‘Of course’: You’ll never guess how @BarackObama marked Maya Angelou’s death [pic]

Celebrated author poet Maya Angelou passed away this morning at the age of 86. Tributes are pouring in from all over the world.
But let’s face it: There’s only one tribute that truly matters. This one:

Leave it to President Narcissist’s OFA flunkies to remind us what Maya Angelou’s life — and her death — are really about.
OFA’s shameless glorification of Dear Leader stopped being a surprise a long time ago. But it’s still as irritating as ever. Is there anything in this world that isn’t ultimately about Obama?

Boom: Q1 GDP revised downward to -1.0%

By Ed Morrissey
For the first time in three years, the American economy contracted over the course of a quarter. In the interim report on GDP, the BEA estimates that the US economy shrunk by a full point in 2014 Q1, a downward revision of the advance estimate of 0.1% growth:

Real gross domestic product — the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States — decreased at an annual rate of 1.0 percent in the first quarter according to the “second” estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the fourth quarter, real GDP increased 2.6 percent.
The GDP estimate released today is based on more complete source data than were available for the “advance” estimate issued last month. In the advance estimate, real GDP was estimated to have increased 0.1 percent. With this second estimate for the first quarter, the decline in private inventory investment was larger than previously estimated (see “Revisions” on page 3).
The decrease in real GDP in the first quarter primarily reflected negative contributions from private inventory investment, exports, nonresidential fixed investment, state and local government spending, and residential fixed investment that were partly offset by a positive contribution from personal consumption expenditures. Imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, increased.

Don’t blame federal budget cuts for this contraction, or the weather either. Federal government spending rose 0.7% after dropping 12.8% in Q4, although state government spending fell by 1.8%. Exports fell by 6.0%, a sharp drop in any sense and a remarkable reversal from +9.5% in Q4, and real non-residential fixed investment dropped 1.6%.
Not all of the news was bad, though. Real personal consumption expenditures (consumer spending) rose 3.1% in Q1, almost the same level as in Q4 (3.3%). The real final sales of domestic product, which are sales to end-user consumers, rose 0.6% — much lower than Q4′s 2.7%, but still positive. However, growth in real gross domestic purchases was entirely flat (0.0%) after a stagnation reading in Q4 of 1.6%.
CNN rushed to cheer everyone up by proclaiming the “expected” nature of the slump:

Brace yourself. The U.S. economy looks like it went on a roller-coaster ride at the start of the year.
Revised numbers released Thursday show the economy shrunk in the first quarter, marking the first downturn since early 2011. Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of economic growth, fell at a 1% annual pace, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
A slump was entirely expected, and economists aren’t too worried. They expect a sizeable bounce back in the spring.

CNBC’s Rick Santelli isn’t as sanguine, and certainly isn’t banking on the 4% growth number for the rest of the year cited in CNN’s report:
Reuters chalks it up to — what else? — cold weather:

The U.S. economy contracted in the first quarter for the first time in three years as it buckled under the weight of a severe winter, but there are signs activity has since rebounded.

....There have been indicators of better growth in Q2, but nothing that would indicate a 4% growth rate for the rest of 2014. There is more hampering the US economy than just a cold winter. This is part of the continuing cycle of stagnation seen since the June 2009 recovery, and there are no indications that we are breaking that cycle now. This report should be a sign that we’re getting more fragile, not gaining strength.

Obama Is Bypassing Congress Again. This Time It's Going to Cost You.

By Nicholas Loris and Nichole Rusenko
Next week, the Obama administration is planning to unveil a climate action plan that it intends to implement without legislative approval. It’s a creative approach to governing, not unlike other executive actions President Obama has taken to bypass Congress.
When lawmakers refused to pass cap-and-trade legislation, Obama announced there was more than one way to skin the cat. Through climate plans, executive orders and regulatory action, he directed his agencies to find ways to curb the country’s carbon dioxide output and commit to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

Leading the charge, unsurprisingly, is the Environmental Protection Agency, which will release its carbon-dioxide regulations for existing power plants on Monday. The plan will drive up energy prices for American families and businesses without making a dent in global temperatures.
Our infographic explains what it means for jobs, incomes and the states hurt most.

U.S. Chamber Of Commerce: Obama’s New EPA Rule Could Cost $51 Billion And 224,000 Jobs Per Year

By Caroline Schaeffer

A new study released by the U.S. Chamber Of Commerce has some dire warnings for the Administration’s recent proposals concerning lowering greenhouse gas emissions.
The proposals, which require states to make major cuts in pollution from coal generators, will, by 2030, cost upwards of $51 billion and an average of 224,000 lost jobs per year.
And it’s not just those people working in the energy industry who will be affected:

The impacts of higher energy costs, fewer jobs, and slower economic growth are seen in lower real disposable income per household. … The loss of annual real disposable income over the 2012-30 period will average over $200, with a peak loss of $367 in 2025. This translates into a shortfall in total disposable income for all U.S. households of $586 billion (in real 2012 dollars) over the next 17 year period 2014-30.

The study also found that the standards set forth under the plan are not likely to lower carbon emissions much, while simultaneously producing unintended consequences. The regulations would only reduce emissions by 1.8%, at a time when global emissions are expected to raise by about a third.
The President’s initiative may help him sleep at night, but it won’t end up making a huge difference for the environment. And, more importantly, it won’t do much good for the average American.

While Vets Wait, VA Employees Do Union Work

By Jillian Kay Melchior
In 2012, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs paid at least $11.4 million to 174 nurses, mental-health specialists, therapists, and other health-care professionals who, instead of caring for veterans, worked full-time doing union business.
The list of these taxpayer-funded union representatives at VA offices around the nation and their salaries was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act by Georgia representative Phil Gingrey’s staff and provided to National Review Online.
...In total, the VA spent at least $13.77 million on 251 salaried employees performing full-time union work. Others, who were not included on the list provided by the VA, work part-time for unions at the taxpayer expense. In fiscal year 2011, the latest on record, the VA used 998,483 hours of this “official time,” costing taxpayers more than $42 million.
...Employees across the federal government are paid full-time or part-time to perform work for their various unions, but perhaps nowhere is the practice more offensive than the overburdened VA.

A Great Reform from the VA Scandal

By Bruce Walker
.....Operations in the private market work efficiently or die. This calculation is utterly missing in the world of government bureaucrats and their political allies.

Civil servants actually profit from sloth, incompetence, corruption, and deceit. The pat answers for problems like the VA scandal have sounded like this: “Give us more money. Give us the tools to do the job right, and we will. We have asked Congress for the resources to do the job right, and Congress has refused.”

Then, when panicked politicians thoughtlessly throw more tax dollars at the “problem,” these selfsame civil servants have more staff to manage, and so qualify for higher positions in the Civil Service, bigger offices, more junkets, etc. The one thing that never happens is that bad government employees lose their jobs – except, of course, when a high-profile political appointee resigns.

The Civil Service System is the culprit. It was created more than a century ago to prevent an incoming administration from firing government employees and replacing those positions with party operatives who helped win the presidential election. However noble the original intention of this change may have been, the practical effect was that Civil Service employees became almost impossible to fire.

The solution to “underfunded” government operations became to hire more people in hopes that some of the new workers would actually work. These new employees, after their probationary period, learned the ropes and understood that being too efficient would actually rile their coworkers. The inherent inefficiency of government has been dramatically multiplied by this immunity to termination or demotion because of the Civil Service System and the cost of government increased significantly.

Beyond that, the high-level officers in charge of federal departments have acquired a degree of immunity to government failure as well, because everyone who understands the system knows that they have little power to really make Civil Service employees follow orders and policies establishment by the administration.

There is a very simple answer: permit the president to fire any federal employee in the Executive Branch for any reason, with no right of appeal. At once, the president would become truly accountable for failures in government, and the president would also be accountable for buildings full of bureaucrats who do nothing useful. Crucially, this reform would retain the current system for hiring and promoting government employees. The president would not be able to hire the merit system employees, and so he would have no power to reward his party faithful with government jobs, as had been the case before the Civil Service System. (PK'S NOTE: Not the President, this should be Congress)

Would a Democrat president fire wholesale all Republicans in the merit system? No: that president would not be able to hire a single Democrat to take their place. New employees would still have to pass Civil Service exams, meet minimum qualifications, and so on, and these new employees might well largely be Republicans. Beyond that, firing people is political poison. The spoils system was based upon rewarding friends, not punishing people who are in the other party. The fired worker has friends, family, even Democrat friends at work who would be angered by this injustice.

Moreover, any president or cabinet secretary who fired competent people would create situations in which his department would do the sorts of things we see in the VA scandal today, but with this addendum: the president would own this scandal completely, because he would have exercised his power to correct abuses but used that power badly.

The effect on the federal government generally could be transformative. Though conservatives rightly view those getting fat at the trough as a huge problem in government, we often forget that the fattest pigs at this trough are not special interests in the private sector or nutty groups of environmentalists or even classroom teachers, but the faceless, gray gnomes hiding in air-conditioned offices, getting regular promotions, earning annual bonuses for “good work,” and making no waves until something like this VA scandal draws a spotlight on them. This tragedy in the VA Administration could be the spark of a truly great reform.

Obama's West Point Speech signals a presidency in deep trouble

By Thomas Lifson

Yesterday’s speech to the graduating class of West Point by President Obama may be remembered as the signal that his presidency has entered a crisis of confidence, much as Jimmy Carter’s infamous “malaise” speech has gone down in history as marking a failed presidency. Not only was the content of the speech delusional (calling Russia “isolated” in the wake of a massive and historic gas deal with China that marks a major rapprochement between two powers hostile to the United States; claiming Ukraine as an example of the success of his coalition strategy), the delivery was wooden, as if Obama were wishing he were on a golf course or basketball court, and felt a hostile vibe. And the visible reception was embarrassingly icy, with only a few people applauding at key lines, and a standing ovation in which the vast majority remained seated and unmoved, suggesting the commander in chief is held in contempt by the next generation of military leadership.

Writing at Powerline, Scott Johnson titled his quick reaction to the speech, “More mush from the wimp.” This is an allusion to an infamous Boston Globe op-ed critical of aJimmy Carter speech written by the late Globe op-ed page editor Kirk Scharfenberg. As a joke among the newsroom staff, Scharfenberg wrote “More mush form the wimp” on the piece, which was supposed to bear the headline “All must share the burden.” But his sarcastic barb was printed in 161,000 copies of the paper before being corrected.

The comparison is apt. Carter was a disaster who has been exceeded by Obama. As Carter fostered the rise of Iran’s mullahs and emboldened the Soviets, Obama has allowed Al Qaeda to spread and grow, all the while claiming it was “on the run.” As Carter’s economic policies gave rise to the neologism “stagflation,” Obama has managed to shrink the work force, hide inflation by keeping food and gasoline costs of the CPI, and make the title “recovery” a joke, as the nation remains mired in stagnation throughout his presidency.

The big difference is that Obama has enjoyed the enthusiastic support of most of the media, and their willing complicity in papering over his scandals and failures. But as of recent days, I think the limit has been reached, and his media supporters demoralized to the point of ineffectiveness.

There was something visually striking about his speech at West Point. For the first time I can remember, his teleprompter screens were visible in a good portion of the media coverage. And because of the lighting, they stood out very clearly as dark shapes. He looked absolutely pathetic, going back and forth between the two of them, in his trademark tennis match style of delivering a speech. When the prompters are invisible, it is an annoying tic, but justifiable on the presumption that he is addressing the entire audience. But when the screens are visible to viewers, the fakery leaps out, making him look like some sort of puppet whose master knows only a few moves.

Fox News showed the throughout his speech.

But .... showing the cool reception he received, demonstrates, the awful truth was visible elsewhere. Needless to say, the Official White House version was a tight shot, keeping the prompters outside the field of vision.

While as an opponent of the president, I am glad that the truth of his incompetence is becoming more visible, as an American I am alarmed that we have two and half more years of him to survive. The villains of the world who run entire countries (and they are legion) see a man floundering and know how much time they have left to take advantage of our weakness. We are still paying the price for Carter’s incompetence. The ultimate toll of the Obama presidency could be far, far worse.

The Being There President

By Ed Lasky

A key to understanding Barack Obama and his presidency may be found in a simple-minded character from a twenty-five year old movie. Truth can be stranger than fiction -- and less enjoyable to experience.

In March, 2007, I wrote this about then-presidential candidate Barack Obama:

Despite a meager record to run on, with virtually no executive experience, he may very well become President. His story is eerily similar in many ways to the story of Chance the Gardener, the main character in the book and movie, Being There. In that story by Jerzy Kosinski, a man literally comes from nowhere to become a Presidential candidate.

The key to his success: a freshness, a lack of record to run on, the constant repetition of simple feel-good platitudes that lull listeners into a sense of trust and induce in them a yearning to believe.

...Being There was a satire about a gardener (mishearing led to him being called Chauncey Gardiner), whose exposure to the real world had been minimal. He spent a great deal of time, however, watching television (“I like to watch TV”). The constant exposure to television had given him the gift of being able to relate on the lowest-common denominator level with Americans.

His aphorisms were declared masterpieces of allegorical wisdom; they were simple enough to be capable of many meanings -- like a fortune cookie. He was a blank slate. The media swooned. Wealthy and powerful patrons had found the perfect political candidate to promote to the highest office in the land.

There are remarkable similarities between Barack Obama and the simple-minded Chauncey Gardiner.

Both like to watch television. In Obama’s case, quite a lot. His knowledge of various television shows, many of them decidedly lowbrow, help gin up support for the first “pop culture president.” While he avoids discussions with both Republicans and Democrats about policy (or can appear to be like a deer frozen in headlights when discussing health care, his signature policy), he can converse quite comfortably about Jersey Shore and Real Housewives. He watches television regularly.

Gardiner’s sayings included this one about the economy:

Mr. Gardner, do you agree with Ben, or do you think that we can stimulate growth through temporary incentives?

[Long pause]

Chance the Gardener: As long as the roots are not severed, all is well. And all will be well in the garden.

President "Bobby": In the garden.

Chance the Gardener: Yes. In the garden, growth has it seasons. First comes spring and summer, but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again.

Were Obama’s slogans (Hope and Change; Yes, We Can; We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For) any more profound? What did this gibberish even mean? Yet his simple TV-informed phrases were praised for their profundity.

If “tastes great, less filling” can sell beer, why can’t a presidency be sold that way as well?

In Obama’s second autobiography (more to follow, unfortunately), The Audacity of Hope, he tipped his hand when he described himself being a “"blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views." Indeed, Ted Kennedy encouraged him to run for the presidency precisely because he had no record.

....As Joseph Curl writes in “Obama, the unaccountable president,”

Has there ever been a president in the history of America who knew less than President Obama?

With each new crisis and scandal, Mr. Obama tells Americans that he just didn’t know.

He didn’t know the Veterans Administration was letting America’s veterans languish and die unattended — he learned about it in the newspaper.

He didn’t know the Justice Department was trolling phone records of members of the U.S. media. He didn’t know the ATF was running guns into Mexico; didn’t know the NSA was spying on the German chancellor; didn’t know the Obamacare website was a disaster; didn’t know the IRS was targeting conservative groups.

Bryan Preston piled on in “Barack Obama Seems to Learn a Lot from News Reports. Except, How to be President,”

For the VA scandal, Obama and his team couldn’t even bestir themselves to come up with a new excuse. They just trotted out the “he learned about it from watching the news” line that they have used and abused in past scandals.

· Associated Press: Obama Learned Of IRS Targeting From News Reports: Aide

· Real Clear Politics: Carney: Obama Didn’t Know About Fast & Furious Until He Saw It In Media

· USA Today: NSA Denies Obama Knew Of Spying On German Leader

· CNN: HHS Chief: President Didn’t Know Of Obamacare Website Woes Beforehand

· Business Insider: The White House Says It Had No Idea The DOJ Seized The AP’s Phone Records

After the Fast and Furious scandal broke, Obama responded to the national outrage by saying he was out of the loop until he turned on the television.

So the President of the United States, with hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer dollars supporting Leviathan, only learns about problems and scandals by watching TV?

Hey, believe it or not, this is possible.

He is a notorious loner who does not like people, according to a former aide; he has a chronic work ethic problem; he is protected by bad news and problems by his small entourage of ego-protectors; he does the barest of minimum in terms of presidential duties -- that have been dumbed down for him to a check-the-box style of presidential leadership; he has a lot of fun enjoying his luxe lifestyle; and, as previously noted, he does watch a lot of TV.

So we have a bumbling president whose administration lurches from one act of incompetence to another -- when it is not passive before America’s adversaries.

...Where is Waldo? He is probably in front of the Boob Tube. And that would also answer the increasing number of critics, such as National Review’s Jim Geraghty who ask (rhetorically?) “So…just what is it that you do here, Mr. President”?

The scandals and self-inflicted man-made disasters (among them a wasted trillion-dollar stimulus, the wreckage of Obamacare) all reinforce the image that he may be a skilled speechmaker-if one likes messages the length of Tweets-but a lousy manager and terrible leader. Also, President Passive just doesn’t seem to care when people suffer.

...Of course, promises of good things to come can only go so far until people tire of waiting for the promises to be fulfilled. As we enter the sixth year of his presidency the promises have reached their expiration dates.

Jonah Goldberg also used the Gardiner analogy when commenting on Obama’s feel good rah-rah approach towards the ACA’s disastrous rollout:

Yeah, I thought it was a very strange decision to have essentially a campaign rally-style event for what has long ago already become the worst IT disaster in American history. I mean, that's a settled issue that even the defenders agree with now. And the sort of applause line stuff with the human props - half of whom either haven't even enrolled yet or just enrolled yesterday - and the almost Chauncey Gardner-esque sort of, “The product is good, the insurance is good” repetition.

And James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web column points out that the Gardineresque mode may have metastasized:

Life Imitates the Movies

Chance the Gardener: "In the garden, growth has its seasons. First comes spring and summer, but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again."--from "Being There," 1979

"We understand that there are a lot of questions swirling around not just our foreign policy but America's role in the world. People are seeing the trees, but we're not necessarily laying out the forest."--Benjamin Rhodes, deputy national security adviser, quoted in the New York Times, May 25

Being There was a comedy. Reality under Obama is a tragedy. And it is running for two and a half more years.

Too Big to Succeed: A Fresh Commentary on the Democrat Scandal Machine

By Karin McQuillen

S.E. Cupp over at the New York Daily News has taken a fresh look at the Democrat scrambling to avoid blame for their many messes. Every time the Democrats, including Obama and the lapdog press, point out that the President/the Cabinet Secretary/the head of the IRA, VA, HHS, NSA can’t be held responsible for the failures of government programs, they are right. The real blame is the big government programs themselves. The liberal overreach has created an ungovernable bureaucracy that inevitably is screwing up everything it touches, hence the scandal explosion in almost every branch of government.

Democrats don’t realize that their efforts to deflect attention away from this inconvenient truth often ends up pointing directly at it….Yes, people at the top should be held responsible when things go wrong. But at the same time, it hardly matters who that is when he or she is sitting on top of a steaming pile of bureaucratic waste.
The oversight of millions of low-level bureaucrats with unnavigable chains-of-command and arcane protocols is the problem.
The outsourcing of sensitive government work to low-level contractors in Canada and elsewhere is the problem.
The sprawling and ever-expanding surveillance state that puts our most personal information in the hands of unaccountable bureaucrats is the problem.
And, yes, money is the problem, too, but not in the way Democrats insist. The VA itself reported more than $2 billion in waste and fraud, just in 2012. The inability to manage the money these bloated bureaucracies we already have is the problem.
Big-government bureaucracy is the problem, and Democrats unintentionally tell us that all the time. But don’t take my word for it.
“The point is, we are a big country,” says self-described democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders. “The VA sees six and a half million people a year. Are people going to be treated badly? Are some people going to die because of poor treatment in the VA? Yes, that is a tragedy and we have to get to the root of it.”
Well, I think he just did.

The federal government has become too big to succeed.

By Walter Hudson

.....Some of the more extreme uses of the phrase include MSNBC host Touré Neblett telling Holocaust survivors to “check their privilege” before opining on public policy. Then there’s this Twitter thread where two black professing feminists tell a white woman that it’s impossible for her to be raped, because she’s white. Most recently, Salon contributor Brittney Cooper tells us that “privilege” produced mass shooting perpetrator Elliot Rodger:

How many times must troubled young white men engage in these terroristic acts that make public space unsafe for everyone before we admit that white male privilege kills?

The lunacy knows no bounds. PolicyMic, a publication recommended by Touré, has a piece detailing how the new Godzilla film is “a major failure” on account of “oversimplified female and minority characters.” It’s now racist to tell stories with white male leads.
It can be tempting to respond to such nonsense in one of two ways. We may choose to ignore what Hot Air associate editor Noah Rothman calls “the ‘privilege’ movement,” dismissing it as silly and not worth our attention. Or, we may be tempted to limit our response to calling out the “privilege” police as bigots.
The “privilege” movement is silly, and its police are bigoted. But that’s only where our consideration should begin.
The bigotry of the “privilege” movement is more than offensive or socially inappropriate. The bigotry of the “privilege” movement fuels a public policy agenda which aims to encroach upon individual rights. That makes the movement dangerous. Its adherents ought to be shunned with greater social censure than that brought to bear against Donald Sterling. They should be shunned like criminals. How else should we regard people who have declared their intention to throttle our lives, deprive us of liberty, and seize our property?
It’s time for these looters to check their privilege. Before opening their mouths to express further idiocy, they should consider how their lives subsist on the productive effort of those they seek to destroy. Indeed, the idea on the surface of the “privilege” meme, that people should take stock of how their worldview may be distorted by their unjust receipt of unearned benefits, proves wholly legitimate. The “privilege” movement has merely reversed its polarity.
It’s the spoiled brat women’s studies major whose institutional mind rot is subsidized through public universities, public grants, and publicly guaranteed loans who ought to check her privilege before daring to rail against the producers whose confiscated wealth make her consumption possible. It’s the committed socialist who seeks to fix prices, limit commerce, and redistribute wealth who ought to check his privilege before running out of other people’s money. It’s the looters among us who bask in privileges sustained by the exploitation of innocents who ought to check their privilege before the rest of us get motivated enough to rescind it.
This “privilege” movement and the would-be apparatchiks promoting it through institutions of education, media, and government need to be opposed as strenuously as skinheads, and for the same reason. Instead, we have allowed them to claim the moral high ground in the political discourse. They hijack language and deflect criticism by successfully projecting their own qualities upon scapegoats like “white male privilege.” Consider this excerpt from Cooper’s racist rant at Salon:

I am struck by the extent to which Rodger believed he was entitled to have what he deemed the prettiest girls, he was entitled to women’s bodies, and when society denied him these “entitlements” he thought it should become the public’s problem. He thought that his happiness was worth the slaughter of multiple people.

Pot, meet kettle. How dare a purveyor of racism and sexism who would weld the force of law to mandate racial preferences feign a shudder at someone else’s sense of entitlement. Cooper may not want to slaughter people, but stands plenty willing to use force to satisfy her own sense of entitlement. The difference is a matter of degree.