White House Hints of New Health Bill

White House Hints of New Health Bill -  NYTimes.com

With the House and the Senate still at loggerheads over their health care bills, the White House hinted on Tuesday that President Obama might post his own bill on the Internet before the bipartisan health care summit he is planning for Blair House next week.

Hrmm...

Nuclear power aids White House climate push

So Drudge has this story up: Nuclear power aids White House climate push. Good for Obama, I hope that he follows through. This NYT article has a bit more information if you can handle the typical editorializing...

Update: The Heritage Foundation is not impressed:

Expansive loan guarantee programs are wrought with problems. At a minimum, they create taxpayer liabilities, give recipients preferential treatment, and distort capital markets. Further, depending on how they are structured, they can remove incentives to decrease costs, stifle innovation, suppress private-sector financing solutions, perpetuate regulatory inefficiency, and encourage government dependence.

Still, this might be the best we can hope for from this administration. Shouldn't we take what we can get?

Administration may abandon civilian 9/11 trial

Administration may abandon civilian 9/11 trial.

Ok, so this is a bit of old news I wanted to say something about. I've said privately that I believe this administration really has no idea what it is doing. I see mistake after blunder and backtrack after clarification on a regular basis coming from the White House. Close Gitmo - keep Gitmo open. Leave Iraq - stay in Iraq. Surge in Afghanistan - wait 4 months to decide to surge in Afghanistan. Release torture photos - uh, oh, don't release torture photos. I vow no middle class tax hikes - I'm 'agnostic' about middle class tax hikes. Indefinite detention of terrorists is a terrible human rights violation - err, maybe it's not so bad, etc. etc.

And now maybe we don't wanna do civilian trials for the 9/11 planners in NYC. Who the hell knows, really? I get the feeling these guys are just playin' it by ear sometimes. Regardless of whether they actually do know what they are doing - this is what they project to me.

And this was an idea so ridiculously stupid it should have been laughed out of any half competent oval office. It's good that they might toss the idea but the fact that they actually put this in motion doesn't instill confidence. And really the fact that they walked it back doesn't either. If you're gonna get up to the bully pulpit and proclaim yourself the savior of America, the Free World, and even the Oceans Themselves then you shouldn't need to change your mind. You're right. Right?

You lie?

Obama during the campaign on health care negotiations:

We are all serious

So terrorism is a serious business. I know it. You know it. We all know it. I know that Obama knows it. But when I watch Obama give a speech or talk about it - I can't tell that he knows it. I basically have to take it on faith. I have to convince myself: "well, of course he takes it seriously, I mean, what kind of person wouldn't?" But it just doesn't register - I don't see it in his tone or mannerisms; it just doesn't seem to register on his emotional radar. Instead I feel like he takes this war and terrorism in general seriously in the manner I take my taxes - or visits to the dentist - seriously.

Unfortunately this doesn't inspire confidence in me. I don't want my Commander in Chief to conduct a war like I fill out my 1040 - with intermittent channel surfing and long sighs of irritation: for the love of the Home Tree^tm, when will this be over?

This could entirely be a matter of political grooming but you'd have a hard time convincing many people that Bush had more "polishing" than Obama. If there's any word that can be used to describe Obama it's polished. I hope that this is the case and that Obama really does take these wars and national security as deadly serious as Bush made me believe he did. 

Compare these comments by Bush back in 2006 recently reposted at the Foundry with those made by Obama over the past week:

See what I mean?

A Picture is Worth...

Over at Instapundit I see this Rasmussen graph of the Presidential approval index. It is quite startling:

The biggest lie?

The Wall Street Journal explains the surreptitious nature of our current political climate.

"And tidings of comfort and joy from Harry Reid too. The Senate Majority Leader has decided that the last few days before Christmas are the opportune moment for a narrow majority of Democrats to stuff ObamaCare through the Senate to meet an arbitrary White House deadline. Barring some extraordinary reversal, it now seems as if they have the 60 votes they need to jump off this cliff, with one-seventh of the economy in tow.

Mr. Obama promised a new era of transparent good government, yet on Saturday morning Mr. Reid threw out the 2,100-page bill that the world's greatest deliberative body spent just 17 days debating and replaced it with a new "manager's amendment" that was stapled together in covert partisan negotiations. Democrats are barely even bothering to pretend to care what's in it, not that any Senator had the chance to digest it in the 38 hours before the first cloture vote at 1 a.m. this morning. After procedural motions that allow for no amendments, the final vote could come at 9 p.m. on December 24."

Remember this? Via Naked Emperor News:

Good, solid B+ charts

Click for the breakdowns:

h/t Instapundit

Obama grades himself on his first year: B+

Yeah... So this is all over the interwebs but I wanted to look at how he earned his B+.

Obama rattles off the list of things he believes earns him the grade. Hit the links after the jump and see if you agree.