Gee, maybe you can get the Obama seal of approval too.... just by being his buddy and turning a blind eye on cue!

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How Chicago culture affects and offends...

A WORD FROM KRISTOFER HARRISON

Posted by Scott Johnson, Powerline

Kristofer Harrison served as the Chief of Staff to the Counselor of the Secretary of State during the Bush administration. Mr. Harrison writes to comment on Paul Mirengoff's post "No class, bad character" on Dick Cheney's speech this past week, Stephen Hayes's Weekly Standard article "Obama's minions are ingrates," and my post on both of them, "No class, bad character: The inside story." Mr. Harrison writes:

You, Paul and Stephen have the story dead to rights. I was involved in the the Bush administration's 2008 Afghanistan review and it was every bit as in depth and serious as the one several years earlier for Iraq. It involved many of the same people who helped conduct Gen. McChrystal's recent review and included Democrats, Republicans, our British allies, Afghans, etc. The strategy put forward was sound and competent, and carbon-copy similar to the one that President Obama announced in March.

It is also true that team Obama was briefed on this review before assuming office. In fact, we began briefing both campaigns even before the election. I don't remember the dates, but well before the election we began bringing together the national security teams from both campaigns for in-depth briefing sessions under the auspices of the Aspen Institute. These were long events where Bush administration cabinet-level officials spent days -- yes, days -- briefing the two candidates' advisers. After the election we began spending hours with the transition team on the details of the plan and the situation on the ground.

It is also true that Obama's transition team asked us to hold the Afghanistan review findings, a request to which President Bush acquiesced because (as it was relayed to me) he did not want to box the new president into a narrow set of options. In March, when Obama announced his new Afghanistan strategy, I did not notice a single change from the new plan that we had given him...only Obama did not resource it with enough troops.

The Chicago mob's behavior is unbelievably unseemly. Here they were given an immense amount of material, a complete strategic review and plan with the author's heading left blank. President Bush felt it was his duty to do so. And all Obama can do is smear president Bush, even after he filled his own name into the author's column.

Obama seems not to understand that it is not President Bush who is suffering here. Rather, it is our under-resourced soldiers in Afghanistan who are suffering. Obama has had his hands on this plan for a full year now, and he's done virtually nothing except play politics. He needs to give our soldiers the resources to succeed, and then help create the political atmosphere so that they have time to succeed. It seems he has the intestinal fortitude to do neither. Weak, weak, weak.

Thoughts on Health Care Reform from Mike Walker

It is sad that some politicians are cutting special deals and some rich lobbying groups are drooling at the prospect of how much money they are going to make out of health care reform, but I have never lived in a perfect world and never expect perfection out of Washington D.C.

Just don't tell me that the politicians and lobbyists for the health insurance companies or the trial lawyers are putting our Country ahead of their own selfish interests. Be assured, probably sooner rather than later, the rest of are going to be taking money out of wallets and handing it to the lobbyist's minions with the blessing of our elected officials.

But I also refuse to make a demand for perfection the enemy of doing a good. And we are on the verge of doing a wonderful good.

It is such a fine thing to know that in the very near future, millions of American who need but cannot afford health care will be protected. It also renews my faith in our great Country that good and decent people will no longer be denied health care coverage because of a pre-existing condition.

The comfort in that outweighs my anger over the fat cats getting richer and there is always the chance that they may someday get their just deserts.

After that, I lose my enthusiasm for the political nabob’s agendas. This is especially true in the case of a proposed government-run health insurance company, some "Halloween-esque" morph of Fannie Med or Freddie Doc. It will be a disaster.

From a fiscal perspective, a government-run health care company will behave like the old schoolyard bully who is hungry and wants the other kid’s lunch money.

He will come up on the unsuspecting and defenseless kids at the playground and offer two options: Give me your lunch money now or I will beat it out of you (through punitive legislation) and then take your lunch money anyway. Fork it over, kid.

The bully cares not if it is a boy or girl, happy or sad, good or bad, because when he is hungry it is all a matter of “mind over matter.” The bully does not mind stealing the lunch money and the poor kid does not matter.

So at the end of day, the government bully will be getting fatter and fatter and the other kids will be going home hungry.

A government-run health care business is not good for Americans. It is not good for America.

We can and must do better

Warm regards,

Mike

Obama Hits Opponents With Chicago Brass Knuckles

by Michael Barone, Townhall.com

"His father was a great friend of my father." The reference to William Ayers' father was how Mayor Richard M. Daley began his defense of Barack Obama for his association with the unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist. Daley's father, of course, was Richard M. Daley, mayor of Chicago from 1955 until his death in 1976. Ayers' father was head of Commonwealth Edison, the Chicago-based utility, from 1964 to 1980.

You bet they were great friends. That's governance, Chicago style. The head of government is friends with the heads of every big business, lobby and union, and together they make decisions on how everyone else will live. Those on the inside get what they want. Those on the outside -- well, they get what the big guys want them to have. That's life in the big city.

It's not the worst way to run a city. I know -- I'm from Detroit, which might be better off if it had mayors named Daley for 41 of the last 54 years. But it's not the optimal way to run a national administration, at least if you've promised to bring in a new era of bipartisanship and mutual respect. Even so, it appears to be the way that Barack Obama, who once aspired to be mayor of Chicago, has decided to run his administration.

We can see that nowhere better than on the health care issue. Over the spring and summer, the White House door has been wide open to lobbyists from health care businesses. The doctors' lobby has gotten promises that physician payments won't be knocked down too much. In return, they are expected to lobby for whatever bill the congressional Democrats come up with.

The pharmaceutical firms' lobbyist, former House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Billy Tauzin, has gotten assurances that his clients' business model won't be wrecked any more than it already has been by stringent regulation. In return PhRMA is running TV ads for health care reform.

The health insurance companies were on board, too. Until, that is, Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus presented his bill requiring them to cover anyone who applies but exacting only small fines from healthy individuals who decide not to buy insurance until they get sick. Since this looked like a quick road to bankruptcy, the health insurers' lobby commissioned a study that pointed out, correctly I think, that the Baucus bill would increase the cost of insurance to those who already have it.

The response of the Chicago-style Obama White House was reminiscent of the response of the late Mayor Daley when asked an inconvenient question by a reporter whose father and brother were Democratic precinct committeemen. "Sometimes in the best of families, there's a bad apple," replied Daley, to the bewilderment of reporters from out of town. A bad apple is, in Chicago, a former great friend who is not playing team ball.

So the health insurers have been denounced by White House spokesmen and Democratic congressional leaders as foul fiends and gougers of working families. Prominent Democrats have been talking about revoking insurance companies' exemption from the antitrust laws (granted so that small firms would have access to data needed to compete with the giants). Translated into Chicagoese: Nice little insurance company you got there. Too bad if something happened to it.

The same treatment is being given to Fox News, which according to White House spokesmen, "is not a news organization." "Other news organizations, like yours," Obama consigliere David Axelrod told ABC News, "ought not to treat them that way."

In other words, when Fox breaks the news that the White House green czar is a self-proclaimed "Communist" or that operatives of pro-Obama ACORN have been aiding and abetting child prostitution, other news outlets should spike the story. Or risk being demoted from great friend to bad apple.

Last February, Obama told Fox News (to which I am a contributor), "I don't always get my most favorable coverage on Fox, but I think that's part of how democracy is supposed to work. You know, we're not supposed to all be in lockstep here."

Now we are. Maybe Obama thought everyone in Washington would be his great friend. Having encountered un-Chicago-like dissent and disagreement, he has responded with classic Chicago brass knuckles. We'll see how far this kind of thuggery gets him.

Petroleum is a major part of America’s energy picture. Shall we get it here or abroad?

By Sarah Palin

Given that we’re spending billions of stimulus dollars to rebuild our highways, it makes sense to think about what we’ll be driving on them. For years to come, most of what we drive will be powered, at least in part, by diesel fuel or gasoline. To fuel that driving, we need access to oil. The less use we make of our own reserves, the more we will have to import, which leads to a number of harmful consequences. That means we need to drill here and drill now.

We rely on petroleum for much more than just powering our vehicles: It is essential in everything from jet fuel to petrochemicals, plastics to fertilizers, pesticides to pharmaceuticals. Ac­cord­ing to the Energy Information Ad­min­is­tra­tion, our total domestic petroleum consumption last year was 19.5 million barrels per day (bpd). Motor gasoline and diesel fuel accounted for less than 13 million bpd of that. Meanwhile, we produced only 4.95 million bpd of domestic crude. In other words, even if we ran all our vehicles on something else (which won’t happen anytime soon), we would still have to depend on imported oil. And we’ll continue that dependence until we develop our own oil resources to their fullest extent.

Those who oppose domestic drilling are motivated primarily by environmental considerations, but many of the countries we’re forced to import from have few if any environmental-protection laws, and those that do exist often go unenforced. In effect, American environmentalists are preventing responsible development here at home while supporting irresponsible development overseas.

My home state of Alaska shows how it’s possible to be both pro-environment and pro-resource-development. Alaskans would never support anything that endangered our pristine air, clean water, and abundant wildlife (which, among other things, provides many of us with our livelihood). The state’s government has made safeguarding resources a priority; when I was governor, for instance, we created a petroleum-systems-integrity office to monitor our oil and gas infrastructure for any potential environmental risks.

Alaska also shows how oil drilling is thoroughly compatible with energy conservation and renewable-energy development. Over 20 percent of Alas­ka’s electricity currently comes from renewable sources, and as governor I put forward a long-term plan to increase that figure to 50 percent by 2025. Alaska’s comprehensive plan identifies renewable options across the state that can help rural villages transition away from expensive diesel-generated electricity — allowing each community to choose the solution that best fits its needs. That’s important in any energy plan: Tempting as they may be to central planners, top-down, one-size-fits-all solutions are recipes for failure.

For the same reason, the federal government shouldn’t push a single, uni­versal approach to alternative-powered vehicles. Electric cars might work in Los Angeles, but they don’t work in Alaska, where you can drive hundreds of miles without seeing many people, let alone many electrical sockets. And while electric and hybrid cars have their advantages, producing the electricity to power them still requires an energy source. For the sake of the environment, that energy should be generated from the cleanest source available.

Natural gas is one promising clean alternative. It contains fewer pollutants than other fossil fuels, it’s easier to collect and process, and it is found throughout our country. In Alaska, we’re developing the largest private-sector energy project in history — a 3,000-mile, $40 billion pipeline to transport hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of natural gas to markets across the United States. Onshore and offshore na­tural gas from Alaska and the Lower 48 can satisfy a large part of our energy needs for decades, bringing us closer to energy independence. Whether we use it to power natural-gas cars or to run natural-gas power plants that charge electric cars — or ideally for both — natural gas can act as a clean “bridge fuel” to a future when more renewable sources are available.

In addition to drilling, we need to build new refineries. America currently has roughly 150 refineries, down from over 300 in the 1970s. Due mainly to environmental regulations, we haven’t built a major new refinery since 1976, though our oil consumption has increased significantly since then. That’s no way to secure our energy supply. The post-Katrina jump in gas prices proved that we can’t leave ourselves at the mercy of a hurricane that knocks a few refineries out of commission.

Building an energy-independent Amer­ica will mean a real economic stimulus. It will mean American jobs that can never be shipped overseas. Think about how much of our trade deficit is fueled by the oil we import — sometimes as much as half of the total. Through this massive transfer of wealth, we lose hundreds of billions of dollars a year that could be invested in our economy. Instead it goes to foreign countries, including some repressive regimes that use it to fund activities that threaten our security.

Reliance on foreign sources of energy weakens America. When a riot breaks out in an OPEC nation, or a developing country talks about nationalizing its oil industry, or a petro-dictator threatens to cut off exports, the probability is great that the price of oil will shoot up. Even in friendly nations, business and financial decisions made for local reasons can de­stabilize Amer­i­ca’s energy market, since the price we pay for foreign oil is subject to rising and falling exchange rates. Decreasing our dependence on foreign sources of energy will reduce the impact of world events on our economy.

In the end, energy independence is not just about the environment or the economy. It’s about freedom and confidence. It’s about building a more secure and peaceful America, an America in which our energy needs will not be subject to the whims of nature, currency speculators, or madmen in possession of vast oil reserves.

Alternative sources of energy are part of the answer, but only part. There’s no getting around the fact that we still need to “drill, baby, drill!” And if those in D.C. say otherwise, we need to tell them: “Yes, we can!”

— Sarah Palin was governor of Alaska from 2006 to 2009, and the Republican candidate for vice ­president in 2008. This article appears in the November 2, 2009,

Is Obama a Fool!

October 14, 2009 Posted by John Hinderaker, Powerline

Scott is on record as believing that he is; I have reserved judgment. President Obama's apparently unilateral concession to Russia in abandoning our anti-missile defense system in central Europe, with no publicly-acknowledged quid pro quo, may support the view that in international relations, at least, Obama is a fool. But we need to be fair here: it is possible that this seemingly unilateral giveaway was, in fact, a bargain, and that Obama got something from the Russians, presumably in relation to Russia's client Iran, that has not yet become public.

So this report on Hillary Clinton's trip to Russia is worrisome:

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin warned major powers on Wednesday against intimidating Iran and said talk of sanctions against the Islamic Republic over its nuclear programme was "premature". ...

Clinton failed to secure any specific assurances from Russia on Iran during her visit, leaving her open to criticism at home that she had not received anything from Moscow after earlier U.S. concessions on missile defence.

I'm not giving up hope yet. Maybe Obama didn't really give away the store for nothing. So far, though, there is no evidence that he got anything from Russia in exchange for his abandonment of European missile defense. Could Obama possibly be that inept a negotiator? Time will tell.

NOT BUYING IT, EVEN IN NORWAY

October 10, 2009 Posted by John Hinderacker, Powerline at 10:53 AM

Reader Alan Macomber writes:

Got curious about how the media in Norway is playing the Nobel Peace Prize decision (I read/write Norwegian fluently), so I check out the Aftenposten (largest daily) this morning. Found one of those opinion poll widgets on their site- vote on if you think the prize to Obama was correct. 62% of Aftenposten's own Norwegian readers voted not vs 37% who voted yes. Just thought you'd be interested in how it plays out over there. Swedish dailies are pretty much skewing this as a stupid joke the Norwegians have created (to be expected...Swedes love to laugh at dumb stuff their next door neighbors do).

It's time to act, cut through the "study sessions", "PR scenarios", endless ruminations and act, now. Have faith in your hand-picked General.