TRUMP'S EXECUTIVE CABINET TEAM OF RIVALS SHOWS STRONG LEADERSHIP

TRUMP'S EXECUTIVE CABINET TEAM OF RIVALS SHOWS STRONG LEADERSHIP:

TRUMP DOESN'T WANT A TEAM OF "YES MEN" AND BUTT KISSERS.

MSM NETWORKS (CNN) APPLAUDED OBAMA'S "TEAM OF RIVALS", SILENT WHEN TRUMP DID LIKEWISE.

CAN YOU SAY MEDIA BIAS??


Sources: The Economist, Fox News, YouTube


The late Pres Abraham Lincoln received notoriety for creating a "Team of Rivals" when selecting members of his executive cabinet.

Barack Obama was hailed and lauded by the Mainstream Media for following in Lincoln's footsteps, especially when Obama nominated his former 2008 opponent Hillary Clinton for the role of Secretary of State.

Now in the year 2016, President-Elect Donald J. Trump is building his own executive cabinet "Team of Rivals" leadership fleet.

But wait!

Where is the Mainstream Media?

Obama was praised for his "Team of Rivals".

So why is the MSM silent when Trump practices the same brilliant leadership strategy?
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***** The next administration

Donald Trump has a team of rivals too
THE president-elect’s first administration hires had all been middle-aged white men who had backed him to the hilt when others wrinkled their noses.

But with a pair of nominations announced on November 23rd he rang the changes. He named Nikki Haley, the Indian-American governor of South Carolina, to be his ambassador to the United Nations, and Betsy DeVos, a billionaire Republican benefactress, as his education secretary.

As The Economist went to press, he was also reported to have invited Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon whom he defeated in the Republican primaries, and who is black, to be his secretary of housing and urban development.
All three possible appointments are intriguing, perhaps Mrs Haley’s especially. She is a first-generation American—her parents migrated from the Indian state of Punjab in the 1960s—who converted from Sikhism to Christianity before her marriage, yet still occasionally attends gurdwara.
Sparky, personable and, at the age of 44, an acknowledged Republican star, she could be the first Indian-American to hold a cabinet office. She is also a former opponent of Mr Trump’s.
She criticised him implicitly last January, when giving the official Republican rebuttal to Barack Obama’s last state-of-the-union speech. “It can be tempting to follow the siren call of the angriest voices,” she warned:

Americans “must resist.” She then criticised Mr Trump explicitly after he failed to disavow the support of a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Having distinguished herself by the alacrity with which she had lobbied to remove the Confederate flag from government buildings the previous year, after a racist massacre of black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, Mrs Haley’s condemnation carried moral weight.

It is smart of Mr Trump, who once derided her for her criticisms, to try to harness that. Her nomination is evidence that he can in fact bury a grudge. There is speculation he might also be trying to head off a potential challenger in 2020; that would be smart, too.

Mrs DeVos, an heir by marriage to the Amway direct marketing fortune, is another former critic of Mr Trump. She gave money to three of his rivals in the primaries—including Jeb Bush, an establishment figure Mr Trump humiliated—and said the reality television star did “not represent the Republican Party”.

In some ways the epitome of the well-heeled Republican elite he railed against on the trail, Mrs DeVos is also a crusader for the pro-choice school reforms, including an expansion of charter schools and vouchers to make private education more widely accessible, he has called for.

Amid uncertainty about what Mr Trump means to do with power, given the sketchiness of his platform and his apparent abandonment of a couple of big campaign promises, Mrs DeVos’s appointment is a rare clue to a Trump policy agenda. Teachers’ unions decried it; Mr Bush, one of Mr Trump’s most indefatigable Republican opponents, warmly applauded.

Mr Carson’s nomination, if he agrees to it, would be rather odd, but that is now expected of the retired medical whizz.

Backed by a devoted following of evangelical Christians, he briefly led the Republican primary field, yet seemed unaware of what the job of president entailed; his brilliant brain seemed resistant to remembering almost any detail of foreign policy. When reported to be in the reckoning for a cabinet role, his business manager said that was the “last thing he would want”, because he “feels he has no government experience.”

This was not a great recommendation for a job that includes responsibility for the federal government’s efforts to alleviate urban poverty.

GOP WELCOMES BLACK VOTERS.....NO MORE EXCUSES (HIRAM REVELS)

GOP WELCOMES BLACK VOTERS.....NO MORE EXCUSES

DID YOU KNOW IT WAS ACTUALLY THE GOP WHICH FIRST ALLOWED BLACK PEOPLE TO VOTE IN AMERICA & SEEK PUBLIC OFFICE? (HIRAM REVELS - 1800's)

Sources:  RNC, BlackPast.org, YouTube

Today, the Republican National Committee is out with a new video highlighting Black Republicans across the country engaging voters in their communities: 

After the results of the 2012 presidential election, the RNC recognized that a change in the way it reached out to black voters was in order. We already saw improvements in support from Black voters in the 2014 midterm elections, but the work was far from over. 

We are still working every day to build trust through engagement, establish a consciously committed presence in black communities across the country, and train the next generation of leaders through programs like the Republican Leadership Initiative (RLI). 

The Republican Party has always stood for self-determination, empowerment, and community-based involvement, values that we know resonate with African Americans. 

With this rededication to black voters, the RNC is opening doors and creating opportunity for dialogue where it didn't exist before. At the RNC and Ohio Republican Party Black History Month celebration in Columbus, Ohio earlier this month, Black Republicans from across the state shared with us why the party's message resonates with them. 

We are all committed to empowering others to be their best selves. We are all committed to preserving the freedom and liberty we have as Americans. 

Together, we are the GOP.

South Carolina, Secession & Slavery: Historic Link

States’ Rights, But To What?


One hundred and fifty years ago today South Carolina declared its independence from the United States. The move had been in the offing since early November, when Abraham Lincoln’s election led the state’s leaders to fear that Washington would begin to restrict slavery in the territories and in their own state. That was the proximate cause, at least; there was more to it. Beyond the election, South Carolina was no longer happy in a union with the free states, where northern opponents of slavery were allowed to openly denounce the “peculiar institution” in Congress and in their home states.

It’s true, then, that South Carolina seceded over states’ rights: though, as neo-confederates are loath to admit, the specific right in question concerned the ownership of human chattel. One of the South’s persistent complaints was the northern states would not vigorously cooperate in the return of fugitive slaves and that the free states allowed antislavery organizations to flourish.

In other words, for South Carolina, slavery and states’ rights were not mutually exclusive; in fact, they were the same thing. Today too few people understand the intricate legal history that connects slavery to states’ rights — and as a result a needless debate continues, 150 years after secession began.



As most people know, until the adoption of the 13th Amendment in 1865, owning slaves was constitutionally protected. But the Constitution also protected the slave-owners’ right to have escaped slaves returned: the Fugitive Slave Clause of Article Four, Section Two of the Constitution declares that “No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.”

The clause was awkwardly phrased and deliberately constructed to mislead readers; the delegates to the Constitutional Convention purposely did not use the term “slave” in the Constitution. Its language seemed to imply that the return of fugitive slaves would be entirely a matter of interstate relations. That made sense at the time: slavery was legal in 11 of the 13 states; only Massachusetts and New Hampshire had ended the institution. Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Connecticut had passed laws to gradually end slavery, but all three had legislation authorizing the return of fugitive slaves.

Despite the ambiguous language of the constitutional clause, in 1793 Congress passed the first fugitive slave law, which regulated the return of runaway slaves and authorized both federal and state judges to enforce it. The standards in this law were weak, and many Northerners feared it would lead to kidnapping.

The federal government got involved at an opportune time, because the slave-owning consensus at the state level was fracturing. By 1804 New York and New Jersey had passed laws to gradually end slavery, while the new northern states, Vermont and Ohio, had banned slavery outright. Moreover, starting in the 1820s, most northern states passed legislation, known as “personal liberty laws,” to protect free blacks from kidnapping. These laws also made it more difficult for Southerners to recover their fugitive slaves because, in addition to the federal requirements regulating the removal of alleged fugitives, they had to fulfill state rules as well.

In 1842 the Supreme Court weighed in with its decision in Prigg v. Pennsylvania. The Court ruled that the personal liberty laws violated a master’s constitutional right to reclaim a runaway slave. The Court went further, holding that a master did not even have to bring a fugitive before a judge, but had a common law right to recapture a runaway as long as it could be done without a breach of the peace. In an attempt to create a uniform national law, the Court also held that northern judges had a constitutional and moral obligation to enforce the 1793 law (though, because they were not paid by the federal government, they could not be required to do so).

Southerners, of course, saw the ruling as a vindication of a constitutional right. But Northerners, incensed by this overwhelming federal protection of slavery, saw it as a license for kidnapping. As a result, with few federal judges in the nation and no national system of law enforcement, Southerners had an unqualified right to seize their fugitive slaves wherever they found them. But they could not necessarily count on any law enforcement from Northerners to help them.

Their fears were soon realized: eight months after the Prigg decision a Virginia master was forced to leave a slave, George Latimer, in Boston in exchange for a sum that was far less than Latimer was worth, because local law enforcement officials would not keep in him in jail long enough for a court to order his return to Virginia. Less than a year later Massachusetts passed the “Latimer Law,” which prohibited the use of state jails or the participation of state judges in the return of fugitive slaves. Most of the other northern states soon passed similar laws.

This led to Southern demands for federal guarantees that they could recover their runaway slaves, culminating in the infamous Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. The law allowed for the appointment of a federal commissioner in every county of the nation, with the power to hear fugitive slave cases and order the return of an alleged fugitive. It was the country’s first federal law enforcement bureaucracy and the first instance of a federal law enforcement presence at the local level.

The law was dramatically unfair: it denied alleged fugitives a jury trial, access to the writ of habeas corpus and, most astoundingly of all, the right to testify at the hearing. Anyone interfering in the return of a fugitive slave could face six months in jail and a $1,000 fine, an enormous sum in the 1850s.

The worst part of the law was the procedure for paying commissioners. They received $5 if they determined that the alleged slave was in fact a free person, but they got $10 if they decided the person was a slave. Congress had reasoned that if a commissioner found for the slaveowner he would have to fill out a great deal of paperwork, and thus need greater compensation. But for the vast majority of Northerners, this seemed like a crude attempt to buy justice.

The Fugitive Slave Law was never as effective as Southerners wanted, but over the next decade about 350 slaves were returned under it. Only a dozen or so were rescued by mobs across the North; while most Northerners opposed the law, few were willing to openly defy it. But where they did — in Boston, Syracuse, Oberlin, Milwaukee and elsewhere — the rescues made headlines as they undermined the credibility of the national government and sent a powerful message to the South.

In short, during the decades leading up to the 1860 election Northerners and Southerners battled over whether, and how, the states or the federal government would control the future of slavery. In this period the Southerners almost always won. But, for South Carolinians, Lincoln’s election appeared to be a takeover of the federal government by opponents not just of slavery, but of the fugitive slave laws that they believed maintained the delicate balance between pro- and anti-slavery sentiments.

Even though Lincoln was on record insisting he would enforce all federal laws in both regions, they had something of a point. In its “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union,” the state declared that the

ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution: they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.

The South Carolinians put their argument in constitutional terms, arguing secession was both justified, and necessary, because “a geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that ‘Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,’ and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.”

In other words, the Palmetto State asserted that slavery was threatened because the North no longer followed the Constitution, which protected states’ rights to maintain the institution of slavery and protected the rights of individual southerners to retrieve fugitive slaves. The South Carolinians wrote:

But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. … [They] have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. …. Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation.

Not all Southerners supported secession; those who opposed it argued that slavery was safer in the Union because they believed the national government could never free the slaves. As Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, the adamantly proslavery leader of the South Carolina delegation to the Constitutional Convention, bragged to his state’s legislature: “We have a security that the general government can never emancipate them, for no such authority is granted and it is admitted, on all hands, that the general government has no powers but what are expressly granted by the Constitution, and that all rights not expressed were reserved by the several states.”

But these arguments fell on deaf ears. South Carolinians no longer trusted the national government, the free states or the Constitution. In that sense, secession was most definitely about states’ rights. But it is vital to remember just which rights South Carolina was committed to defending.


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Sources: 50 States.com, C-Span, NY Times, Red State.com, Russia Today, Youtube, Google Maps

GOP Accepted Black Voters First! Not Racist "Dixiecrats"

When Did Blacks Start Voting Democratic?

For how long have the Democrats garnered the black vote? Certainly there was a point during the last century when a majority of blacks started supporting the Democrats rather than Republicans.

What has been the voting pattern and what happened to change that pattern?

Answer:

There was a big move to Democratic voting in Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration, and another in Lyndon B. Johnson's.

Blacks mostly voted Republican from after the Civil War and through the early part of the 20th century. That's not surprising when one considers that Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president, and the white, segregationist politicians who governed Southern states in those days were Democrats.

The Democratic Party didn't welcome blacks then, and it wasn't until 1924 that blacks were even permitted to attend Democratic conventions in any official capacity. Most blacks lived in the South, where they were mostly prevented from voting at all.




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Sources: CNN, Fact Check.org, Google Maps

Pres. Obama's "Team Of Rivals" Fit For The Task Or Political Gimmicks?

GOP to Geithner: Step down. Congressional Republicans issued a blistering review of the Obama administration's economic policies Thursday and suggested Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner should lose his job. NBC's Kelly O'Donnell reports.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Why the Greg Craig debacle matters


President Barack Obama is returning from his trek to Asia Thursday to a capital that is a considerably more dangerous place for him than when he departed.

While he was abroad, there was a palpable sense at home of something gone wrong. A critical mass of influential people who once held big hopes for his presidency began to wonder whether they had misjudged the man. Most significant, these doubters now find themselves with a new reluctance to defend Obama at a phase of his presidency when he needs defenders more urgently than ever.

This is the price Obama has paid with his complicity and most likely his active participation, in the shabbiest episode of his presidency: The firing by leaks of White House counsel Gregory Craig, a well-respected Washington veteran and influential early supporter of Obama.

The people who are most aghast by the handling of the Craig departure can’t be dismissed by the White House as Republican partisans, or still-embittered Hillary Clinton supporters. They are not naïve activists who don’t understand that the exercise of power can be a rough business and that trade-offs and personal disappointments are inevitable. Instead, they are people, either in politics or close observers, who once held an unromantically high opinion of Obama. They were important to his rise, and are likely more important to the success or failure of his presidency than Obama or his distressingly insular and small-minded West Wing team appreciate.

The Craig embarrassment gives these people a new reason – not the first or only reason – to conclude that he wasn’t the person of integrity and even classiness they had thought, and, more fundamentally, that his ability to move people and actually lead a fractured and troubled country (the reason many preferred him over Hillary Clinton) is not what had been promised in the campaign.

This may seem like a lot to hang on a Washington personnel move. After all, intramural back-stabbing or making people fall guys when things go wrong (think Bill Clinton’s Defense Secretary Les Aspin after the disaster in Somalia) are not new to Washingtonians.

But Craig’s ouster did not occur in a vacuum. It served as a focal point to concerns that have been building for months that Obama wasn’t pressing for all that might be possible within the existing political constraints (all that one could ask of a president); that his presidential voice hadn’t fulfilled the hopes raised by his campaign voice (which had also taken him a while to find); that he hadn’t created a movement, as he had raised expectations that he would; that would be there to back him up and help him fulfill his promises.

That is why it is worth pondering how the Craig story, unfolded in detail – its consequences likely will echo far longer than anything Obama said or did in Asia.

Briefly, here’s what happened, some of it told for the first time: Craig, who had known the Clintons since they were all at Yale Law School together, had served as a senior adviser to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, but in 1998 gave up that job to help defend Bill Clinton against impeachment. Yet in 2008, he supported Obama for the nomination – not so much a turning against Hillary Clinton as being impressed early, as were some other prominent Washingtonians, by the then-state senator but would-be U.S. Senate candidate at a fundraiser held by Vernon Jordan, seeing Obama as the first potentially inspiring Democratic figure since Robert Kennedy. In the course of the campaign, Craig wrote a highly publicized memo questioning some of Hillary Clinton’s claims of foreign policy experience, such as coming under enemy fire in Tuzla, Bosnia. During the campaign, Craig coached Obama for the debates (playing McCain), and praised him highly. Craig’s imprimatur helped the neophyte Obama in certain influential circles.

He hoped to get a high foreign policy position in an Obama administration, but when Clinton was named secretary of state, this of course became untenable. The Clintons are an unforgiving lot. So, Obama and Craig agreed that Craig would take the job of White House counsel for a year, and then they’d discuss what he’d do next. Thus, Craig was handed a very tricky portfolio.

During the transition, about mid-December, Craig presented to a group of the president’s newly named national security advisers meeting in Washington – including Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, national security adviser General James Jones, and others – three proposed executive orders: One ordered the shutting down of Guantanamo in a year. (The others banned torture and closed down the C.I.A.’s “black sites”; and addressed future detainee policy.) The one-year target for closing Guantanamo resulted from consultations with human rights and detainee rights groups, who argued that Guantanamo could be shut down in three months, and with Pentagon officials, who had no united position but argued that it would take from a year to 18 months.

At the meeting, only the newly named Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, beamed in from Arizona, questioned whether a year was realistic. When Gates, as he later confirmed publicly, said that though it was an “ambitious” deadline, he supported it because setting it was the only way to get things, especially the bureaucracy, moving toward that end, and that it could be extended if it couldn’t be met, that was it.

Obama’s new national security team signed off on the executive order to close Guantanamo in a year. This was passed along to the president as well as his top aides; Craig was never in a meeting with the political side of the White House on the Guantanamo matter – and the president-elect and then president raised no objection before, when, or after he signed off on it.

Unsurprisingly, the deadline became hard to meet, for various legal and political reasons – including the congressional outburst of NIMBYISM (similar to its earlier outbursts on Dubai Ports and even Terri Schiavo – short-term, irrational, and politically motivated fits that erupt from the Congress from time to time). If Craig failed to foresee this (as some later charged), he had a lot of company.

The closing of Guantanamo is undoubtedly far further along than it would have been without the executive order. But along the way, Craig fell out of favor with the president’s political aides and, apparently, the president himself. Whether he was simply being made the fall guy, or the tight circle of Chicagoans in the White House didn’t care for this outsider, or he committed some unknown errors, suddenly, in August, leaks began to surface that his job was in danger. Non-denial denials were issued from the White House. The leaks became a pattern, a systematic, anonymous, tipping off of reporters that Craig would soon be gone.

Craig was accused, anonymously of course, of a welter of charges: of being “too close to the human rights groups” (if so, what was wrong with that?), of not playing well with others, of being a bad manager, of being fixated on Guantanamo to the detriment of other issues. In the summer, Obama offered Craig another job, which Craig declined, and the two agreed that they would discuss the matter further later in the year. But the leaks continued, and Craig decided that his situation was untenable, and he had to leave.

To make sure he did, he was leaked his way out, up to the day before he planned to resign. What caused so many Obama supporters’ stomachs to turn was that Obama could have stopped the leaking at any time; he or White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel could have arranged a dignified departure. (They’re within their rights to get rid of someone if they’re dissatisfied, for good reasons or not – but a preferred route would be to call that person in and ask what day would suit him or her to resign, and then just let that person do it. This happens a lot in administrations; even if people don’t believe the resignation was voluntary, there’s a soupcon of dignity left to that person.) Even some Hillary Clinton supporters, who still hold no brief for Craig, think he was treated shabbily.

And this opinion is not confined to “political junkies.” Thomas Wilner, a distinguished Washington attorney who challenged Bush administration detainee policies, particularly on Guantanamo, and had worked with Craig on these issues, told me, “There's a lot of concern among a lot of lawyers in this town, especially those who were supporting Obama, that somebody this bright, this respected, this good, and with this integrity, was treated in such a way."

Yes, we knew, or should have, during the campaign that the supposed idealist Obama had a bit of the Chicago cut-throat in him, but there was little sign that he could be as brutal and heedless of loyalty as he was in the Craig affair. An unexpected climate of fear emanates from the Obama White House.

The incident underscored worries that several had held about the Obama White House for some time: that it was too tightly controlled and narrowly focused by the Chicago crowd; that it seemed from the outset to need an older, wiser head, someone with a bit more detachment.

The current crowd displays a certain impulsiveness and vindictiveness that do it no good – as in the silly war-let on Fox News that it is now trying to back out of. Even if Craig was making a hash of his job – and there’s no independent evidence of this – it just wasn’t smart to treat someone widely held in such high respect in this manner; once again, the impulsiveness backfired.

The replacing of Craig with Washington attorney Robert Bauer, Obama’s own attorney for years as well as counsel for the Democratic National Committee and the Obama campaign, further narrowed the White House circle just when it needed broadening, lowered the stature of the office, and choosing the president’s personal attorney for a position that calls for dispassionate judgment is hazardous. (Does anyone remember Alberto Gonzalez?)

The Obama’s themselves hang tight with a small Chicago crowd. Yes, he talks to others, and yes, a president’s time is very limited, but the Obama’s themselves seem as closed-off and unto themselves as does his inner White House circle. (Is this a coincidence? What is all this wariness about?) When the Obama’s go to someone’s house for dinner, almost invariably it’s to that of Valerie Jarrett, the old friend from Chicago who serves as a counselor and whom they see all day. Old Chicago friends fly in for weekends frequently. Old friends, who had helped launch him, helped them personally, have been left behind.

At the same time as the Craig imbroglio happened, many people who had defended Obama against charges that he wasn’t what he’d been cracked up to be were now becoming concerned themselves: though it was a relief to have a president who thought through crucial decisions about sending the country’s young to war, it was taking him awfully long to make up his mind about what to do about Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the decision-making was bafflingly leak-ridden (was this a deliberate airing of ideas or a loss of control over the process?); that the health care debate had in fact careened out of his control and it seemed less and less likely that, having used up almost a year of his presidency on it (his “deadlines” had become irrelevant, and so, in a way, had he), he would end up with a bill, if at all, that did enough net good.

Certain things are not his fault: the unprecedented truculence of the Republican Party, scared silly by right-wing ranters on cable television; the unholy economic and foreign-policy mess that he inherited; the fact that he never had, as so many liberal commentators asserted, the 60 (or 58 or 59) Senate votes that would enable him to get what he wanted from the Congress. It’s not his fault that unemployment rates remain stubbornly high following a traumatic recession.

And it’s always risky to project the long-term from the moment. Perhaps this will prove to have been a passing moment. Perhaps Obama will still salvage a health care bill that is a real step forward (though there will be a humongous fight over its definition); maybe he’ll come up with a smart strategy – or the best of bad options – on Afghanistan and Pakistan; it’s not impossible that he’ll add real progress on climate change and regulatory reform to his list of achievements, and that he’ll start to get the deficit under control.

Maybe there’ll be enough examples of grace that will make people forget this period of pettiness. He’s been lucky before; maybe he’ll get lucky again. Meanwhile, serious people who had a lot of hope about him and who defended him are more worried than ever, and in this if anything over-communicative society the White House can’t write them off as “a bunch of Washington insiders.” So meanwhile, there’s a palpable mood change in Washington that could signify that Barack Obama is in deeper trouble than he was even a week ago.



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Sources: Politico, MSNBC, The Daily Beast, Wikipedia, VisitingDC, Google Maps