Maureen (Mo) Dowd was nicknamed The Cobra by The Dubster early on in that frat-boy's feckless time in the White House. For more than eight years, The Cobra savaged The Dubster and his gang of war criminals with great glee. Now, The Cobra has a new target: The Hopester, now POTUS. The Hopester was betrayed by his Transition Team:On November 5, 2008, Barack Obama named his entire transition team — formally organized as the Obama-Biden Transition Project, a 501(c)(4) organization. The work of this entity was overseen by three co-chairs: former White House chief of staff John Podesta, Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett, and Obama's current chief of staff Pete Rouse.
The co-chairs were assisted by an advisory board comprised of Carol Browner, William Daley, Christopher Edley, Michael Froman, Julius Genachowski, Donald Gips, Governor Janet Napolitano, Federico Peña, Susan Rice, Sonal Shah, Mark Gitenstein, and Ted Kaufman. Gitenstein and Kaufman served as co-chairs of Vice President-elect Biden's transition team.
Supervising the day-to-day activities of the transition were the Transition Senior Staff:
Chris Lu - Executive Director
Dan Pfeiffer - Communications Director
Stephanie Cutter - Chief Spokesperson
Cassandra Butts - General Counsel
Jim Messina - Personnel Director
Patrick Gaspard - Associate Personnel Direct
All of these people, if currently serving in the administration, should offer their letters of resignation. There is not a single buck, but several bucks that need to stop here. If this is (fair & balanced) reorganization, so be it.
[x Philly Fishwrap]
How To Pay For The Stimulus
By Signe Wilkinson
Click on image to enlarge. ♥[Signe Wilkinson was born in the depths of the baby boom and graduated from her suburban Philadelphia high school about the same year the SAT scores began their slide. After acquiring a BA in English from a western university of middling academic reputation, Wilkinson was unprepared for real work..., so she became a reporter, stringing for the West Chester (PA) Daily Local New. She also worked for the Quakers, the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, and with a housing project in Cyprus, a job that ended with a bang when a coup d'etat was followed by a military invasion from Turkey. Since then, Wilkinson has felt that a little multi-culturalism goes a long way.
Back in the newsroom, Wilkinson began drawing the people she was supposed to be reporting on. She realized cartooning combined her interests in art and politics without taxing her interest in spelling. After a year of remedial art school, including a stint at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, she began freelancing at several Philadelphia and New York publications, finally landing a full-time job at the San Jose Mercury News in 1982. After 3 1/2 years on a steep learning curve, Wilkinson repaid her long-suffering Mercury News editor by taking a job at the Philadelphia Daily News, where she has been drawing contentedly ever since. Wilkinson won the Pulitzer Prize for her editorial cartoons in 1992 and in 2007, Wilkinson received the Thomas Nast Prize for editorial cartooning.]
Copyright © 2009 Signe Wilkinson
[x NY Fishwrap
Well, That Certainly Didn’t Take Long
By Maureen Dowd
Tag Cloud of the following article
On 9/11, President Bush learned of disaster while reading The Pet Goat to grade-school kids. On Tuesday, President Obama escaped from disaster by reading The Moon Over Star to grade-school kids.
“We were just tired of being in the White House,” the two-week-old president, with Michelle at his side, explained to students at a public charter school near the White House.
Even as he told the children his favorite superheroes were Batman and Spider-Man, his own dream of being the superhero who swoops in to swiftly save America was going SPLAT!
It just ain’t that easy.
Unlike W. and Dick Cheney, who heroically resisted acknowledging their historically boneheaded mistakes, President Obama summoned a conga line of Anderson, Katie, Brian, Chris and Charlie to the Oval Office to do penance, over and over.
“I think I messed up. I screwed up,” he confessed to Couric.
He told the anchors that the man who helped make him president, Tom Daschle, had made “a serious mistake” by not paying taxes on a car and driver. (It should have been a harbinger of doom when Daschle began sporting those determined-to-be-hip round red glasses.)
Mr. Obama admitted that “ultimately it’s important for this administration to send a message that there aren’t two sets of rules. You know, one for prominent people and one for ordinary folks who have to pay their taxes.”
It took Daschle’s resignation to shake the president out of his arrogant attitude that his charmed circle doesn’t have to abide by the lofty standards he lectured the rest of us about for two years.
Before he recanted, his hand forced by a cascade of appointees who “forgot” to pay taxes, his reasoning was creeping perilously close to that of the outgoing leaders he denounced in his Inaugural Address: that elitist mentality of “we know best,” we know we’re doing the “right” thing for the country, so we can twist the rules.
Mr. Obama’s errors on the helter-skelter stimulus package were also self-induced. He should put down those Lincoln books and order “Dave” from Netflix.
When Kevin Kline becomes an accidental president, he summons his personal accountant, Murray Blum, to the White House to cut millions in silly programs out of the federal budget so he can give money to the homeless.
“Who does these books?” Blum says with disgust, red-penciling an ad campaign to boost consumers’ confidence in cars they’d already bought. “If I ran my office this way, I’d be out of business.”
Mr. Obama should have taken a red pencil to the $819 billion stimulus bill and slashed all the provisions that looked like caricatures of Democratic drunken-sailor spending.
As Senator Kit Bond, a Republican, put it, there were so many good targets that he felt “like a mosquito in a nudist colony.” He was especially worried about the provision requiring the steel and iron for infrastructure construction to be American-made, and by the time the chastened president talked to Chris Wallace on Fox Tuesday, he agreed that “we can’t send a protectionist message.”
Mr. Obama protested to Brian Williams that the programs denounced as “wasteful” by Republicans “amount to less than 1 percent of the entire package.” All the more reason to cut them and create a lean, clean bill tailored to creating jobs.
The Democratic president has been spending so much time trying — and failing — to win over Republicans that he may not have noticed the disillusionment in his own ranks.
Betrayed by their bankers and leaders, Americans were desperate to trust someone when they made Barack Obama president. His debut has left them skeptical about his willingness to smack down those who would flout his high standards or waste our money.
Companies that have gotten bailouts continue to make a mockery of taxpayers.
Until it came to light Tuesday, Wells Fargo, which received $25 billion in federal funds, was blithely planning a series of “employee recognition outings” to Las Vegas luxury hotels this month.
As ABC reported, Bank of America took its $45 billion in bailout funds and sponsored a five-day carnival outside the Super Bowl stadium, and Morgan Stanley took its $10 billion in bailout money and held a three-day conference at the Breakers in Palm Beach. (Morgan Stanley had also still planned to send top employees to Monte Carlo and the Bahamas, events just canceled.)
The New York Post revealed that Sandy Weill, former chief executive of Citigroup, took a company jet to fly his family for a Christmas holiday to a $12,000-a-night luxury resort in San José del Cabo, Mexico. No matter that the company just got a $50 billion federal bailout and laid off 53,000 worldwide.
The interior of the 18-seat jet, as described by The Post, is posh, with a full bar, fine-wine selection, $13,000 carpets, Baccarat crystal glasses, Cristofle sterling silver flatware and — my personal favorite — pillows made from Hermès scarves.
Aux barricades! ♥
[Maureen Dowd received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1999, with the Pulitzer committee particularly citing her columns on the impeachment of Bill Clinton after his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Dowd joined The New York Times as a reporter in 1983, after writing for Time magazine and the now-defunct Washington Star. At The Times, Dowd was nominated for a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, then became a columnist for the paper's editorial page in 1995. Dowd's first book was a collection of columns entitled Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk (2004). Her second book followed in 2005: Are Men Necessary?: When Sexes Collide. Dowd earned a bachelor's degree from DC's Catholic University in 1973.]
Copyright — 2009 The New York Times Company
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Copyright © 2009 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves
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