The Administration

Stop right there, Mr. President. Whoever is advising you that it’s all right and not a contradiction in any way that you can continue to rail against lobbyists while lining your pockets with their political help is selling you some bad corn whiskey, as my grandfather used to say.
 
A report by The New York Times last week uncovered that over a dozen of the president’s top campaign fundraisers all have close ties to the lobbying industry. This during the very weeks where Obama is out on the political hustings (at taxpayers’ expense, mind you) throwing all sorts of invectives at fat cats on Wall Street and all those who “influence Washington.” Something’s not right when Obama takes such a purist position on campaign dollars and self-righteously condemns those who would peddle their agendas, and yet has a virtual money-machine behind the White House curtain.

Last night on “Lou Dobbs Tonight” we talked about a new poll released by well-known Democratic pollster Douglas Schoen, who warned the White House this week that the president should keep his distance from the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Schoen, who conducted a randomized survey of the protesters — or really what was, in effect, a very large focus group — reported that the movement “reflects values that are dangerously out of touch with the broad mass of the American people.”

Under the headline “Why We Need a Third Party,” Washington Post columnist Matt Miller condemns both the Democratic and Republican parties for being “prisoner to interest groups” whose chief aim is “to win elections, not solve problems.”

Some deep thinking there. Miller goes on to list unemployment, the budget, healthcare and education as problems “we need to truly fix,” then quotes the late Sen. Pat Moynihan saying, “If issues can’t be discussed, they can never be advanced.”

What’s needed to bring about “a new politics of problem-solving,” writes Miller, is a third party that would offer “candidates with the vision and nerve to fill today’s void.”

CHICAGO — Today, David Axelrod, the chief of the Reelect Obama Campaign, announced that it will formally join the Occupy Wall Street protests and start mobilizing against the policies endorsed by the Obama administration. 

Axelrod brandished a Tim Geithner bobblehead doll, which he stabbed repeatedly with a pen knife while chanting an indecipherable spell, which he later said he hoped would lead to the Treasury secretary’s immediate departure from his office.

Axelrod, in announcing this unusual campaign, said: “We have decided that we aren’t going to defend the indefensible. Yes, we have terrible unemployment. Yes, Wall Street is getting away with murder. Yes, people have lost faith in the future. As much as I have tried, we can’t blame Bush for this anymore. We have to blame the Obama administration.

Republicans are screaming for a special counsel; reporters/commentators from CBS to Fox News are aggressively questioning Attorney General Eric Holder's truthfulness in testimony last May to Congress about when he first knew about Operation Fast and Furious. (Holder answered the question posed by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., about when he first knew about Fast and Furious, “I’m not sure of the exact date, but I probably heard about [it] for the first time over the last few weeks.”) Justice Department documents seem to indicate that he would have known about it in July 2010.

For Holder, this must seem like déjà vu all over again — here’s how.

I am a big fan of Hank Williams Jr., and own his first three greatest-hits albums. But he should apologize to President Obama for his Hitler reference. Any sentence that combines Barack Obama and Adolf Hitler is stupid, ignorant, should not be part of our political discourse, and is an embarrassment to the political right.

There is a distemper in some circles on the right. They say global warming does not exist. One Republican candidate conducts himself in such a way that "N----rhead" enters our campaign discourse after he come close to suggesting violence against the Federal Reserve chairman and equated monetary policy with treason. Another Republican candidate cannot give a declarative answer about whether Mom should die if she lacks health insurance.

Say what you will about the vice president, but Joe Biden has one helluva mouth on him. Whether it’s telling the president in front of a large crowd (and a very hot mic) this is one big … er, well, you know … or telling a key swing presidential state that his boss is to blame for its financial woes, he’s nothing if he ain’t honest.
 
Early yesterday (while on a campaign swing, mind you), Joe Biden missed a key talking point while visiting a local Florida radio station. Apparently, the abysmal state of America’s economy is no longer former President Bush’s fault, but his own!

This coming weekend, I’ll be joining alumni from the two Bill Clinton presidential campaigns who will gather in Little Rock, Ark., on the 20th anniversary of Clinton’s declaration for the presidency on Oct. 3, 1991.
 
It was in that announcement speech that Clinton articulated that he intended to follow a different path than traditional Democratic Party liberal orthodoxy, appealing to the middle class, political moderates and independents. “The change we must make isn’t liberal or conservative,” he said. “It’s both, and it’s different … People don’t care about the idle rhetoric of ‘left’ and ‘right’ and ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative.’ ”

I never thought it would come to this. I never imagined a time post-2000 when I would actually lament a return to the past. But here we are, facing a recession as deep and even longer than the one in the early 1990s. A recession that ushered in none other than the Comeback Kid — President William Jefferson Clinton.

His was a presidency that brought us DNA samples; Don’t ask, don’t tell; school uniforms; and wagging fingers regarding a certain intern.

But set all that aside (if you can), and recall some of the fiscal successes of his presidency, and it’s easy to long for those days. Read more...

The stock market continues its nosedive this week — falling close to 400 points on Thursday. Market analysts are saying the probability of recession is at its highest point in a long while.

What’s going on? After failed stimulus attempts on the part of this president, we are still wandering around in the economic wilderness.

If President Obama’s economic team lacks the know-how to fix this mess, then please, just own up to it now and let’s get a new set of advisers in the White House. If there’s a better idea out there, the president doesn’t seem to be listening.