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President Barack Obama has chosen former Procter & Gamble Chief Executive Bob McDonald, an Army veteran, as his nominee to be the next secretary of veterans affairs, a senior Obama administration official said on Sunday. Obama's announcement of McDonald, 61, will be made this week, possibly on Monday. If confirmed by the Senate, McDonald would be tasked with repairing the Veterans Administration after widespread evidence of delays in military veterans getting healthcare at VA facilities. The announcement is to come days after a White House review found significant and chronic failures across the board at the Veterans Administration and evidence that a "corrosive culture" prevails.If confirmed, McDonald would replace Eric Shinseki, who resigned in late May after significant problems at the VA, including secretive wait lists, became highly publicized.
Gazette opinion: Obama earned the low ratings Sometimes, you have to admit you're wrong. And, we were wrong. We said that things couldn't get much worse after the sub par presidency of George W. Bush. But, President Barack Obama's administration has us yearning for the good ol' days when we were at least winning battles in Iraq. The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal polls show that Americans are giving Obama lower marks than in 2006 when Iraq was going poorly for Bush and a tepid response to Hurricane Katrina sunk Bush's ratings. It's not that popularity polling should be the final or even best measure of a president. There is that old saw that points out there's a difference between doing what is right and what is popular. For us, though, it's the number of bungled or blown policies in the Obama administration which lead us to believe Obama has earned every bit of an abysmal approval rating.John Nolte of Breitbart summarizes the rest of the piece:
"She knew under the Federal Records Act that she had an obligation for these documents to be preserved."...
As for Mr. Brown, we'll address his flaws first. We have been consistently critical of his lack of transparency in discussing his role in Maryland's disastrous health insurance exchange launch. His explanations have been guarded and convoluted; a simple apology and a pledge to learn from the experience would have been much better. Mr. Brown was, officially, Maryland's point-person for health care reform. Had the website been a success, he would have taken credit; thus, he must accept a share of blame for its failure. That said, the buck stops with Gov. Martin O'Malley, not Mr. Brown, whose actual role appears to have been more symbolic than managerial.That's an endorsement? He wasn't incompetent he really wasn't supposed do anything? Worse the Sun called Gansler, "able public servant during his long career." The Sun's criticisms of Gansler stemmed from his campaign not for his governance. To endorse the guy whose managerial role they described as "symbolic" over someone with a track record is ridiculous. I bring up the endorsements again even though the race is over, because it shows the lengths that Brown's supporters have to go to get past his failure. Either they ignore it or they say he was a no show. Neither one is a ringing endorsement for the guy's leadership. But the failure isn't just Brown's, or the O'Malley/Brown administration. It's the failure of Maryland's Democratic party - as nearly the entire leadership of the party in Maryland endorsed Brown. And the leading newspapers in Maryland endorsed him too. So the Democrats want power without responsibility. And the media that should be serving as a check on government's power have failed miserably in their civic responsibility. Look at Brown's last ad before the primary, called "Step up." Brown comes across as confident, but even as he asks viewers for their help to "build a better Maryland," he offers no qualifications for the job, only that he is driven by the value his father instilled in him that "service to others comes first." He sounds like it is his convictions not his record that should be the criterion for choosing him. He wants us to forget his record.
Unverified footage posted to YouTube on Saturday appears to show the Israeli air strike carried out Friday afternoon on a car carrying two operatives belonging to the Popular Resistance Committees, a coalition of armed groups in Gaza. The footage shows a vehicle driving along a coastal road before being struck. Passersby remain seemingly unharmed. Israel confirmed carrying out the targeted killing of Osama Hassumi, 29, and Mohammad Fatzih, 24, on Friday, charging that they were involved in a cell responsible for repeated rocket fire on Israel’s southern cities over the past several weeks and were planning terror attacks on Israeli civilians.Interesting comment at YouTube:
Lois Lerner has no records of two years of missing emails and Republican claims that she’s hiding something are “silly,” her lawyer said in his first interview since the controversy around the former IRS official erupted two weeks ago. “She doesn’t know what happened,” lawyer William Taylor III said of the 2011 computer crash that erased two years worth of Lerner’s correspondence. “It’s a little brazen to think she did this on purpose.”Taylor indicated that Lerner “requested that IT use every possible resource” to try and recover the contents of her hard drive. Regardless of the misfortune of Lerner’s unrecoverable hard drive, many have asked if the emails were printed in hard copy anywhere as a backup. IRS rules specify in part that agency emails “created or received in the transaction of agency business” are to be printed and kept on file. IRS commissioner John Koskinen has said that not all emails are necessarily considered an “official record.”
Two years after activists for same-sex marriage obtained the confidential tax return and donor list of a national group opposed to redefining marriage, the Internal Revenue Service has admitted wrongdoing and agreed to settle the resulting lawsuit. The Daily Signal has learned that, under a consent judgment today, the IRS agreed to pay $50,000 in damages to the National Organization for Marriage as a result of the unlawful release of the confidential information to a gay rights group, the Human Rights Campaign, that is NOM’s chief political rival. “Congress made the disclosure of confidential tax return information a serious matter for a reason,” NOM Chairman John D. Eastman told The Daily Signal. “We’re delighted that the IRS has now been held accountable for the illegal disclosure of our list of major donors from our tax return.”This admission by the IRS goes back to the vicious fight over the Prop 8 vote in California where HRC and its allies resorted to releasing donation information of individuals and harassing those traditional marriage supporters at their homes and businesses.
President Barack Obama’s June 27 effort to boost the flagging morale of his supporters quickly devolved into a demoralizing pity party. Republicans “don’t do anything except block me and call me names,” he told supporters, only a few days after it was revealed that his economy shrank 2.9 percent in the first three months of 2014. “If we make some basic changes, we can create more jobs and lift more incomes and strengthen the middle class… I know it drives you nuts that Washington isn’t doing it,” he said. “It drives me nuts.”The president also went back to dismissing the many scandals engulfing his presidency as phony. Susan Jones of CNS News:
President Obama warned people in Minnesota Friday not to believe what they hear on television: "They're fabricated issues, they're phony scandals that are generated. It's all geared towards the next election or ginning up a base. It's not on the level," the president insisted.Here's the video: CNS News provided the full transcript of Obama's remarks:
And hits Walker on jobs despite low unemployment in the state....
"We know those emails are out there, we know they can be found."...
Obama is beside the point. They [the liberal media] don’t even like Obama anymore. Nothing could be more obvious. Almost nobody does. But they won’t say so in public because that would mean that they would be revealed as fools who believed the most banal tripe imaginable. It would also mean admitting Barack Obama never really existed, that they invented him. He was their projection. Barack Obama is the creation of the New York Times, et al. Without them he would never have happened and they know it. So the media are left in an untenable position. If you say Barack Obama is a mistake, then you yourself are a mistake. Who wants that? No wonder they won’t investigate the scandals. No wonder they won’t report any of this. They are too ashamed of themselves to speak.I agree that the MSM is deeply disappointed in Obama, and deeply reluctant to say so. But I doubt they're as deeply disappointed as all that, not deeply enough to question their own role in the whole thing, or their belief system. That takes a great deal of courage and integrity, particularly for people with entrenched and vested interests---such as the Times editors and their ilk, as Simon points out---who would therefore be extremely reluctant to do it.
It was another crazy week of news and politics in higher education....
Some links from around the web for your Friday evening reading. "I didn't do it for attention for myself. I did it for attention for the troops"...
