Even Pelosi Agrees Obama Doesn't Keep Promises

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, piqued with White House pressure to accept the Senate health reform bill, threw a rare rhetorical elbow at President Barack Obama Tuesday, questioning his commitment to his 2008 campaign promises.

A leadership aide said it was no accident.

Pelosi emerged from a meeting with her leadership team and committee chairs in the Capitol to face an aggressive throng of reporters who immediately hit her with C-SPAN’s request that she permit closed-door final talks on the bill to be televised.

A reporter reminded the San Francisco Democrat that in 2008, then-candidate Obama opined that all such negotiations be open to C-SPAN cameras.

“There are a number of things he was for on the campaign trail,” quipped Pelosi, who has no intention of making the deliberations public.

People familiar with Pelosi's thinking wasted little time in explaining precisely what she meant by a “number of things” – saying it reflected weeks of simmering tension on health care between two Democratic power players who have functioned largely in lock-step during Obama’s first year in office.

Senior House Democratic leadership aides say Pelosi was pointedly referring to Obama’s ’08 pledge not to raise taxes on the middle class, which she interprets to include a tax on so-called “Cadillac” health care plans that offer lavish benefit packages to many union members. - Politico Story

CSPAN Wants Obama to Stick to Promise

The head of C-SPAN has implored Congress to open up the last leg of health care reform negotiations to the public, as top Democrats lay plans to hash out the final product among themselves.

C-SPAN CEO Brian Lamb wrote to leaders in the House and Senate Dec. 30 urging them to open "all important negotiations, including any conference committee meetings," to televised coverage on his network.

"The C-SPAN networks will commit the necessary resources to covering all of the sessions LIVE and in their entirety," he wrote.

In a Tuesday afternoon press conference on health legislation negotiations, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appeared to object to the premise behind the request.

"There has never been a more open process for any legislation in anyone who’s served here’s experience," she said.

However, Republican leaders sided with C-SPAN's calls for transparency.

"As House Republican leader, I can confidently state that all House Republicans strongly endorse your proposal and stand ready to work with you to make it a reality," Minority Leader John Boehner wrote in response to the letter. "Hard-working families won't stand for having the future of their health care decided behind closed doors. These secret deliberations are a breeding ground for more of the kickbacks, shady deals and special-interest provisions that have become business as usual in Washington." - FOX News Story

Obama Looks for Do-Over for Terrorism

Hit for being too slow and diffident in his initial response to the Christmas Day terror plot, President Barack Obama is hoping for a do-over Tuesday – summoning his security chiefs to the White House to explain what went wrong.

The session in the Situation Room is Obama’s first chance to go face-to-face with those responsible for securing the nation, and a big opportunity to set the tone and tempo for the government’s response to the terror plot against Northwest Flight 253.

The White House is giving no sign Obama will ask anyone to take the fall for intelligence and security failures that led to the near-disaster. But the White House is trying to project an air of decisive action by the president, on an issue where the stakes couldn’t be higher.

“This calls for a really hard look,” Georgetown University professor Bruce Hoffman said. “Not putting in place measures to prevent the recurrence—the failure to do that is political suicide….I’m not sure that kind of threshold would have applied after the 9/11 attacks, but it would now.”

Here are five things to watch for around Tuesday’s meeting: - Politico Story

Bad News for Democrats - Congress Receives Lowest Approval

Voters feel more strongly than ever that Congress is performing poorly and that most of its members are in it for themselves.

Fifty-eight percent (58%) of U.S. voters now say Congress is doing a poor job. That’s the highest negative finding since Rasmussen Reports began surveying on the question in November 2006.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 12% of voters believe Congress is doing a good or excellent job, the lowest total since the first of February last year.

Forty-three percent (43%) of all voters say most members of Congress are corrupt, the highest level of belief since we began asking this question in June 2008. By comparison, just 32% say most congressmen are not corrupt, but that’s the lowest level of confidence in over 20 months. Twenty-five percent (25%) remain undecided.

Another new low is the number who say most members of Congress are more interested in their own careers than in helping other people. - Rasmussen Reports Poll

Obama Administration Won't Fight Al Qaeda in Yemen?

The U.S. does not plan to open a new front in Yemen in the global fight against terrorism despite closing its embassy there in the face of Al Qaeda threats, President Obama's top counterterrorism adviser said Sunday.

"We're not talking about that at this point at all," White House aide John Brennan told Fox News when asked whether U.S. troops would be sent to Yemen.

"The Yemeni government has demonstrated their willingness to take the fight to Al Qaeda," he said. "They're willing to accept our support. We're providing them everything that they've asked for."

The comments came in the wake of the failed Christmas Day attack against a U.S. airliner by an accused 23-year-old Nigerian who says he received training and instructions from Al Qaeda operatives in Yemen.

President Obama plans to return from his holiday vacation in Hawaii for a Tuesday meeting at the White House about the airliner plot.

On Sunday, the U.S. and Britain shuttered their embassies in the Yemeni capital, San'a, citing security reasons.

"We're not going to take any chances" with the lives of American diplomats and others at the embassy in Yemen's capital, Brennan said, making the rounds of four Sunday television talk shows. "There are indications Al Qaeda is planning to carry out an attack against a target inside of San'a, possibly our embassy."

Brennan said the threat against Americans and Westerners would not ease until Yemen's government got a better handle on the threat from terrorists inside the country. He estimated there are several hundred members of Al Qaeda in Yemen. "We are very concerned about Al Qaeda's continued growth there," he said. - FOX News Story

What strikes me most is, they are very concerned, just not concerned enough to continue the fight against Al Qaeda. Hell why should Obama do that? Give it a few years and this will be the new Afghanistan.

Lack of Leadership will set back the fight against terror and all of those Great Warriors who died for the USA will be in vein.

Obama Not the Chosen One Any Longer-Poll Numbers Fall

Democrats Attack the Messenger Instead of Reading the Message

Democrats are turning their fire on Scott Rasmussen, the prolific independent pollster whose surveys on elections, President Obama’s popularity and a host of other issues are surfacing in the media with increasing frequency.

The pointed attacks reflect a hardening conventional wisdom among prominent liberal bloggers and many Democrats that Rasmussen Reports polls are, at best, the result of a flawed polling model and, at worst, designed to undermine Democratic politicians and the party’s national agenda.

On progressive-oriented websites, anti-Rasmussen sentiment is an article of faith. “Rasmussen Caught With Their Thumb on the Scale,” blared the Daily Kos this summer. “Rasmussen Reports, You Decide,” the blog Swing State Project recently headlined in a play on the Fox News motto.

“I don’t think there are Republican polling firms that get as good a result as Rasmussen does,” said Eric Boehlert, a senior fellow with Media Matters, a progressive research center. “His data looks like it all comes out of the RNC [Republican National Committee].”

“Whether intended or not, Rasmussen polls have been used by conservative voices as talking points, and when that happens on one side it inevitably produces a reaction from the other,” explained Mark Blumenthal, a polling analyst and the editor and publisher of Pollster.com. “Rasmussen produces a lot of data that appear to produce narratives conservatives are promoting, and that causes a reaction.”

While Scott Rasmussen, the firm’s president, contends that he has no ax to grind — his bio notes that he has been “an independent pollster for more than a decade” and “has never been a campaign pollster or consultant for candidates seeking office” — his opponents on the left insist he is the hand that feeds conservative talkers a daily trove of negative numbers that provides grist for attacks on Obama and the Democratic Party. - Politico Story

DHS Secretary Still Under Fire - Resignation Soon?

After a determined effort Monday morning to walk back three disastrous words that threatened to rival “heck of a job Brownie,” Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano spent the rest of the week in Washington reviewing the department’s detection capabilities and increased security and updating President Barack Obama on the assessment Thursday morning.

The president seemed to be trying to throw her a lifeline Tuesday when he made it clear that he understood that her statement that “the system worked” referred only to what transpired after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded his Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit. But Republican critics, who already had Napolitano in their sights, spared no words in criticizing her — and show no inclination to stop.

One of them was her home-state senator, Republican Jon Kyl, who told reporters in Arizona that he no longer feels “totally safe” with his former governor at the helm of the Department of Homeland Security. Kyl was flanked at the Phoenix news conference by fellow Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain. - Politico Story

States Consider Legal Action against Deal Cut W/Nebraska Senator for Vote

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) reached out Thursday evening to South Carolina GOP Attorney General Henry McMaster, the leader of a group of 13 Republican state attorneys general who are threatening to file suit against the Senate health care bill, and urged him to forgo any legal action, POLITICO has learned.

According to a copy of a memo sent by McMaster’s chief of staff to other GOP state attorneys general detailing the call, Nelson asked McMaster to “call off the dogs,” a reference to recent threats by the state AGs to file a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a Medicaid provision in the bill that benefits Nebraska at the expense of other states.

Under the terms of a deal Nelson cut with Senate leaders to secure his crucial vote for the health care package, Nebraska would be exempted from having to pay for the coverage of its new Medicaid enrollees—leaving the federal government to pick up the tab. The deal is expected to cost the federal government $100 million over the next 10 years. - Politico Story

Obama Fails in Reaction and Leadership after Attempted Terrorism Attack

From the time he launched his campaign for president three years ago, Barack Obama had to consider how he would react to the first serious act of terrorism during the campaign, or if he won, on his watch. His fellow Democrats had been thinking about the moment even longer - since the September day in 2001 when attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon defined George W. Bush’s presidency and gave Republicans a decisive advantage on a defining political issue.

And yet the White House’s response to last week’s attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit could rank as one of the low points of the new president’s first year. Over the course of five days, Obama’s Obama’ reaction ranged from low-keyed to reassuring to, finally, a vow to find out what went wrong. The episode was a baffling, unforced error in presidential symbolism, hardly a small part of the presidency, and the moment at which yet another of the old political maxims that Obama had sought to transcend – the Democrats’ vulnerability on national security – reasserted itself. - Politico Story