In Washington DC there are three passions that rule this town – politics, football, and politics. Living here has given me front row seats to a pair of leadership trainwrecks in Daniel Snyder and Barack Obama. As both have been experiencingdifficult times lately, it seemed like a good time to write about the similarities I’ve noticed between the two.
First off, I moved to the DC area in 1999, the same year that Dan Snyder bought the Washington Redskins. Interestingly enough, the job that brought me here was working for Snyder’s old company, Snyder Communications. Also, I never met the man during my time working there, and from the stories I’ve heard about him that’s not a complaint.
For those of you unfamiliar, Snyder immediately became a big news item from the beginning. He was brash, energetic, and has had no problems making bold moves as owner. Whether it was interrupting summer camp by arriving in his helicopter during practices, expanding Fedex Field’s seating while raising ticket prices, and charging admission to summer camp for one season. Also, despite having no background in football, he became heavily involved in the team. Snyder held post-game meetings with his head coaches, brought in a big name personnel man from the 49ers Super Bowl Dynasty (Vinny Cerrato), has chased down and overpaid big name coaches, and has even micro managed to the point of firing several kickers over the course of a season for blown kicks. Read the rest of this entry »
In the summer of 2008, then presidential candidate Barack Obama delivered a historic campaign speech in Germany. With the Berlin Wall as a back drop, Obama proudly informed the masses that he was not there as a candidate, but as “…a fellow citizen of the world.”
The crowd went crazy and the world rejoiced. Finally, the United States was ready to join the community of man.
In what former U.S. ambassador to the UN John Bolton calls our first post-American President, Obama has bestowed instant cachet on the growing ranks of Americans who revel in the thought of being the first in their own social set to be considered cutting edge ‘citizens of the world.’ Especially since joining this community of global citizens confers upon them automatic (albeit, unearned) virtue, along with instant and unassailable moral stature.
For those of you who just aren’t with it, (like Christians, conservatives and a few Republicans) here are the latest, up to the minute, details on how to gain inclusion in this trendy and politically correct group.
To become a ‘citizen of the world,’ you must first and foremost declare your support for the disenfranchised. Preferably in front of a camera in a very public forum. Just pick a group of victims upon whom you will bestow your empathy and support. The only caveat being that they reside in underdeveloped countries ruled by misunderstood men of good will like Uganda, or Cuba, or Somalia, or…well, you get my drift. Oh, and make sure everyone understands that these victims are only victims because of George W. Bush and/or America. Read the rest of this entry »
“We’re trying to do too much at once,” Lieberman said. “To put this government-created insurance company on top of everything else is just asking for trouble for the taxpayers, for the premium payers and for the national debt. I don’t think we need it now.”…
Lieberman did say he’s “strongly inclined” to vote to proceed to the debate, but that he’ll ultimately vote to block a floor vote on the bill if it isn’t changed first…
“I can’t see a way in which I could vote for cloture on any bill that contained a creation of a government-operated-run insurance company,” Lieberman added. “It’s just asking for trouble – in the end, the taxpayers are going to pay and probably all people will have health insurance are going to see their premiums go up because there’s going to be cost shifting as there has been for Medicare and Medicaid.”
Since that statement came out earlier today the Reid camp…or cheerleaders….have tried to spin it so it doesn’t sound as bad as it really is. I mean how can it be bad if Joe will vote to open floor debate on Reid’s bill? Of course they are leaving out the other vote…the one that closes debate and moves the bill to a vote. Joe says he will NOT vote for that if the public option is there.
The nation’s medical costs will keep spiraling upward even faster than they are now under Democratic legislation pending in the House, a report from government economic experts concluded Wednesday.
Republicans said the report is a warning sign that health care legislation is likely to fall short of President Barack Obama’s goal of “bending the cost curve” by slowing torrid rates of medical inflation.
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Unlike previous estimates that have focused mainly on the legislation’s impact on the federal deficit, the actuaries’ report looked at total costs, public and private, over the next 10 years. It found that the nation’s health care tab would increase somewhat more rapidly with the legislation than if nothing is done. The main reason: Newly insured people will seek medical care.
The nation’s health care tab, now at about $2.5 trillion annually, is projected to approach $4.7 trillion in 2019 without the legislation. Read the rest of this entry »
And he answers the “blame Bush” theme still so prevalent in the Obama Administration!
On CNN’s State of the Union program on Sunday (transcript), White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was questioned about the Obama Administration’s indeciviseness in Afghanistan. Attempting to change the subject, Rahm fell back on the standard “blame Bush” defense suggesting that Afghanistan was just another mess that they had to clean up.
You have literally got into a situation, is there another way you can do this? And the president is asking the questions that have never been asked on the civilian side, the political side, the military side, and the strategic side. What is the impact on the region? What can the Afghan government do or not do? Where are we on the police training? Who would be better doing the police training? Could that be something the Europeans do? Should we take the military side? Those are the questions that have not been asked. And before you commit troops, which is — not irreversible, but puts you down a certain path — before you make that decision, there’s a set of questions that have to have answers that have never been asked. And it’s clear after eight years of war, that’s basically starting from the beginning, and those questions never got asked.
And what I find interesting and just intriguing from this debate in Washington, is that a lot of people who all of a sudden say, this is now the epicenter of the war on terror, you must do this now, immediately approve what the general said — where, before, it never even got on the radar screen for them. That — everything was always about Iraq.
Amazing. As if no one will realize what a pack of lies that is.
Based upon that experience and my 40 years since then in and out of public life, I want to make what I hope will be taken as a friendly suggestion to President Obama and his White House, and it is this: Don’t create an enemies list.
“it is a plain fact of American political life today that Democrats are completely dependent on black votes. The day African Americans stop casting 80 to 95 percent of their votes for Democrats is the day Democrats stop winning elections.”
- Mona Charen, Do-Gooders
In the Age of Obama, racism has no place in America. Therefore, if a white girl wins a beauty pageant at a historically all-black university, it will be celebrated as a historic first; or, not made a big deal of at all, since she would have been judged upon the merits of her beauty, regardless of the color of her skin. As the previous pageant winner, Patrece Parson, expresses it, she was
‘very shocked’ at the judge’s choice of a white woman, adding: ‘We’ve never had one before’.
Hmmm….I wonder if she had the same “very shocked” reaction at the election of Barack Obama to the highest office in the land, as “we’ve never had one before” [i.e., a "black" president].
Voters in this small city decided overwhelmingly last year to do away with the party affiliation of candidates in local elections, but the Obama administration recently overruled the electorate and decided that equal rights for black voters cannot be achieved without the Democratic Party. Read the rest of this entry »
But no…instead, FOX does a good deal of what the other star-struck networks have failed to do: Provide a critical look at the Obama Presidency and act in the role of a watchdog press.
62% say that criticism of political leaders is worthwhile because it keeps those leaders from doing things that should not be done, while 22% say such criticism keeps leaders from doing their jobs.
What if the MSM gave proper coverage vetting of candidate Obama in ‘08?
The Obama administration really needs to get over itself.
First, the president and his aides go to war with Fox News because the network maintains a generally anti-Obama slant.
Then, an anonymous administration aide attacks bloggers for failing to maintain a sufficiently pro-Obama slant.
These are not disconnected developments.
An administration that won the White House with an almost always on-message campaign and generally friendly coverage from old and new media is now frustrated by its inability to control the debate and get the coverage it wants.
To answer this question in an objective manner, we should compare the two men and the answer or answers will become apparent. Since Obama prefers to live his life as an enigma, we will compare Marx’s well documented life to the recent accomplishments of Obama, as far as accomplishments that’s all we have.
If we compare the men as authors, Obama has suffered the ignominy of having claimed to have written an autobiography that was written by another man. Marx is the most well read author in all of history, if we assume that the bible was written be multiple authors. Mohammed is a distant second, the followers of Marx far outnumber the followers of the Prophet.
Marx would surely be unimpressed, if not with the writing skills of Obama, at least with the output.
Marx, was described as a genius, prophet, and economic theorist, “first of all a very learned man,” by Joseph Schumpeter a well known (Austrian) Harvard economist, iconoclast and devout conservative. Despite outspoken pundit claims, we have yet to observe traces of Obama’s genius.
Marx wrote for the New York Tribune, their best paid correspondent. He also wrote for the Tribune and the Herald, the antecedents of the Herald Tribune, an organ of staunch Conservatism for generations.
Maneuvering to boost prospects for sweeping health care legislation, Senate Democrats hope first to win quick approval for a bill that grants doctors a $247 billion increase in Medicare fees over a decade but raises federal deficits in the process, officials said Wednesday.
By creating a two-bill approach, Democrats intend to claim the more comprehensive health care measure meets President Barack Obama’s conditions — that it will neither add to deficits nor exceed $900 billion in costs over 10 years.
If approved and signed into law, the legislation would avert a 21 percent reduction in Medicare fees paid to doctors that is scheduled to take effect in January as well as additional cuts in future years. Read the rest of this entry »
The former CBO director, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, warns today on the effect ObamaCare will have on our economy and health care. These facts should be painfully obvious to those with even one iota of common sense. This bill will lead to a huge middle class tax increase:
Remember when health-care reform was supposed to make life better for the middle class? That dream began to unravel this past summer when Congress proposed a bill that failed to include any competition-based reforms that would actually bend the curve of health-care costs. It fell apart completely when Democrats began papering over the gaping holes their plan would rip in the federal budget.
As it now stands, the plan proposed by Democrats and the Obama administration would not only fail to reduce the cost burden on middle-class families, it would make that burden significantly worse.
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The bill creates a new health entitlement program that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates will grow over the longer term at a rate of 8% annually, which is much faster than the growth rate of the economy or tax revenues. This is the same growth rate as the House bill that Sen. Kent Conrad (D., N.D.) deep-sixed by asking the CBO to tell the truth about its impact on health-care costs.
To avoid the fate of the House bill and achieve a veneer of fiscal sensibility, the Senate did three things: It omitted inconvenient truths, it promised that future Congresses will make tough choices to slow entitlement spending, and it dropped the hammer on the middle class. Read the rest of this entry »
“Today we reached a critical milestone in our efforts to reform our health care system, the president said this afternoon,” speaking from the White House Rose Garden.
Although the bill drew an “aye” vote from one Republican senator, President Obama touted the bill as a proposal having both “Democratic and Republican support.”
“After the consideration of hundreds of amendments, it includes ideas from both Democrats and Republicans, which is why it enjoys the support of people from both parties,” he said.
The president thanked in particular the senator who cast the lone Republican vote, Sen. Olympia Snowe from Maine.
Democrat….er, “Republican” Senator Snowe caving to the Democrats is not surprising. Just look at her scorecard at Club For Growth:
No…not surprising in the least and I suppose the ignorant claim that her defection is proof that the bill is bipartisan should not surprise us either coming from this administration. Read the rest of this entry »
America’s Health Insurance Plans commissioned a study from PriceWaterhouseCoopers recently on the Baucus health bill and it shows many things that we all expected and feared would happen. The cost of insurance will go waaaaay up….by about 18% on average ON TOP of the expected inflation.
Key Findings
Health reform could have a significant impact on the cost of private health insurance coverage.
There are four provisions included in the Senate Finance Committee proposal that could increase private health insurance premiums above the levels projected under current law:
A new tax on high-cost health care plans,
Insurance market reforms coupled with a weak coverage requirement,
Cost-shifting as a result of cuts to Medicare
and New taxes on several health care sectors.
The overall impact of these provisions will be to increase the cost of private insurance coverage for individuals, families, and businesses above what these costs would be in the absence of reform.
On average, the cost of private health insurance coverage will increase:
26 percent between 2009 and 2013 under the current system and by 40 percent during this same period if these four provisions are implemented.
50 percent between 2009 and 2016 under the current system and by 73 percent during this same period if these four provisions are implemented.
79 percent between 2009 and 2019 under the current system and by 111 percent during this same period if these four provisions are implemented.
America’s Health Insurance Plans asked PricewaterhouseCoopers to check out the impact of four components in the Baucus bill: Read the rest of this entry »
President Barack Obama marks veteran reporter Helen Thomas’ (who says President Obama “lacks courage“)89th birthday.
Pete Souza / White House
One of the great weaknesses of the Bush administration was its incompetence in defending its own interests and countering media distortions. Contrast that with Team Obama’s aggressive new strategy.
The current administration has been extremely new media-savvy, taking full advantage of the internet, from YouTube to Flickr, to their own White House blog. Along with that savvy, comes awareness of the threat that FOX News and Glenn Beck, talk radio and Rush Limbaugh, pose to the administration’s ability to enjoy a smooth ride.
It would have been one thing had the Bush Administration gone after, say, the NYTimes for leaking information vital to national security interests. It would have been quite another had they expended their energies going after Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann, 60 Minutes, and CNN.
Apparently the Obama Administration has no such qualms about ridiculing dissent. And in fact, sees it as a critical front in their personal crusade to remake America. Read the rest of this entry »
In Washington DC there are three passions that rule this town – politics, football, and politics. Living here has given me front row seats to a pair of leadership trainwrecks in Daniel Snyder and Barack Obama. As both have been experiencing difficult times lately, it seemed like a good time to write about the similarities I’ve noticed between the two.
