Tag Archives: Barack Obama

What Did the President Know, and When Did He Know It?

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I remember watching the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973 and hearing Senator Howard Baker ask that question. It has again become appropriate, this time related to what the President knew in 2016. John Hinderacker has a post over at PowerlLine examining recently declassified information bearing on that question.

Highly redacted handwritten notes from a briefing CIA Director Brennan gave to President Obama on 28 July, 2016 have been declassified.

The relevant text reads:

We’re getting additional insight into Russian activities from….

CITE alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on 26 July of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.

President Obama had several comments or questions, only one of which survives redaction. He wanted to know whether there was any evidence of collaboration between the Trump campaign and the Russians. Brennan’s answer to that question isn’t recorded in the notes, but we know from other documents that the fact that there was no such evidence was communicated to Obama. Contributions by Comey, McDonough and Rice are fully redacted.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Brennan’s notes is their date (assuming July 28 is correct). According to the intelligence report, Hillary Clinton approved the plot to smear Trump with the Russia collusion fiction on July 26. Just two days later, the head of the CIA, the FBI Director, the National Security Adviser, the President’s Chief of Staff and the President himself met, presumably in the Oval Office, to discuss the intelligence. The report, picked up by spying on the Russians, who I take it were spying on Hillary, was obviously top priority and was taken seriously by the intelligence community, in the person of Brennan.

What little reporting that has been done on this briefing has focused on either the claim that the Trump/Russia collusion hoax originated inside of the Clinton campaign or the claim that President Obama was informed of the hoax within days of it being launched.

There’s another important angle here. The CIA learned of Clinton plan because it had leaked to the Russians. What are the odds that the same leaker(s)/operative(s) would have been embedded in the inner circle of a Clinton White House staff?

We dodged a very large bullet in 2016.

Romney Was Right. Again.

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Remember when Barack Obama pooh-poohed Mitt Romney’s claim that Russia was America’s potential adversary? Well, the plant closings and layoffs announced yesterday by GM show that Romney was right again. He wrote that as a result of the bailout given to GM a decade ago, the company’s failure “will be virtually guaranteed” because it would not be forced to undergo radical restructuring to be competitive in the marketplace. By subsidizing GM’s failing business culture, the federal government would be making a sucker bet with taxpayer dollars and forestalling the inevitable.

The Chevy Volt is one of the models being dropped. Barack Obama promised GM workers that he would drive a Volt when he left office. If he hasn’t bought one yet, he’d better hurry.  And if he likes his Volt, he can keep it.

Was Obama a Better President Than Buchanan?

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Da Tech Guy weighs them in the balances and finds that, yes, Barack Obama really wasn’t our worst president.

However while Obama’s failures might have lead to civil war Buchanan’s actually did.

Also,

In both cases Obama’s actions and Buchanan’s inaction were consistent with their worldviews.  Buchanan’s sympathy to both Slavery and the south and Obama’s dislike of America and embrace of our enemies made any other result unlikely. Obama suffers because in comparison because of the high expectations the people had of him but Buchanan suffers because unlike Obama he actually had years of experience in both the House and Senate as well as being Secretary of state to an ambassador to both Russia and England.

Read the whole thing.

Those of use who said that a Jimmy-Carter-like presidency was a best-case scenario for Barack Obama were right.

My 401(k) Could Use the Help

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CNBC is reporting that Deutsche Bank is forecasting that Donald Trump’s economic proposals should double the economy’s growth rate by 2018. After the beating that my retirement funds have taken over the past eight years, I’d be pleased to see that. One of the reasons I now plan to work until I’m 75 is the economy’s poor performance over the past decade—and I don’t blame Bush. As the CNBC post notes,

Obama is the first president since Herbert Hoover not to see at least 3 percent growth for a calendar year.

The 20th of January can’t come too soon.

About Those “Lost” Emails …

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Paul Sperry reports at the NY Post that one of the servers used for Hillary’s private email system was not destroyed but was “repurposed” as a work station. However, FBI agents were not permitted to seize it. It turns out that some of the “lost” emails may be recoverable.

Also, Andrew McCarthy has a piece up at NRO dealing with an email release through Wikileaks that shows that President Obama was lying when he said that he was unaware of Hillary’s private email until he heard about it through news reports. It seems that he was sending her emails using the private address.

Read both.

What Bernie Has Already Won

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Michael Goodwind has a column at the NY Post where he opines that regardless of who wins the Democrat’s nomination, Bernie has won the future of the party. It’s his agenda not Hillary’s that will make its way into future platforms.

America doesn’t need a double dose of the same bad medicine, but that is what young Democrats want. They believe Obama has been too moderate and see Clinton as even more old-school.

Just so, and bad medicine is a good analogy. The inept regulatory state expanded by President Obama and our presence in the world that he’s contracted have weakened the nation. Just as bleeding George Washington with leeches was not helpful during his terminal illness, another, stronger dose of Obama’s medicine will not be good for America.

Read the whole thing. And read all the way to the end of the column for the bit about Michael Bloomberg.

The Economy Outside the Beltway

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The President claimed in his State of the Union speech that the national economy is doing well. That may seem true inside the Beltway, but out here in the Real World, it doesn’t look so good.

Salena Zito writes that economic discontent is widespread.

The economy is dismal not just in the old Rust Belt but nationwide. On Tuesday, the National Association of Counties released its gold-standard study that shows, six years after the economic expansion began, 93 percent of U.S. counties have failed to fully recover from the devastating contraction they suffered during the recession.

Only 7 percent, or 214 out of 3,069 counties nationwide, recovered by 2015 to their pre-2008 numbers on total employment, economic expansion, home values and unemployment.

Read the whole thing. She suggests that the economic malaise of the Obama economy is one of the key drivers of the populist unrest pushing both the Trump and the Sanders presidential campaigns.

John Hinderacker chimes in, noting that the economic recovery over the last 7 years has been the worst in the past 70, in large part because of government disincentives.

In other words, government welfare programs are crushing America’s economic growth.

He’s posted a staggering chart of federal welfare programs that spend over a terabuck (a trillion dollars) each year. It’ll still be too hard to read after you click to enlarge it.

Meanwhile, back inside the beltway, DC city officials are bent out off shape because their minimum wage hike has caused Walmart to have second thoughts about building more stores in the city.

Hmmmm.

A Dumb Idea About “Smart” Guns

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The President has ordered the Departments of Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security to study smart gun technology.

Here’s the TL;DR on the subject.

1. As an electrical engineer, I know how reliable electronic components are. I wouldn’t trust a gun that would be bricked by a capacitor or semiconductor failing. Or a dead battery.

2. If something uses software, it can be hacked. I wouldn’t trust a gun that someone could disable—or fire—remotely.

UPDATE—M1911_C_A_D.001

Clausewitz and ISIS

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Carl von Clausewitz’s book On Warfare is required reading at almost every military academy. It has its imperfections, but it offers some useful ideas on how war can be used to implement policy. James Holmes, a professor of strategy at the Naval War College has written an interesting essay on how Clausewitz might have viewed President Obama’s ISIS strategy.

Such is the topsy-turvy challenge before Washington. Administration leaders must put policy and strategy, not artificial limits on military means, in charge of the counter-ISIL campaign. If U.S. policy is to destroy ISIL, let us figure out what that entails in terms of ground, air, and sea forces and set those forces in motion. If it is to contain ISIL through airpower, let us say that and resign ourselves to an open-ended effort promising few satisfactions.

The United States can wage unlimited war against the Islamic State, or it can wage war by contingent. Trying to do both opens up a world of strategic problems.

Read the whole thing.

Common Nonsense Gun Control Measures

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Barack Obama is in the process of rolling out a series of executive orders to implement several common nonsense gun control measures. (By common nonsense I mean the usual proposals that seem to make progressives feel good, but have no real world effect on crime other than turning otherwise law-abiding citizens into criminals.) This will apparently include measures designed to plug the non-existent gun show loophole.

Most of the usual suspects on the left have made appreciative noises, but a few are expressing disappointment that the President isn’t moving more aggressively to suppress Second Amendment rights.

μολὼν λαβέ.

Unmanaging the Unmanageable

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Jennifer Rubin has a piece over at WaPo about the commander-in-chief’s meltdown in the polls. It begins:

President Obama’s petulant news conference in Turkey insisting there is no need to shift our strategy for fighting the Islamic State might have been the low point in his presidency. But that does not mean he’s hit rock bottom.

Yeah, well, until he hits bottom, he’s not going to realize that he’s powerless over the world situation and that our lives have become unmanageable.

Read the whole thing.

The President on Gun Control

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Barack Obama has been talking up the idea of more “common sense” gun control. I remember that he said he did want to take away anyone’s guns when he ran for President in 2008.

He also said “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like your private health insurance plan, you can keep your plan. Period.”

Jimmy Carter and the Good Old Days

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Over at PJ Media Tyler O’Neil has a post called Is Obama as Bad as Carter? No, He’s Worse. Jimmy Carter’s presidency is viewed most as a failure, but, to his credit, Carter did try to change course on some policies that were obvious losers.

Rather than altering his policies for the good of the people, Obama persists, aiming to enshrine his agenda in law, with or without the Constitution. Compared to the rule of such an ideologue, the Carter days may be good indeed.

Read the whole thing.

Back in 2008, there were some of us who viewed Barack Obama as Carter Mk2 as a best case scenario. We told you so.

Obama Burns 9,000 Gallons of Jet Fuel to Celebrate Earth Day

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No. Really.

Read about it here.

I agree with Instapundit that we should believe in the global warming climate change crisis when the folks telling us about it act as if they really believe it themselves.

UPDATE—Burning that much jet fuel produces a bit more than 6 tons of carbon emissions.