Year: 2011

Time Looks Inside Obama’s War Room

Buck Banks

Obama’s guerrilla war on Republicans is being waged on three fronts. At the White House, senior aides including David Plouffe oversee a master strategy and communicate most often with the President, while the growing Chicago operation focuses on rapid responses to candidate attacks on Obama. The Dems’ attacks come from the second floor of the DNC headquarters, a few blocks south of the Capitol, where communications director Brad Woodhouse oversees a daily flood of biting e-mails, ads and Web videos. A sign of his instincts: his glass-walled office is plastered with a half-dozen images of kittens in fields, kittens purring for the camera, kittens pawing each other. Look closely and one of the images stands out: a Photo­shopped picture of George W. Bush biting into a kitten like a cob of corn, a clear sign that this is not the workplace for the faint of heart. It is an oft repeated maxim of Obamaland’s that the country is closely divided and the final count next November is likely to be so too.

— Time magazine.

Occupy Wall Street Moment

Buck Banks

Occupy Wall Street’s planned protest at Lincoln Center turned into an amazing moment (skip to 3:00 in the video) with Philip Glass reading the closing lines from his opera “Satyagraha,” echoed by the people in attendance.

The words: “When righteousness withers away and evil rules the land, we come into being, age after age, and take visible shape, and move, a man among men, for the protection of good, thrusting back evil and setting virtue on her seat again.”

Romney Admits He Has a ‘Limited Understanding of the Economy’

Jon Ponder

Steve Benen:

This exchange, from Mitt Romney’s chat with the editorial board of the Washington Examiner, seems like the sort of thing that might come back to haunt the former governor.

TIM CARNEY: The European Union might be on the verge of an economic meltdown and the U.S. is already getting involved at least indirectly. They opened the Fed window. The IMF, which we heavily fund, is sending money their way. Do you support this Fed and these IMF measures and, if this were still going on when you were inaugurated, what steps — what US aid — would you be willing to provide to Europe?

ROMNEY: Not much, because Europe is capable of solving Europe’s problems. I actually think that — I mean, I’m not an economist by training, but what limited understanding of the economy I have suggests it’s very difficult to cobble together Greece, Ireland, Italy and Germany with the same monetary policy and highly disparate fiscal policies. I don’t know how they hold it together. (Emphasis added.)

Law Makers Have to Live With Consequences of Their Own Gun Laws

Trish

concealed Guns were king during the last couple of legislative sessions in Florida. The Republican super-majorities of both chambers passed laws to imprison pediatricians who so much as asked if there was a gun in the home. They voted to allow visitors in state parks to bring all the guns they wanted into campsites, where they could presumably blast away at fellow campers who seem threatening. At the same time, they worked tirelessly to ensure that employers on private property could not set their own rules prohibiting employees from bringing guns to work, which surely renders annual evaluations much more high stakes.

Florida’s very own Marion Hammer, inducted into the Florida Woman’s Hall of Fame by former Gov. Jeb Bush, and longtime National Rifle Association (NRA) head and lobbyist, led the way on expanding the rights of guns to go wherever they wanted, no questions asked (under penalty of prison). The Republicans in the Florida House and Senate just could not seem to do enough of her bidding.

And now they have to live with it. In a story surely destined for the Department of Ironies, the Florida legislature is finding out firsthand what it means to bring guns into everyone’s personal space. And many of them don’t like it.

[…]