The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has awarded a $5.9 million grant to a University of Chicago Medical Center program run by one of President Barack Obama’s closest friends.

Obama’s longtime friend, Eric Whitaker, runs the Urban Health Initiative (UHI), which was founded as a means of connecting low-income patients with health clinics in their own communities.

The UHI was one of only 26 programs — out of 3,000 applications — to receive a slice of the $1 billion in taxpayer money from the executive’s “We Can’t Wait” initiative, which is aimed at spurring job growth via executive action, reported Keith Koffler at White House Dossier.

HHS has denied any White House involvement in the decision, but the president will have a tough time feigning surprise given his deep ties to the UHI:

• Eric Whitaker runs the UHI, has known the president since his days at Harvard Law and occasionally vacations with the Obamas.
• Michelle Obama launched the UHI while working as an executive at the University of Chicago Medical Center, which runs the program.
• Valerie Jarrett, the president’s senior adviser, was the chairman of the University of Chicago Medical Center board of trustees until she resigned her post to join the White House.
• David Axelrod, now-communications director for the Obama campaign, provided public relations services to the UHI after Michelle Obama recommended that he be hired in 2006.

Despite those deep ties, HHS stands by its process, describing the decision making as free from White House influence.

“Applications that met the basic eligibility requirements underwent a competitive, objective review,” an HHS spokesperson told White House Dossier.

Dossier noted that this is only the latest incident where “red flags” have been raised in the administration’s tangled relationship with the UHI.

A September report by The Daily Caller showed that Obama donor George Kaiser gave the UHI $10,000 in 2009 — the same year that Kaiser received the $535 million Department of Energy loan guarantee for Solyndra.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/05/14/project-run-by-obama-family-friends-receives-5-9m-hhs-grant/#ixzz1v4STwF6n

“When your name is Barack Obama, it’s always tight.”

The audience, which seems to share the same IQ as Bill Maher’s confederacy of dunces, cheered wildly.

Allahpundit at Hot Air

I think this dumb, insulting line is almost a verbal tic for him at this point. He used a variation of it on the trail in 2008 to smear McCain even though Maverick refused to make an issue of his association with Rev. Wright because he didn’t want to be attacked as racist.

And now he’s going to use it again to smear Romney supporters and undecideds who end up concluding that he’s been a crappy president, even though we have empirical proof that the name “Barack Hussein Obama” will not in fact prevent someone from winning 365 electoral votes and several southern swing states.

If this lame appearance designed to pander to women were anything like a real interview, one of these five would have hit him with the obvious follow-up: Would a president with a funny name be facing a tight election if unemployment had dipped to six percent and we hadn’t hemorrhaged $5 trillion more in debt in three years? Instead, he had to face tough questions about which Kardashian was married to Kris Humphries, which is just the sort of submoronic thing you’d ask if you were trying to help him relate to low-information voters by letting him show his “common touch.”

The speed of satire today is astonishing.

Plenty more of President Obama Zelig Obama here.

And speaking of Microsoft, there’s this nugget, from an editorial in the WSJ:

“When I hear people talk about the free enterprise system and entrepreneurship, I try to remind them, you know, all of us made that investment in Darpa [the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] that helped to get the Internet started,” said Mr. Obama. “So there’s no Facebook, there’s no Microsoft, there’s no Google if we hadn’t made this common investment in our future.”

Microsoft—a product of the Internet? That may surprise Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who founded the software company in 1975. The company didn’t introduce its first Internet browser for another 20 years, and in the meantime it became the dominant computer software company long before the Internet became economically important. The irony of Mr. Obama’s error is that for much of Microsoft’s history the Internet was seen as a threat to its desktop dominance.

There’s no doubt that Darpa has done many good things, but the point Mr. Obama misses is that Darpa is engaged in funding research. This is a proper role for government, especially on national defense. But Darpa does not attempt to commercialize products. Facebook and Google, like Apple and Microsoft, were founded by private investors.

The President likes to elide that distinction between government funding for basic research and commercialization, which is how his Administration lost so much money on stinkers like Solyndra.

In spite of what Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and the Obamas, claim, America welcomes people of all races and colors so long as they don’t insist that they have anything but the opportunity to succeed coming to them.

Native-born black Americans have been coddled like newborns for the past 50 years, which is two full generations, three in the urban community. They have been the recipients of trillions of tax dollars in federal and state programs, and what does the country have to show for it?

The fact is, blacks who have emigrated from Africa and the Caribbean have done so, like millions of other immigrants, in order to improve their lives and the lives of their children. They work hard and they are cheered on by a white society that, unlike black America, is, by and large, colorblind.

Frankly, if I were black, I would be embarrassed that the areas in which my people excelled, aside from music and sports, were crime, violence and rioting. It would shame me that in spite of Operation Head Start, Affirmative Action, welfare, food stamps and government set-asides, I was still playing the victim of bigotry, and blaming crime statistics, illiteracy and children raised without fathers, on Whitey.

What does it say about a society when a 16-year-old peddling drugs in the street is a poster boy for urban enterprise?

What does it say about a society when the president, the attorney general, the ambassador to the U.N. and two of the last three secretaries of state, have all been blacks, and we still have to listen to all the whining about how oppressed these people are?

When people such as Sharpton, Jackson and Charles Rangel, are hailed as civil rights leaders, and the likes of Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Shelby Steele and Ward Connerly, are essentially ignored by their fellow blacks and the mass media, it reminds us that a great many white liberals are active participants in the vile conspiracy to keep black Americans dependent and malleable. After all, when decade after decade, nothing is demanded of millions of people except that they troop out every election to vote for Democrats, it’s no accident when they come to regard state and federal handouts as their due.

Treat any individual as an invalid long enough and it’s no big surprise that at some point he comes to accept that he can’t walk under his own power.

It’s worth noting that Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty, and $15 trillion later, this war is going just about as well as the one he waged in Vietnam. The main difference is that this one has lasted roughly five times as long, and with no end in sight. Talk about not having an exit strategy.

If I were working on Romney’s presidential campaign, I would suggest that we produce a TV spot in which Santorum and Gingrich are sitting on that same sofa that Gingrich once shared with Nancy Pelosi, and I would have them say that, even after all the insulting things they each said about Romney, they still have every intention of voting for him. So just imagine what they think of Obama!

Another couple of TV ads would consist of Obama’s telling us that if he didn’t cut the deficit in his first four years, he deserved to be a one-term president, and another in which we show the speech in which he declared that if he didn’t get the unemployment rate down below 8%, he surely deserved to be a one-term president. Romney’s contribution would be a voiceover in which he simply said, “I’m Mitt Romney and I approve this message.”

Another spot would show Obama leaning over to Russia’s Premier Dmitry Medvedev, unaware that the mic was live, and saying “After my election, I’ll have more flexibility.” Romney would then hold up a toy he’d borrowed from Santorum or Gingrich and say, “Etch-a-Sketch, anyone?”

Still another would consist of a Joe the Plumber type uttering the great line that I’ve seen attributed to various people: “Apparently, I’m supposed to be angrier about what Mitt Romney does with his own money than what Barack Obama does with mine.”

Quite frankly, whether or not Obama reaches his goal of raising a billion dollars for his war chest, I think the only way that Romney can lose the election is if the National Enquirer provides proof that he’s been dating a sheep. And even then, the election would be a toss-up.

Speaking of animals, whenever I hear Barack Obama insist he’s the right guy to fix the economy, I’m reminded that dog owners use that exact same verb when they take their pets in to be neutered.

Yep, Obama!

(via Michael Medved on the radio)

From the Calvin Coolidge page:

Did you know?

• On Feb. 22, 1924 Calvin Coolidge became the first president to make a public radio address to the American people. President Coolidge later helped create the Federal Radio Commission, which has now evolved to become the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).   President Obama became the first president to hold virtual gatherings and town halls using Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.

From the Ronald Reagan page:

Did you know?

• President Reagan designated Martin Luther King Jr. Day a national holiday; today the Obama Administration honors this tradition, with the First and Second Families participating in service projects on this day.
• In a June 28, 1985 speech Reagan called for a fairer tax code, one where a multi-millionaire did not have a lower tax rate than his secretary. Today, President Obama is calling for the same with the Buffett Rule.

From the JFK page:

Did you know?

• President John F. Kennedy famously suggested the American people: “Ask what you can do for your country.” In 1961, the Peace Corps was created, facilitating service among citizens working toward peace in developing countries. In 2011, President Obama celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps with a Presidential Proclamation.

From the George W. Bush page:

Did you know?

• After blaming everything wrong with America on President Bush, President Obama took credit for ending the war in Iraq, even though he vehemently opposed the “surge” that cemented the victory. Then he neglected/bungled the diplomatic effort with Iraq, thus squandering our strategic leverage in the region.
• After seeing Bush’s former vice-president Dick Cheney speak out in favor of gay marriage in 2009, Obama began evolving and three years later became, according to Newsweek magazine, the first gay president.

All right — the stuff about Bush I invented.

The rest, I am sad to report, is really there. Or will be until embarrassment sets in.

Let’s hope Obama doesn’t spot his image in the Reflecting Pool or Biden might get his chance.

Edward Klein’s new book on Barack Obama, The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House, is a withering portrayal of a radical adrift, in over his head, drowning in his own incompetency — while being weighed down by a small circle of “advisers” who are compounding the problem of the Amateur in the White House.

Klein’s book begins with a talisman-like quote uttered by Barack Obama when his recently appointed Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner tried to boost Obama’s ego by telling him, “Your legacy is going to be preventing the second Great Depression.”  To which Barack Obama responded, “That’s not enough for me.”

As all of America knows by now, Obama has aggressively sought to “fundamentally transform” America — one of the few promises he has kept from the days of 2008.  Five trillion dollars of borrowing, ObamaCare passed over the objections of the majority of Americans through legislative legerdemain and special deals made with resistant politicians, failed stimulus, green programs failing left and right as taxpayers are left holding the bag, a recovery that is the most anemic on record, an America that has been sundered by the man who promises to unite us, America weaker abroad and at home — yes, America has been fundamentally transformed.  Mission Accomplished…

Noel Sheppard rubs it in.

This from a man who on October 2, 2008, shortly before that evening’s Vice Presidential debate, said of Palin:

“Is this [vice presidential debate] about her brain power?… Do you think cute will beat brains?…Do you think she’d do better on the questions on Jeopardy! or the interview they do during a half-time?…My suspicion is that she has the same lack of intellectual curiosity that the President of the United States has right now and that is scary!”

Then on January 12, 2010:

They find these empty vessels who know nothing about the world! Nothing about foreign policy! Who immediately begin to spout the neo-con line. I read her book — it’s full of that crap….It’s unbelievable how little this woman knows!…Don’t put her on Jeopardy!”

And again on November 2, 2010:

“Senator, do you think Sarah Palin is qualified to be President of the United States?…If she were on Jeopardy! right now and the topic was national government, American government generally defined, would she look like an imbecile, or would she look okay? Does she know anything?”

And finally on January 19, 2011:

“I’d like to see her on just a couple of episodes of Celebrity Jeopardy! or It’s Academic Mac McGarry to just see if she knows anything.”

William McGurn in the WSJ

In his January 2011 inaugural address, California Gov. Jerry Brown declared it a “time to honestly assess our financial condition and make the tough choices.” Plainly the choices weren’t tough enough: Mr. Brown has just announced that he faces a state budget deficit of $16 billion—nearly twice the $9.2 billion he predicted in January. In Sacramento Monday, he coupled a new round of spending cuts with a call for some hefty new tax hikes.

In his own inaugural address back in January 2010, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie also spoke of making tough choices for the people of his state. For his first full budget, Mr. Christie faced a deficit of $10.7 billion—one-third of projected revenues. Not only did Mr. Christie close that deficit without raising taxes, he is now plumping for a 10% across-the-board tax cut.

It’s not just looks that make Mr. Brown Laurel to Mr. Christie’s Hardy. It’s also their political choices.

When the Obama administration’s Transportation Department called on California to cough up billions for a high-speed bullet train or lose federal dollars, Mr. Brown went along. In sharp contrast, when the feds delivered a similar ultimatum to Mr. Christie over a proposed commuter rail tunnel between New York and New Jersey, he nixed the project, saying his state just couldn’t afford it.

On the “millionaire’s” tax, Mr. Brown says that California desperately needs to approve one if the state is to recover. The one on California’s November ballot kicks in at income of $250,000 and would raise the top rate to 13.3% from 10.3% on incomes above $1 million. Again in sharp contrast, when New Jersey Democrats attempted to embarrass Mr. Christie by sending a millionaire’s tax to his desk, he called their bluff and promptly vetoed it.

On public-employee unions, Mr. Brown can talk a good game—at Monday’s press conference, he announced a 5% pay cut for state workers, and he has proposed pension reform. Yet for all his pull with unions (the last time he was governor, he gave California’s public-sector unions collective-bargaining rights), Gov. Brown, a Democrat, has not been able to accomplish what Republican Gov. Christie has: persuade a Democratic legislature to require government workers to kick in more for their health care and pensions.

That’s because California Democrats are stupid and hyper-partisan. They want to be Greece.

Now, no one will confuse New Jersey with free-market Hong Kong. Still, because the challenges facing the Golden and Garden States are so similar, the different paths taken by their respective governors are all the more striking. And these two men are by no means alone.

Our states today are conducting a profound and contentious rethink about the right level of taxes, spending and government. Most obvious is the battle for Wisconsin. There Republican Gov. Scott Walker finds himself pitted against public-sector unions that successfully forced a recall election for June 5 after the legislature adopted the governor’s package of labor reforms last spring.

Amid the turmoil—Democratic legislators fled the state to prevent a vote, while union-backed protesters occupied the Capitol—Mr. Walker looked weakened. Now he has taken the lead in polls. More than that, voters have taken the lesson: A recent Marquette University Law School poll showed only 12% of Wisconsin voters listing “restoring collective bargaining rights for public employees” as their priority.

Indeed, the American Midwest today is home to some of the biggest experiments in government. Republicans now hold both the governorships and the legislatures in Michigan, Indiana and Ohio, and in Wisconsin they control all but the Senate. In each they are pushing for smaller, more accountable government. The outlier is Illinois, where Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn and his Democratic legislature pushed through a tax increase on their heavily indebted state.

Now ask yourself this. Can anyone look at Illinois and say to himself: I have seen the future and it works?

Indiana’s Mitch Daniels, a Republican, is probably the only governor who can truly claim to have turned around a failing state. That may change if we get eight years of Mr. Christie in New Jersey. Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, also a Republican, may be another challenger for the title, having just succeeded in pushing through arguably the most far-reaching reform of any state public-school system in America.