Obama’s reelection team has already played some major cards

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Presidential elections are won or lost because of how a candidate’s team plays the “cards” it has. It is puzzling then, to watch the “play” pattern Barack Obama’s reelection team is using.  It begs the question: What could motivate the playing of Obama’s best “cards” eighteen months before Election Day?

Major “cards” already used

Last week Representative James Clyburn, a Black Democrat from South Carolina, played the race card saying, “.. the president’s problems are in large measure because of his skin color.” Using this one now can only mean trouble with Obama’s Black base.

Obama has already released his “real” birth certificate. Which may actually be real, but why release it now instead of just before Election Day?

April’s unemployment number was made better by an infusion of 62,000 of the Democrats’ dreaded “hamburger flipping” jobs, (the ones that didn’t used to count when Bush was in office).  Getting the current 9.0% unemployment down is essential to Obama’s chances next year. Last fall McDonald’s got a wavier from the more expensive sections of Obamacare. It is a sure bet these jobs were the YING to the wavier YANG. Obama could have dialed up Mickey Dee’s anytime to collect on this debt. Why use the quick jobs jump now?

An Afghani Intelligence chief is on record as insisting the location of Osama bin Laden was well known for four years. While this may be a stretch many observers maintain his whereabouts was known for at least several months. Obama might not have had much choice. Maybe he really didn’t know where to find bin Laden until just before the mission. But that event coming so close to releasing his putative birth certificate has somewhat blunted the value of both moves.

Read More at Coach is Right By Coach Collins, Coach is Right

Morning Bell: The Unstimulated Obama Economy

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Newsflash from The New York Times: President Barack Obama’s stimulus did not work. No, the Times doesn’t say that in so many words, but in an op-ed this morning, the paper laments the sputtering economy and the fact that Washington just isn’t doing enough to help the economy grow. The problem, of course, is that Washington has done too much of the wrong things to get the economy moving again.

The economic news that’s really sticking in the Old Gray Lady’s craw is revised data released last week that shows the economy’s growth stuck at 1.8 percent, slow consumer spending, stagnant wages, higher prices for gas and food, the poor housing market, flagging consumer confidence and a recent Labor Department report showing a higher-than-expected rise in claims for jobless benefits. The Times complains:

The grim numbers tell an unavoidable truth: The economy is not growing nearly fast enough to dent unemployment. Unfortunately, no one in Washington is pushing policies to promote stronger growth now.

What the Times forgot to mention, though, is that Washington over the past two years has done a lot—a whole lot—with the biggest ticket item being the Obama-Reid-Pelosi $787 billion stimulus that was designed to “create or save” 3.5 million new jobs by 2011. Despite the extraordinarily high cost, that didn’t happen, and unemployment has increased to 9 percent.

But don’t tell that to the Obama stimulus apologists, though. In an interview on Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace remarked that in light of the dismal economic numbers, the Obama Administration’s policies and near $1 trillion stimulus “isn’t working” and asked Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD), a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus to respond. For her, those dots just don’t connect:

Well, I mean – I don’t know that I agree with that, because, you know, first of all – let me finish here. I mean, first of all, the trillion dollars for stimulus package – actually $786 billion – was absolutely necessary to make sure that this economy didn’t go into a freefall. We also know that we had to make sure that we began to stimulate the kind of growth that we need in this country to invest in the future.

For the American people, though, that reality is hitting home. Joseph Lupton, an economist at JP Morgan Chase and Company, says, “There are pretty big costs to not really generating a sizeable recovery.” And as The Wall Street Journal reports, those costs are high unemployment, with 5.8 million people out of work for more than six months.

Read More at The Foundry Mike Brownfield, The Foundry

Tea party pushes GOP candidates to right

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In the first presidential election since the tea party’s emergence, Republican candidates are drifting rightward on a range of issues, even though more centrist stands might play well in the 2012 general election.

On energy, taxes, health care and other topics, the top candidates hold positions that are more conservative than those they espoused a few years ago.

The shifts reflect the evolving views of conservative voters, who will play a major role in choosing the Republican nominee. In that sense, the candidates’ repositioning seems savvy or even essential.

But the eventual nominee will face President Obama in the 2012 general election, when independent voters appear likely to be decisive players once again. Those independents may be far less enamored of hard-right positions than are the GOP activists who will wield power in the Iowa caucuses, the New Hampshire primary and other nominating contests.

“The most visible shift in the political landscape” in recent years “is the emergence of a single bloc of across-the-board conservatives,” says the Pew Research Center, which conducts extensive voter surveys. Many of them “take extremely conservative positions on nearly all issues,” Pew reports. They largely “agree with the tea party” and “very strongly disapprove of Barack Obama’s job performance.”

Read More at the Washington Times by Chris Babington, The Washington Times

Perry’s Path to GOP Nomination Could be the Clearest

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Maybe Texas Gov. Rick Perry said he’s decided to test the waters on a presidential run just because he’s feels left out.

For all the attention paid to the presidential possibilities of two members of the House (Paul Ryan and Michele Bachmann) and a reality show host (you know who), you’d never know that the Republicans had on their bench the three-term governor of the state with the nation’s best economy and the largest Republican population.

But for some reason, when Perry told people he wasn’t running, reporters believed him. If Chris Christie even flies over Iowa, the blogosphere goes into meltdown mode, but the political press for some reason mostly took Perry at his word.

It seems strange that they would have.

Perry, who has been governor for more than a decade, is a favorite of the Tea Party movement for his tough stands on state sovereignty, border security, taxes and gun rights. Anybody who packs heat when he jogs so he can blow away coyotes that mess with his Labrador retriever and hangs out with Ted Nugent at a Tax Day rally is going to have serious street cred with the Republican base.

Read More at Fox News By Chris Stirewalt, Fox News

U.S. Military Personnel, Veterans Give Obama Lower Marks

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U.S. military veterans and those currently on active military duty are less likely to approve of President Obama’s job performance than are Americans of comparable ages who are not in the military.

These results are based on an analysis of more than 238,000 interviews conducted as part of Gallup Daily tracking from January 2010 through April 2011. Respondents were classified as veterans/active-duty military based on responses to a series of questions probing whether any member of the household had served in the U.S. military, and whether the respondent himself or herself had served and, if so, whether the respondent was currently on active duty. Americans currently serving in the military overseas or on ships at sea would not be included in this national cell and landline telephone sample.

Thirty-seven percent of all active-duty military personnel and veterans surveyed approved of the job Obama is doing during the January 2010 to April 2011 time frame. That compares with 48% of nonveterans interviewed during the same period.

Obama’s approval rating varies by age, with younger Americans in general most likely to approve and older Americans least likely. The gap in approval between veterans/active duty military and nonveterans persists across the age spectrum, from 18- to 29-year-olds to those 80 and older.

Differences Across Gender Groups

Veterans and active-duty military, particularly those 40 and older, are predominantly men, and men are less likely to approve of the job Obama is doing than are women. However, the gap in Obama job approval between veterans/active-duty military and nonveterans persists among men in each age group.

Read More at Gallup by Frank Newport, Gallup

Planned Parenthood Challenges New South Dakota Abortion Law

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A law scheduled to go into effect July 1 to require women to wait 72 hours and consult a crisis pregnancy center adviser before getting an abortion violates First Amendment rights, according to a lawsuit filed Friday by Planned Parenthood in U.S. District Court in Sioux Falls, S.D.

Calling South Dakota’s abortion laws the most burdensome in the nation, Planned Parenthood said that HB 1217 aims to misinform pregnant women with the intent of dissuading them from getting an abortion.

“Under the pretext of ensuring the patient’s decision to have an abortion is ‘voluntary, uncoerced, and informed,’ the law has both the purpose and the effect of severely restricting access to abortion services, and violates patients’ and physicians’ First Amendment rights against compelled speech and patients’ right to informational privacy,” Planned Parenthood said in a written statement.

HB 1217 was passed in March and aims to toughen the state’s current 24-hour mandatory waiting period. The law requires physicians to provide women with a list of “pregnancy help centers” where they must go to get “written proof” that they sought counseling before getting an abortion.

A woman must also be given the opportunity to view a sonogram and receive literature describing the risks associated with abortion.

Read More at Fox News

Wisconsin case should’ve had different judge

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A legal expert who has been watching the court battle over Wisconsin’s collective bargaining law says it was not only wrong for the judge to void the measure, but she should have recused herself from the case.

Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, thinks Judge Maryann Sumi should have withdrawn herself because her son was an organizer for one of the big unions in Wisconsin that protested the legislation backed by Governor Scott Walker and other Republican lawmakers.

“Even worse, the day before she issued her decision, she actually hired lawyers who filed a brief on her behalf in this very same case, which is being considered by the Supreme Court of Wisconsin,” he explains. “I have never heard of a judge hiring lawyers to file a brief [to make] arguments in a case.”

Judge Sumi ruled against the law last week, saying Republicans violated Wisconsin’s open meetings law — but Spakovsky disagrees.

“If you read her opinion, she ignores the fact that there is a specific exemption for the kind of bill that was passed,” he notes. “She basically said that they didn’t give a 24-hour notice of a legislative meeting. But the meeting was for a conference committee, and the Senate actually has a rule that says that there doesn’t have to be any notice of proceedings for a conference committee.”

Read More at OneNewsNow by Chris Woodward, OneNewsNow

Pro-Obama Media Always Shocked by Bad Economic News

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As megablogger Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, has noted with amusement, the word “unexpectedly” or variants thereon keep cropping up in mainstream media stories about the economy.

“New U.S. claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly climbed,” reported cnbc.com May 25.

“Personal consumption fell,” Business Insider reported the same day, “when it was expected to rise.”

“Durable goods declined 3.6 percent last month,” Reuters reported May 25, “worse than economists’ expectations.”

From Human Events By Michael Barone, Human Events

The GOP Loss In New York Was About New York, Not Paul Ryan

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Republicans suck in New York. Period. End of Story.

The GOP lost the special election in NY-26 and the media and Democrats are heralding it as proof that the GOP is getting punished for wanting to reform medicare.

Back when the GOP lost the 2009 special election in New York featuring Dede Scozzafava, et al, the Democrats heralded the GOP defeat as proof that Republican opposition to Obamacare and being the “Party of No” was a clear sign that the Democrats were right on the agenda and the GOP’s obstruction of Barack Obama would be punished by the voters.

That was before the GOP went on to win the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races and pick up Ted Kennedy’s (!!!!) seat in Massachusetts.

To say that this special election defeat of the GOP is a repudiation of the GOP’s efforts on Medicare is laughable on its face.

The truth of the matter is that the Republican Party of New York sucks and has sucked for a while. It is especially terrible at special elections where the out of touch party leaders pick state legislators who everyone hates and runs them.

Read More at Red State by Erick Erickson, Red State