The Executive who refused to Execute

President Obama addresses the press corps

 yesterday on sequestration.

(Fox News TV Screenshot by Dick Bergeron)

After a cursory gathering with leaders of Congress yesterday, President Barack Obama held a little publicized, yet dour press conference to report on the results of that meeting. 

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and their lieutenants were invited to that get-together.

As anyone who is following this latest of beltway originated crises knows, that get-together yielded no progress on the now politically ubiquitous topic of sequestration.

It’s not even clear why the President called this meeting at the 11^th hour, on the last day possible to negotiate a solution.  Not he, his staff, nor anyone else in the leadership of Congress had the appetite to effect a compromise.

Yes I Can: This Plan’s for You, Not for Me

Whatever anyone may say about the Obama health plan now being obsessively driven through Congress; whatever you may think about its merits; whether you are for it or against it, or undecided; whether any Washington decision-makers even fully comprehend the contents of this multi-inch thick bill; there is one incontrovertible and largely unknown fact about it:

A select power group of elite Washington officials are ensuring that none of its provisions will personally affect them in any way whatsoever.

They are the President of the United States, Barack Obama, chief proponent of this proposal, together with every single senator and congressperson walking the halls of the Capitol building. Acting in unison, they are assuring that this proposed legislation will completely exempt them from any and all of its provisions.

The President and each legislator on Capitol Hill will continue to enjoy the full benefits of a gold-plated health care plan guaranteed for life.

The President is on the stump solemnly intoning that the cost of medical care in this country must come down. But he is removing himself from any personal sacrifice that his proposed health legislation will require of ordinary Americans. Yet, Republicans and Democrats on The Hill continue to participate in this hypocritical sleight of hand.

What do you think?

A Committee of Vultures

The Washington, D.C. political vultures who have been circling the corpse of Lehman Brothers descended on it today and began picking at the remains. It happened in the Rayburn House Office Building this morning, when members of Henry Waxman’s (D-CA) Committee on Oversight and Government Reform grilled Richard Fuld. Fuld is the former Chairman and CEO of Lehman Brothers, the now-defunct Wall Street investment firm.

The usage of the phrase ‘Oversight and Government Reform’ in the name of Waxman’s Committee is one of the best examples of the noun ‘oxymoron’ that I can think of. Waxman’s committee has enforced absolutely no effective oversight, nor has it proposed any significant reforms having to do with the economic meltdown and resulting panic gripping U.S. and international markets. Nada!

But these politicians need cover, and that means beating the bushes for fall guys. It’s easy to do these days. One of Waxman’s first targets today was Lehman’s Richard Fuld. I’m no fan of this man, because a unit of his firm was up to its eyeballs in risky financial derivatives – a primary cause of the fiscal crisis.

That was not the only cause. Another major factor was the failure of Congress to implement and to enforce reasonable regulations for mortgage guidelines designed to protect vulnerable borrowers. No one in Congress wants to hear this now, but the Legislative Branch in D.C. is one of the key irresponsible participants for having actively stimulated the writing of loans to people who had no decent chance of repaying them.


Fuld, in response to a question about how the fiscal fiasco occurred, had the guts to push back on Waxman’s committee and to say, “A goal of the government was to provide funding to people who could not or would not pay their mortgages.” That’s an incontrovertible fact.

Blame it on God, or the Republicans

Monday, as my wife and I were driving north from Potomac, MD, about 15 miles from the center of the Capitol Building in D.C., I tuned in C-Span radio to get a live feed of the debate taking place in the House of Representatives. The lower house was debating the famed “bailout bill” which was defeated later that afternoon.

Radio, when used in this manner, presents events with surprising clarity. There are no Wolf Blitzers to paraphrase what happened and to tell you what you should think about it. Most TV talking heads like to spoon feed us with selected video clips tailored to their own views. Listening to an event in real time radio, uninterrupted and unvarnished, gives the listener a wholly different look: it’s called reality.

At one point in the deliberations last Monday, a congressman who arose to speak out against the proposal concluded his comments with this ending, “Duty is ours. Outcomes belong to God.” I could think about that for weeks before I could even begin to decipher what in blazes he was talking about. Could it have been something like this: “Well, I’m going to vote ‘no’ on this bill, and God can figure out what to do next.” It’s a pretty sick dude who would put the consequences for the sub-prime mess squarely in God’s lap.

Especially since the record shows that Congress, through its willful inaction, is largely responsible for ignoring oversight of the financial markets and, in particular, for not reining in the run-away lending habits of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

Furthermore, Nancy Pelosi, House Speaker, didn’t do herself or the process any good when, before Monday’s debate, she stood in front of reporters and pronounced in accusatory tones that Republicans who didn’t attend a previous bipartisan caucus were “unpatriotic” for not having been present.

If Republicans had attended that meeting, it would have been a slick trick, since Democrat Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut, Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, later confirmed that he had been so busy that he simply forgot to invite members of the opposing party.

Pelosi got a free pass from the media for that insult, because the brief news conference in which she fired the “unpatriotic” label against her opponents received scant, if any, TV coverage.

If you like, you can view Pelosi’s brief comments at, http://sayanythingblog.com/entry/pelosi_calls_republicans_unpatriotic/

As I wrote before, we all deserve much better than this from our representatives on “both sides of the aisle,” as they like to intone on Capitol Hill where, sometimes, I think the inmates run the asylum.

“Flip Flopping” on Public Issues

Ever since the 2004 election, when George Bush and John Kerry were competing for the presidency, there’s been no lack of one candidate accusing another of “flip flopping.” It began with the famous quote attributed to John Kerry about his vote on the Congressional authorization to go to war in Iraq: “I voted for it, before I voted against it.”

I don’t know your thinking about casually calling another person a “flip flopper,” but I don’t find it useful. Yet, I grant that it can be very effective and that it can even destroy a person’s credibility.

A vital consideration in evaluating the sincerity of a politician’s change of position is that of intent. Why did the politician change her or his mind? If it’s merely expedience, or yielding to inappropriate pressure from peers, lobbyists, or political hacks, then it may be valid to classify that politician as a “flip flopper.” Conversely, it could be the result of a well-thought-out change of mind undertaken after serious reflection.

Politicians should be given leeway to change their views as long as they adhere to the critical caveat of explaining logically and convincingly why they have done so.

When circumstances change, do we really want thoughtless elected officials to keep us in Iraq for 100 years, simply because of a prior vote to have gone to war there?

Note: Photo Source: http://www.undermars.com/gallery1.html

A Sad Bunch of Senators

Early last evening, I sat down to about an hour of news TV to catch the results of the U.S. Senate’s questioning of General Petraeus about the impact of the recent troop surge in Iraq and of his related recommendations. I was appalled at the conduct of some of the senators. It outraged me that these politicians would use a national forum on a day like 9/11 to inflate their political and presidential ambitions by treating one of America’s finest soldiers with such impunity and indignity.

Except for perhaps less than a handful of senators on the panel, not a one is qualified to even tie the shoelaces on the boots of such a distinguished American warrior as General Petraeus.

Don’t misunderstand me about what’s happened in Iraq: I think that President Bush grossly misunderstood and miscalculated the nature of the conflict in the Middle East. He never wrapped his mind early enough around the intense tribal and religious distrust between Iraqi Sunnis and Shi‘as. But so has today’s cadre of irresponsible senators who, on the platform offered by 9/11, used it to bloviate incessantly to the tune of their own voices.

Yesterday, the elected officials who spoke eloquently at Bridgewater’s 9/11 commemoration ceremony outside the municipal complex, honored the dead of the Twin Towers, their families and survivors, and America’s military personnel. Flannery, Bateman and Ferguson did not use the occasion of this solemn day, as did senators in Washington, to sully the national honor with pointless, obtuse accusations.