Category Archives: Featured

Deliverance

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

You know what? I am perfectly happy to follow the news about The Little Prince (with a nod toward Antoine de Saint-Exupry).

As you know the Prince was born yesterday (with a nod toward Judy Holliday) and in the way of Royalty the announcement read: “Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Cambridge was safely delivered of a son at 4.24 p.m. The baby weighs 8 lbs. 6 oz. The Duke of Cambridge was present for the birth. The queen, The Duke of Edinburgh, The Prince of Wales, The Duchess of Cornwall, Prince Harry and members of both families have been informed and are delighted with the news.”

You have to hand it to the Royals; who else would have the chutzpah to use the construct: “was delivered of a son?” Continue reading →

To Brief Or Not To Brief: Shouldn’t Be A Question

BY B. JAY COOPER
Reprinted from BJayCooper.com

Reed Cherlin, a former assistant press secretary in the Obama White House, wrote a provocative piece for Slate proposing eliminating the daily White House press briefing. He argues, accurately, that the briefings have become a “preening” exercise for the media and a “first, make no news” goal for the Obama press office team.

If those two conditions were to be true and constant, I’d agree with Mr. Cherlin. But, they needn’t be.

I worked in the White House press office in the late 80s, before the Internet and before the onslaught of cable news channels and their ubiquitous talking heads who typically take one extreme position or another and take it over and over all day. The briefings have become even more performance art than they were in my day. But, and I don’t mean to sound like my father but, “in my day,” they also served a purpose. Continue reading →

On the President’s Remarks Last Week

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

In the same week that Detroit declared bankruptcy, the President opined on George Zimmerman and the state of race relations in this country.

The President should have spoken up on the Zimmerman verdict, which has become a festering national wound, although I thought his remarks were incomplete at best, needlessly adversarial at worst.

The fact that Barack Obama can stride up to the podium in the Brady Room, tell Jay Carney to take a seat, and start opining on race relations in front of the whole world tells you all you really need to know about the state of race relations in this country. Continue reading →

Helen Thomas

BY B. JAY COOPER
Reprinted from BJayCooper.com

Before I started my job in the White House press office, a veteran there warned me, “when you come in, at 6 or 7 a.m., Helen Thomas will be sitting on the credenza outside the press secretary’s’ office and will ask you questions about overnight stories. Do not say a word, not even ‘no comment.’ She will top her story with your quote before you even know what the facts are.”

The first day I walked into the White House, at a time of day when few were in their offices, the first person I saw was a guard and then I ran into Helen sitting on that credenza who asked, nonchalantly, something about an overnight story. I didn’t even say good morning, worried I’d be quoted.

Continue reading →

The Fall of the Motor City

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Eminem is the best thing to come out of Detroit in the last twenty years. That, and the Clint Eastwood Chrysler commercial.

Detroit filed for bankruptcy yesterday.

No surprise there. Kind of like Whitney Houston dying. You can only dance on death’s door for so long before the door opens and lets you in.

It was a bunch of French Canadians who first saw Detroit’s immense promise. Antoine de La Mothe Cadillac joined with 51 others and founded a place they called Fort Ponchartrain du Détroit, which provided a wonderful gateway to the Great Lakes and the Great White North, better known as Canada. Continue reading →

Detroit. Bankrupt.

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

The City of Detroit filed for bankruptcy yesterday afternoon. It owes as much as $20 billion and there is no conceivable way that debt will ever be paid. The city offered its debtors 10 cents on the dollar but the debtors refused.

A good deal of the blame – rightly or wrongly – will be placed at the feet of municipal workers – sanitation, water, sewer, cops, firefighters and so on.

The pressure of ever-rising wages for no additional work, leading to ever-rising pension costs, plus ever increasing benefits and ever more closely defined work rules will likely be found to be at the bottom of all this.

But its not the unions’ fault. It is the fault of the elected officials – Democratic elected officials in Detroit – who didn’t have the, um, guts to ever say “No” to their largest voting bloc. Continue reading →

Health Care Costs Drop 50%!

BY FRANK HILL
Reprinted from TelemachusLeaps.com

“Health insurance has suddenly become affordable in New York,” said Elisabeth Benjamin, Vice President for health initiatives with the Community Service Society of New York.

“It’s not bargain-basement prices, but we’re going from Bergdorf’s to Filene’s here. The extraordinary decline in New York’s insurance rates for individual consumers demonstrates the profound promise of the Affordable Care Act,” she added.

Well, since everyone in New York seems to be right all the time, just as in the NY Times recent screed against the new initiatives and policies undertaken by the GOP majorities in the state legislature and from the Governor’s Mansion, we guess whatever New Yorkers say about everything has to be true.

Continue reading →

Individual Mandate Hit on Young Americans

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

22 House Democrats joined with just about every Republican to delay the individual mandate included in the massive Obamacare law still being implemented three years after it was signed by the President.

House Republicans scheduled a vote on the mandate delay shortly after the President decided to delay the mandate on the business sector on his own accord.

If a mandate is good enough for the business community, the reasoning goes, it ought to be good enough for Generation Y.

And the fact of the matter is that the individual mandate is going to hit young adults the hardest. They are the ones who will be forced to buy insurance they don’t want and can’t afford.

Continue reading →

Greatest Deliberative Body

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

The national press corps held its collective breath on Monday night as members of the United States Senate wrangled over whether the holiest of holies – the filibuster rule – would be changed or scrapped altogether by the 55 Democrats in the majority.

This is known as the “nuclear option” and it is generally threatened by the Majority Leader – Republican or Democrat – when the Minority Leader – Republican or Democrat – successfully uses the existing filibuster rules to slow progress on legislation or nominations to a crawl.

The modern version of a filibuster can be broken if the majority can muster 60 votes. As the AP’s Dave Espo wrote: “While a simple majority vote is required to confirm presidential appointees, it takes 60 votes to end delaying tactics and proceed to a yes-or-no vote.” Continue reading →

Good News: No Riots

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

The good news was there were no riots.

Some protests. A few folks got hurt here and there by vengeful kids who wanted to take their anger out on somebody. A promise of future protests by cable television star Al Sharpton. But not much burning and looting and otherwise carrying on.

I guess that’s progress.

Despite the fact that it is really hot out (or maybe because of it), and despite the fact that the unemployment rate is around 25 percent for African-Americans, there wasn’t an explosion of violence in reaction to the George Zimmerman ruling. Continue reading →

Was Justice Carried?

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

We often hear about a “miscarriage of justice” but rarely a “carriage of justice.” Much as we call people inept, but never say someone is really, really, ept.

Ok, there is no such word as “ept” so that doesn’t count.

The national news corps was all a-twitter – including being ON Twitter – when the jury came back with its not guilty verdict in the George Zimmerman trial for the death of Trayvon Martin. Too many of them expressed everything from disappointment to outright shock at the result. Continue reading →

The Traffic Cop

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Unlike the House, where the Speaker is expected to expedite the will of the majority, the person charged with running the Senate is not expected to exert his will.

Instead, he or she is more like a glorified traffic cop, making certain that all of the highways of the upper chamber are cleared of obstructions and moving smoothly.

It’s a tough job because the Senate is necessarily full of obstructions and rarely moves smoothly.The Senate majority leader, unlike the Speaker, is not named in the Constitution. Nor is the majority leader the top Senator in the line of succession to the White House. That title goes to the president pro tempore — usually the longest serving senator. Continue reading →

The Anti-Snowdens

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

Edward Snowden is still, as far as we know, hiding out in the transit lounge of an airport in Moscow, Russia. He is, as President Obama referred to him “a 29-year-old hacker” who leaked damaging information about what the National Security Agency is doing to, according to our government, protect American citizen from foreign attack.

Stay with me here.

I had the honor of traveling to San Antonio, Texas on Wednesday to be present at what is known in the military as a Change of Command ceremony on the grounds of the Alamo. The command that was changing was the 717th Military Intelligence Battalion from Lieutenant Colonel Joe Kushner to Lieutenant Colonel Jay Haley. The 717th is a subordinate unit of the 470th Military Intelligence Brigade. Continue reading →

Confab on Immigration

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Republicans are having a confab on immigration as I write this entry.

I imagine that none of them like the Senate product. I don’t blame them. I don’t like what the Senate produced, even though, had I been in the Upper Body, I would have voted for it.

The bill needs to be fixed.

The border surge is a complete waste of money. The internal security stuff is way too intrusive. I don’t like the e-verify provisions, especially on small businesses. I don’t think the Senate bill does enough on assimilation. You should have a conversational understanding of English if you are going to be a citizen. You should understand the basics of Continue reading →

Higher Salaries to Attract Better Candidates

BY FRANK HILL
Reprinted from TelemachusLeaps.com

I got to thinking the other day about what was ‘more important’ to the United States of America: Having great referees in our professional sports leagues….or having great representatives and senators in Congress in Washington?

Apparently, based on the way we pay our elected representatives versus professional referees, we ‘value’ the services of NFL/MLB and NHL referees at or around the same level as we ‘value’ our elected officials in this nation.

We know, we know: ‘The market values rare talent’. Alex Rodriguez, LeBron James, and Peyton Manning are those ‘rare talents’ and command massive salaries up to $25M per year. ‘They put fannies in the seats and sell advertising on the tube!’ team owners and general managers say to justify such exorbitant salaries. Continue reading →

Dog Days

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Originally printed in The Hill

The dog days of summer used to be dedicated to the appropriations process on Capitol Hill.

Both the House and the Senate would slog through 13 spending bills, usually under an open amendment process. Members of the various subcommittees would fend off hostile amendments, defending projects, programs and spending levels.

When the bills passed the House or Senate floors, members of both bodies would put out press releases, touting the bacon they would be bringing home for local constituencies. And back home, those constituents would applaud news of funds from Washington, to build bridges, to fund the local Veterans Affairs hospital, or whatever else was being touted by those press releases. Continue reading →

Duck Sex and Essential Government (Part II)

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

When last we commiserated about the sex life of ducks, we questioned why taxpayers were being billed (billed—ducks—get it?) for million-dollar National Science Foundation (NSF) research into the corkscrew-like genital appendage on the female duck that deters the unwanted advances of the male.

The study, now in its eighth year, is just one of hundreds of taxpayer-funded projects that presumably hold the promise of scientific discovery and the eventual benefit to society worth the investment. And maybe that will turn out to be the case.

Though science projects are a budgetary breeding ground of questionable spending priorities and outright waste, there are others much worse.

Remember the Las Vegas retreat for General Service Administration employees? How about the Internal Revenue Service spending $49 million on conferences? Continue reading →

Politics Is Easy, Governing Is Hard

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

This has to have been the longest, yet least relaxing Independence Day ever.

As you know, the 4th was on a Thursday so here, in Our Nation’s Capital, almost everyone I know pretended they had been sequestered out of having to work on Friday and made it a four day weekend.

While wondering why we choose to end 4th of July fireworks displays with the playing of The 1812 Overture by a Russian composer celebrating a victory over France this happened:

— The U.S. Government announced that the Employer Mandate part of ObamaCare could just wait until January 1, 2015 instead of its scheduled launch on January 1, 2014. It would have taken less time (3 years, 7 months) to defeat Japan in World War II than to implement ObamaCare (3 years, 9 months). And Obama will still miss it. Continue reading →

Carolina ‘Yay/Boo’ Cheer

BY FRANK HILL
Reprinted from TelemachusLeaps.com

Everyone was all a-twitter last weekend when a lower level deputy Treasury secretary, not President Obama, announced in his blog, (not the President’s) that the onerous employer-mandate section of Obamacare (just that part, nothing else) was going to be suspended for a year.

Until after next year’s mid-term elections.

Of course. More political gamesmanship from this President on health care. Every time there is a ‘cost’ associated with Obamacare that gets pushed to the out-years while the bennies of Obamacare get shoved to the in-years from day 1 (coverage of children til age 26, etc). Continue reading →

Gettysburg Anniversary Lessons to Relearn

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

The 150th Anniversary of one of the most important events in American history and arguably in world history slipped past the public consciousness July 3, without much attention or appreciation.

The event was the Battle of Gettysburg, actually a series of the most bloody battles of the Civil War that occurred just outside Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, beginning with Picket’s Charge up Cemetery Ridge on the afternoon of July 1, 1863, and ending with the retreat of the Confederate Army under the command of General Robert E. Lee in the early morning hours of Independence Day, July 4.

Continue reading →