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."

Gilded Class Warriors

The People's Cube

Victor Davis Hanson
"Obama never quite squared his accusations that "millionaires and billionaires" had not paid their fair share with his own obvious enjoyment of the perks of "corporate jet owners," "fat cat bankers" and Las Vegas junketeers.
" Now that paradox has continued right off the bat in the second term. In the State of the Union, Obama once more went after "the few," and "the wealthiest and the most powerful," whom he blasted as the "well-off and the well-connected" and the "billionaires with high-powered accountants."
"  Like clockwork, the president then jetted to West Palm Beach for yet another golfing vacation at one of the nation's priciest courses, replete with lessons from a $1,000-a-hour golf pro to improve the presidential putting.
"  The rest of the first family jetted off on their own skiing vacation to elite Aspen, Colo., where nobody accepts that at some point they've already "made enough money." "

The President's Strange Obsession with Millionaires and Billionaires  "Barack Obama’s rhetoric makes for some interesting politics, but it amounts to destructive public policy.  And a president who seeks to patronize one section of American society by demonizing another, does a grave disservice to our country."

Oh, by the way, in case you were interested;
Michael Moore is a controversial documentary filmmaker with a net worth of $50 million  And this is his house:

 

Michael Barone on The Permanent Campaigner

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE  "Do we have a president or a perpetual candidate? It’s not an entirely unfair question.
"Even as Barack Obama was warning of the dreadful consequences of the budget sequester looming on March 1, he spent days away from Washington, apparently out of touch with Democratic as well as Republican congressional leaders.

http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/cartoons/

"In the meantime, Obama fans were lobbing verbal grenades at none other than the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward.
"His offense: He’s continuing to make it clear, as he did in his book The Price of Politics, that it was Obama’s then–chief of staff and now–Treasury Secretary Jack Lew who first proposed the dreaded sequester.
"This inconvenient fact threatens to interfere with the ready-for-teleprompter narrative that the Republicans want to cut aid to preschoolers in order to save tax breaks for corporate jets.
"It appears that Obama prefers delivering such messages to crowds of adoring supporters over actually governing."

Branco Cartoon – Manufacturing Crisis

From Legal Insurrection

http://legalinsurrection.com/tag/a-f-branco/

Top Television Shows Today Full of Garbage

Intellectual Conservative  "Hollywood is hypocritical about diversity when it comes to TV shows. The top 10 shows are full of profanity and sex."  Read the full article

"If you stopped watching network television awhile ago because it had gotten so bad, you made the correct decision. It has continued to get worse. A few years ago, network television became dominated by cheaply made reality TV shows and talent contests, sitcoms with hyperactive manic characters, and socially liberal themes. Television has always pushed the edge when it comes to socially progressive themes. But at what point does it go too far? Perhaps when there are no other options left during prime time network TV."

The Maneater

Parents Television Council  "A non-partisan education organization advocating responsible entertainment."
PTC's Best and Worst of TV
Best: The Middle on ABC
The Middle is consistently chosen as Best TV Show of the Week because of its humorous depiction of the clash of wills between teenagers, children, and parents -- yet, with parental authority, family, and good moral lessons always being upheld in the end…even if the route getting there is winding, convoluted, and funny.



poplicks.com

Worst: 85th Annual Academy Awards 

In order to appeal to Hollywood’s favored frat-boy viewership, the producers selected as host a man whose entire career has been devoted to being insulting, crude, and tasteless – and who was guaranteed to bring such qualities to his performance: ....

Worst on cable TV: "Tosh.O" on Comedy Central

"....Tosh is much more about sneering mockery, bigotry, and graphic sex and toilet jokes."

Obama and his sequesteria

As a president, this petulant juvenile is worse than nothing.
Obama’s Politics Put our Navy in Harm’s Way  "It would seem that while we possess colossal power, we also harbor colossal stupidity in our command structure. There are unprovable, as yet, rumors flying that this situation only came to be over the outraged protests of the upper Navy brass overruled by an always politics-first White House."

Obama’s campaign of pain  "In other words, Obama is done trying to work with Republicans in 2013 and 2014. He is abandoning any real effort for bipartisan immigration, gun, or energy reform. The bulk of his effort will now be devoted to eliminating all Republican power in Washington.
"And Obama’s first step in that campaign will be to maximize the amount of pain the sequester inflicts on the American people."
...."For perhaps the first time in the history of the United States, it is in the political interest of a president to inflict maximum pain on the American people."   (Emphasis added)
Which will be possible with the help of the media that supports him.

WP: Obama Agenda Depends On Winning House  "It’s clear that this is Obama’s entire goal. To demonize the House Republicans, in order to gain majority control of Congress in 2014. Then he will have no opposition and he can then ram through his entire agenda without any compromising whatsoever."

Obama's Middle East travel plans

Caroline Glick "This week on the Tribal Update, the satirical webcast produced weekly by Latma, the Hebrew-language satirical media criticism website I run, we bring you a behind the scenes look at how Obama and his advisers arrived at their decision to have the President visit Israel next month."
The video from Israel is in Hebrew with subtitles. 

Krauthammer Mocks Sequesteria: 'We Have Sequestered Against The Lord And His Wrath Is Great'

Newsbusters

"One wonders if Krauthammer was also taking a poke at the media who have for years bestowed so much reverence upon the current White House resident that they've made him almost God-like."

 

Why we call the media "lamestream"

American Thinker: Two Palestinian Deaths  "Thus, the Times and the Post, while scouring for every bit of possible evidence to question treatment of Palestinians in Israeli jails, showed no such interest or curiosity about treatment of Palestinians in Abbas's jails. None at all."

Sequester Scare! Two Thirds of News Stories Devoted to Hyping Budget Hysteria   “Deadline day. Hours, now, until massive government cuts go into effect that could impact every American. Jobs vaporizing. Flights delayed. Even criminals walking free.” That’s the call to panic with which ABC’s Josh Elliot greeted viewers on the March 1 Good Morning America. Elliot’s frenzied tone, on the day sequestration was going into effect, was typical of the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) network coverage of Washington’s most recent fiscal debate.

 

George Will: Obama Has 'So Gone Over the Top in His Rhetoric He’s Even Losing the Mainstream Media'   "...February may have been a tipping point in Obama's relationship with media.

"Consider as additional evidence NBC's David Gregory on Friday saying the President doesn't like the Washington press corps and the feeling is mutual."

 

Beat the press; Reporters reveal how the Obama administration threatens and controls the media

NY Post  Via Weasel Zippers   Covering "the increasing pressure that White House correspondents feel when dealing with the Obama administration — to follow their narrative, to be properly deferential (!), to react to push-back by politely sitting down and shutting up. "
....
" “I had a young reporter asking tough, important questions of an Obama Cabinet secretary,” says one DC veteran. “She was doing her job, and they were trying to bully her. In an e-mail, they called her the vilest names — bitch, c--t, a--hole.” He complained and was told the matter would be investigated: “They were hemming and hawing, saying, ‘We’ll look into it.’ Nothing happened.” "

Dare we hope the media is beginning to question this administration?

White House’s false sequester claims prompt media pushback

"Those [false] statements came as the White House sought to create public anger about Republicans’ refusal to vote for additional new tax revenues as part of a last-minute budget deal to forestall the sequester, which will force mandatory across-the-board cuts across much of the federal budget."
....
"But the release of more than 2,000 illegal immigrants set off a wave of public anger, partly because of coverage by upstart media outlets that have not been allied with the White House."   Emphasis added.

Via Lucianne

This comes from....the NEW YORK TIMES? Obama’s Fault  Op-ed columnist Bill Keller begins with assigning blame across the board, but spends the rest of the article on the President's culpability. (Which gave me a thrill up my leg.)
"When President Obama told us in his first Inaugural Address that our time of “putting off unpleasant decisions” was over, advocates of reforming our fiscal disorder read that as a promise that the new president would go beyond the perennial economic quick fix."....
 "Clearly the days of “putting off unpleasant decisions” are not over. And this is where they get you."

Morning Joe Mocks Obama’s ‘Doomsday’ Sequester: ‘Nobody Told Him’ He Won Election, ‘Nothing’s Happened’  "Getting away from the mockery, Willie Geist informed, “The White House actually, turned out, couldn’t produce a single district where the sequester was shown to explicitly cause layoffs.”
It’s interesting, Nicolle Wallace added, to see how “completely disoriented the "Democrats and the Obama administration seems to have become by the message here.” They’re just confused about the effects of the cuts."

David Gregory Gets Sperling to Admit Obama Lied During Presidential Debate Will Gregory demand that Obama apologize?
"Anyway, it's great that four months after the fact David Gregory busts Obama for a bald-faced lie he told during a 2012 presidential debate, but this would've been much more helpful, you know, before the election."  More here: Sperling's Disingenuous Defense of Sequester

WaPo Busts Obama…Again: Four Pinnochios for 'Janitor Pay Cut' Claim

"We're seeing small pockets of excellent reporting on sequestration, and this includes the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler. Kessler's already exposed Obama's scare tactics as lies twice this week. Yesterday Kessler hit the trifecta with this report blowing a hole in Obama's lie about Capitol Hill janitors receiving pay cuts."