I admit to a certain amount of schadenfreude at the Business Roundtable’s belated realization that the Administration and their congressional allies are anti-business, pro-tax, and anti-trade. They have never portrayed themselves as anything else, but the Business Roundtable choose to sell out the American people on the president’s health care plan in exchange for access that didn’t matter at the end of the day.

Ivan Seidenberg, Verizon’s CEO, who moonlights as the Chairman of the Business Roundtable revealed his discontent in a recent speech, as reported by Kim Strassel of the WSJ:      

Mr. Seidenberg made clear this week with his newsy and newfound criticism of the White House. The chairman revealed in a speech to the Economic Club of Washington that he’d become "somewhat troubled" by a "disconnect between Washington and the business community." Here he and his fellow CEOs had "worked closely with policy makers"—they’d even pushed ObamaCare. And yet! "We see a host of laws, regulations and policies being enacted that impose a government prescription" on private actors. Truth was, Washington had created a downright "hostile environment" for job creation!

 

Agreed, said Roundtable President John Castellani, in an op-ed the same day. We stuck with that majority "through trying circumstances," even "alienating many of our traditional colleagues," and what did we get? They keep "vilifying" the private sector! And taxing it, and empowering unions, and ignoring trade. "The time has come for a new course," declared Mr. Castellani, a mere 18 months after Democrats announced plans to tax companies, empower unions and ignore trade.

…

Now that it thinks about it, the Business Roundtable is hard-pressed to name much the White House has done for growth. It is standing by as taxes increase on dividends. Its financial reform threatens derivatives and opens boardrooms to activists. It has failed to pass trade agreements. It still wants union "card check." Its EPA is taking over energy markets. It will stifle the Internet. It has ignored tort reform. Immigration remains broken. Deficits are nuts. Even that health-care bill is creating "uncertainty."

 

One can only guess how much shorter this list might be had the "leading U.S. companies" been fighting for free markets from the start. In the meantime the Roundtable can join that nonexclusive club of economic actors—health insurers, drug companies, Medicare doctors, utilities—that purchased a share of the Obama agenda and are now feeling buyer’s remorse.

President Obama did the right thing firing General McChrystal. Any military officer that is so naive as to believe a Rolling Stone report would help him out should be fired for gross incompetence. 

Victor Davis Hanson argues that Rolling Stone and McChrystal deserve each other:

In short, each gamer and conniver did not quite get out of this sordid episode what they had hoped: Instead of Bruce Lee with four stars surrounded by a brilliant but misunderstood Lawrence of Arabia staff,  we get a near insubordinate general desperate for his supposedly unique “story” to get out, surrounded by a crowd  of well-meaning groupies — all to be exposed by a duplicitous Hunter Thompson wannabe who now finally “makes it” with the scalp of a four-star — all against the backdrop of an anti-military tabloid that can’t quite believe its good fortunate that its intended victim gladly put his head in their noose, and all for their ultimate aim of getting the U.S. out of Afghanistan in defeat and shame.

As my other grandfather, the old Swedish horse-breaker, used to say, “What a bunch.”

My very limited sympathies are, of course, with a distinguished general, who is a better, braver sort that those who did him in. But that said, his laxity and absence of judgment — and, yes, ego — did an enormous amount of damage at a time of war, and all of the ripples (changes in command, effect on the enemy, political insider stuff with the Afghans and at the White House) are not quite yet over with. (One can see Nemesis at work yet again [she's busy with sanctimonious Al Gore as the sex poodle after flying off from the Edwards' mansion to circle around the Katrina-BP Gulf], as McChrystal should have learned from his early freelancing comments not to press his luck with the deadly goddess.)

But readers, you’ve already beat me to the moral of the story: God help us all when a four-star general really believes he can use Rolling Stone to help get a message out that might help us defeat the Taliban and help himself in the process.

The President’s weekly radio address bemoaned those dastardly Republicans. The Republicans are blocking progress Obama claims. How can and honest person make this argument? Does Obama really think the American people don’t know the Democrats have wide majorities in the House and Senate?

Obama’s party has a 59-41 majority in the Senate (technically 57 Ds and 2 independents who caucus with the Ds) and a 255-178 majority in the House. At most one single Republican is holding Obama back—1 single Republican Senator is all it takes to pass something the Democrats care about.

The reality is that Democrats are holding back Obama agenda, not Republicans. And there is no way Republicans will back the President after he has alienated a majority of the American people.  

The Economist might be wishing they could take back some of the happy words they have written about Obama. After all, they endorsed him. Maybe next time they will look past a politicians words and look at their actions. Here’s what they have to say about Obama’s shakedown of BP:

For several reasons. The vitriol has a xenophobic edge: witness the venomous references to “British Petroleum”, a name BP dropped in 1998 (just as well that it dispensed with the name Anglo-Iranian Oil Company even longer ago). Vilifying BP also gets in the way of identifying other culprits, one of which is the government. BP operates in one of the most regulated industries on earth with some of the most perverse rules, subsidies and incentives. Shoddy oversight clearly contributed to the spill, and an energy policy which reduced the demand for oil would do more to avert future environmental horrors than fierce retribution.

Mr Obama is not the socialist the right claims he is. He went out of his way, meeting BP executives on June 16th, to insist that he has no interest in undermining the company’s financial stability. But his reaction is cementing business leaders’ impression that he is indifferent to their concerns. If he sees any impropriety in politicians ordering executives about, upstaging the courts and threatening confiscation, he has not said so. The collapse in BP’s share price suggests that he has convinced the markets that he is an American version of Vladimir Putin, willing to harry firms into doing his bidding.

Nobody should underestimate the scale of BP’s mistake, nor the damage that it has caused. But if the president does not stand up for due process, he will frighten investors across the board. The damage to America’s environment is bad enough. The president risks damaging its economy too.

Helen Thomas is a real treasure. I knew she was biased, but I didn’t realize she is bigot. She says the Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and go back to Germany and Poland.

Virginia Postrel has some insightful things to say about Presidential glamour.  About Obama she says:

Postrel: Yes, President Obama is a very glamorous figure. Glamour is a particular form of illusion. It’s an illusion that tells a truth about the audience’s desires, and it requires mystery and distance. During the campaign people projected onto Barack Obama whatever they wanted in a president or even in a country. Lying is usually a bad thing, but they would project onto him that he was lying about his positions because he secretly agreed with them: “Anyone that smart has got to be a free trader at heart. He’s just saying this to pander to those idiots. He can’t really mean it.”

You’ve seen, as he’s taken office and tried to govern, this back and forth where he is consciously or unconsciously trying to maintain his glamour—which requires a kind of distance from the political process so that people can continue to see him as representing them, regardless of their contradictory views—while actually trying to be president, which means you have to decide what to do about Guantanamo. You have to decide what health care bill you’re going to back. You have to decide all these things, and you’re going to make somebody disillusioned. This morning I saw that the former editor of Harper’s is about to write a book, The Mendacity of Hope, attacking Obama from the left. That’s the power and the downside of glamour.

Also here’s what she has to say about Reagan’s glamour:

Postrel: There were two glamorous presidents in my lifetime besides Obama. The first was JFK, and he dealt with this problem by getting killed. That was something I didn’t want to mention in an article about Obama. There were lots of problems in the Kennedy administration and lots of secrets that were being hidden that came out later. But because he was assassinated, the glamour stayed.

The other glamorous president of my lifetime, I would argue, was Ronald Reagan. And he managed to govern because he actually did stand for some specific ideas that brought a broad consensus of supporters together. He was still a figure of distance and mystery, to the extent that his authorized biographer, who followed him around for years, was unable to get at what the man was really like and wrote a semi-fictionalized biography with fake characters. But there was a core of identifiable beliefs that enabled him to govern and to maintain this sort of glamour, particularly to the Reagan coalition. Libertarians would say, “well, he’s really more libertarian,” and social conservatives would say, “well, he’s really more socially conservative.” But he did have specific beliefs that held those people together. They didn’t hold together so well after him.