"The clemency process is run out of the Justice Department, where career prosecutors have little interest in reversing the work of their colleagues."

"It’s a recipe for intransigence, dysfunction and injustice on a mass scale. Mr. Obama understands the problem, even if he didn’t fix it. As he wrote in an article published in this month’s issue of The Harvard Law Review, the process operates like a lottery, making it hard to tell what distinguishes the few lucky applicants who get clemency from the many deserving ones who don’t."

So write the editors of the NYT in an editorial titled "Mr. Obama, Pick Up Your Pardon Pen." The headline is misleading. Yes, Obama does have a few days left, and he could issue a bunch of pardons. But the point is that the system is bad, Obama obviously knows it, he could have done something to restructure the process, and he did not.

The final sentence is extraordinary for the NYT: "Perhaps President-elect Donald Trump will learn from Mr. Obama’s failure to heed that wisdom."

1. The word "failure," attached to Obama?!

2. Hope expressed that Donald Trump will fix something.

3. Wisdom attributed to — you have to read the preceding sentence — George W. Bush.

"Part of the job description is also shaping public opinion. And we were very effective, and I was very effective..."

"... in shaping public opinion around my campaigns. But there were big stretches, while governing, where even though we were doing the right thing, we weren’t able to mobilize public opinion firmly enough behind us to weaken the resolve of the Republicans to stop opposing us or to cooperate with us. And there were times during my presidency where I lost the PR battle."

Said Barack Obama.

"In his waning days in the White House, President Obama is desperately trying to make his policies as permanent as possible by tying the hands of his successor — and far more than other presidents have done on their way out."

"From his dramatic and disastrous change of US policy on Israel to his executive order restricting 1.65 million acres of land from development despite local objections, Obama is trying to make it impossible for Donald Trump and a GOP-controlled Congress to govern."

So say the editors of the New York Post.

ADDED: Remember when leaving mad just meant prying W's from computer keyboards, ripping the phone cords from the wall, stealing doorknobs, leaving notes that said "GET OUT," and pasting up stickers with the new President depicted as an ape? Those were simpler times.

Obama, tired, gets lost in a sentence and knows it.

It was a long press conference today.

Why can't a President, like an ordinary person say I lost my train of thought!?

"I'm glad Obama is taking prison rape seriously, but the president shouldn't be telling comedians what kind of jokes they are and aren't allowed to tell."

"Would he tell comedians not to joke about murder? How about drone strikes that kill innocent people?"

The Times of India catches Obama in "an ungainly sight" — chewing gum during the Republic Day parade in New Delhi.

He was also seen taking the gum out of his mouth while Prim Minister Modi was "trying to explain something." Was Modi trying to explain why you shouldn't chew gum during the Republic Day parade?

The Times of India includes some Twitter commentary:

[A]uthor Shobhaa De...  said, "Barack bhai working his jaws overtime and chewing gum! At least it isn't gutka. But seriously - gum during a formal parade?".

"Glad to see @BarackObama is so human. Like most Americans, he chews gum. Anyone know what brand?," was how noted film-maker Shekhar Kapur reacted.

"Barack bhai" — what does that mean? Yahoo Answers says it means "brother," but:

'Bhai' exactly means brother. But in Mumbai this term is used for gangster....

Now, what is "gutka"?

Gutka or Gutkha... is a preparation of crushed areca nut (also called betel nut), tobacco, catechu, paraffin, slaked lime and sweet or savory flavorings.... A mild stimulant, it is sold across India in small, individual-sized packets that cost between 2 and 10 rupees per packet. Gutka is consumed by placing a pinch of it between the gum and cheek and gently sucking and chewing... Many states of India have banned the sale, manufacture, distribution and storage of gutka and all its variants...

I guess Shobhaa De knew it wasn't gutka because the mouth action didn't include gentle sucking. As for Shekhar Kapur's question: "Anyone know what brand?" I, like most Americans, know that the brand is Nicorette.

"The Islamic State was born out of the ashes of Al Qaeda in Iraq, which was crippled by the time Mr. Obama withdrew American forces from Iraq at the end of 2011."

"The civil war that erupted in neighboring Syria pitting President Bashar al-Assad against a variety of rebel organizations provided a haven for the Qaeda affiliate to reconstitute itself with an influx of foreign fighters. 'To anyone watching developments in Iraq from mid-2010 and Syria from early 2011, the recovery and rise of ISIS should have been starkly clear,' said Charles Lister, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar. 'The organization itself was also carrying out an explicitly clear step-by-step strategy aimed at engendering the conditions that would feed its accelerated rise.'"

From a NYT article titled "Many Missteps in Assessment of ISIS Threat."

Obama's "Starbucks salute."

I think this is nothing but a distraction, but it serves some interests. Care to exploit any?

Obama has spent $11 billion on high-speed higher-speed passenger trains, but where are they?

"... mostly nowhere..."

(The link goes to The New York Times, not to some Obama-bashing site.)

The White House inadvertently exposes the name of the CIA’s top officer in Kabul.

"The disclosure marked a rare instance in which a CIA officer working overseas had his cover — the secrecy meant to protect his actual identity — pierced by his own government."

The only other recent case came under significantly different circumstances, when former CIA operative Valerie Plame was exposed as officials of the George W. Bush administration sought to discredit her husband, a former ambassador and fierce critic of the decision to invade Iraq.

Valerie Plame was exposed. Nice use of the passive voice there by The Washington Post! As the top comment over there says:

So... Bush never actually outed a CIA agent —  Richard Armitage did — but that didn't stop the Left from engaging in a two year witchhunt. But Obama can out CIA agents with impunity, I guess, no investigation required?

"The Obama administration hasn’t been distinguished by cool, cerebral, sure-footed professionalism, but by something closer to amateur hour."

"From the botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act to the bloody aftermath of the intervention in Libya, from enabling political witch-hunts at the IRS to being repeatedly outmaneuvered by Russia’s Vladimir Putin, from swelling the debt he was going to reduce to embittering the politics he promised to detoxify, Obama’s performance has been a lurching series of screw-ups and disappointments."

From "Obama fails to show his vaunted ‘competence,'" by Jeff Jacoby in The Boston Globe.

"There can be no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or body of magistrates."

Wrote Montesquieu, quoted by Senator Ted Cruz in the introduction to — PDF — "THE LEGAL LIMIT: THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION’S ATTEMPTS TO EXPAND FEDERAL POWER," which is mostly a set of lists of (purported) abuses of power, with each item footnoted to a media source.

I found that via Dana Milbank's "Ted Cruz, the reckless accuser," which begins:

Sen. Ted Cruz, in a speech to fellow conservatives at the Federalist Society this week, provided detailed evidence of what the right calls the “lawlessness” of the Obama administration.

The Texas Republican, in his latest McCar­thyesque flourish, said he had a list of "76 instances of lawlessness and other abuses of power."

To his credit, Cruz made his list public.

So, basically, Dana Milbank, you old bullshitter, it wasn't McCarthyesque at all, and you knew it wasn't McCarthyesque when you wrote that it was McCarthyesque, but you just wanted to say it was McCarthyesque.

And you're calling Cruz "the reckless accuser"?!  Oh, I didn't say he was exactly the same as Joe McCarthy. I said it was McCarthyesque. Don't you know the meaning of -esque?

Yeah, it means bullshit. Joe McCarthy talked about have a list of names of individual human beings, a list he never revealed, of names that were currently unknown to the public and that he was threatening to reveal. Cruz's list was a list not of people but of things the Obama Administration has done, and these were not secret things. They were known things that Cruz had collected on a list. What is the threat of revealing the already-known things in the form of a list? And the list was made public, so it wasn't even a secret list, a list to which one could refer as a scary threat — which wouldn't even be a scary threat anyway because it wasn't a list of names of human beings whose lives would be ruined.

(Milbank goes on to question the accuracy of a few items on Cruz's list and to characterize the whole list as really about Cruz's disagreement with the "politics and policy" of the Obama administration.)

Barack Obama's 5 Commandments, rewritten.

In The Nation, Karen Greenberg discerns 5 Commandments Obama proclaimed when he came into office in 2009. (I know, to characterize Obama's principles as "Commandments" is to put him in the role of God, but this is The Nation, and there's no self-awareness about gazing upon Obama as a God, only disappointment that he wasn't enough of a God.)

Thou shalt not torture.
Thou shalt not keep Guantánamo open.
Thou shalt not keep secrets unnecessarily.
Thou shalt not wage war without limits.
Thou shalt not live above the law.

Based on what Obama has done, Greenberg offers a rewrite:

Thou shalt not torture (but thou shalt leave the door open to the future use of torture).
Thou shalt detain forever.
Thou shalt live by limitless secrecy.
Thou shalt wage war everywhere and forever.
Thou shalt not punish those who have done bad things in the name of the national security state.

The desperation would be laughable, but it's not funny to write "How Adam Lanza Wrecked Obama's Second Term."

20 children were murdered, and 6 adults. Leave it alone. Conduct your pathetic search for someone or something to blame somewhere else, Alex Seitz-Wald. Have some decency. Find another grave upon which to dance the Dance of Obama Exculpation. 

How are all these JFK retrospectives affecting Obama?

Much as I think there's way too much talk about how whatever happens affects Obama, I'd like to talk about this.

We've seen it coming for years, the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. There was plenty of time for media to prepare material — books, movies, TV shows, articles — going back over the historical event that's already been examined over and over. This onslaught of material was perfectly predictable, and those with present-day political interests surely thought hard about how to harness the energy and feeling that would swell up in November 2013.

But they did not know in advance how nasty the political arena was going to look. Those who were hoping to burnish the image of the Democratic Party did not know what trouble would be surrounding their current President. They must have thought all the respectful backward gazing at Jack would stir up more love for Barack (the other -ack). And now they must be — ack! — choking on the noisome melée of goo for Jack and boo for Barack.

So I wonder how Barack Obama feels about all this 50th anniversary business. Perhaps he's relieved that there's a distraction, but maybe he's irked that Kennedy is getting all the love and sentimental celebration right when there's suddenly — unexpectedly! — a rage for exposing the explosion of chaos under Obama.

The NYT acknowledges Obama's in trouble by reminding us that Bush was really, really bad. Remember?!!

At the website front page the teaser headline  — which is also the headline in the paper version — is:  "As Troubles Pile Up, a Crisis of Confidence for Obama." But if you click to the article, the headline becomes "Health Law Rollout’s Stumbles Draw Parallels to Bush’s Hurricane Response."

I can think of a whole bunch of non-parallels:

1. Bush's political party didn't design and enact Hurricane Katrina.

2. Bush didn't have 5 years to craft his response to the hurricane.

3. Bush didn't have the power to redesign the hurricane as he designed his response to it.

4. The Republican Bush believed he could not simply bully past the Democratic Mayor of New Orleans and the Democratic Governor of Louisiana and impose a federal solution, but the Democrat Obama and his party in Congress aggressively and voluntarily took over an area of policy that might have been left to the states.

5. The media were ready to slam Bush long and hard for everything — making big scandals out of things that, done by Obama, would have been forgotten a week later (what are the Valerie Plame-level screwups of Obama's?) — but the media have bent over backwards for years to help make Obama look good and to bury or never even uncover all of his lies and misdeeds.

6. If Bush experienced a disaster like the rollout of Obamacare, the NYT wouldn't use its front page to remind us of something Bill Clinton did that looked bad.

But let's check out the asserted parallels in that NYT article by Michael D. Shear:

The disastrous rollout of his health care law not only threatens the rest of his agenda but also raises questions about his competence in the same way that the Bush administration’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina undermined any semblance of Republican efficiency.

But unlike Mr. Bush, who faced confrontational but occasionally cooperative Democrats, Mr. Obama is battling a Republican opposition that has refused to open the door to any legislative fixes to the health care law and has blocked him at virtually every turn. 

Oh, well, that's another nonparallel. Republicans oppose Obama, unlike those Democrats who sometimes helped Bush. And the NYT reinforces my point #5 (above).

But think about it this way, NYT. What if Bush and the Republicans had created the hurricane, and the Democrats adamantly believed it would be better not to have a hurricane? Would the Democrats have been "occasionally cooperative" to Republicans who smugly announced that they won the election and they've been wanting this hurricane for 100 years and canceling the hurricane was not an option?

Republicans readily made the Hurricane Katrina comparison. 

Oh? Note the wording. It doesn't say that important Republicans were bringing up Katrina on their own. I suspect that the journalist, Shear, asked various Republicans to talk about Bush and Katrina and some of them did.

“The echoes to the fall of 2005 are really eerie,” said Peter D. Feaver, a top national security official in Mr. Bush’s second term. “Katrina, which is shorthand for bungled administration policy, matches to the rollout of the website.” 

Okay, so Shear got Feaver to put a name on the assertion that Republicans made the comparison. No other Republican is named. Shear moves on to Obama's "top aides" and tells us — here's my point #5 again —  that they stressed how unlike Katrina it is, since "Mr. Obama is struggling to extend health care to millions of people who do not have it. Those are very different issues."

I agree. The health care screwup isn't a natural disaster. Obama and the Democrats made their own disaster, stepping up to do something they should have known they weren't going to be able to do well, and they lied about what they were doing to get it passed.

And yet they meant well. They wanted to help people. Unlike Bush, who — what? — asked for that hurricane?

ADDED: My point #4, above, draws from this passage in Bush's "Decision Points" (previously blogged here):

If I invoked the Insurrection Act against [Governor Blanco's] wishes, the world would see a male Republican president usurping the authority of a female Democratic governor by declaring an insurrection in a largely African American city. That left me in a tough position. That would arouse controversy anywhere. To do so in the Deep South, where there had been centuries of states' rights tensions, could unleash holy hell.

And the NYT would have framed it that way (which is my point #5).

Chuck Todd thinks Obama should do a town hall meeting, maybe with Bobby Jindal or Rick Perry.

This came up during a conservative radio show that followed the sedate interview Todd did with the President the other day:

I actually think he would benefit from just simply doing some town halls and not White House-screened town halls with supporters, but doing, you know, going back, essentially letting some folks vent, letting some folks vent, handling the vent a little bit....

Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich did that joint town hall back in ’96, in ’97 in New Hampshire. It was a big, it was a good moment, frankly, for both of them. At the time, it ended up helping Clinton more than helping Newt, but it was sort of, that’s another way you could do this.

Todd says Clinton wasn't "afraid" to do that kind of "political theater," but Obama? "It’s not that President Obama is, it’s just not, well, I mean, if you went to law school with him, you know." Ha. Todd has trouble finding his way out of that sentence so he throws it over to the radio host, Carol Platt Liebau, who'd earlier mentioned that she "was on the Harvard Law Review with him, and when criticized, he really did used to bristle a bit." And this awkward little dialogue happens:

CPL: Yeah.
CT: I mean, that’s not what he, that’s not his…
CPL: Comfort zone.
CT: …comfort zone. He’d rather be in a lecture hall.

And CPL moves on to the next topic.

Obama admits government — compared to the private sector — is far less capable of accomplishing anything on computers.

In yesterday's interview with Chuck Todd, Obama said:

You know, one of the lessons -- learned from this whole process on the website -- is that probably the biggest gap between the private sector and the federal government is when it comes to I.T. ...

Well, the reason is is that when it comes to my campaign, I'm not constrained by a bunch of federal procurement rules, right? 

That is, many have pointed out that his campaign website was really good, so why didn't that mean that he'd be good at setting up a health insurance website? The answer is that the government is bad because the government is hampered by... government!

And how we write -- specifications and -- and how the -- the whole things gets built out. So part of what I'm gonna be looking at is how do we across the board, across the federal government, leap into the 21st century.

I love the combination of: 1. Barely able to articulate what the hell happens inside these computer systems, and 2. Wanting to leap!

Because when it comes to medical records for veterans, it's still done in paper. Medicaid is still largely done on paper.

When we buy I.T. services generally, it is so bureaucratic and so cumbersome that a whole bunch of it doesn't work or it ends up being way over cost. 

This should have made him sympathetic to the way government burdens private enterprise, but he's focused on liberating government to take over more of what has been done privately. And yet there's no plan, no idea about what would suddenly enable government to displace private businesses competing to offer a product people want to buy.

Instead, we've been told we must buy a product, and things have been set up so we can only go through the government's market (the "exchange"), and the government has already demonstrated that its market doesn't work. But you can't walk away, you're forced to buy, and there's nowhere else to go. And yet, he wants us to feel bad about the cumbersome bureaucracy the government encountered trying to procure the wherewithal to set up the market it had already decided we would all need to use.

It's like a medieval torturer complaining to his victim about how difficult it is to use pilliwinks while the thumbscrews are on backorder.

And yeah, in some ways, I should have anticipated that just because this was important and I was saying this was my top priority. And I was meeting with folks once a month telling 'em, "Make sure this works."

He was meeting with his "folks" once a month. He was tellin' 'em "Make sure this works." Why didn't that work, that tellin' 'em? The tellin'-the-folks method. He is the President. I think it looked like this:



Why didn't that work? Who knew?!

There are gonna be some lessons learned....

Yeah, he had to learn that you can't just say This is important, I care — Obamacare — and so let it be done. Make sure this works.

"I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me."

Says Obama, sounding distanced.

WaPo Fact Checker gives 4 "Pinocchios" to Obama's promise that you can keep your health care plan.

Glenn Kessler rejects the excuses and weasling:

[A]s White House spokesman Jay Carney put it: “It’s correct that substandard plans... are no longer allowed — because the Affordable Care Act is built on the premise that health care is not a privilege, it’s a right, and there should be minimum standards for the plans available to Americans across the country.”

But such assertions do not really explain the president’s promise — or Jarrett’s tweet ["FACT: Nothing in #Obamacare forces people out of their health plans. No change is required unless insurance companies change existing plans."]. There may be a certain percentage of people who were happy with their “substandard” plan, presumably because it cost relatively little....

The president’s statements were sweeping and unequivocal — and made both before and after the bill became law. The White House now cites technicalities to avoid admitting that he went too far in his repeated pledge, which, after all, is one of the most famous statements of his presidency.