Presidents of the United States are Just Like Us!

In case you’ve ever wondered what it looks like whan I walk my dog, it’s pretty much like this:

Just replace the tall, athletic guy with an adorable 112 pound redhead who couldn’t shoot a basket to save her life.  Oh, and add a few more pounds to (and remove a good bit of the pretentiousness from) the dog.  And assume that the dog’s owners don’t have a full-time staff who probably take the dog on regular walks and train him well. Otherwise, we could be twins.

(In case you’re not quite as cultured as me, the title there (and here) is a reference to that monumental publication “Us Weekly,” which has a regular series titled “Celebrities are Just Like Us” (parodied here), which involves squeeing with delight over pictures of celebrities doing things like buying coffee or tying their shoes.  I had a roommate who read it, OK?)

If you like your healthcare, you can(‘t) keep it, part II

Well, I’m sure most people will be able to keep their healthcare, right?  I mean, what’s a million or so people on those lower premium limited benefit plans?  After all, most people get their health insurance through their workplace, right?  Yeah, I’ll just keep doing that. 

Or will you?  (via Instapundit)

Under interim regulations, current employer-based coverage would not be grandfathered and hence subject to the health care laws’ consumer provisions if:

* The plan eliminates benefits related to diagnosis or treatment of a particular condition.

* The plan increases the percentage of a cost-sharing requirement (such as co-insurance) above the level at which it was on March 23, 2010.

* The plan increases the fixed amount of cost sharing such as deductibles or out-of-pocket limits by a total percentage measured from March 23, 2010, that is more than the sum of medical inflation plus 15 percentage points.

* The plan increases co-payments as a total percentage measured from March 23, 2010, that is more than the sum of medical inflation plus 15 percentage points or medical inflation plus $5.

* The employer’s share of the premium decreases more than 5 percentage points below what the share was on March 23, 2010.

According to the report, by 2013 51% of all employers — 66% of small employers (3-99 employees) and 45% of large employers — would have to relinquish current coverage. In a worst-case scenario, 69% of firms would lose their grandfathered status.

So, if you like your health insurance, and you are part of a lucky minority, you can keep it.  Well, that’s basically what Obama said.

I think that the whole “Obama’s not getting emotional enough about the oil leak” meme is just about the dumbest criticism of a president I’ve ever heard

Yet it seems to be everywhere, mostly from liberals (go figure). 

But don’t worry, he’s fighting back against it anyway. 

“I don’t sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar, we talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick.”

The fact that the president takes these critics seriously, and has decided that he can posture and showboat his way back into their good graces (as opposed to actually managing the situation), is just one more of many reminders that we sent a child to do an adult’s job.

Related: Instapundit has a round-up.

I’ve noticed a number of conservative commenters

complaining about President Obama’s slow reaction to the oil leak.  Some have even called it “Obama’s Katrina.”  I have to say, I”m not sure what he could or should be or have been doing, so I’m not seeing a place to blame him. 

Of course, that logic hardly worked for Bush in the actual Katrina, when there were clear layers of city and state government that had the actual responsibility to act, and there literally was nothing the feds were able to do.  And, since Obama was one of those who blamed the federal government for something that they couldn’t and shouldn’t have acted on, I’m not exactly feeling sorry for the guy.

I don’t like it when people call the president a moron

Or an idiot, or stupid, or any other name my mother used to chide me or my brother for calling each other when we were fighting over who got the toy surprise from the Apple Jacks box.  So I simply don’t know how to react to this video, pointed out by theblogprof. (via Instapundit)

Normally, I don’t watch web videos: I prefer to keep the sound off, they’re sometimes slow, sometimes they take too long to make their point.  I’d prefer to just read at my own pace.  But when I read this transcript:

When I was young, just got out of college, I had to buy auto insurance. I had a beat-up old car. And I won’t name the name of the insurance company, but there was a company — let’s call it Acme Insurance in Illinois. And I was paying my premiums every month. After about six months I got rear-ended and I called up Acme and said, I’d like to see if I can get my car repaired, and they laughed at me over the phone because really this was set up not to actually provide insurance; what it was set up was to meet the legal requirements. But it really wasn’t serious insurance.

Now, it’s one thing if you’ve got an old beat-up car that you can’t get fixed. It’s another thing if your kid is sick, or you’ve got breast cancer.

I actually had to watch it, just to make sure that this wasn’t missing some wisecrack or some explanation. 

When President Obama was running for office, I think that this would have worked as a parody.  Never worked, no real life experience, doesn’t even know the simplest things about insurance.  I would have laughed, taking it as exaggeration.

This doesn’t delight me anymore

There was a time, when Barack the Lightworker was still in recent memory, when people were still painting things like this (BTW, not safe for work or anyone who ever wants to have sex ever again!), that any sign of liberal blowback, of liberal criticism, was something to cherish in the most lovely schadenfreude, and perhaps a bit of delight over the fact that maybe they aren’t all brainwashed. 

But I think that that day has passed.  Newsbusters points to an article, one among many, from a very leftwing professor detailing President Obama’s failings:

Barack Obama has now, in just a year’s time, become the single most inept president perhaps in all of American history, and certainly in my lifetime. Never has so much political advantage been pissed away so rapidly, and what’s more in the context of so much national urgency and crisis. It’s astonishing, really, to contemplate how much has been lost in a single year.

…he doesn’t really “charge” at anything. He just talks about things, thinks about things a real long time, defers to others on things, and waits around for things to maybe happen.

…I have never seen a president so utterly lacking in passion. This man literally doesn’t even seem to care about himself, let alone this or that policy issue. He doesn’t seem to have any strong opinions on anything, a sure prescription for presidential failure.

…if you’re trying to run the most failed presidency ever, a really good idea is to campaign in the grandest terms possible, and then deliver squat. You know, talk about bending the arc of history. Invoke Martin Luther King’s dream and his struggles and even those of the slaves. Ring the big bells of generational calling. Remind voters every thirty seconds that the country badly needs “Change!”. Then get elected and turn around and continue the policies of your hated predecessor in every meaningful policy area. Only with less conviction. People will love that.

Is it amusing in a way?  Sure.  He’s not wrong, not about anything.  And yet, that’s my country’s president he’s talking about.  I love this country.  On one hand, I can’t defend Obama here, but on the other, I don’t want to see the leader of the U.S.A. maligned quite like this, fairly or not.  I can’t argue against it, so I can only be sad that it has come down to this.

I don’t know what this means, but it troubles me.

The present White House has a tendancy to shoot from the hip, so I’m hoping that this is just some flunkie’s idea of  strong sounding phrase that doesn’t have any real meaning or intent behind it.  Yet, the more I think about it, the more it troubles me, and I’d like to remember that it was there in case of future reference. 

The White House’s official response to this week’s Supreme Court decision upholding free speech rights in Citizens United (Via Ann Althouse):

With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics. It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans. This ruling gives the special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington–while undermining the influence of average Americans who make small contributions to support their preferred candidates. That’s why I am instructing my Administration to get to work immediately with Congress on this issue. We are going to talk with bipartisan Congressional leaders to develop a forceful response to this decision. The public interest requires nothing less.

(bolding mine) The Supreme Court’s decision was on constitutional grounds.  It ruled that the law which forbid distribution of a movie is invalid, under the constitution.  The president has no power to change that.  The congress has no power to change that.  The constitution says what it says. 

What, exactly, is Obama proposing to do here?

Added: Really good description of the issues at play in this case here.

Liberals replacing hope with rage

David Michael Green is really getting pissed off at Obama:

Like any good progressive, I’ve gone from admiration to hope to disappointment to anger when it comes to this president. Now I’m fast getting to rage.

How much rage? I find myself thinking that the thing I want most from the 2010 elections is for his party to get absolutely clobbered, even if that means a repeat of 1994. And that what I most want from 2012 is for him to be utterly humiliated, even if that means President Palin at the helm. That much rage.

But read the whole thing, it’s great fun. 

Oftentimes I wish that I could go back in time and supply the internet to the folks at various historical times, just to see if these sorts of attitudes were common, or if we now are special.  Were people bitching like this in the early Clinton years?  If they were, I’m sure they changed their tunes.  How about the Reagan years- he was pretty unpopular at first.

But it sure seems like President Obama has that something special, doesn’t it?