Less than an hour before Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski planned to announce a write-in campaign to retain her seat, her top aide e-mailed scores of the most prominent lobbyists in Washington to ask them to join a Saturday conference call with the senator.
The emails went to another segment of her supporters that couldn't be ignored:
Karen Knutson, Murkowski’s chief of staff, emailed scores of top lobbyists in town and employees at some of the largest oil companies – including Chevron, Conoco Phillips and Marathon Oil – to ask them to join the senator on a conference call Saturday, according to a copy of the e-mail and a recipient list obtained by POLITICO.
Here's B.B. King doing "Baby, You Done Lost Your Good Thing Now"
Here's Jack Kelly writing about how The Thrill Is Gone. A brief excerpt:
The low point came when Mr. Obama professed not to know whether Elizabeth Birnbaum, the woman he appointed to head the Minerals Management Service, resigned or was fired. No one expects the president to don scuba tanks and plug the hole himself. But he at least ought to know what's going on with his own people.
"He came across as a beleaguered bureaucrat in damage control," wrote Craig Crawford of Congressional Quarterly.
Here's Maureen Dowd, a former worshipper of The Obamessiah:
It’s impossible not to feel sorry for President Obama, pummeled by the cascading disasters, at home and abroad, unleashed by two war-mongering oil men — plus scary escalations by Israel, Iran and North Korea. (Dick Cheney’s dark influence is still belching like the well. BP just brought on a new public relations executive: Anne Womack-Kolton, who served as Cheney’s campaign press secretary in 2004 and worked in W.’s White House and at the Energy Department.)
Well, actually it is possible to avoid feeling sorry for the Messianic muttonhead. I know a lot of people who accomplish the feat every waking hour.
If you like, you can go here for a similar column written by Newsweek's Jonathan Alter.
IMAO, what we're dealing with is the inevitable disappointment in the leadership style of someone who has been given the toughest job in the world, but who has never even had to deal with the heavy burdens of running a Whataburger night shift.
What kind of competence were they expecting?
I hope you're enjoying the B.B. King/Eric Clapton jam. (That's a much younger, less bald Phil Collins on the drums, BTW.)
I found this in the comment field of the New York Post article up at the top:
Bush has been out of office for almost 2 years and you're STILL crying about him. Did Reagan ever blame Carter for the mess he left? Did Carter ever blame Ford for Nixon? For ANYTHING? Did Nixon ever blame Vietnam on Kennedy or Johnson? Did Kennedy blame Ike or Truman for the Cold War and the Cuban Missle Crisis? Did Truman blame FDR for WW2? Did FDR blame Hoover for the Depression? Or did these men focus on the issues instead of acting like a child and pointing fingers?
Well, they probably did. But I don't have time to research it.
It's been a year and a half, and the guy and his minions still can't speak to the media without saying the phrase "what we inherited". What they're doing is "more of the same".
I hope you'll listen to King and Clapton all the way through to the end. The last minute of that video is like listening to Zeus talk to Thor. Great stuff.
