By Christina Lamb, Times Online

 Obama has gone from hero to zero in a years time

WHEN Barack Obama took office last year he was compared to Superman, even joking at a dinner that he had been “born on Krypton and sent here … to save the planet Earth”. Last January he appeared on the cover of Spider-Man.

Now, with his legislative agenda in tatters, the president has moved from comic-strip hero to comparisons to one of the great flawed figures of American literature. Ten days ago Charlie Cook, a leading election analyst, compared Obama and his battle to push through healthcare reform to Captain Ahab and his suicidal hunt for the great white whale.

Despite poll after poll showing that Americans’ main priority is jobs, the president has focused on reforming the US healthcare system and extending coverage to the 40m citizens with no insurance.

“I think choosing to take a Captain Ahab-like approach to healthcare — I’m going to push for this even in the worst downturn since the Great Depression — is roughly comparable to Bush’s decision to go to war [in Iraq],” Cook told Politico. “It basically destroyed the first year of a presidency.”

Obama made a last-ditch attempt last week to secure opposition support through a seven-hour summit shown live on television. Although he was admired for his unflappable handling of 40 legislators, no progress was made as Republicans called for a clean sheet. “Boy, that didn’t work,” wrote Peggy Noonan, the veteran Republican commentator, in Friday’s Wall Street Journal.

Read More:

By David Reilly, Bloomberg

 Poor Jimmy Carter, always used  in the same sentence as Obama

President Barack Obama is starting to look like the second coming of Jimmy Carter. If he’s going to avoid that fate, the president had better take radical action — and fast.

That means doing more than offering belated talk about jobs, or waging ineffectual on-again, off-again bank warfare. What, after all, is the point of bashing Wall Street only to then blow bonus kisses to JPMorgan Chase & Co. chief Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. head Lloyd Blankfein?

Obama needs to ditch his professorial, community-organizer mien and start cracking some heads. Unless, that is, he is intent on paving the way for a Palin presidency in 2013.

Supporters are crying out for Obama to pull out of his tailspin. In an article in Politico, Douglas Wilder, the nation’s first African-American governor and an early Obama supporter, urged the president to get his act together.

“The need is becoming more obvious by the day,” Wilder wrote. “Getting elected and getting things done for the people are two different jobs.”

Read More:

By CHRIS STIREWALT, Washington Examiner

According to Carter and the MSM these people are racists

It’s too bad that the first black president wasn’t a conservative.
Not that there wouldn’t have been charges of racism and some actual racism, too. But it would have finally dispelled the old myth about the racist Right and the tolerant Left.

As it is, many liberals who once complained about being labeled unpatriotic for their vituperative opposition to George W. Bush are suggesting that anyone who opposes the policies of President Obama is a racist.

Jimmy Carter, who at age 85 has still not tired of inflicting damage to his own party, suggested in an MSNBC interview that the broad-based opposition that has met Obama’s proposals is racist.

Read More:

By Michael Gerson, Washington Post

Obama and Carter both lacked credibility

President Jimmy Carter once sent a note to an adviser extolling the importance of crisis to leadership. "When a president has authority to act unilaterally (as in a crisis), his leadership can be exerted. Otherwise, compromise, delay and confusion are more likely. It’s our system. I like it."

Politicians, like the rest of us, are often victims of their wishes. Carter was eventually smacked by the waves of crisis he sought to ride.

But encouraging a sense of crisis is a traditional tool of executive leadership. And using a joint session of Congress to address a single domestic issue is the most dramatic expression of this approach.

Carter did it effectively in April 1977. He spoke of the energy crisis as "the moral equivalent of war." Energy resources were "simply running out." (Carter’s CIA predicted worldwide oil shortages by the mid-1980s.) America needed to "cope with a crisis that otherwise would overwhelm us."

Read More:

By Geoffrey P. Hunt, American thinker

Barack Obama is on track to have the most spectacularly failed presidency since Woodrow Wilson.

In the modern era, we’ve seen several failed presidencies–led by Jimmy Carter and LBJ. Failed presidents have one strong common trait– they are repudiated, in the vernacular, spat out. Of course, LBJ wisely took the exit ramp early, avoiding a shove into oncoming traffic by his own party. Richard Nixon indeed resigned in disgrace, yet his reputation as a statesman has been partially restored by his triumphant overture to China.

But, Barack Obama is failing. Failing big.  Failing fast. And failing everywhere: foreign policy, domestic initiatives, and most importantly, in forging connections with the American people. The incomparable Dorothy Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal  put her finger on it: He is failing because he has no understanding of the American people, and may indeed loathe them. Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard says he is failing because he has lost control of his message, and is overexposed. Clarice Feldman of American Thinker produced a dispositive commentary showing that Obama is failing because fundamentally he is neither smart nor articulate; his intellectual dishonesty is conspicuous by its audacity and lack of shame.

Read More:

We hope he’s only a one term President

President Barack Obama is “quite comfortable” with the prospect of being a one-term president in order to address the issues he is concerned about, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Friday.

The comment came on the same day the president’s approval reached a new low, with only a 45 percent approval rating in the Zogby International poll released Friday. The poll said that 51 percent disapprove of the president’s job performance. The Real Clear Politics average of all polls puts the president approval rating at 52.2  percent.

Gibbs was addressing a question about a comment made by Rep. Leonard Boswell (D-Iowa), who said the president told him he is willing to risk a second term to get a health care overhaul bill approved.
Gibbs said that would be true of most issues.

Read More: By Fred Lucas, CNSNews

By Richard Viguerie and Mark Fitzgibbons, Worldnetdaily

Obama manipulates the law from his teleprompter

Some conservatives worried President Obama would be too Jimmy Carter-esque. Actually, he combines Nixonian methods with “shock and awe” socialism.

Obama’s entered into the realm of illegality in his first few months in office. It took Nixon years longer. And Obama’s doing it in the open.

Why aren’t conservatives more adamantly protesting Obama’s unlawful acts involving General Motors and Chrysler? Granted, with the Obama administration’s overloading us daily with outrageous actions, conservatives may be a bit overwhelmed. But that’s all the more reason to be outspoken in every available forum.

Investors Business Daily and a handful of others have called the government’s takeovers of auto companies what they are: violations of the Constitution. If a Republican president had engaged in this level of blatant disregard for the law, liberals would be demanding impeachment.

The Constitution says, “No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” It also says the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

Worldnetdaily

Americans will be forced into unsafe cars

The Obama administration has announced an executive decision to raise the Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or CAFE, standards to 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016, four years ahead of the deadline originally set by the Energy Security and Independence Act of 2007.

And that could mean danger for many Americans.

Steve Milloy, the author of the book “Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Ruin Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them,” has argued that these new Obama administration-imposed CAFE standards “may kill more Americans at a faster rate than the Iraq War – [President Obama's] signature issue in the 2008 presidential campaign.”

Moreover, by advancing by four years the date for the 35.5 mpg CAFÉ standard to be met, Obama is trying to outdo Jimmy Carter in a move that runs the risk of having his administration being characterized as “Jimmy Carter II.”

Sarah Baxter,The Times of London

LESS than two weeks into his administration, President Barack Obama is being portrayed by opponents as a new Jimmy Carter – weak at home and naive abroad – in an attempt to dim his post-election glow and ensure that he serves only one term.

The charge has stung because it was made privately by Hillary Clinton supporters during a hard-fought primary campaign and plays to fears about Obama’s inexperience.

He is engaged in early trials of strength with Republicans in Washington and critics of the United States around the world – not least Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president. Obama faces battles to talk Wall Street into giving up its addiction to large bonuses and US banks to start lending again.

By Robert Merz

Democrats have shown a soft spot for Hamas

Gee, there isn’t even a decent interval between the election & the sell out.  But this isn’t new and should not have been unexpected.

Earlier news reports, usually ignored by the media, indicated repeated contacts between Democrats and Hamas, Hezbollah, and their supporters in Syria. If contacts with terrorists don’t call the patriotism of Liberals into question, they certainly make you question their judgment.

Senator Obama recently reportedly had a one-on-one meeting with Osama Siblani, the publisher of the Arab American News.  Once, when Mr. Siblani was asked if Hezbollah was a terrorist group, he said: “No, They are not terrorists. Absolutely not. No. They are freedom fighters.”  And Mr. Siblani has the ear of the would-be President of the US.  But, that is only the tip of the iceberg.

In April 2008, Former President Carter met with senior Hamas officials in Cairo, Egypt, In May 2008, Robert Malley, a former Obama advisor, left the campaign after reports that he had met with Hamas. (Here the question arises, was he forced to resign for meeting with Hamas or for getting caught at it?)

On February 2008, a New York Sun editorial stated that senior advisers to both Senators Obama and Clinton were meeting with President Assad in Syria.

These are just some of the outrages from 2008.  As early as 2006 an article in the Jerusalem Post stated that “important Democrats” met with Hamas and expressed interest in establishing relations with the Palestinian terror group.  Interestingly, after the 2006 mid-term elections, one of the first things Nancy Pelosi did was make a pilgrimage to Damascus to meet President Assad.  We all remember photos of her in the demure headscarf—not wanting to offend her Islamist hosts.

One wonders what the relationship really is between the Democrats, the Syrians, and Hamas.  Was Pelosi’s trip to Damascus part of some sort of political payback?  What did the Democrats say to or what requests were they getting from Syria—an ally of Iran and Hezbollah.  Was there any quid pro quo or were they just talking about the price of oil?

Many reports say Assad allowed terrorist fighters, explosives, and cash to flow from Syria to Iraq to help kill Americans.  Syria also reportedly helped destabilize Lebanon, armed Hezbollah, and played host to groups like Hamas and Jihad Islami.  So, why are the Democrats, including Senator Obama so cozy with them?

How cozy?  During the presidential campaign, Ahmed Yousuf, a top Hamas spokesman said: “We like Mr. Obama, and we hope that he will win the elections.”  The Hamas TV station Al-Aqsa also ran an interview with George Galloway who said that he would pray for Mr. Obama.  Galloway is the British Member of Parliament who was accused of getting money from Saddam Hussein in the UN’s oil-for-food scandal.  Galloway is also famous for saying: “Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life.”  A Stalinist praying for Senator Obama, how nice.  Senator Obama has attracted favorable attention from North Korea, Venezuela, and Cuba.

The question is why? What do these enemies expect get from the Democrats? What, if anything have the Democrats offered them?