Schism.

You make the call. Is this Biden signaling a climbdown by the administration (again), or is this Biden trying to force a climbdown by publicly breaking with Obama? Remember, according to ABC, he was one of the most passionate opponents of the new rule inside the White House. He knows he’s handing the GOP a [...]

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But wait 'til you hear his reason why.

Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn — a stalwart against government overreach — disagrees with the Obama administration’s mandate that even religiously-affiliated employers provide employees with insurance that covers contraception, but he doesn’t think it represents a particularly drastic departure from the president’s other policies. “This is blown out of proportion,” he said. “It is an [...]

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He can't wait.

Conn Carroll’s already covered the bases on this at the Examiner but let me quote the key bit from an analysis by the lefty think tank Brookings back in August when the waivers were first announced: The White House has announced its plan to grant waivers of the provisions of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) [...]

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Conscience.

ABC says Lieberman, Manchin, Casey, and both Nelsons (Bill and Ben) have headed for the lifeboats, but I think that count’s already outdated. According to Fox News’s Chad Pergram, John Kerry also thinks the new rule “needs to be compromised, adjusted.” If all six vote with the GOP caucus to either repeal the rule or [...]

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Plus a sneak peek at his new book and his CPAC speech.

Yesterday I had the chance to spend some time with Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), the conservative stalwart who has spent the last several years trying to fight off attempts from members of both parties to impose a ruinous cap-and-trade system to control energy production and usage in the US.   He now has a book coming [...]

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Intervention.

I don’t usually draft posts in advance but tonight I’m going to get cracking on the inevitable “New Syrian government dominated by Sunni fanatics” post. It may not run for another year or two, but it’ll run. Will The One try to get congressional approval for this, I wonder, or will he “wing it” like [...]

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Plus: Democrats Tim Kaine, Bob Casey break with Obama over contraception ruling.

But … what about the big climbdown? Ah well. Maybe he took a second look at what Planned Parenthood did to Komen and thought better of it. Even the man who leads the greatest army in the world needs to know when he’s outgunned. Besides, how many divisions does the Pope have? President Obama “reinforced” [...]

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Change.

Pity poor Glenn Greenwald, who thought the left’s opposition to Bush’s counterterror policies was based on something more profound than crude partisan tribalism. Why he thought that, I don’t know: The writing was on the wall when the anti-war movement started dying even as Obama geared up for a surge of tens of thousands of [...]

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"I don’t have an opinion to express on how the Senate does its business with regards to this issue."

This isn’t even the most cavalier statement about the budget made by a Democrat today. Take it away, Steny Hoyer: At a briefing with journalists on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, Hoyer was asked, “Mr. Hoyer, around the same time of the State of the Union [on Jan. 24], I think it was the same day, [...]

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Heart-ache.

For a guy who’s allegedly so concerned about money in politics, he sure is good at getting money into politics. He broke his promise in 2008 to accept public financing once he realized he could raise three-quarters of a billion dollars. Despite his endless self-congratulation about not taking any dirty lobbyist money, he takes plenty [...]

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$193 million for American ... layoffs.

Last we heard from the Fisker Karma, the electric vehicle in which US taxpayers sunk $193 million so far, the loans were paying off by creating jobs … in Finland.  As it turns out, even that report was too optimistic.  With Fisker having burned through about 40% of the stimulus funds guaranteed by the Obama [...]

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Go ahead -- make his game.

Did Chrysler buy two minutes of the most expensive television time possible to air a stealth promotion for Barack Obama? Clint Eastwood narrates and appears in Chrysler’s spot, in which he declares that we have reached “halftime in America,” which seems to hint at a two-term Presidency for Obama: Politico covers the controversy: “It’s halftime. [...]

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All costs get passed to consumers. Always.

So you think you got a payroll-tax holiday for free? Think that the big fat-cat mortgage lenders will foot the bill as part of Obama’s promise to make the cut pay for itself? CBS’ Sharyl Attkisson delivers the wake-up call to home buyers, who will pay a pretty penny for the latest gimmick of Obamanomics: [...]

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Two visions.

Americans for Prosperity has a new one-minute advertisement reminding us that today is the 101st birthday of Ronald Reagan — and that we face a crucial question of vision in this nation.  One vision sees America as a place of dependence, of static class divisions, where economic mobility is a thing of the past.  The [...]

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Better late than never?

When Egypt’s population began widespread demonstrations against the Hosni Mubarak regime, it took Barack Obama eight days to demand the resignation of our nominal ally in Cairo.  When Moammar Qaddafi began a campaign of military attacks on his own people to suppress a revolt, it took us just a few weeks to launch an undeclared [...]

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Better late than never?

When Egypt’s population began widespread demonstrations against the Hosni Mubarak regime, it took Barack Obama eight days to demand the resignation of our nominal ally in Cairo.  When Moammar Qaddafi began a campaign of military attacks on his own people to suppress a revolt, it took us just a few weeks to launch an undeclared [...]

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Conscience.

“The decision to require Catholic hospitals to provide contraceptives and abortifacients they deem immoral in their insurance plans, demonstrates either President Obama’s personal antagonism to religious liberty — or the degree to which he is beholden to the secular left. “Because it makes no political sense… “Obama is too politically savvy to have been caught [...]

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Cameo!

The early hours today look dull — “Meet the Press,” which leads with Gingrich, is probably your best bet — but things will pick up this afternoon when The One sits down with Matt Lauer during NBC’s endless Super Bowl pre-game show for a little class warfare before kickoff. No word yet on the exact [...]

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Paralysis.

“A United Nations Security Council effort to end the violence in Syria collapsed in acrimony with a double veto by Russia and China on Saturday, hours after the Syrian military attacked the city of Homs in what opposition leaders described as the deadliest government assault in the nearly 11-month uprising. “The veto and the mounting [...]

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Bad policy.

For the last three years, domestic politics in the US has centered around the concept and application of mandates in health care.  Barack Obama made that the key to his health-care reform; the Tea Party got fueled in large part over its inclusion.  Obama argued at the time and to this day that his mandate [...]

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Genuflect, genuflect, genuflect ... not that it will do you much good.

Michael Ramirez’ work at Investors Business Daily is always brilliant, but yesterday’s editorial cartoon may be one of his best ever.  The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner takes on the Church of Government, as my friend John Hinderaker calls it at Power Line, and skewers Barack Obama’s pretensions of being a faith leader while shredding the [...]

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Whoa.

Some have suggested that Republicans could nominate a syphilitic camel in 2012 and still beat Barack Obama. (Hey, I’m willing to hear the camel out; what’s his position on taxes?) That sounded like hyperbole until Scott Rasmussen released this video today, discussing the internals of his head-to-head matchups in weekly tracking polls. Mitt Romney now [...]

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Wait -- what?

When the administration announced earlier this month that it would stick to its decision to require religiously-affiliated employers to provide their employees with insurance that covers contraception, the national Catholic reaction was, to put it mildly, less than supportive. All across the country, Catholic bishops wrote and read letters to their flocks that read, “We [...]

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Power grab.

Welcome news on the merits, but I doubt Obama cares much. If he wins, then the Cordray and NLRB appointments are vindicated constitutionally, which will give him political cover to be even bolder with his executive power grabs. If he loses, then instead of whining endlessly on the campaign trail this year about the conservative [...]

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Trends.

Today’s unemployment news gave the Obama administration a bit of good news for the upcoming election — and really just a bit — but Gallup had already provided a big dash of cold water yesterday.  In their look at partisan trends on a state-by-state basis, there has been a dramatic shift in favor of the [...]

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He'll always have Corzine.

No surprise to you and me, but apparently this comes as quite a shock to the Huffington Post.  Paul Blumenthal reports that Democrats sputter that Wall Street never had it so good, but perhaps the investors in the world of finance might know a bad stock when they see it.  Obama has been outraised in [...]

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Boost.

The US economy had a good month for job creation in December, according to the new report this morning from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  We added 243,000 net jobs and the unemployment rate fell two-tenths of a percent to 8.3%: Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 243,000 in January, and the unemployment rate decreased [...]

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Elections.

This makes twice in 24 hours that the SecDef has telegraphed a hugely consequential military decision to the enemy. Either (a) he’s a moron, (b) he’s lying for strategic advantage, or (c) he has something else in mind. I don’t think he’s a moron and I can’t fathom what the strategic advantage to this might [...]

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But don't take our word for it ...

Three years ago today, while Barack Obama demanded almost $800 billion in stimulus funds, he told NBC that the money would generate millions of net new jobs and a new period of growth in short order.  “If I don’t have this done in three years,” Obama told NBC, “then there’s going to be a one-term [...]

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Fantasy.

Today, Politico’s Jim VandeHei reports that economic indicators should have Barack Obama worried about his re-election prospects, not more sanguine.  VandeHei relies heavily on this week’s economic and deficit projections from the CBO, but perhaps not heavily enough: A new CBO report grabbed lots of headlines for projecting the deficit will top $1 trillion this [...]

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