Journalists as Ring Wraiths; When you’ve got a country to transform, any caviling* is disloyalty.

Victor Davis Hanson 
*Cavil : to raise trivial and frivolous objection

"Today’s Washington journalists are like J. R. R. Tolkien’s ring wraiths, petty lords who wanted a few shiny golden Obama rings — only to end up as shrunken slaves to the One. 

"The Bob Woodward/Ron Fournier/Lanny Davis psychodrama is another small reminder that the Obama administration continues to assume that the press should be little more than a veritable Ministry of Truth. Its proper duty is to serve the White House and promote the progressive agenda of Barack Obama. Any were considered suspect who questioned whether those exalted ends should really be achieved by any means necessary — but they were so few and far between that it mattered little."
....
"How many times can a Washington toady invoke the Gettysburg Address to supersize another mediocre Obama speech?"
....
"Do we remember “AttackWatch.com,” whose website offered “files” on potential Obama critics? Its spooky, pseudo-intelligence red-and-black format offered names and pictures, and asked readers to report critics with the invitation, “Have you seen or heard this attack?” “Yes/No.” "

 

Email tells feds to make sequester as painful as promised

There is no sense of honor nor conscience in this Obama-led administration, and- as with Bill Clinton- no capacity to feel shame. Moreover those of us who see Obama for what he is and say so are called racists. Shame on those voters who brag about Obama's election victory as if it was of no more consequence than a ball game.

This is how much the Obama Administration gave to Egypt just 48 hours after sequester began:

dcxposed.com

Washington Times  "“This email confirms what many Americans have suspected: The Obama administration is doing everything they can to make sure their worst predictions come true and to maximize the pain of the Sequester cuts for political gain,” said Rep. Tim Griffin, Arkansas Republican."....
"Ms. Noem told Mr. Vilsack the email made it sound like the administration was sacrificing flexibility in order to justify dire predictions.
“I’m hopeful that isn’t an agenda that’s been put forward,” the South Dakota Republican congresswoman told Mr. Vilsack." Obama's media will help:

 Obama opting to cut where it hurts most   "A 2011 GAO report gave a sampling of the vastness of what could be cut, consolidated and rationalized in Washington: 44 overlapping job training programs, 18 for nutrition assistance, 82 (!) on teacher quality, 56 dealing with financial literacy, more than 20 for homelessness, etc. Total annual cost: $100 billion-$200 billion, about two to five times the entire domestic sequester.
"Are these on the chopping block? No sir. It's firemen first."
....
"But he cannot win if “nothing bad really happens.” Indeed, he'd look both foolish and cynical for having cried wolf. His incentive to deliberately make the most painful and socially disruptive cuts possible (say, oh, releasing imprisoned illegal immigrants from detention) is enormous. And alarming."
(Emphasis mine, just to make sure you all saw it. TD)

The Obama administration wants the sequester to hurt immediately so the public will clamor for its reversal. But will this gambit work? Probably not. "So we have a cock-eyed scenario where the White House may well want to ramp up economy-strangling cuts quickly, in an inversion of the normal order. Unlike the Hippocratic oath, the watchword here is “first, do some harm.”"

 

Memo Proves that Obama Admin Wants to Make the Sequester Cuts Hurt So Bad   "Two of Obama’s major initiatives, his health care law and his EPA regulatory state, were predicted to be job killers. They have proven to be job killers. But Obama is now hoping to use the cover of sequestration to blame his dismal economic record on Republicans. Whatever lie gets him through the day."

White House and Press Relations Getting Worse

More Reporters Step Forward to Discuss Obama White House’s Petty Treatment of Press   "The validity of the story aside, an indisputable truth is that the press has been guilty since before the 2008 election of running interference for this president. And the American people are wise to it. A Gallup poll conducted last September found that the number of respondents who said they trust the news media had reached an all-time low.

US News  "Like previous administrations, Obama's advisers are trying to force-feed the press corps with their version of reality, and they sometimes give the impression they don't respect the men and women who cover the presidency. Their tactics include bullying, hassling, and, yes, threatening reporters in an effort to get them to back down from their stories or their lines of inquiry. The threats can include warnings that a reporter will lose whatever access he or she has to Obamaworld. In other cases, administration figures or Obama's allies outside government threaten to publicly challenge a reporter's credibility, sometimes with the accompanying use of foul or insulting language."  Via Lucianne

And representing the United States of America...

Dennis Rodman, Obama's Madeleine Albright  "This little incident, which in itself ranks up there on the sanity scale with Maxine Waters' warning of 170,000,000 Americans losing their jobs due to the sequester, is nevertheless a timely reminder of just how power-mad progressives really are, and how thoroughly their power-madness obliterates any notions of conscience or decency."

This ain't Henry Kissinger

Find Dennis:

 And following Rodman's visit, North Korea threatened war again.

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How's Obama looking around the world?

From the UK Telegraph: Barack Obama a 'dithering, controlling, risk-averse' US president
" "The president had a truly disturbing habit of funnelling major foreign policy decisions through a small cabal of relatively inexperienced White House advisers whose turf was strictly politics," Mr Nasr writes in The Dispensable Nation: America Foreign policy in Retreat."
....
" "American foreign policy has been on a four-year autopilot, which I argue has been excessively risk averse and domestically focused. I don't see any clear decision yet to change that," said Mr Nasr in an interview with The Daily Telegraph.
" "I wrote this book to problematise the way Obama has approached this whole region, and that it is dangerous to disengage and confuse a low-level foreign policy with success in foreign policy," he concluded."

Ladies and Gentlemen, Presenting the next Director of the [Obama] CIA!!!

"...I think that it is unimportant if Obama is or isn't a Muslim. I don't care whom they pray to. 

"The question is whether their world view, and their policies would be any different if they were Muslims. And I think the answer to that is no. And since it is their policies, not their beliefs that matter to the world, they should be judged for that."  In this speech, Brennan refers to Jerusalem by its Arabic name, "Al-Quds".

 US plan for UN to endorse Khamenei’s fatwa? Shock in Jerusalem US "....President Barack’s Obama’s circle in Washington was studying a bizarre plan for the opposite objective.
"It surfaced in an article published Tuesday, Feb. 12, by Ambassador Thomas Pickering, a veteran American diplomat who is influential in the framing of Obama’s Iranian policy.

"This what he wrote: “In years past, he (Khamenei) issued a fatwa condemning nuclear weapons. Washington could take advantage of this fact by drafting a UN Security Council resolution endorsing the fatwa. This could be a small step toward boosting Khamenei’s international profile while simultaneously pressuring Iran to follow its own religious decree.”
"Instead of dismantling these rogue nuclear programs, Pickering was proposing to legitimize Iran’s possession of a nuclear bomb capacity that only stopped one step short of assembling a bomb."

Tax receipts on pace to hit record $2.7T this year, congressional report says

Obama got his tax increases without cutting spending; now he wants more tax increases but still will demagogue any cuts the Republicans propose. Are the press totally incapable of seeing this?

Fox News   "As President Obama launches into the next phase of budget negotiations with Congress, recent estimates may lend credence to Republican claims that the federal coffers are well fed on taxes. "....
"With the enactment of the sequester, Congress will cut deeper and deeper into discretionary spending. But costly entitlements will continue to grow, driving up the U.S. debt and also the annual interest taxpayers pay on that debt."

 

Regulation Nation: New federal rules for school food will cost millions, group says

Fox News   "Newly proposed federal regulations aimed at the snack foods and drinks served in the nation's schools could come with a hefty price tag.
The American Action Forum estimates the regulations, which include caps on serving sizes and calorie counts, will cost schools $127 million and require more than 926,000 hours of paperwork."....
 

The Afghan Endgame

Texas on the Potomac More about this cartoonist in the future

AEI Critical Threats  "The president’s decision on Afghanistan was not as bad as it might have been—indeed, it was not as bad as it seemed certain to be at the start of this year. It leaves a glimmer of hope for success, which our commanders, troops, and diplomats in the field will exert all their powers to keep alive. But it was still a mistake that puts our nation’s security in greater jeopardy. We hope that the president will continue to reevaluate his own willingness to accept risk in light of the rapidly diminishing economic and political returns he will receive from lowering force levels.
"The war in Afghanistan is not yet lost. We are not yet losing, in fact, and success remains possible. But it is absolutely vital that the White House give General Dunford some flexibility to adjust the withdrawal timelines, and even to ask for temporary reinforcements, as the situation on the ground evolves."
By Frederick W. Kagan, Kimberly Kagan

About.com

The Obama economy for low-information voters

Forget the Sequester, the U.S. Economy Is Broken  "You should be worried that the solutions to all the above problems aren’t working. And they haven’t been working for the last five years. In fact, the solutions — the old standbys of low interest rates and deficit spending — are now creating more problems than they could ever solve."

http://terrellaftermath.com/

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2013/03/03/will-anyone-police-this-white-house/

Jennifer Rubin; Will anyone police this White House? ".... Until Friday’s news conference mainstream media never showed much skepticism about the reams of scare stories being passed around. And if not for Bob Woodward, not a single news outlet would have reported the origin of the sequester. (Think about the level of negligence involved on that point alone.) Whether on account of bias or ineptitude, media haven’t been very good at extracting the truth until quite recently."