Presidential disrespect went around and now comes around

Legal Insurrection  "G.O.P. vs. Obama: Disrespect or Just Politics? "

"That is the deeply probing question asked by The NY Times with regard to G.O.P. opposition to Obama.

"There was no such question when it came to Democratic treatment of George W. Bush, it was pure disrespect.

"Please dig deep into the history books and show me another President who was booed at his successor’s inauguration:"

"And another President who had sit not only through the booing, but also listen to his successor lay into him during the inaugural speech. As The Times itself noted, we have to go back 75 years for an inaugural speech as cutting as Obama’s:

It was a delicate task, with Mr. Bush and Dick Cheney sitting feet from him as Mr. Obama, only minutes into his term as president, described the false turns and the roads not taken….

"Yet not since 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt called for a “restoration” of American ethics and “action, and action now” as Herbert Hoover sat and seethed, has a new president so publicly rejected the essence of his predecessor’s path.

"Obama is being treated no worse than he and his supporters treated Bush. What goes around comes around."

From the NY Times article linked:

But White House officials, echoing their boss’s aversion to suggestions of racism, never play that card, not even in private conversations with reporters.

One administration official said that Mr. Obama “made it clear” when he came into office “that there wouldn’t be people crying wolf on race every day.”

For which we must praise Mr. Obama.

Zero Jobs 101 — the Psychology of Alienating Employers

Victor Davis Hanson  The Great Sit-Down Strike

"In the last 30 months, the Obama administration has created a psychological landscape that finally just seemed, whether fairly or not, too hostile to most employers to risk new hiring and buying. Each act, in and of itself, was irrelevant. Together they are proving catastrophic and doing the near impossible of turning a brief recovery into another recession."

....

"Highly publicized visits to bankrupt subsidized green plants, blaming George Bush, new racially-driven invective from some congresspeople against the Tea Party, sermons about the sensitivities of illegal aliens, politically-correct tutorials about Islam — all that might rally the base or in isolation be understandable, but again fairly or not, such liberal rhetoric simply adds to the problem from yet another dimension: confirming perceptions that employers are about the last people in the world that this administration is worried about."   (Emphasis added)

Will President Obama’s Thursday address be the worst speech ever?    "...some presidential historians made the connection to Carter’s moment three decades ago.

"“It was a make-or-break speech,” said John Kenneth White, a political science professor at Catholic University. Carter had “gone to Camp David to assess what had gone wrong in the energy crisis, but also what had gone wrong with his presidency, to hit the restart button.”"

....

"And it’s not like the president has announced a cabinet shakeup or fired any of his army of czars.

"It’s not looking too good so far."

(Updated) Wikileaks makes public hundreds of thousands of unredacted State Department docs

Rick Moran  "The juvenile hackers who run Wikileaks have probably just murdered dozens of people around the world. They have dumped their entire cache of State Department cables into the public domain - without redacting names of informants."

....

"And this is the guy the left has put on a pedestal and lionized? "

Update: Taliban Use Wikileaks to Hunt, Murder Named Afghans  

One example from 2006 described an encounter between US officers and an Afghan. The Times has redacted the report to ensure that no individual or their relatives could be targeted.

Yesterday the account of Mr [X]’s meeting was accessible to anyone on the internet with the thousands of others published by WikiLeaks. When The Times sought to track down Mr [X] to ask his response, he was found to be dead.

He was killed by the Taleban two years ago after being suspected of spying for American forces.

"Anyway, so the Taliban are doing exactly what I said they would do, in my pieces for PBS and CJR: they are vowing to hunt down and murder anyone who is identified in the Wikileaks archive as having worked for the U.S."

Google being Google, you have to look pretty deep past a list of pro-Wikileaks articles that all deny that anyone has been hurt ("there is no evidence,,,"). Mr. Assange, who is angry over the "collateral damage" caused by US strikes seems to have no worries about causing it himself. 

Don't expect the whole 'jobs plan' to be unveiled in Obama's speech

Rick Moran  "Why, when some presidents get in trouble, do they insist on "reorganizing" the government? In the end, they usually make things worse by creating another department or agency that simply grows the size of government and employs more federal workers.

"I think what this downplaying of Obama's speech shows is that they really don't have a plan at all and that repeating banalities on a speaking tour is all they've got. It will no doubt be a "Blame the GOP" tour - about the only thing the president has demonstrated an ability to accomplish."

Walsh calls Obama ‘idiotic’  "“How idiotic is this president?” Walsh said to the GOP crowd Wednesday night in Nunda Township. “I don’t want to be disrespectful, but he’s going to bring forth a jobs plan next week. Think about that for a minute. He’s been in office for three years. He’s destroyed job creation systematically for three years.” "

Rep. Joe Walsh Blasts MSNBC’s Bashir: ‘Your Profession Did Not Vet’ Obama

Read more on this here.

"An acrimonious Bashir, perhaps not surprisingly, then resorted to citing racism as the reason behind Walsh‘s stated decision to skip Obama’s jobs speech next Thursday:"

The perfect gift for that liberal who has everything

http://www.diversitylane.com/

Education Secretary Arne Duncan has trashed Texas schools, but Texas gets great bang for the buck.

Insider Online  "The Obama administration made what was supposed to be a pre-emptive strike on Texas Governor Rick Perry, but which turned out to be, in baseball terms, a “swing … and a miss.” The administration unleashed Education Secretary Arne Duncan to attack Texas’s record on education, with Duncan saying he feels “very, very badly for the children.” When pressed to explain precisely what Texas has done wrong on education, Duncan came up a bit short on specifics. "