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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (62922)	3/3/2013 5:17:30 PM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

] Tags: amheuser \| busch \| newspaper \| beer \| watered \| down Anheuser-Busch Defends Itself with Newspaper Ads Sunday, 03 Mar 2013 05:07 PM Share: More . . . A A \| Email Us \| Print \| Forward Article 0 inShare Budweiser-maker Anheuser-Busch InBev defended itself against allegations it is watering down its alcoholic drinks by taking out full-page advertisements in newspapers across the United States. The company was placing ads in more than 10 newspapers nationally, a representative of Anheuser-Busch said on Sunday. The ads featured a picture of a can of drinking water below the caption, "They must have tested one of these." Anheuser-Busch donates water to the American Red Cross. Beer consumers have filed a proposed class-action lawsuit accusing the company of mislabeling the alcohol content of the brands Budweiser, Michelob, Michelob Ultra, Hurricane High Gravity Lager, King Cobra, Busch Ice, Natural Ice, Bud Ice, Bud Light Platinum and Bud Light Lime. Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com newsmax.com Urgent: Should Obamacare Be Repealed? Vote Here Now!

To: calgal who wrote (62922)	3/3/2013 5:25:07 PM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

You are here: Magazine / Indefensible The Magazine Indefensible Mar 11, 2013, Vol. 18, No. 25 • By WILLIAM KRISTOL Single Page Print Larger Text Smaller Text Alerts President Obama is an appalling commander in chief. In the last couple of months alone, he’s selected and muscled through the Senate the least qualified nominee for secretary of defense in a half century; forced out of his position early a superb combatant commander, General James Mattis, because Mattis took seriously the Iranian threat; and blithely ordered women into combat arms units, with no pretense of serious consideration of the effect of this on the capability, discipline, and morale of our warfighters. Before that, while growing every other part of the federal government, he cut defense. So we shouldn’t be surprised that he’s not doing anything serious about the further devastating cuts sequestration will impose on the military. Newscom And the Republicans? To their credit, they opposed Chuck Hagel, and did so forcefully. But on General Mattis, on women in combat, and on national security in general, they’ve been mostly silent. And now, with respect to the sequester, the Republican party has, at first reluctantly, then enthusiastically, joined the president on the road to irresponsibility. Touting their role as trimmers of a welfare state they once wanted to transform, titillated by the prospect of using as a boomerang against President Obama an idea that was originally his own, thrilled to be showing unaccustomed cleverness by trying to make lemonade out of lemons, the Republicans have taken to the ramparts to preserve, protect, and defend sequestration. Related Stories Kristol Podcast: Republicans Will Hang Tough, Not Let ... Avoiding the Defense Cliff 'What They're Saying about Chuck Hagel' Obama Tries to Have it Both Ways on Defense McConnell: 'No Last-Minute, Back-Room Deal and ... More by William Kristol A Darkling Plain The Next Scott Brown? Resistance Is Not Futile What Did Lew Do? Video of Hagel's Speech to Controversial Group Exists It was only a couple of weeks ago that GOP politicians and conservative commentators were reluctantly allowing as to how they might temporarily have to accept the sequester as the least bad of a set of bad options. But despondent Republicans wanted to believe in something. Demoralized conservatives wanted to be excited about something. So they convinced themselves: That creature we’re enamored of? It’s not an ugly duckling at all, it’s a graceful swan! Now what? It’s the morning after. Bloated domestic discretionary federal programs may become a bit less bloated. But they won’t be reformed or improved. Meanwhile, it is defense—the first function of the national government, whose share of federal spending has gone from about 47 percent under John Kennedy to less than 20 percent today—that takes the bulk of the cuts. The one part of the government that has performed well, even above and beyond the call of duty, over the last decade is slashed deeply and indiscriminately. It’s at this point that the writer is supposed to interject, hastily and apologetically, that of course the Pentagon can and should be cut to some degree, that of course there is at least some bloat in its budget, and that of course no one is mindlessly defending all defense spending. We scorn this pointless accommodation to what are assumed to be the prejudices of uninformed readers. The fact is, if America is to pursue anything resembling its traditional role in the world for the last 70 years, the Pentagon has already been cut too much. We are already at dangerously low levels. The most reasonable position to take now on defense spending cuts is: No. But the GOP is now saying: Yes. Which means the Republican party is complicit in the failure of political responsibility and national seriousness we’re now witnessing. Which means, unfortunately, that historians will say not just of the Obama administration but also of today’s Republican party: “They were weighed in the balance and found wanting.”

To: calgal who wrote (62922)	3/3/2013 5:33:52 PM
From: calgal	Respond to of 71588

Second-Term BluesIs Obama’s free ride over?Mar 11, 2013, Vol. 18, No. 25 • By FRED BARNES Why do presidents get in trouble in their second terms? They think they have a mandate when they don’t. They believe they’re stronger politically than they really are. They’re convinced they can get away with things other presidents couldn’t. They think too highly of themselves personally and act accordingly. President Obama hasn’t hit the second-term skids—yet. And he insists he knows the perils of four more years in the White House and how to avoid them. But there are signs of trouble ahead, signs that Obama and his advisers appear not to have recognized. Sign number one is the sequester. It’s given Obama numerous opportunities to overreach, and he seems determined to seize all of them. The first: blaming Republicans for the automatic spending cuts that went into effect last week. The idea for the sequester, as everyone now knows, originated in the White House. And contrary to the president’s claim, it did not allow for substituting tax hikes for cuts. Then the president unleashed a campaign of near-hysteria over the sequester’s impact. The cuts amount to $44 billion from a $3.6 trillion budget between now and the end of the 2013 fiscal year on September 30. The White House clanged the bell for all hands on deck and deployed cabinet members, agency heads, and Democratic governors to sow fear in the land with predictions of widespread disruptions in the lives of most Americans. Obama himself led the fear-mongering. The health of children will suffer, he said. Hundreds of thousands will be deprived of flu vaccinations and cancer screenings. Federal prosecutors will “let criminals go.” Unemployment will soar. Border security will be harmed, as will military readiness and “our ability to respond to threats in unstable parts of the world.” Whew! Obama’s list of horrors is longer than Dante’s. But after the House and Senate rejected his vague plan for more tax increases than spending cuts, the president faces the temptation to further overreach and make his worst-case scenario come alive—to vindicate his dire predictions. The problem is the public knows there’s fat and waste in the federal budget. And it should be easy to expose, say, that furloughs of air traffic controllers or food inspectors were ordered when the required cuts could have been satisfied by eliminating conferences, administrative jobs, and a federal pay raise due April 1. Obama sneered at a suggestion from Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal when he met with governors at the White House last week. If the president delayed Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion and subsidies offered by state exchanges for two years, that would more than offset the sequester. Obama, in response, said he wouldn’t let opponents succeed in blocking his health plan by the back door after they’d failed through the front door. You may not have heard of Organizing for Action (OFA). It’s the organization for continuing the Obama campaign during his second term. Its ostensible aim is to promote the president’s policy priorities. To do so, it intends to raise $50 million, chiefly from big donors. OFA is unprecedented. No previous president had such an organization or even considered having one. It’s a kind of private political pressure group. Had President George W. Bush set one up, the media would have pounced and demanded he jettison it. But Obama has gotten minimal pushback from the press. The real purpose of OFA, I suspect, is to attack Republicans to improve Democratic chances of capturing the House in 2014 and gaining total control of Washington. By exploiting a loophole in campaign law and ethics regulations, OFA is officially a “social welfare group,” at least nominally nonpolitical. But its first ad targeted Republican House members on gun control. A second purpose is to spare Obama his least favorite task, dealing face-to-face with members of Congress, especially Republicans. But politics isn’t the problem OFA creates for Obama. Nor is the hypocrisy of establishing it, given Obama’s past assaults on special interests looking for favors and preferences in Washington. Rather, it’s the special interests seeking access and favors by writing big checks to the new group. OFA is an invitation to crony capitalism and scandal. It offers “ample potential for influence peddling,” the New York Times said. Read more...