{"id":189794,"date":"2010-02-12T21:46:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-13T02:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/02\/12\/obama-fail\/"},"modified":"2010-02-12T21:46:00","modified_gmt":"2010-02-13T02:46:00","slug":"obama-fail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/02\/12\/obama-fail\/","title":{"rendered":"Obama Fail"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>OK, so Obama made some noises about recess appointments, and the Republicans let <a href=\"http:\/\/www.politico.com\/news\/stories\/0210\/32874.html\">27 nominees get an up or down vote<\/a>, the ones that do not matter.<\/p>\n<p>Well, that&#8217;s good.<\/p>\n<p>What is not good is that Obama followed up with signals that there is no need for recess appointments (BTW, Clinton made about 150, and GWB made about 200).<\/p>\n<p>No, when you have them down, you <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">put your foot on their neck<\/span>.<\/p>\n<p>If they block your Transportation Security Administration (TSA) nominee, as they did. because they don&#8217;t like Barack Obama&#8217;s position on union rights for the employees, you don&#8217;t back down, you <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">appoint Teamsters President James Hoffa as your TSA chief<\/span>.  Hell, if they were still alive, you appoint his dad, Jimmy Hoffa, or maybe Walter Ruther or Eugene V. Debs during the recess.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, as <a href=\"http:\/\/voices.washingtonpost.com\/ezra-klein\/2010\/02\/a_deal_on_nominations_that_eve.html\">Ezra Klein notes<\/a>, in getting this small concession, Obama stated that recess appointments are a, &#8220;rare but not unprecedented step,&#8221; which makes any attempt to do recess appointments in the future an invitation to your standard Republican sh%$ storm of phony outrage, and as <a href=\"http:\/\/yglesias.thinkprogress.org\/archives\/2010\/02\/27-nominees-confirmed.php\">Matthew Yglesias notes<\/a>, the Obama administration really does not have time for this crap.<\/p>\n<p>Stupid, really stupid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>OK, so Obama made some noises about recess appointments, and the Republicans let 27 nominees get an up or down vote, the ones that do not matter. Well, that&#8217;s good. What is not good is that Obama followed up with signals that there is no need for recess appointments (BTW, Clinton made about 150, and &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[998,978,982,1173],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-189794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress","category-politics","category-stupid","category-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189794"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189794"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189794\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}