to be… “yes, I get it”.

In a time of deep economic insecurity, Obama will use this stage on Wednesday to offer hope after a grueling, grinding first year of his presidency, aides say. For the many who think the United States is still on the wrong track, Obama will attempt to present a clearer sense of how everything he’s pursuing fits together to help.

And for jittery Democrats facing re-election this fall, Obama will seek to give them an agenda they can sell to voters.

~~~

Obama will propose ways to help the middle class. But any new ideas probably will play a supporting role to the plainspoken narrative he wants to tell, that his agenda works for people despite their growing doubts.

“Obviously you want to write a speech in a way that is interesting enough that people want to listen, and that leaves them feeling a sense of momentum and progress,” senior Obama adviser David Axelrod told The Associated Press. “But these are serious times. I don’t think this is a time for rhetorical flights of fancy.”

Despite Axelrod’s attempts to diss any “rhetorical flights of fancy” and hopes to leave the nation breathless with awe and new found energy, the substance of an unchanging, government heavy agenda thrust – by all accounts – remains the soup de jour. The speech will apparently be nothing more than the same ol’, same ol’, repackaged to rally the base.

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Jake Tapper’s on top of the news again, reporting on the new start up of the old campaign staff. Yes, folks, in the wake of the much misinterpreted and desperately spun MA special election loss, David Plouffe… Obama campaign manger and mastermind of the Greek columns staging… is back on the payroll. If you thought Obama or the DNC accurately “heard” the message of the MA voters, you thought wrong.

Oh yes, Obama got in front of the cameras to announce a hold on the proceedings until Scott Brown gets seated. He said all the words to give the impression that he suddenly became astute to the nation’s wishes… but then he sent his henchman, Rahm’bo, behind the scenes to solicit Pelosi on the feasibility of passing the Senate bill as written. Whoops… no go there.

As a master of media manipulation, Obama refocused the headlines… this time on a front line assault on the banks. But I have no doubts the back rooms were busy with a new tact on the old agenda…. how to repackage the box of manure called healthcare for public consumption.

Enter the old campaign face – David Plouffe – specifically setting up camp with the DNC for new and improved spin.

“Plouffe is one of the smartest guys in the business, he has the full trust of the President and his team, and we appreciate any and all help he can give us,” White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer said. “This is a very challenging political environment and you want all the best players on the field.”

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It was just yesterday that I posted about the equally meteoric rise and fall of BHO. But apparently driving Obama’s failures home… not merely confined to the MA special election loss… was important enough for Mort Zuckerman – former Obama supporter – to again fire another political shell over Obama’s bow. After recapping domestic and foreign failure after failure on record, Zuckerman’s op-ed in US News and World Report, “The Incredible Deflation of Barack Obama” comes to a single conclusion:

The consequence is that there isn’t a single critical problem on which the president has a positive public rating. Only a minority of Americans now believe the president will make the right decisions for the country. Nor can he any longer take refuge in the rejoinder that “we inherited a terrible situation.” Or blame it on fat-cat bankers and insurance companies. Blaming others, including Bush, for the country’s predicament is less and less persuasive. “At some point you own your presidency,” wrote Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal. “At some point the American people tell you it’s yours.”

Another stellar point made by Zuckerman is Obama’s penchant for the cameras, and perpetual campaign mode of governance.

Perhaps the inevitable outcome was disappointment—and on this Obama has not disappointed. Alas, he has accelerated the deflation of hope with his extraordinary volume of public appearances. In his first six months, he gave three times as many interviews as George W. Bush, four times as many prime-time news conferences as Bill Clinton, and more interviews than both combined: 93 for Obama and 61 for his two immediate predecessors. He appeared on five Sunday talk shows on the same morning, followed the next day by David Letterman, the first-ever presidential appearance on a nighttime comedy show. In another week, he squeezed in addresses to the U.S. Climate Change Summit, the U.N. General Assembly, the U.N. Security Council, and a variety of press conferences.

His promiscuity on TV has made him seem as if he is still a candidate instead of president and commander in chief. He—and his advisers—have failed to appreciate that national TV speeches are best reserved for those moments when the country faces a major crisis or a war. Now he faces the iron law of diminishing novelty.

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The fall of Barack Hussein Obama is proving to be no less meteoric than his rise to public adoration. In fact, the fall may be even more dramatic than the well staged rise via staging, crowds and media hype of the historic nature of America’s first black POTUS.

The steady decline in policy support may have been noted in sundry polls, but it is in the last 48 hours that fallout from the MA special election of Scott Brown as the junior Senator may have taken it’s toll on the Obama “magic”. Instead, as FA compadre, Scott Malenski, notes, the liberal/progressive “friendlies” are turning on Obama in droves.

Domestically we have a major supporter and powerhouse, Paul Krugman, publicly humiliating Obama using the O’supporters’ catch phrase on his NYT’s blog yesterday… “He wasn’t the one we’ve been waiting for.”

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There’s only so much an Alinsky machine can do. Obama’s “Organizing for America” has evidently worn out it’s less than personal welcome in MA. Despite “volume” activism, timing and message missed the mark by a wide margin.

Coakley’s campaign was aided by Obama-offshoot Organizing for America and voter-turnout wizard Lynda Tocci, who orchestrated Hillary Clinton’s New Hampshire primary upset. But many Democrats privately complained that the organization did not begin to focus seriously on the ground game until late last week.

Meanwhile, field workers furiously recruited party operatives in Worcester, Quincy and Boston, where Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s vaunted organization was called to action at the last minute, several insiders complained.

“They didn’t reach out ’til late,” said one top Democratic operative. “They hadn’t even been in the field and they didn’t know (Brown) was closing in.”

Menino was blunt when asked how the contest is going.

“It’s going,” he said.

When it came to volume of phone calls, the Democratic machine hit it’s stride… making more than 1 million calls to targeted voters in the last 48 hours of the election. The problem? According to recipients, it was hard to discern the thrust of the message from sheer harassment.

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This is just too rich…. the short and sweet version? Kerry warns that Brown rallies are “…reminiscent of the dangerous atmosphere of Sarah Palin’s 2008 campaign rallies.”

“I’m no stranger to hard fought campaigns, but what we’ve seen in the past few days is way over the line and reminiscent of the dangerous atmosphere of Sarah Palin’s 2008 campaign rallies. This is not how democracy works in Massachusetts,” Kerry said in a written statement Monday.

“Scott Brown needs to speak up and get his out of state tea party supporters under control. In Massachusetts, we fight hard and win elections on the issues and on our differences, not with bullying and threats,” he added.

Well, at least he’s not reminiscing about Ghengis Khan anymore…

Does make you wonder if the now Sr. MA Senator’s handlers, who ought to be keeping him in touch with the doin’s of the common folk, mentioned that the bullying and threats, as well as physical assaults, aren’t coming from the Brown supporters.

But it’s good for a laugh today, eh?

With MA leading the nation of “deadwood” voters on their registration rolls, it’s entirely possible that the Brown/Coakley race could be decided “from the beyond”, so to speak.

In Nov 2009, CNS News reported on the study done by Aristotle, Inc that noted:

In Massachusetts, 116,483 registered voters are dead, 3.38 percent of the state’s total of registered voters. Another 538,567, or 15.6 percent, had moved to an area outside of where they are registered to vote.

When you consider that uber-progressive Ed Schultz admitted he’d have no moral problems committing voter fraud in order to defeat Brown on his Jan 15th radio show, the potential for massive voter fraud in the MA special election looms large.

UPDATE Today Ed Schultz corrected himself.

Schultz today said that was not exactly the message he had wanted to convey: “I misspoke on Friday. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I meant to say if I could vote 20 times — that’s what I would do.”

Gotta love it when an MSNBC employee and radio host can brag about a wish to commit voter fraud… not once or ten times, but twenty times.

END UPDATE

While there are many ways Dems can (and will) mount a challenge to a Brown win, the most obvious is the recount stall tactic. Via MA election law, any determined win of more than 1/2% of the turnout vote renders a recount request void. If we use the the Commonwealth’s voter breakdown as of October 2008, there are 2,078,610 registered voters in MA. This makes the magic 1/2% number margin, (assuming full voter turnout and not including additional registration) at approx 10,393 votes.

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Matthew Mosk at ABC’s Blotter blog went behind the MA special election scenes, only to find a very busy group of lawyers for both candidates. With what is anticipated to be a close race, and high stakes, both sides are compiling legal arguments to accommodate for any result.

Both sides are going to be ready for a fight,” said one election lawyer involved in the preparations, who discussed the effort on the condition he not be named.

Brian McNiff, a spokesman for Secretary of the Commonwealth William Francis Galvin, who is in charge of elections in Massachusetts, said attorneys in his office have been fielding a lot of calls from the two sides in recent days.

The Democrats’ chief concern is being prepared to try and hold the seat if the outcome is close. Recounts are much easier to mount if the margin of victory is less than half of one percent, according to state election rules.

~~~

Should Brown prevail by a sizeable margin, Democrats could still slow the process enough to prevent him from being seated in time for a healthcare vote, election law experts said.

Brown would have to be both certified the winner and formally seated in the Senate before he would be eligible to cast a vote. Both steps are overseen by Democrats.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee isn’t playing games with Coakley’s defense. Lead attorney is the veteran of the mother of all legal challenges in recent memory, Marc Elias. Elias is the Perkins Coie attorney who oversaw the six month legal challenge that successfully catapulted a losing Franken to his eventual Senate seat. His firm, Perkins Coie, should also be a familiar name for those that remember Thomas Daniel, oft used investigator of many Palin complaints while Governor of Alaska.

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In a single instant of Mother Nature’s fury, the island nation of Haiti was transported into the worst nightmare of 3rd world conditions. Considering that Haiti wasn’t a booming economic scene to begin, it’s amazing to see that there is always a lower depth in a crevice in which to sink.

As we’ve been watching the heart wretching visuals of people in dire need, there has been no delay in a world community willing to step up to the plate with assistance. But even a multinational rescue effect of willing workers and supplies cannot overcome the logistics of an area suffering from almost total inaccessiblity.

Without fanfare, and expecting none, my heart swells with pride as I watch our US military pave the path for relief efforts to flow. For without their central organization – allowing for the distribution of supplies from water, food and medicine to heavy moving equipment – all is for naught.

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In what is tandamount to a PR press release, Kate Linthicum at the LA Times reports that ACORN California has broken away from it’s “embattled” national parent organization. Cited throughout the article are ACORN higher ups, expressing their concern over ACORN’s tarnished reputation, and their distraction with legal challenges interfering with the mission ACORN.

Yet the face of the new ACORN will essentially remain the same as the old… only the name has changed.

The new group will have the same mission, will be staffed by many of the same employees who worked for ACORN, and will be funded by most of the same donors, said Amy Schur, the former head organizer for California ACORN.

Schur sits on the interim board of directors for the new group, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, which was incorporated in California on Monday. ACCE is seeking federal nonprofit status.

~~~

Schur said ACCE plans changes, including outsourcing accounting and forming an advisory council of 22 community leaders, in order to avoid the problems with finances and management that made ACORN vulnerable to conservative attacks.

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Schur said California members were looking for local control and were frustrated by a lack of transparency. In 2008, it was revealed that top ACORN leaders had tried to hide the embezzlement of nearly $1 million from the organization nine years ago by the brother of ACORN founder Wade Rathke.

~~~

Keith Rohman, president of the Los Angeles City Human Relations Commission and chairman of ACCE’s advisory council, said the new California group “is an opportunity to take what is best and leave behind what was not so good.”

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With the less than opaque veil shrouding the current White House actions, Obama’s latest unheralded EO on Jan 11th, establishing the Council of Governors, sent the blog world into a tizzy. The extremes of reaction ran the gamut.

When Shutking broke out the “martial law” headline, commenter John Erickson, who’s blog profile says he works in government in Lincoln, Nebraska, tut tutted that view, saying they were only a federal advisory committee.

PropagandaMatrix comes thru with less sensationalist perspective, noting the other blog fears, but not casting it’s own lot into the more extreme theories. They did, however, note this “..clearly represents another assault on Posse Comitatus, the 1878 law that bars the military from exercising domestic police powers, which was temporarily annulled by the 2006 John Warner National Defense Authorization Act before parts of it were later repealed.”

As with most government powers, there is always the potential for abuse. In this case, there is cause for serious concern because every bit of this entails expanding traditional Command in Chief powers to the DOD, spreading troops around the US (potentially not American troops at that…) and deciding who has ultimate tactical command over reserves and Guard in the event of “emergencies”, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters.

Since we can’t expect much in clarification from this transparent administration, it’s up to us to sort out the intent, and inherent dangers to our founded Republic. And we sure we don’t need yet another head scratcher, like Obama’s INTERPOL executive order before Christmas. So I’m here to connect a few more dots on the Council of Governors.

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For those still clinging to fantasy about Obama’s approval rating soaring mightily over Rasmussen “disinformation/propaganda” numbers…. would you believe MSM’s darling, CBS viewers coming in at 46% “approval”?

Do allow me to quote from the CBS article:
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It was only in the past week that the less than “stimulating” news from the Dec 2009 unemployment report hit the news. Economists are warning those numbers, when revised by the benchmark revision this month, will be even more startling.

From CEPR’s Dean Baker:

“The economy lost another 85,000 jobs in December, driven by continued job losses in construction and manufacturing. While the current data still show a 378,000 job gain for the decade, these numbers will be lowered by approximately 824,000 when the benchmark revision is incorporated into the data with the release of the January employment report. The data show a decline in private sector jobs of 1,549,000 for the decade. The benchmark revision will increase the private sector job loss for the decade to more than 2.4 million….. The employment to population (EPOP) ratio fell by 0.3 percent to 58.2 percent, the lowest level in more than a quarter century.

Economic Policy Institute’s Heidi Shierholz says the unemployment would have risen to 10.4% if the 661,000 workers were counted instead of being considered a labor force decline. 40% of all are unemployed for more than six months, and the average re’employment time… for those that don’t just give up… is over 20 months.

The Feb 17th passage of the ARRA was designed specifically to “stimulate” the job growth and funnel them to “shovel ready” projects. According to the 12/31/09 update on Recovery.gov…, $68.5 billion ( a quarter of the allocated $275 billion) has been funded for grants, contracts and loans. Additionally 42% of the $224 billion for entitlements had been funded.

I think we can safely conclude that 10 months and 24 days after enactment, and after disbursement of 1/3 of all ARRA funds, the “stimulus” is considerably less stimulating than advertised. After this most recent BLS report, apparently the POTUS and one of his spending cohorts in chief, Speaker Pelosi, concur.

Knowing the numbers, projected to be 10 times lower, were not going to play well with the American public, they hit the airwaves within days calling for a “jobs bill”.

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