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Governor: Media Giving Obama ‘Longest Wet Kiss In Political History’
Posted on 28. Mar, 2010 by Noel Sheppard.
Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour on Sunday said that since healthcare reform legislation passed a week ago, the liberal media have given the Obama administration the longest wet kiss in political history.
After ABC’s Jake Tapper hosting "This Week" asked the Governor about a new Washington Post poll finding Democrats have become a little more popular since the bill passed, Barbour replied, "I am surprised that the, the numbers in the Washington Post poll weren’t better."
He marvelously continued, "I mean since this thing passed last weekend, we’ve been seeing the longest wet kiss in political history given to the Obama administration by the liberal media league, and every day it goes by it gets sloppier" (video embedded below the fold with transcript, relevant section at 8:13):
JAKE TAPPER, HOST: Governor Barbour, there was good news for Democrats in the Washington Post poll that I wanted to ask you about. And, it does suggest that maybe the Party, according to some critics, miscalculated, both in terms of policy, by walking away, there aren’t as many Republican ideas in the bill, and politics. Just listen to these numbers. In February, on the generic ballot, Republicans led Democrats 48% to 45%. But now, after the bill has passed, the Democrat leads 48% to 44%. Doesn’t that suggest that maybe your Party miscalculated, both in terms of the fact that the law is now the law of the land and probably let’s not kid ourselves it will be for a long, long time and in terms of the politics, in terms of the fact this is not hurting Democrats as much as you thought it would?
GOVERNOR HALEY BARBOUR (R-MISSISSIPPI): Well, in fact, I think Ed has got it just backwards. You mentioned ot Valerie Jarrett we’ve now learned that big corporations are going to have to take $14 billion worth of write-offs according to the Towers Watson estimate. $14 Billion worth of write-offs that nobody knew about, and that’s — how many jobs are those $14 billion of losses, on corporate balance sheets? How many jobs are they going to cost? We’re going to learn a lot more about this deal. We’re learning already where they said small businesses who didn’t cover their employees would have to pay $750 per employee. Now it turns out, when you read the bill, if you have the average employee in Mississippi who makes $32,000 a year, if the cost of health insurance is more than $3,000 for that employee, the small business has to pay $3,000, not $750. Four times as much. As people find out these sorts of things, this bill is going to become even more unpopular. And candidly, I am surprised that the, the numbers in the Washington Post poll weren’t better. I mean since this thing passed last weekend, we’ve been seeing the longest wet kiss in political history given to the Obama administration by the liberal media league, and every day it goes by it gets sloppier.
Nicely put, Governor. I’m not sure we could have said it better.
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WASHINGTON — President Nicolas Sarkozy of France travels to the United States on Monday for a two-day trip designed to underscore his close cooperation with President Barack Obama on Afghanistan, Iran and other issues, and apparently to make a statement about their personal relationship.
The trip, culminating in a news conference Tuesday and then a private dinner at the White House, comes at a crucial time for both.
Mr. Obama has just scored two major victories — the passage of historic health-care legislation and agreement with Russia on a new strategic arms control treaty — and is heading into a period of heavy international engagement.
Mr. Sarkozy, for his part, has seen his popularity fade and his party suffer stinging defeats in regional elections. At the same time he is preparing for a crucial stint on the world stage as France takes leadership of both the Group of Eight and the Group of Twenty.
As the newspaper Le Parisien put it, “This meeting could not come at a better time” for Mr. Sarkozy.
The closeness of the Sarkozy-Obama relationship — and for that matter, of Mr. Obama with other European leaders — has been questioned, based on issues like Mr. Obama’s decision in February to skip an annual U.S.-European summit meeting.
But in an interview here last week with the International Herald Tribune and three French correspondents, the national security adviser, James L. Jones Jr., repeatedly rejected the notion of any strains.
He called Mr. Sarkozy a “very helpful and steadfast ally” on Iran and “a strong adviser and supporter on the Middle East.” If Mr. Sarkozy sometimes urges the American president to push harder in both areas, said the general, Mr. Obama appreciated the “honest exchange of views.”
General Jones, a former supreme allied commander in Europe, said that Mr. Obama had particularly appreciated Mr. Sarkozy’s decision to bring France back into NATO’s military wing and Paris’s “strong support” on Afghanistan.
The United States has been pressing its NATO allies to provide more military trainers for Afghanistan. French officials have been quoted as saying they will send no more, but General Jones appeared to leave open the possibility that Mr. Sarkozy would make such a gesture during the visit.
While the general acknowledged that as NATO commander he had known frustration over allied contributions in Afghanistan, he said that he had never seen better cooperation within NATO. “We’ve achieved a major breakthrough in how we think of Afghanistan and Pakistan,” he said, “and there is a new sense of energy that we can be successful.”
He played down two areas of friction. The announcement that France had agreed to sell four Mistral-class warships to Russia might once have raised American hackles. But General Jones seemed unperturbed. “It was not the subject of any serious bone of contention,” he said, adding that the United States, too, wanted better relations with Moscow.
Europeans were deeply unhappy when the Pentagon, while taking bids for a huge contract to supply aerial refueling tankers, changed the plane’s specifications in a way they interpreted as giving an advantage to the chief American bidder, Boeing, to the detriment of the European aerospace group EADS.
General Jones asserted that as a former director of Boeing he could not comment. But he said that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates had “assured the president that the Department of Defense wants the competition to be fair and equal for all parties.”
The presidents also are expected to discuss some differences: France wants the United States to institute tougher financial regulations and to undertake more resolute action on climate change.
Mr. Sarkozy is to open his trip with a speech Monday at Columbia University in New York. He then is to meet with the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon.
In Washington on Tuesday, he plans to meet with several senators before the presidents hold a late-afternoon news conference.
They are then to adjourn, with Michelle Obama and Carla Sarkozy, for a private dinner that French officials are calling “testimony to a particularly close friendship.”
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The political faultlines of financial reform are not breaking cleanly along party lines, as Republicans break rank to support it
Will the GOP block financial reform to extract revenge for healthcare? John McCain, grumpy on a good day, was outright cranky over the passage of healthcare reform, promising “no co-operation for the rest of the year” on any legislation.
But not all Republicans agree they should be the “party of no”. The conservative author (and former George W Bush speechwriter) David Frum criticised fellow Republicans for trying to turn healthcare reform into Obama’s Waterloo instead of trying to get their ideas included in the bill. According to Frum, the result was that “when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none“. Frum’s remarks generated so much heat among conservatives that he resigned from the American Enterprise Institute before the week was out.
Emboldened by their success, Barack Obama and his allies on Capitol Hill wasted little time in placing financial reform next on the agenda. They are betting that a few Republicans will resist the temptation to go for all the marbles by simply opposing any bill.
Two Republican senators had already broken ranks to negotiate a bill with Democrat Chris Dodd, who chairs the Senate finance committee. Last week, Dodd decided to press the issue by releasing his own draft legislation, though he was careful to leave the door open for further negotiations with his Republican colleagues. Dodd’s bill, which runs 1,120 pages, would create a new consumer protection watchdog, regulate the exotic derivatives that have spiralled out of control and build a firewall between commercial banking and investment banking.
After the near-death experience of healthcare reform, one might think that Democrats in Congress would be wary of taking on another large, complex bill that expands government involvement in the private sector. But instead of making things harder, Dodd said that the recent passage of healthcare reform “strengthened our hand” on financial reform.
One Republican senator, Bob Corker of Tennessee, who has been talking with Dodd, thinks his party made a “major strategic error” by walking away from bipartisan negotiations on healthcare, giving Democrats a political advantage. Making things even more complicated for Republicans, another of their senators, Richard Shelby, has engaged in separate talks with Dodd. With the bankers being blamed for the current recession, it seems likely that several other Republican senators will be looking for ways to support financial reform rather than just dig in their heels.
Over in the House, the GOP is sounding more intransigent. House minority leader John Boehner urged a gathering of the American Bankers Association to hang tough in the face of threat of reform, saying, “Don’t let those little punk staffers take advantage of you and stand up for yourselves.”
The political faultlines of financial reform are not breaking cleanly along party lines. The anger at the banking bailout can be felt across the political spectrum. Many libertarians, and more than a few liberals, still fume at the government coming to the rescue of the feckless bankers who brought this all on themselves. Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke bear the burden of having carried out a necessary but unpopular bailout, and make easy punching bags for conservative and liberal populists alike. Their detractors have criticised proposals to hand additional regulatory powers to either the Treasury or the Fed.
But it’s hard to imagine the GOP stoking Tea Party populism by blocking regulation without being seen as siding with the banks. I don’t think we will see angry voters shouting “Keep your hands off my hedge funds!” at town hall meetings this summer. Just saying no will not work for the Republicans on financial reform. The public interest is too compelling for Congress to do nothing.
The financial industry will have to accept regulation as the price for having been bailed out by the government. And if Republicans are reluctant to lead on financial reform, they should at least get out of the way.
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For both buyer and seller, the deal is worth the risks
IT TOOK more than a decade for Ford to create what it called its Premier Auto Group around a bunch of classy European brands—starting in 1987 with its purchase of Aston Martin, followed by the acquisitions of Jaguar, Volvo and then Land Rover. It all proved a terribly expensive distraction. Now, it has taken Ford three years of tricky negotiations to dismantle the group, selling the European marques at a considerable loss. Aston Martin went to a British-led consortium in 2007, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) was snapped up by Tata of India in 2008 and, on March 28th, a deal was signed to sell Volvo to Geely, a small but vastly ambitious Chinese carmaker.
The sticker price is $1.8 billion, a fraction of the $6.45 billion that Ford paid for Volvo in 1999. The cost to Ford is worse even than those figures suggest: it has had to support the Swedish carmaker through years of losses and even now it faces further expenses associated with the sale to Geely that will eat up much of the meagre sum it is getting for Volvo. …
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Just a slideshow on The Iraq War
