Category: Barack Obama

Eric Holder Argues that Assassination is Legal

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Jeebus. It’s now OK to murder an American citizen because the President says so:

Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday explained why it’s legal to murder people — not to execute prisoners convicted of capital crimes, not to shoot someone in self-defense, not to fight on a battlefield in a war that is somehow legalized, but to target and kill an individual sitting on his sofa, with no charges, no arrest, no trial, no approval from a court, no approval from a legislature, no approval from we the people, and in fact no sharing of information with any institutions that are not the president.

…………

By “government” Holder means the president, whether President Obama or President Romney or President Santorum or any man or woman who later becomes president, and nobody else. That one person alone is to decide what is appropriate and lawful and feasible. If the Vice President thinks it is feasible to capture somene, too bad for him. He should have gotten a better job if he wanted to be a decider. If the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court thinks preaching against the United States is not a capital offense, tough tamales. He shouldn’t dress in his bathrobe if he wants to be taken seriously. If the United States Congress objects that the president’s “surgical strikes” tend to kill too many random men, women, and children, well they know what they can do: Run for president! If the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings has objections, well — Isn’t that SPECIAL? And the American people? They can shut up or vote for a racist buffoon from the bad party.

…………

But you see, this is all OK, because Barack Obama is a good guy, so no countervailing government structures, or for that matter any public access to information needs to be allowed:

A consensus has emerged during the presidency of Barack Obama. His administration is increasingly regarded as the worst on issues related to freedom of information and transparency.

Today, Josh Gerstein of POLITICO has a story that gives voice to this emerging consensus, which more and more open government advocates hold despite the fact that the Obama Administration maintains it is committed to “openness.”

Gerstein’s story features a quote from a Washington-based lawyer “who’s been filing” Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests since 1978. The lawyer, Katherine Mayer, says, “Obama is the sixth administration that’s been in office since I’ve been doing Freedom of Information Act work. … It’s kind of shocking to me to say this, but of the six, this administration is the worst on FOIA issues. The worst. There’s just no question about it.”

Think about this for a second: This is all predicated on the idea that the Executive is a good guy who won’t abuse power, and so there is no need for checks and balances.

This is why I call Barack Obama the worst constitutional law professor ever.

My Take on Obama’s State of the Union Speech

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I didn’t expect to be impressed, and I wasn’t.  I’m really not one of his fans.

Quick bullet points:

  • His nods to populism seemed to be insincere.  I really don’t believe that we’ll see any effort to crack down on, for example, Chinese trade/currency manipulation.
  • He couldn’t resist inserting yet another “there are people on both sides” who are nasty bit, as was his digression about milk spill regulations, and icky regulations.
  • Raising taxes on millionaires, and banning congressional insider trading and lobbying by campaign bundlers are winners, but won’t pass this Congress.
  • His statements on spending war savings on infrastructure is nothing new.
  • His call for establishing a financial crimes unit is probably a good idea, assuming that it is not just rearranging deck chairs.
  • I liked his shout out to Richard Cordray heading the CFPB.  It was pretty much his only “in your face” to the ‘Phants.

Obama’s War on Open Government Continues

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They are going after a CIA officer who revealed our chain of gulags and torture:

The Justice Department on Monday charged a former CIA officer with repeatedly leaking classified information, including the identities of agency operatives involved in the capture and interrogation of alleged terrorists.

The case against John Kiriakou, who also served as a senior Senate aide, extends the Obama administration’s crackdown on disclosures of national security secrets. Kiriakou, 47, is the sixth target of a leaks-related prosecution since President Obama took office, exceeding the total number of comparable prosecutions under all previous administrations combined, legal experts said.

Kiriakou, who was among the first to go public with details about the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation measures, was charged with disclosing classified information to reporters and lying to the agency about the origin of other sensitive material he published in a book. He faces up to 30 years in prison if convicted.

Seriously, this sh%$ is just evil.

There have been more prosecutions of leakers in 3 years of the Obama administration than there had been over the prior two hundred and twenty years.

This is despicable.

Obama’s Assassination Catch-22

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If you are targeted by this administration for assassination, then only you can challenge this in court, but the Obama administration will sniff out your communications with your lawyers in order to find and kill you:

On Saturday in Somalia, the U.S. fired missiles from a drone and killed the 27-year-old Lebanon-born, ex-British citizen Bilal el-Berjawi. His wife had given birth 24 hours earlier and the speculation is that the U.S. located him when his wife called to give him the news. Roughly one year ago, El-Berjawi was stripped of his British citizenship, obtained when his family moved to that country when he was an infant, through the use of a 2006 British anti-Terrorism law — passed after the London subway bombing — that the current government is using with increasing frequency to strip alleged Terrorists with dual nationality of their British citizenship (while providing no explanation for that act). El-Berjawi’s family vehemently denies that he is involved with Terrorism, but he was never able to appeal the decree against him for this reason:

Berjawi is understood to have sought to appeal against the order, but lawyers representing his family were unable to take instructions from him amid concerns that any telephone contact could precipitate a drone attack.

Obviously, those concerns were valid. So first the U.S. tries to assassinate people, then it causes legal rulings against them to be issued because the individuals, fearing for their life, are unable to defend themselves. Meanwhile, no explanation or evidence is provided for either the adverse government act or the assassination: it is simply secretly decreed and thus shall it be.

Exactly the same thing happened with U.S. citizen Anwar Awlaki. When the ACLU and CCR, representing Awlaki’s father, sued President Obama asking a federal court to enjoin the President from killing his American son without a trial, the Obama DOJ insisted (and the court ultimately accepted) that Awlaki himself must sue on his own behalf. Obviously, that was impossible given that the Obama administration was admittedly trying to kill him and surely would have done so the minute he stuck his head up to contact lawyers (indeed, the U.S. tried to kill him each time they thought they had located him, and then finally succeeded). So again in the Awlaki case: the U.S. targets someone for death, and then their inability to defend themselves is used as a weapon to deny their legal rights.

This is deeply repulsive, and, unfortunately, it is the new normal, and the next president, whether it be in 2012 or 2016, will accept this and extend these policies, just as Obama has, and things will get worse again.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot??!!??!!??

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OK, I get the optics.

Having Obama give his nomination acceptance speech in a huge outdoor stadium, with a much louder and more enthusiastic crowd, as he did in 2008.

It gives his speech more excitement.

I get it.

But to give the speech in Bank of America Stadium?!?!?!?

First, he chooses an anti-union right to work state, and now he’s testifying in an edifice named after a bank?

And it’s not just a bank.  It’s one of the “too big to fail” banks that got billions (trillions?) in taxpayer bailouts.

Great googly moogly!

John Stewart Goes Postal on Barack Obama

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Brutal!

John Stewart gives Barack Obama a righteous, and justly deserved, beat-down over the President’s signing of the “f%$# the Bill of Rights” indefinite detention defense authorization bill.

It’s remarkable how much eloquence he (and to be fair, his writers) gives to the absolute outrage through humor than the outrage expressed by other commentators.

If you want to show someone who doesn’t get why what happened is so wrong, this conveys it more succinctly than anything I’ve read from Greenwald, or Taibbi, or the Rude Pundit.

Stewart is a national treasure.

I Know that this is Stating the Obvious……

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Barack Obama did not “Keep his promise” to get out of Iraq.

We still have thousands or armed mercenaries contractors, and Obama did not pull the troops out voluntarily.

The Iraqis kicked us out, and Obama wanted to stay.

He wanted thousands of troops, a number of bases, to remain in Iraq.

As I’ve said before, Obama claims to oppose “stupid wars”, but he refuses to acknowledge that any war can be stupid.”

What Digby Says

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Her comments on the Obama’s administration craven capitulation on Plan B contraception:

If Democrats cared as much about getting young women to the polls as they care about getting ideologically incoherent swing voters, they’d win in a walk. They are progressive and they are hostile to the GOP agenda on nearly every level. They have been the most loyal Democratic voters but they are demoralized and need to be reassured that the Democrats give a damn about them. The Plan B decision says the opposite.

This is patently clear to anyone with a brain, but, unfortunately, Barack Obama isn’t.

He got into the Senate because his rich primary opponents cut each other to bits, and then his opponent in the general self destructed (wanted to have sex in public with his wife) and was replaced by the craziest person in the Republican party (Alan “WTF?” Keyes).

He won the White House because the press hated Hillary Clinton, and George W. Bush so thoroughly trashed the Republican brand, and then faced a doddering old fool who selected the stupidest f%$#ing person in Alaska as a running mate.

It’s better to lucky than smart, but stupid is always bad news, and I see absolutely no sign of any sort of political savvy here.

It’s sad when a politician seizes on a load of crap (Post Partisan Unity Schtick) as a “special sauce,” and then believes it.

Of course, this describes the Republicans too, and they all add a hefty dose of batsh%$ insane.

I miss the calm sanity and liberalism of Richard Milhaus Nixon.

Another Core Democratic Party Value Betrayed

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This one isn’t a surprise. Barack Obama has a long tradition of ambivalence to women’s reproductive rights.

He’s been uninterested in women’s issues since his days in the Illinois legislature.

Most recently, we have the ruling by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruling the FDA’s decision to make the Plan B morning after pill an over the counter medication.

Let’s be clear here. This is the first time ever that an HHS Secretary has overruled the FDA.

And Obama is fine with this:

President Obama, who took office pledging to put science ahead of politics, averted a skirmish with conservatives in the nation’s culture wars on Thursday by endorsing his health secretary’s decision to block over-the-counter sales of an after-sex contraceptive pill to girls under age 17.

The administration action inevitably raised questions about whether politics was trump in this instance — especially from disappointed supporters in the scientific and women’s rights communities. Mr. Obama, who had criticized how his predecessor made decisions on issues like contraceptives, sought to dispel that idea in remarks to White House reporters.

“I did not get involved in the process,” he quickly asserted.

Yes, while Barack Obama is getting his faux populist cred on for the upcoming election, he had nothing to do with this decision.

In the control freak factory that is the Obama administration, the idea that this decision was not thoroughly vetted by both the policy and political wonks is simply not believeable.

In fact, if the head of HHS made this decision without passing it up the chain, it justify their firing.

Mr. Obama said the decision was made by his secretary of health and human services, Kathleen Sebelius. On Wednesday, in a rare move, she overruled the Food and Drug Administration, which had recommended that the morning-after pill Plan B One-Step is safe and should be sold without a prescription to people under 17, just as it is now to those who are 17 and older.

“I will say this, as the father of two daughters: I think it is important for us to make sure that we apply some common sense to various rules when it comes to over-the-counter medicine,” Mr. Obama said.

“And as I understand it, the reason Kathleen made this decision was she could not be confident that a 10-year-old or an 11-year-old going into a drugstore should be able — alongside bubble gum or batteries — be able to buy a medication that potentially, if not used properly, could end up having an adverse effect. And I think most parents would probably feel the same way.”

Bullsh%$.

This is just too dangerous, but acetaminophen, which causes, “over 56,000 injuries, 2,500 hospitalizations, and an estimated 450 deaths per year,” kids can buy that at the drug store.

And of course the whole, “Using his daughters as political human shield thing,” is contemptible.

First, he is putting a barrier in that will likely force some girls to ask their rapist’s permission, second, even a couple of hour delay to get a prescription makes the drug less effective, and third, it’s a couple of orders of magnitude (at least) safer than pregnancy.

Once again, I am glad that I don’t live in a swing state, so I don’t have to vote for this hypocritical ratf%$#.

Yeah, not primarying him was such a good thing.

Just When I Thought that I Could Not Get Any More Cynical………

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I read this analysis, which makes the very convincing case that Barack Obama does not object to the detention provisions of the defense authorization bill because he supports the rule of law, but because it classifies these detainees as prisoners of war, and so subject to the strictures of the Geneva Conventions:

However, on further reflection I conclude that the Obama regime’s objection to military detention is not rooted in concern for the constitutional rights of American citizens.  The regime objects to military detention because the implication of military detention is that detainees are prisoners of war. As Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin put it:  Should somebody determined “to be a member of an enemy force who has come to this nation or is in this nation to attack us as a member of a foreign enemy, should that person be treated according to the laws of war? The answer is yes.”

Detainees treated according to the laws of war have the protections of the Geneva Conventions. They cannot be tortured. The Obama regime opposes military detention, because detainees would have some rights.  These rights would interfere with the regime’s ability to send detainees to CIA torture prisons overseas.  This is what the Obama regime means when it says that the requirement of military detention denies the regime “flexibility.”

The Bush/Obama regimes have evaded the Geneva Conventions by declaring that detainees are not POWs, but “enemy combatants,” “terrorists,” or some other designation that removes all accountability from the US government for their treatment.

By requiring military detention of the captured, Congress is undoing all the maneuvering that two regimes have accomplished in removing POW status from detainees.
A careful reading of the Obama regime’s objections to military detention supports this conclusion.(See http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/legislative/sap/112/saps1867s_20111117.pdf)

The November 17 letter to the Senate from the Executive Office of the President says that the Obama regime does not want the authority it has under the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), Public Law 107-40, to be codified. Codification is risky, the regime says. “After a decade of settled jurisprudence on detention authority, Congress must be careful not to open a whole new series of legal questions that will distract from our efforts to protect the country.”

In other words, the regime is saying that under AUMF the executive branch has total discretion as to who it detains and how it treats detainees. Moreover, as the executive branch has total discretion, no one can find out what the executive branch is doing, who detainees are, or what is being done to them. Codification brings accountability, and the executive branch does not want accountability.

Those who see hope in Obama’s threatened veto have jumped to conclusions if they think the veto is based on constitutional scruples.

(emphasis original)

Read the White House PDF.  They flat out  say that the reason that they object is because they want more “flexibility” (to torture, etc).

It’s not for nothing that I call Obama the “The Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever”.

H/t Washington’s Blog.

Bill Daley Being Shuffled Out the Door

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Well, it looks like Obama’s more prominent efforts to completely capitulate to the Washington, DC insider consensus, his appointment of William Daley, political insider and bankster, as his chief of staff, is now inoperative:

President Obama’s chief of staff, William M. Daley, has turned over some of his day-to-day management responsibilities to another senior aide, Pete Rouse, according to several officials with knowledge of the change. The shift comes after a turbulent period in which the White House has struggled with a weak economy and a hostile Congress.

Mr. Daley made the announcement in a staff meeting on Monday, these officials said, though it was unclear exactly what his new role would look like. He told a Chicago television station recently that he planned to return to his home there after the 2012 election.

The news of the management changes was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

A banker with deep connections on Wall Street and in Democratic politics, Mr. Daley was recruited by Mr. Obama last fall to smooth relations with the business world. But after the administration’s failure to strike a deficit-reduction deal with the House speaker, John A. Boehner, Mr. Daley found that his deal-making skills were of less use.

Yeah, that whole “Kissing Republican and bankster ass,” post partisan unity schtick strategy worked so well, didn’t it.

Don’t worry though, you can be sure that a year from now, we’ll see it back, just as soon as the polls close.

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

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The Marijuana Policy Project has just declared that Barack Obama is the worst President ever on medical Marijuana.

I think that this is not a deeply felt philosophy, but yet another case where a lack of ideology, or perhaps a contempt for ideology, that leads him to placate the most extreme of the dead enders, whether it be the drug war, or the Iraq war. (Where we were thrown out, we didn’t leave voluntarily)

What this means is that he doubles down more aggressively on bad policy than he would if he actually believed in it.

It’s kind a metaphor for his whole a political career.

H/t Disinformation.

More Like George W. Bush Every Day

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Barack Obama is now claiming that the legal opinion granting him the authority to assassinate American citizens is a state secret, and so it is not subject to any sort of public scrutiny.

You know, as scary as George Bush was, he was basically a dunce, Barack Obama is a lot of things, but he is not stupid.

This not a fact that I find particularly reassuring:

Why? What justification can there be for President Obama and his lawyers to keep secret what they’re asserting is a matter of sound law? This isn’t a military secret. It isn’t an instance of protecting CIA field assets, or shielding a domestic vulnerability to terrorism from public view. This is an analysis of the power that the Constitution and Congress’ post September 11 authorization of military force gives the executive branch. This is a president exploiting official secrecy so that he can claim legal justification for his actions without having to expose his specific reasoning to scrutiny. As the Post put it, “The administration officials refused to disclose the exact legal analysis used to authorize targeting Aulaqi, or how they considered any Fifth Amendment right to due process.”

Obama hasn’t just set a new precedent about killing Americans without due process. He has done so in a way that deliberately shields from public view the precise nature of the important precedent he has set. It’s time for the president who promised to create “a White House that’s more transparent and accountable than anything we’ve seen before” to release the DOJ memo. As David Shipler writes, “The legal questions are far from clearcut, and the country needs to have this difficult discussion.” And then there’s the fact that “a good many Obama supporters thought that secret legal opinions by the Justice Department — rationalizing torture and domestic military arrests, for example — had gone out the door along with the Bush administration,” he adds. “But now comes a momentous change in policy with serious implications for the Constitution’s restraint on executive power, and Obama refuses to allow his lawyers’ arguments to be laid out on the table for the American public to examine.” What doesn’t he want to get out?

Think about it for a second: This ruling just an evaluations of public court rulings and public statutes, but they have buried this from any sort of public scrutiny.

There can’t be any sensitive secrets involved, but they are covering it up.

Something is hinky here.

The President Murders an American Citizen

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One of the flat out most disturbing thing that Barack Obama has done is to claim that he has an absolute right to murder anyone, anywhere, any time based on his unilateral declaration that it is in the interest of national security.

Most recently, this was shown in the murder of Anwar al-Awlaki.

This was an extrajudicial killing with the only evidence made public being that he “inspired” people to wage war against us.

I really don’t have the words to describe just how awful this is, but the Rude Pundit does. (and the essay is completely safe for work as well)

Just go read him.

I’m just thankful that I live in Maryland, where my vote for President does not matter in 2012, so I won’t.*

*No, I won’t vote Republican, I just won’t cast a ballot for President, or I’ll write in Howard Dean.

Melissa Harris-Perry is a (Not Very) Useful Idiot

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And what’s more, she is an idiot who is inadvertently enabling racists to use coded speech to race bait.

You see,she is claiming that “white liberals” are losing faith in Barack Obama because they are all a bunch of racists, who require a black man to be Superman in order to get their support:

President Obama has experienced a swift and steep decline in support among white Americans—from 61 percent in 2009 to 33 percent now. I believe much of that decline can be attributed to their disappointment that choosing a black man for president did not prove to be salvific for them or the nation. His record is, at the very least, comparable to that of President Clinton, who was enthusiastically re-elected. The 2012 election is a test of whether Obama will be held to standards never before imposed on an incumbent. If he is, it may be possible to read that result as the triumph of a more subtle form of racism.

You know, there is also the possibility that he’s just not doing a good job.

One indicator of this is that his favorability numbers are cratering among the Black community aw well:

New cracks have begun to show in President Obama’s support amongst African Americans, who have been his strongest supporters. Five months ago, 83 percent of African Americans held “strongly favorable” views of Obama, but in a new Washington Post-ABC news poll that number has dropped to 58 percent. That drop is similar to slipping support for Obama among all groups.

“There is a certain amount of racial loyalty and party loyalty, but eventually that was going to have to weaken,” said Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University, who studies African Americans. “It’s understandable given the economy.”

So we have a 25% drop among AAs, and a 28% drop among whites.

And we have no numbers at all broken out for white liberals.

So Harris-Perry is full of crap, but that’s the least of it.

You see, every time we get this sort of sh%$ spewed at us, it allows the real racists out there, and there are a lot of them, to claim that there is no racism, and that it’s all just a code word for the liberal agenda.

Dr. Harris-Perry is clearly a big fan of Barack Obama, and she is clearly wants to explain away what other people see as his failings, but tossing about specious accusations of bigotry where no objective data serves to make any statements about racism that much less credible.

I know that it’s easier than answering things David Sirota’s statement that. “Racism isn’t responsible for the president’s drop in popularity. His right-wing policies are,” but it is intellectually bankrupt, and it serves the purposes of the real racists out there.

Quote of the Day

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Politico, who always shorts Democratic Party Prospects, is saying that the Democrats’ chances of retaking the house are not good, and they uncork this one:

Now, resigned to the likelihood that the president will be a down-ballot drag in many races and absent signs of an electoral wave on the horizon, Democrats are scaling back their expectations.

(emphasis mine)

I tend to think of Politico as a bunch of shallow inside the beltway lizard brains (as in medulla oblongata), but they nailed it here.

Obama is a huge drag on the ticket, and the 2010 results, which were a reversal of historical proportions were the direct result of nationalizing the election and making Obama the issue.

I’m beginning to think that the eventual Republican nominee will have to do the equivalent of, “putting half a dozen children on a spit, and toasting them at the flame that comes out of their mouth,” to paraphrase Christopher Fry, in order for Obama to win.

Luckily for him, all the ‘Phants seem intent on doing this.

Obama Loses Frank Rich

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For not prosecuting the banksters. This is significant because, as Matt Taibbi notes, was “one of Obama’s great supporters in the punditry world,” and Rich’s latest piece is positively brutal:

What haunts the Obama administration is what still haunts the country: the stunning lack of accountability for the greed and misdeeds that brought America to its gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression. There has been no legal, moral, or financial reckoning for the most powerful wrongdoers. Nor have there been meaningful reforms that might prevent a repeat catastrophe. Time may heal most wounds, but not these. Chronic unemployment remains a constant, painful reminder of the havoc inflicted on the bust’s innocent victims. As the ghost of Hamlet’s father might have it, America will be stalked by its foul and unresolved crimes until they “are burnt and purged away.”

After the 1929 crash, and thanks in part to the legendary Ferdinand Pecora’s fierce thirties Senate hearings, America gained a Securities and Exchange Commission, the Public Utility Holding Company Act, and the Glass-Steagall Act to forestall a rerun. After the savings-and-loan debacle of the eighties, some 800 miscreants went to jail. But those who ran the central financial institutions of our fiasco escaped culpability (as did most of the institutions). As the indefatigable Matt Taibbi has tabulated, law enforcement on Obama’s watch rounded up 393,000 illegal immigrants last year and zero bankers. The Justice Department’s bally­hooed Operation Broken Trust has broken still more trust by chasing mainly low-echelon, one-off Madoff wannabes. You almost have to feel sorry for the era’s designated Goldman scapegoat, 32-year-old flunky “Fabulous Fab” Fabrice Tourre, who may yet take the fall for everyone else. It’s as if the Watergate investigation were halted after the cops nabbed the nudniks who did the break-in.

………

The fallout has left Obama in the worst imaginable political bind. No good deed he’s done for Wall Street has gone unpunished. He is vilified as an anti-capitalist zealot not just by Republican foes but even by some former backers. What has he done to deserve it? All anyone can point to is his December 2009 60 Minutes swipe at “fat-cat bankers on Wall Street”—an inept and anomalous Ed Schultz seizure that he retracted just weeks later by praising Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein as “very savvy businessmen.”

Obama can win reelection without carrying 10021 or Greenwich in any case. The bigger political problem is that a far larger share of the American electorate views him as a tool of the very fat-cat elite that despises him. Given Obama’s humble background, his history as a mostly liberal Democrat, and his famous résumé as a community organizer, this would also seem a reach. But the president has no one to blame but himself for the caricature. While he has never lusted after money—he’d rather get his hands on the latest novel by Morrison or Franzen—he is an elitist of a certain sort. For all the lurid fantasies of the birthers, the dirty secret of Obama’s background is that the values of Harvard, not of Kenya or Indonesia or Bill Ayers, have most colored his governing style. He falls hard for the best and the brightest white guys.

………

Obama soon retreated into the tea-party mantra of fiscal austerity. Short-term spending cuts when spending is needed to create jobs make no sense economically. But they also make no sense politically. The deficit has never been a top voter priority, no matter how loudly the right claims it is. At Obama’s inaugural, Gallup found that 11 percent of voters ranked unemployment as their top priority while only 2 percent did the deficit. Unemployment has remained a stable public priority over the deficit ever since, usually by at least a 2-to-1 ratio. In a CBS poll immediately after the Democrats’ “shellacking” of last November—a debacle supposedly precipitated by the tea party’s debt jihad—the question “What should Congress concentrate on in January?” yielded 56 percent for “economy/jobs” and 4 percent for “deficit reduction.”

Geithner has pushed deficit reduction as a priority since before the inauguration, the Washington Post recently reported in an article greeted as a smoking gun by liberal bloggers. But Obama is the chief executive. It’s his fault, no one else’s, that he seems diffident about the unemployed. Each time there’s a jolt in the jobless numbers, he and his surrogates compound that profile by farcically reshuffling the same clichés, from “stuck in a ditch” to “headwinds” (first used by Geithner in March 2009—retire it already!) to “bumps in the road.” It’s true the administration has caught few breaks and the headwinds have been strong, but voters have long since tuned out this monotonous apologia. The White House’s repeated argument that the stimulus saved as many as 3 million jobs, accurate though it may be, is another nonstarter when 14 million Americans are looking for work.

………

(emphasis mine)

If he’s losing (possibly already lost) someone like Frank Rich, who was  treating like the 2nd coming, he’s losing a lot of people.

About the only silver lining for this is that Rich, unlike myself, or Yves Smith, is unwilling to call him and his administration corrupt over this.