The First Real Obama Interview Since . . . Well, Ever

My hats off to Bret Baier of Fox News for conducting the first real interview of Obama since he entered the national stage as a Senator. Baier asked relevant questions and tough follow-ups, making it difficult for Obama to dodge the questions. Obama was on the defensive throughout, he was bobbing and weaving like a champion boxer on issues of process and his double accounting for savings in Medicare. Further, Obama tried to mount a new - and somewhat bizarre - defense of the indefensible Louisiana Purchase. All in all, Baer conducted a very professional interview. Obama did not come off well.

What I found most stunning about this interview - Obama's admission that his trillion (or more likely, multi-trillion) health care plan will do nothing to solve massive multi-trillion dollar Medicare insolvency. You can find the transcript of the interview here.





And then the Fox Panel analyzed the interview:



Responses to the Baier interview are all over the net:

NRO - Two thumbs up for a superb interview

Doug Ross - The President ducked, dodged, stammered and "did some his best fibbing ever."

Another Black Conservative - "Normally Obama is pretty good at giving non-answers, but under Baier's pressure, his non-answers were quite apparent."

Weekly Standard - "What tripped Obama up was the spinach. He found it hard to defend special deals like the Cornhusker Kickback, Gator Aid, and Louisiana Purchase. He gave a rambling and evasive answer when Baier asked why the bill double-counts Medicare "savings." He said health care reform would pass because "it's the right thing to do." Guess that settles it, then."

Hot Air - "This moment, from Bret Baier’s interview on Fox News with Obama, might just be one of the biggest “WTF?!” moments from Obama’s presidency yet. Obama is either completely making things up, living in an alternate reality, or really, really confused."

Sister Toldjah - "I don’t think I’ve ever seen the President so defensive. And, of course, he did not answer a single question. Very revealing – or, rather, 'transparent.'"

Jammie Wearing Fool - "I can't imagine even the most diehard Obama sycophant thought he came off looking good here. Petulant, whiny, unpresidential, not worthy of even being a community organizer."

Neo-Neocon - "Obama seemed clueless and meandering in the interview, repeating the same points over and over and unable to counter Baier in any effective way, resorting to what Holden Caulfield used to call “slinging the old bull” and bringing up strangely irrelevant stuff like the Hawaii earthquake."

Huffington Post, Newsweek, AP - How Dare Baier

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Even Pelosi Agrees The Slaughter The Constitution Plan Is Unconstitutional

First up, Jack Cafferty doesn't hold back in his recent comments on Pelosi's "sleezy" plan for passing Obamacare.



(H/T Newsbusters)

As I blogged here, the Slaughter the Constitution plan is unconstitutional becasue it violates the express terms of Art. I Sec. 7. That section that require that a bill "pass" both houses and the vote on the bill be "entered" into a journal. Neo-Neocon has much more.

Then there is this from Mark Tapscott at the Washington Examiner, discussing a Court action brought against Republicans in 2005 when they used a mirror of the Slaughter plan to approve an increase in the national debt. Public Citzen filed the Court case:

Here's the argument they made:

"Article I of the United States Constitution requires that before proposed legislation may "become[] a Law," U.S. CONST. art. I, § 7, cl. 2, "(1) a bill containing its exact text [must be] approved by a majority of the Members of the House of Representatives; (2) the Senate [must] approve[] precisely the same text; and (3) that text [must be] signed into law by the President," Clinton v. City of New York, 524 U.S. 417, 448, 118 S.Ct. 2091, 141 L.Ed.2d 393 (1998).

"Public Citizen, a not-for-profit consumer advocacy organization, filed suit in District Court claiming that the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, Pub.L. No. 109-171, 120 Stat. 4 (2006) ("DRA" or "Act"), is invalid because the bill that was presented to the President did not first pass both chambers of Congress in the exact same form. In particular, Public Citizen contends that the statute's enactment did not comport with the bicameral passage requirement of Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution, because the version of the legislation that was presented to the House contained a clerk's error with respect to one term, so the House and Senate voted on slightly different versions of the bill and the President signed the version passed by the Senate.

"Public Citizen asserts that it is irrelevant that the Speaker of the House and the President pro tempore of the Senate both signed a version of the proposed legislation identical to the version signed by the President. Nor does it matter, Public Citizen argues, that the congressional leaders' signatures attest that indistinguishable legislative text passed both houses." (Emphasis added)

It's important to be clear that the issue before the court was whether a minor text correction was sufficient to satisfy the constitutional requirement that both chambers of Congress must pass the exact same bill. In this 2005 case, the court ruled the minor correction was acceptable.

The deeming of an entire bill to have been passed without a prior recorded vote goes far beyond a minor text correction, so the constitutional principle clearly would be violated by the Slaughter Solution.

And now for the kicker, guess who joined Public Citizen in that suit with amicus briefs:

Nancy Pelosi, Henry Waxman and Louise Slaughter

Heh. And hey, they got it right. My question, why isn't John Boehner passing out copies of this brief to every reporter in the WH Press Room?

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Progressively Surreal: The Gulf Between Words & Deeds

We learn today that the Obama administration - which came into office promising to bring us the most transpartent administration ever - has in fact been far more restrictive in answering Freedom of Information requests than the Bush administration ever thought of being. This from Raw Story:

. . . [A] provision in the Freedom of Information Act law that allows the government to hide records that detail its internal decision-making has been invoked by Obama agencies more often in the past year than during the final year of President George W. Bush.

Major agencies cited that exemption to refuse records at least 70,779 times during the 2009 budget year, compared with 47,395 times during President George W. Bush's final full budget year, according to annual FOIA reports filed by federal agencies.

An Associated Press review of Freedom of Information Act reports filed by 17 major agencies found that the use of nearly every one of the law's nine exemptions to withhold information from the public rose in fiscal year 2009, which ended last October.

The AP review comes on the heels of another bit of government transparency news: that the Obama Administration has threatened to veto a congressional intelligence bill because it objects to efforts to increase intelligence oversight.

Among other things, the proposed legislation would subject intelligence agencies to General Accountability Office review. US intelligence agencies are currently immune from review by the Congressional auditing office.

. . . In all, major agencies cited that or other FOIA exemptions to refuse information at least 466,872 times in budget year 2009, compared with 312,683 times the previous year, the review found. Agencies often cite more than one exemption when withholding part or all of the material sought in an open-records request.

All told, the 17 agencies reviewed by AP reported getting 444,924 FOIA requests in fiscal 2009, compared with 493,610 in fiscal 2008." . . .

Let us not forget, Obama promised that his would heal the divides and even slow the rise of the oceans. He was to lead us into the promised land of post-partisanship. Instead, he seems to be leading us to a period of bitter partisanship not seen since prior to the Civil War.

The left is hypocrisy unbound. Under the Bush Presidency, the left screamed from the rooftops that the Bush administration was warring on the Constitution - essentially because Bush and the right would not grant new Constitutional rights to enemy combatants and because he passed the Patriot Act as a responsible means of balancing the needs for protecting America against terrorist attack. Yet now all of that is turned on its head.

Now the left conducts a real war on our Constitution - from Obama's war on private property to Pelosi's plan to Slaughter the Constitution. That does not even begin to consider Obama and the left's larger war on our form of deliberative democracy. Nor the fact that, now that Obama is President, a Democrat controlled Congress, at the request of President Obama, has yet again extended the Patriot Act.

Now Obama, who promised us the most transparent government in office, has pulled down all the blinds on the windows into our government. There was of course his utterly opaque handling of the drafting of Obamacare. But that is one instance. The reality is that, in his first year in office, he has not merely held less press conferences than Bush, he has engaged in an effort to manipulate the press that even radical leftie Helen Thomas, sharply criticized several months ago:

White House correspondent Helen Thomas told CNSNews.com that not even Richard Nixon tried to control the press the way President Obama is trying to control the press.

“Nixon didn’t try to do that,” Thomas said. . . .

“What the hell do they think we are, puppets?” Thomas said. “They’re supposed to stay out of our business. They are our public servants. We pay them.

True, Helen, true. November cannont come soon enough.

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