Carbonhagen: World Leaders Drive to Climate Summit in Gas-Guzzling Luxury Fleet

Monday , December 07, 2009

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World leaders and VIPs began pouring into Copenhagen Monday morning for the city’s long-awaited climate summit, arriving in style in a fleet of gas-guzzling limos and luxury cars.

Most delegates to the climate change conference haven’t exactly been hoofing their way to Denmark’s capital, swarming the city’s airport with 140 private jets, 1,200 hired limousines and a carbon footprint the size of a small country.

Video shot on the scene Monday shows squads of new arrivals at the green gathering pulling up in BMWs, Mercedes Benzes, sleek Volvos and plush Jaguars. A bus reserved for the delegates rode along empty outside the conference center.

Click here to see the video from Americans for Prosperity.

The head of Copenhagen’s biggest limo company says her business usually has a dozen cars on the road. But during the conference — which has been billed as the last best chance to save the environment — she’ll have 200 vehicles churning out fumes, the Daily Telegraph reported.

"We thought they were not going to have many cars, due to it being a climate convention," Majken Friss Jorgensen told the newspaper. "But it seems that somebody last week looked at the weather report."

France alone has ordered 42 vehicles, she said, and the auto supply in Denmark is very quickly drying up. To make up for shortages, Jorgensen and her competitors are bringing in lines of limos from as far away as Germany and Sweden.

"We haven’t got enough limos in the country to fulfill the demand," she said, adding that just five cars in her fleet will be environmentally friendly hybrid vehicles, which are almost impossible to procure in tax-heavy Denmark.

Once the estimated 30,000 delegates, activists, protesters and members of the press arrive this week and next, they’ll find a sumptuous and steeply priced spread awaiting them.

Expensive hotels are sold out, and the conference organizers have been busy laying 560 miles of computer cable and 50,000 square miles of carpet, according to the Times of London.

The conference center hosting the meetings has set up four "climate kitchens" to cook healthy, organic meals for attendees, but they aren’t coming cheap.

Visitors ordering the regular meal will get finger sandwiches, a quiche, some cheese and dessert, but those going "deluxe" get a mini croissant, canape with smoked salmon, mini pizzas, fancy cheese and some pineapple in chocolate — all for an estimated $40 a person.

The whole conference rings up at just under $215 million, according to a report from the U.K.-based Taxpayers’ Alliance, which argued that even though delegates to the climate conference don’t expect to emerge with any signed commitments, they’re still doing potential damage by making their two-week visit.

Conference organizers have gone the whole nine yards seeking to offset the Copenhagen carbon crunch (the U.N. estimates an output of 41,000 tons of gas), using energy-efficient lights, powering the proceedings with a giant wind turbine, and offering visitors recycled materials instead of wasteful plastic water bottles. They’ve also purchased carbon offsets to help manage the output from their 12-day affair.

But Matthew Sinclair, the research director for the Taxpayers’ Alliance, said their presence means that "a huge amount of money is going to be spent on the summit, and thousands of tons of carbon dioxide emitted to get there, just to give the delegates a good photo opportunity."

I think that Robert Gibbs might be even more arrogant than Nobama!!

Tense White House exchange

Fri Dec 4, 1:57 pm ET

Contentious exchanges between White House press secretaries and members of the media have been fairly commonplace during the past few presidential administrations.

However, the one that took place Wednesday between White House press secretary Robert Gibbs and April Ryan of American Urban Radio, in which Gibbs essentially compared Ryan to a petulant child, is among the most heated (and entertaining) in recent memory.

The testy exchange was sparked by Ryan’s insistent questioning of White House social secretary Desiree Rogers‘ role at the recent state dinner, which has been in the headlines because of the fallout from Tareq and Michaele Salahi’s "party crashing."

Ryan claimed that there have been whispers around Washington insinuating that Rogers had overstepped the traditional role of her title at the event to become the "belle of the ball," thus "overshadowing the first lady." Frustrated by Ryan’s tabloid-y line of questioning, Gibbs instructed her to "calm down" and to take a deep breath," adding "I do this with my son and that’s what happens."

As the press corps cringed, murmured and chuckled at Gibbs’ chastising, Ryan shot back: "Don’t play with me." Check it out:

In the end, Gibbs recommended that they return to more weighty issues, "like 98,000 men and women in Afghanistan.

– Brett Michael Dykes is a contributor to the Yahoo! News Blog

Too Little Too Late, Jerk!!

Matthews apologizes for `enemy camp’ remark

By DAVID BAUDER, AP Television Writer David Bauder, Ap Television Writer Thu Dec 3, 12:43 am ET

NEW YORK – MSNBC’s Chris Matthews apologized on Wednesday for saying that President Barack Obama had traveled to an "enemy camp" at West Point to address the nation on the war in Afghanistan.

The pundit had made the remark Tuesday during on-air analysis of Obama’s speech, noting that he saw skepticism and little enthusiasm in the faces of cadets and officers at the U.S. military academy, a place where former President Bush made a hawkish speech in 2002 before the Iraq War started.

"I didn’t see a lot of warmth in the crowd out there," he said. "He went to maybe the enemy camp … to make his case."

Matthews said on his show Wednesday that he had gotten "some very tough calls" from former cadets and parents of cadets, who told him the audience of military officers and officers-in-training are trained not to show the kind of emotion that he thought was lacking. He said he had no reason to assume that those in Obama’s audience were more hawkish on the war than the president.

"I’ve heard too many politicians say, `Oh, that was taken out of context,’ to explain something they wish they hadn’t sent," he said. "Let me just say to the cadets and their parents, former cadets and everyone who cares about this country and those who defend it, I used the wrong words and, worse than that, I said something that is just not right and for that I deeply apologize."

It’s not the first time the motor-mouthed "Hardball" host has seen his mouth get him into trouble.

He apologized in January 2008 following remarks that angered then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Matthews had said that the only reason Clinton was a senator and candidate for president "is that her husband messed around."

Obama’s speech, his seventh prime-time address to the nation since his administration began, was carried Tuesday on 10 television networks and seen by an estimated 40.8 million people, the Nielsen Co. said.

FACT CHECK: Obama overlooks some tough realities

By CALVIN WOODWARD and ROBERT BURNS, Associated Press Writers Calvin Woodward And Robert Burns, Associated Press Writers 50 mins ago

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama’s speech Tuesday night did not always match the reality on the ground in Afghanistan. The president raised expectations that may be hard to meet when he told Americans his troop increase in Afghanistan will accelerate the training of that country’s own forces and be accompanied by more help from allies.

A look at some of his claims and how they compare with the facts:

OBAMA: "Because this is an international effort, I have asked that our commitment be joined by contributions from our allies. Some have already provided additional troops, and we are confident that there will be further contributions in the days and weeks ahead."

THE FACTS: When Obama says he is confident that allied countries will provide more troops in the weeks ahead he is setting aside years of mostly empty-handed American efforts to get others, including allies in NATO, to deepen their commitment to combat in Afghanistan.

One reason, which Obama did not mention, is that other countries, particularly those in Europe, have viewed the conflict — and its likely solution — much differently than Washington. They have seen it primarily as a humanitarian and reconstruction mission, rather than a counterinsurgency fight. And they have pushed for greater nonmilitary means of addressing Afghanistan’s instability.

For a time there also was a European sense of hangover from the U.S. invasion of Iraq and a perceived go-it-alone bent by the Bush administration.

Obama is technically correct in anticipating that some allies will offer more assistance, possibly as early as the coming week during a series of NATO consultations about how the troop requirements of commanders in Afghanistan might be met. But history has shown that these troop contributions often are incremental, sometimes slow in materializing and frequently with conditions attached.

___

OBAMA: The extra U.S. forces for Afghanistan "will increase our ability to train competent Afghan Security Forces, and to partner with them so that more Afghans can get into the fight. And they will help create the conditions for the United States to transfer responsibility to the Afghans. "

THE FACTS: The problem with Afghan forces is not just their lack of numbers. And it’s not an unwillingness to fight. The problem too often is their effectiveness, once trained for combat. Too many get into the fight but don’t remain or don’t perform.

A major change of approach promised by Obama’s new chief commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, is to partner entire U.S. and NATO combat units with newly fielded Afghan units — large and small — so the Afghans get more exposure to professional military leadership practices and combat tactics. This is an approach that was used to good effect in recent years in Iraq.

___

OBAMA: "In the past, there have been those in Pakistan who have argued that the struggle against extremism is not their fight and that Pakistan is better off doing little or seeking accommodation with those who use violence. But in recent years, as innocents have been killed from Karachi to Islamabad, it has become clear that it is the Pakistani people who are the most endangered by extremism. Public opinion has turned. The Pakistani army has waged an offensive in Swat and South Waziristan. And there is no doubt that the United States and Pakistan share a common enemy."

THE FACTS: It’s true the Pakistani army this year has launched offensives against extremist elements in the areas cited by Obama. What he did not mention, however, is that the groups being targeted by the Pakistanis are those that threaten the Pakistani government — not those, also based in Pakistan, that are focused on attacking U.S. and Afghan forces on the other side of the porous border with Afghanistan.

Obama administration officials have publicly praised Pakistan for taking on the extremists in Swat and South Waziristan. But they also have made clear that they want Pakistan to put more military pressure on the Afghan-focused extremist groups, which have so far not been confronted on the Pakistan side of the border, other than by airstrikes from unmanned U.S. drones.

Among the groups not yet confronted directly by the Pakistani army is al-Qaida, whose top leader, Osama bin Laden, is believed to be hiding on the Pakistan side of the border.

___

OBAMA: "Let me be clear: there has never been an option before me that called for troop deployments before 2010, so there has been no delay or denial of resources necessary for the conduct of the war."

THE FACTS: He is correct, despite being accused by former Vice President Dick Cheney of dithering by taking the autumn to review options for Afghanistan.

Former Afghan war commander Gen. David McKiernan asked in 2008 for three brigades — of which two were approved for deployment by Obama in March of this year — but wanted the third to arrive in 2010, not earlier. His successor, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, posited a range of troop buildups — favoring about 40,000 — but did not ask for them to be in place as early as this year.

Swiss ban mosque minarets in surprise vote

By ALEXANDER G. HIGGINS, Associated Press Writer Alexander G. Higgins, Associated Press Writer Sun Nov 29, 6:40 pm ET

GENEVA – Swiss voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional ban on minarets on Sunday, barring construction of the iconic mosque towers in a surprise vote that put Switzerland at the forefront of a European backlash against a growing Muslim population.

Muslim groups in Switzerland and abroad condemned the vote as biased and anti-Islamic. Business groups said the decision hurt Switzerland’s international standing and could damage relations with Muslim nations and wealthy investors who bank, travel and shop there.

"The Swiss have failed to give a clear signal for diversity, freedom of religion and human rights," said Omar Al-Rawi, integration representative of the Islamic Denomination in Austria, which said its reaction was "grief and deep disappointment."

About 300 people turned out for a spontaneous demonstration on the square outside parliament, holding up signs saying, "That is not my Switzerland," placing candles in front of a model of a minaret and making another minaret shape out of the candles themselves.

"We’re sorry," said another sign. A young woman pinned to her jacket a piece of paper saying, "Swiss passport for sale."

The referendum by the nationalist Swiss People’s Party labeled minarets as symbols of rising Muslim political power that could one day transform Switzerland into an Islamic nation. The initiative was approved 57.5 to 42.5 percent by some 2.67 million voters. Only four of the 26 cantons or states opposed the initiative, granting the double approval that makes it part of the Swiss constitution.

Muslims comprise about 6 percent of Switzerland’s 7.5 million people. Many are refugees from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and about one in 10 actively practices their religion, the government says.

The country’s four standing minarets, which won’t be affected by the ban, do not traditionally broadcast the call to prayer outside their own buildings.

The sponsors of the initiative provoked complaints of bias from local officials and human-rights group with campaign posters that showed minarets rising like missiles from the Swiss flag next to a fully veiled woman. Backers said the growing Muslim population was straining the country "because Muslims don’t just practice religion."

"The minaret is a sign of political power and demand, comparable with whole-body covering by the burqa, tolerance of forced marriage and genital mutilation of girls," the sponsors said. They said Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan compared mosques to Islam’s military barracks and called "the minarets our bayonets." Erdogan made the comment in citing an Islamic poem many years before he became prime minister.

Anxieties about growing Muslim minorities have rippled across Europe in recent years, leading to legal changes in some countries. There have been French moves to ban the full-length body covering known as the burqa. Some German states have introduced bans on head scarves for Muslim women teaching in public schools. Mosques and minaret construction projects in Sweden, France, Italy, Austria, Greece, Germany and Slovenia have been met by protests.

But the Swiss ban in minarets, sponsored by the country’s largest political party, was one of the most extreme reactions.

"It’s a sad day for freedom of religion," said Mohammed Shafiq, the chief executive of the Ramadhan Foundation, a British youth organization. "A constitutional amendment that’s targeted towards one religious community is discriminatory and abhorrent."

He said he was concerned the decision could have reverberations in other European countries.

Amnesty International said the vote violated freedom of religion and would probably be overturned by the Swiss supreme court or the European Court of Human Rights.

The seven-member Cabinet that heads the Swiss government had spoken out strongly against the initiative but the government said it accepted the vote and would impose an immediate ban on minaret construction.

It said that "Muslims in Switzerland are able to practice their religion alone or in community with others, and live according to their beliefs just as before." It took the unusual step of issuing its press release in Arabic as well as German, French, Italian and English.

Sunday’s results stood in stark contrast to opinion polls, last taken 10 days ago, that showed 37 percent supporting the proposal. Experts said before the vote that they feared Swiss had pretended during the polling that they opposed the ban because they didn’t want to appear intolerant.

"The sponsors of the ban have achieved something everyone wanted to prevent, and that is to influence and change the relations to Muslims and their social integration in a negative way," said Taner Hatipoglu, president of the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Zurich. "Muslims indeed will not feel safe anymore."

The People’s Party has campaigned mainly unsuccessfully in previous years against immigrants with campaign posters showing white sheep kicking a black sheep off the Swiss flag and another with brown hands grabbing eagerly for Swiss passports.

Geneva’s main mosque was vandalized Thursday when someone threw a pot of pink paint at the entrance. Earlier this month, a vehicle with a loudspeaker drove through the area imitating a muezzin’s call to prayer, and vandals damaged a mosaic when they threw cobblestones at the building.

7 stories Obama doesn’t want told

John F. Harris John F. Harris Mon Nov 30, 5:45 am ET

Presidential politics is about storytelling. Presented with a vivid storyline, voters naturally tend to fit every new event or piece of information into a picture that is already neatly framed in their minds.

No one understands this better than Barack Obama and his team, who won the 2008 election in part because they were better storytellers than the opposition. The pro-Obama narrative featured an almost mystically talented young idealist who stood for change in a disciplined and thoughtful way. This easily outpowered the anti-Obama narrative, featuring an opportunistic Chicago pol with dubious relationships who was more liberal than he was letting on.

A year into his presidency, however, Obama’s gift for controlling his image shows signs of faltering. As Washington returns to work from the Thanksgiving holiday, there are several anti-Obama storylines gaining momentum.

The Obama White House argues that all of these storylines are inaccurate or unfair. In some cases these anti-Obama narratives are fanned by Republicans, in some cases by reporters and commentators.

But they all are serious threats to Obama, if they gain enough currency to become the dominant frame through which people interpret the president’s actions and motives.

Here are seven storylines Obama needs to worry about:

He thinks he’s playing with Monopoly money

Economists and business leaders from across the ideological spectrum were urging the new president on last winter when he signed onto more than a trillion in stimulus spending and bank and auto bailouts during his first weeks in office. Many, though far from all, of these same people now agree that these actions helped avert an even worse financial catastrophe.

Along the way, however, it is clear Obama underestimated the political consequences that flow from the perception that he is a profligate spender. He also misjudged the anger in middle America about bailouts with weak and sporadic public explanations of why he believed they were necessary.

The flight of independents away from Democrats last summer — the trend that recently hammered Democrats in off-year elections in Virginia — coincided with what polls show was alarm among these voters about undisciplined big government and runaway spending. The likely passage of a health care reform package criticized as weak on cost-control will compound the problem.

Obama understands the political peril, and his team is signaling that he will use the 2010 State of the Union address to emphasize fiscal discipline. The political challenge, however, is an even bigger substantive challenge—since the most convincing way to project fiscal discipline would be actually to impose spending reductions that would cramp his own agenda and that of congressional Democrats.

Too much Leonard Nimoy

People used to make fun of Bill Clinton’s misty-eyed, raspy-voiced claims that, “I feel your pain.”

The reality, however, is that Clinton’s dozen years as governor before becoming president really did leave him with a vivid sense of the concrete human dimensions of policy. He did not view programs as abstractions — he viewed them in terms of actual people he knew by name.

Obama, a legislator and law professor, is fluent in describing the nuances of problems. But his intellectuality has contributed to a growing critique that decisions are detached from rock-bottom principles.

Both Maureen Dowd in The New York Times and Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post have likened him to Star Trek’s Mr. Spock.

The Spock imagery has been especially strong during the extended review Obama has undertaken of Afghanistan policy. He’ll announce the results on Tuesday. The speech’s success will be judged not only on the logic of the presentation but on whether Obama communicates in a more visceral way what progress looks like and why it is worth achieving. No soldier wants to take a bullet in the name of nuance.

That’s the Chicago Way

This is a storyline that’s likely taken root more firmly in Washington than around the country. The rap is that his West Wing is dominated by brass-knuckled pols.

It does not help that many West Wing aides seem to relish an image of themselves as shrewd, brass-knuckled political types. In a Washington Post story this month, White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina, referring to most of Obama’s team, said, “We are all campaign hacks.”

The problem is that many voters took Obama seriously in 2008 when he talked about wanting to create a more reasoned, non-partisan style of governance in Washington. When Republicans showed scant interest in cooperating with Obama at the start, the Obama West Wing gladly reverted to campaign hack mode.

The examples of Chicago-style politics include their delight in public battles with Rush Limbaugh and Fox News and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. (There was also a semi-public campaign of leaks aimed at Greg Craig, the White House counsel who fell out of favor.) In private, the Obama team cut an early deal — to the distaste of many congressional Democrats — that gave favorable terms to the pharmaceutical lobby in exchange for their backing his health care plans.

The lesson that many Washington insiders have drawn is that Obama wants to buy off the people he can and bowl over those he can’t. If that perception spreads beyond Washington this will scuff Obama’s brand as a new style of political leader.

He’s a pushover

If you are going to be known as a fighter, you might as well reap the benefits. But some of the same insider circles that are starting to view Obama as a bully are also starting to whisper that he’s a patsy.

It seems a bit contradictory, to be sure. But it’s a perception that began when Obama several times laid down lines — then let people cross them with seeming impunity. Last summer he told Democrats they better not go home for recess until a critical health care vote but they blew him off. He told the Israeli government he wanted a freeze in settlements but no one took him seriously. Even Fox News — which his aides prominently said should not be treated like a real news organization — then got interview time for its White House correspondent.

In truth, most of these episodes do not amount to much. But this unflattering storyline would take a more serious turn if Obama is seen as unable to deliver on his stern warnings in the escalating conflict with Iran over its nuclear program. 

He sees America as another pleasant country on the U.N. roll call, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe

That line belonged to George H.W. Bush, excoriating Democrat Michael Dukakis in 1988. But it highlights a continuing reality: In presidential politics the safe ground has always been to be an American exceptionalist.

Politicians of both parties have embraced the idea that this country — because of its power and/or the hand of Providence — should be a singular force in the world. It would be hugely unwelcome for Obama if the perception took root that he is comfortable with a relative decline in U.S. influence or position in the world.

On this score, the reviews of Obama’s recent Asia trip were harsh.

His peculiar bow to the emperor of Japan was symbolic. But his lots-of-velvet, not-much-iron approach to China had substantive implications.

On the left, the budding storyline is that Obama has retreated from human rights in the name of cynical realism. On the right, it is that he is more interested in being President of the World than President of the United States, a critique that will be heard more in December as he stops in Oslo to pick up his Nobel Prize and then in Copenhagen for an international summit on curbing greenhouse gases.

President Pelosi

No figure in Barack Obama’s Washington, including Obama, has had more success in advancing his will than the speaker of the House, despite public approval ratings that hover in the range of Dick Cheney’s. With a mix of tough party discipline and shrewd vote-counting, she passed a version of the stimulus bill largely written by congressional Democrats, passed climate legislation, and passed her chamber’s version of health care reform. She and anti-war liberals in her caucus are clearly affecting the White House’s Afghanistan calculations.

The great hazard for Obama is if Republicans or journalists conclude — as some already have — that Pelosi’s achievements are more impressive than Obama’s or come at his expense.

This conclusion seems premature, especially with the final chapter of the health care drama yet to be written.

But it is clear that Obama has allowed the speaker to become more nearly an equal — and far from a subordinate — than many of his predecessors of both parties would have thought wise.

He’s in love with the man in the mirror

No one becomes president without a fair share of what the French call amour propre. Does Obama have more than his share of self-regard?

It’s a common theme of Washington buzz that Obama is over-exposed. He gives interviews on his sports obsessions to ESPN, cracks wise with Leno and Letterman, discusses his fitness with Men’s Health, discusses his marriage in a joint interview with first lady Michelle Obama for The New York Times. A photo the other day caught him leaving the White House clutching a copy of GQ featuring himself.

White House aides say making Obama widely available is the right strategy for communicating with Americans in an era of highly fragmented media.

But, as the novelty of a new president wears off, the Obama cult of personality risks coming off as mere vanity unless it is harnessed to tangible achievements.

That is why the next couple of months — with health care and Afghanistan jostling at center stage — will likely carry a long echo. Obama’s best hope of nipping bad storylines is to replace them with good ones rooted in public perceptions of his effectiveness.

The White House’s unprecedented use of ‘unprecedented’

Carol E. Lee Carol E. Lee Wed Nov 25, 12:54 am ET

The Obama White House is addicted to the “unprecedented.”

Perhaps it was a sign when President Barack Obama sat down in January to record his first weekly address and announced: “We begin this year and this administration in the midst of an unprecedented crisis that calls for unprecedented action."

What has followed is declaration after declaration of “unprecedented” milestones. Some of them are legitimate firsts, like the president’s online town hall at the White House in May.

But others the president wins merely on a technicality, and several clearly already have precedents.

The White House’s announcement of its unprecedented — “a first by an American president visiting China” — town hall meeting with students in Beijing, for instance, drew a collective eye roll in certain circles back home, namely among former aides to President George W. Bush, who had already been grumbling about Obama’s carefree application of “unprecedented.”

“I think I attended a town hall with President Bush in China,” former Bush adviser Karen Hughes quipped with a laugh, recalling a 2002 Bush speech in Beijing at which he took questions from the audience. “I thought: Were they asleep? Or were they dreaming? I remember standing and watching President Bush engage in a town hall that I believe was televised.”

President Bill Clinton also took questions from Chinese students at an event during a trip to the country in 1998, then did a radio call-in show in Shanghai the next day.

The White House’s characterization of Obama’s Beijing town hall mirrored the description staff gave Obama’s address to students on the first day of school, which the Education Department called “historic.” Yet President George H.W. Bush delivered an address to students, as did President Ronald Reagan. Maybe it was the streaming online video of Obama’s speech to students that was unprecedented?

Either way, for a president whose approach to exaggerated critiques of his administration is to “call ‘em out” and who has made an issue of forcing corporate America to expose the fine print, one wonders whether his use of “unprecedented” would pass his own litmus test.

Indeed some of his efforts are unprecedented. Obama noted, for example, that world leaders took “unprecedented steps” on nuclear nonproliferation at a meeting of the United Nations Security Council that he was the first U.S. president ever to chair.

But at times Obama’s use of “unprecedented” is questionable.

Obama has said he “took office amid unprecedented economic turmoil” and that the situation demanded “unprecedented international cooperation” and resulted in his signing of the “unprecedented" Recovery Act. Yet it seems the Great Depression and the New Deal might be considered precedents for the current economic crisis and the $787 billion stimulus plan.

And Obama’s promise of “an unprecedented effort to root out waste and inefficiency” sounded a lot like promises of past presidents.

“I believe the Congress and the American people approve my goals of economy and efficiency,” President Lyndon B. Johnson told Congress in 1965. “I believe they are as opposed to waste as I am. We can and will eliminate it.”

On bipartisanship, Obama raised a few eyebrows when during his first press conference he cited “putting three Republicans in my Cabinet” as “something that is unprecedented.”

“He is right — assuming he’s talking specifically about selecting three Republicans (and not Democrats in a Republican administration) simultaneously and during the first term (not over the course of a presidency),” the National Journal pointed out. The magazine noted that Johnson, Harry S. Truman and Franklin D. Roosevelt had three Republicans serving in their Democratic administrations. Republicans Gerald Ford and Dwight Eisenhower had three Democrats serving in theirs.

The White House stands by its claims.

“During his first year in office, President Obama has taken historic and, in some cases, unprecedented  actions to fulfill his campaign promise to change business as usual in Washington and confront the wide-ranging challenges facing America,” said deputy White House press secretary Josh Earnest.

“Cynics may say they’ve heard it all before, but the progress we’ve made on health care reform, energy reform and transparent government demonstrates these changes — in the view of the American people — can’t happen soon enough,” he said.

And when it comes to the Chinese town hall, White House officials say the ex-Bush aides have it all wrong — saying it was the first full-blown “town hall” by a U.S. president in China (because Clinton and Bush took questions after a speech). It was also the first U.S. presidential event streamed to an Internet audience in China and the first with questions from the Internet. And it garnered the biggest viewership, with 55 million online hits alone — making its audience unprecedented, oneofficial said.

The desire to be seen as treading on an unbeaten path is a part of the Obama brand. His candidacy was built on the notion that his rise to the presidency followed no footprints. He wasn’t a Clinton or a John McCain. He had a uniqueness that made him an unprecedented, if not unlikely, candidate.

That theme, which is driven by his personal narrative, has carried over into the White House. And in the context of the something-to-prove drive of a young president with scant executive experience, the Obama White House has used “unprecedented” as a rhetorical means through which he has asserted himself.

It’s also a reflection of the president personally.

“It says how very unique he feels he is,” said Stephen Hess, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution  who worked in the Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations. Hess described Obama as “a man who sees himself as unprecedented in every way … given his background — his mother, his father, where he grew up, how he became president of the United States.”

“Of course, biblically, there’s nothing new under the sun, and for most everything he’s done as president there is some precedent for somewhere,” he added. “What he does is variations on a theme.”

Still, Hess said, the word doesn’t have “great political currency.”

“I don’t think he gets special credit for being unprecedented, but he thinks that way,” he said. “I think that tells us more about him than really anything else about how he runs the White House.”

Andrew Jackson was the first president to use the word “unprecedented,” in 1831, according to a search of the archives of The American Presidency Project. For more than 100 years afterward, presidents used the word “unprecedented” in 72 speeches and mostly reserved it for major addresses.

But since FDR talked of meeting “the unprecedented task before us” during his first inaugural address in 1933, presidents have used the word on almost 2,000 occasions to describe everything from the death of Elvis Presley (Carter) to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (Reagan).

Obama has relied on “unprecedented” in more than 90 instances, using the word at least 129 times in everything from major addresses to small speeches, statements, memorandums and proclamations. (Bush, by contrast, used the word 262 times over eight years.)

Obama has used “unprecedented” to describe his efforts on science research, his plan for the auto industry and his administration’s ethics, transparency and accountability guidelines.

He has promised an “unprecedented commitment” to education, to developing clean energy and “to preserving America’s treasured landscapes,” which, Obama has noted, have seen “unprecedented droughts” and “unprecedented wildfires” in the face of climate change.

There has been “unprecedented consensus” on health care reform under Obama’s watch, as well as “the unprecedented intervention of the federal government to stabilize the financial markets” and an “unprecedented” bank review.

His administration has also taken “unprecedented action to stem the spread of foreclosures,” Obama said, including the creation of “an unprecedented fund, in partnership with the Federal Reserve,” to get credit flowing.

“I wonder if they believe that everything is really unprecedented, or is it just their talking point,” said former Bush spokesman Gordon Johndroe, who is among those smarting over Obama’s use of unprecedented. “This rhetoric is more understandable during a campaign, but I’m not sure it’s going to get them far while governing when the facts don’t always agree.”

It arguably started during the campaign, when Obama’s team was clocking one unprecedented milestone after another: his trip to Europe, his Internet connectedness, his fundraising strategy, his rallies, his crowds. Obama’s election was historic. His inauguration broke attendance records that reportedly required “unprecedented” security.

And sure, once in office, the administration faced a massive economic crisis. And, yes, the Obama team brought the White House onto Facebook and Twitter.

But by applying the “unprecedented” label to a so many scenarios in government — from transparency to efforts to reduce the environmental impact of mountaintop coal mining — the Obama administration risks outsize expectations and overhype.

“It comes close to a certain arrogance,” Hughes said, “as if this president has done things that no other president has ever done before — except that they have done them before.”

Obama even treads on unprecedented territory in ways he’s not trying to highlight. At this point in his presidency he’s spent more time on the golf course, for instance, than his immediate predecessor. He’s also attended more fundraisers. And sometimes he surprises people with his characterization of himself as "America’s first Pacific president," as he did in Tokyo last week.

Obama’s unprecedented use of "unprecedented" will likely continue in his second year in office, when the administration is expected to tackle the unprecedented deficit.

Congressman: Did ACORN bust lead to Anita Dunn’s departure?

Ah, our little Maoist Anita Dunn. Her remarks in the infamous clip end with “President Obama came out of the background of community organizers…”

She took on Fox News, Fox News pushed back and now Dunn is done as the White House community organizer of communications.

Liberals said it was an interim appointment. But as Charley Steiner would say if he covered politics instead of sports, “She’s listed as interim, but aren’t we all.”

Republican Congressman Steve King of Iowa, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, said there may be more to Dunn’s departure than meets the eye: ACORN.

Federal agents raided the ACORN/SEIU Local 100 headquarters in New Orleans just before she left the White House. King may be way out in right field on this one, but he sees a connection with Dunn and ACORN through her husband, who is a lawyer. Maybe.

It seems to be a stretch.

His press release:

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Congressman Steve King made the following statement and issued this release regarding the resignation of White House communications director Anita Dunn.

“Anita Dunn left the White House earlier than expected. Not only has Dunn lavished praises on Chairman Mao and compared him to Mother Teresa, Dunn’s husband has a public record of protecting ACORN and protecting President Obama’s relationship to ACORN.”

“ACORN’s national headquarters are now under a full attorney general investigation. Congress and Attorney General Holder need to launch their investigations and a special prosecutor needs to be named – sooner rather than later.”

Background:

- Four days after Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell raided ACORN’s national office in New Orleans, seizing paper records and computer hard drives, White House communications director Anita Dunn – the wife of a leading ACORN defender – has resigned abruptly from her position. Dunn was the lead critic of Fox News for reporting on the ACORN prostitution scandal, which originally broke on September 10. Dunn subsequently launched a public attack against Fox News on October 11, and she even stated “let’s not pretend they’re a news network” in reference to Fox. The White House press office, likely under Dunn’s direction, blocked Fox from a press pool event on October 22 that included all other networks in their classification. The White House has since given up on its effort to discredit Fox News

- Anita Dunn is married to Robert Bauer, who served as general counsel for Obama for America. In 2008, Bauer sent a letter to then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey arguing that Department of Justice should not investigate election-related fraud allegations against ACORN. The letter is available at http://rawstory.com/images/other/ObamaJusticeletter.pdf. Footnote five of Bauer’s letter complains that “In the last week, several members of Congress who are officially affiliated with the McCain-Palin campaign have written to the Attorney General and U.S. Attorneys pressuring them to investigate ACORN.” The letter also claims that Republican concerns regarding ACORN-related fraud were “manufactured.” Subsequent revelations have validated these Republican concerns and proven the existence of additional fraudulent activities. The clear message of Bauer’s letter was to tell the DOJ to back off from interfering with ACORN’s activities

- ACORN has admitted to over 400,000 fraudulent voter registrations in the 2008 election cycle.

by Don Surber

Our Constitution is 20 pages (the original is 11). It governs our entire country. The new healthcare bill is over 2000. It focuses on one issue. What’s wrong with this picture?

Holy crap!!

Lou Dobbs says he is leaving CNN

By DAVID BAUDER, AP Television Writer David Bauder, Ap Television Writer 37 mins ago

NEW YORK – CNN’s Lou Dobbs, a lightning rod for criticism following his transition from a business journalist to an opinionated anchor on such issues as illegal immigration, told viewers on Wednesday that he was quitting his nightly show to pursue new opportunities.

"This will be my last broadcast," Dobbs said after giving the day’s headlines. Dobbs, who hosts a daily radio show unrelated to CNN, said the network had allowed him to be released early from his contract.

Dobbs was a CNN original, signing on when the cable network started in 1980. For much of that time, he hosted a nightly business broadcast that became one of the most influential shows in the corporate world, and CNN’s most profitable show for advertising revenue.

But Dobbs said his world view changed after the 2001 terrorist attacks and corporate corruption scandals, and he began to more freely express his opinions. He was particularly persistent in bringing the immigration issue to the fore, winning him both higher ratings and enemies. Latino groups had an active petition drive seeking his removal.

His presence became awkward for CNN, particularly as it began emphasizing reporting and non-opinion shows. He angered management this summer by pressing questions about President Barack Obama’s birth site after CNN reporters determined there was no issue.

Dobbs said the decision came after many months of discussion with CNN U.S. President Jon Klein. Dobbs said he wanted to concentrate on his role as a commentator and on advocacy journalism.

Klein hailed Dobbs’ "appetite for big ideas, the megawatt smile and larger than life presence he brought to our newsroom."

"With characteristic forthrightness, Lou has now decided to carry the banner of advocacy journalism elsewhere," Klein said. "We respect his decision."

Dobbs said he was proud of his role in helping to build the first cable news network. He said some leaders in media, politics and business "have been urging me to go beyond my role here at CNN and to engage in constructive problem-solving."

Seated at an anchor desk in front of a screen with a fluttering American flag, Dobbs mentioned his interest in issues such as health care, jobs, immigration, climate change and the wars.

"Unfortunately, these issues are now defined in the public arena by partisanship and ideology rather than rigorous empirical thought and forthright analysis and discussion," he said. "I will be working diligently to change that as best I can."

His resignation was hailed by activists who were seeking his ouster.

"Our contention all along was that Lou Dobbs — who has a long history of spreading lies and conspiracy theories about immigrants and Latinos — does not belong on the most trusted name in news," said Roberto Lovato, co-founder of Presente.org. "We are thrilled that Dobbs no longer has the legitimate platform from which to incite fear and hate."

Tom Saenz, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the leading Latino legal organization, said, "I think the Latino community can and should celebrate that Lou Dobbs is no longer on CNN."

Dobbs did not immediately return telephone and e-mail messages to talk about his critics.

Although he joined CNN in 1980, Dobbs left the network for two year in 1999, after angrily complaining on the air about a decision by then-CNN President Rick Kaplan to switch away from his show to a live news event. An Internet venture failed and when Kaplan left CNN, Dobbs returned.

A decision on who will replace Dobbs is expected to be announced on Thursday.