The Ed Morrissey Show: Kerry Picket, Steven Crowder

Today on The Ed Morrissey Show (3 pm ET), Kerry Picket of the Washington Times returns to give us the inside skinny on Capitol Hill. Steven Crowder will join us in the second half to talk about his upcoming documentary on … Keith Olbermann? All this, and much much more!

The Ed Morrissey Show and its dynamic chatroom can be seen on the permanent TEMS page — be sure to join us, and don’t forget to keep up with the debate on my Facebook page, too!

We’ll also cover the the case of Marizela Perez, who has been missing in the Seattle area for more three months. Marizela’s case has a connection here at Hot Air, as she is the cousin of the Boss Emeritus, Michelle Malkin. Michelle is trying to spread the word through Facebook and Q13Fox/KCPQ in Seattle. We want to encourage prayers for Marizela’s family, and also try to reach anyone in the area who knows where Marizela might be and ask them to contact the police.

The search has its own website now, Find Marizela, for the latest in the efforts to bring Marizela home. There is also a fund for the family to keep the search efforts going. Be sure to check there and at Michelle’s site for further developments, and keep the family in your prayers.

America’s Most Wanted is now on the case, too.

Michelle has an update from last month detailing the difficulties of working with the police on cases of missing adults. Be sure to read it all to understand what this family faces — and many other families as well.

In case you care: Bill Clinton thinks GOP should pick a “more moderate” candidate

On Good Morning America this morning, former President Bill Clinton had (kind of) kind things to say about GOP presidential frontrunners former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, he said, is “doing a better job as a candidate this time than he did four years ago. [He] comes across as more relaxed and more convicted about what he did do, less willing to just be forced into apologizing for it because it violates some part of his party orthodoxy.”

He claimed not to be surprised by the early success of Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn, because, “I’ve been watching her speak, you know, she comes across as a real person. … The story that they tell is pretty compelling, all those foster children she’s taken in, and children she’s raised and the work she’s done.”

Not surprisingly, he also had praise for the MSM favorite, former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman (you know, because, polling at an average of 1.7 percent, he makes a natural addition to any assessment of “the leaders of the pack”).

Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, he said, “did a very nice, a good job for America as ambassador to China. I think he’s quite an impressive man. He’s got an impressive family. I had the honor of meeting one of his children once and having a conversation with her. I think that he’s refreshingly, kind of, unhide-bound. Just comes across as non-ideological — conservative, but non-ideological, practical.”

Earlier in the segment, Clinton highlighted what he’s looking for in a GOP candidate. “The ones I liked are the ones that you think are more moderate,” he said, “’cause I think they’re a little more connected to the real world. And I think they’ll be — they’d be formidable. … But I’m afraid if I say anything nice about them, they’ll lose, for sure.”

Obviously, electability is both tricky and critical: The GOP has to pick a candidate who can win in the general election. But to gauge who can win, I’d rather the GOP look to the electorate and not to somebody like Clinton, the ultimate politician, whose agenda doesn’t exactly match the conservative platform.

After all, Clinton’s not actually afraid moderate candidates will lose the GOP nomination — he’s afraid the GOP will pick someone who can unseat Obama (and that person, I’d argue, is unlikely to be a milquetoast moderate — and very likely to be whichever candidate most clearly articulates a message that resonates with the values of American voters). If Democrats like Clinton and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid could only pick our candidate, they’d pick whoever will bow to Obama most obsequiously, whoever will surrender most readily.

Interestingly, Clinton said nothing about former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, whose position in the polls arguably most resembles Clinton’s at this point in the 1992 Democratic primaries. Perhaps he kept silent because he knows better than anybody Pawlenty could come from behind and win over the public with solid likability, a consistent message and true conservative credibility.

So, two very obvious ideas Clinton should keep in mind if he plans to comment moving forward: 1) The GOP primaries are for GOP voters to decide and 2) Romney and Bachmann might be at the top, and a Huntsman nomination might be on libs’ wish list, but those three aren’t the only candidates in the race.

Get-to-work Obama suddenly uninterested in work

Old and busted: Leading leaders and the leadership they display by meeting with leaders. New hotness: The worthlessness of leaders meeting leaders. Yesterday, Barack Obama insisted that leadership meant meeting with opponents and getting serious about finding compromise and making a deal:

And I’ve got to say, I’m very amused when I start hearing comments about, well, the President needs to show more leadership on this. Let me tell you something. Right after we finished dealing with the government shutdown, averting a government shutdown, I called the leaders here together. I said we’ve got to get done — get this done. I put Vice President Biden in charge of a process — that, by the way, has made real progress — but these guys have met, worked through all of these issues. I met with every single caucus for an hour to an hour and a half each — Republican senators, Democratic senators; Republican House, Democratic House. I’ve met with the leaders multiple times. At a certain point, they need to do their job.

And so, this thing, which is just not on the level, where we have meetings and discussions, and we’re working through process, and when they decide they’re not happy with the fact that at some point you’ve got to make a choice, they just all step back and say, well, you know, the President needs to get this done — they need to do their job.

Now is the time to go ahead and make the tough choices. That’s why they’re called leaders. And I’ve already shown that I’m willing to make some decisions that are very tough and will give my base of voters further reason to give me a hard time. But it’s got to be done.

And so there’s no point in procrastinating. There’s no point in putting it off. We’ve got to get this done. And if by the end of this week, we have not seen substantial progress, then I think members of Congress need to understand we are going to start having to cancel things and stay here until we get it done.

So what is Obama’s idea of leadership? Declaring himself uninterested in such mundane matters as budget negotiations:

The White House effectively turned down an invitation by Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell for President Barack Obama to visit his members on Capitol Hill on Thursday to discuss raising the debt limit.

Jay Carney told the media earlier today that McConnell’s invitation was “not a conversation worth having.” Sounds a lot like Obama’s own press conference. It also highlights a particularly Democratic approach to bipartisanship, which is usually defined as Republicans agreeing to Democratic demands, which is more or less how Obama defined the supposedly bipartisan process that produced ObamaCare and Porkulus, both of which were written by Democrats without Republican input.

Obama tried painting himself as the “adult in the room” yesterday, according to sources at the White House. Don’t you have to actually be in the room to qualify as such?

Dems to spin Fast & Furious probe into gun-control rally

After yesterday’s news of the deal between Senators Pat Leahy and Charles Grassley to get documents and testimony from ATF chief Kenneth Melson on Operation Fast and Furious, it seemed as though Democrats might finally take the scandal of the gunrunning fiasco seriously. Alas, Elijah Cummings and House Democrats appear uninterested in abuses of government power, incompetence, and potential cover-ups at AFT and the Department of Justice. In fact, they want to turn the probe into an argument for expanding government control of firearms:

The top Democrat on a House investigative committee is broadening an inquiry into a botched gun-tracing operation, called Operation Fast and Furious, to include a look at American gun laws.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the leading Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, released a report early Thursday titled “Outgunned,” that details how Bureau for Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents say gun laws need to be tightened for them to fight organized crime along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Why, yes! The right response for Congress to a fiasco where the ATF and DoJ refused to stop guns from flowing over the border is to give them more power to stop American citizens from buying guns in the first place! Certainly, the federal law-enforcement agencies have proven their worth in Operation Fast and Furious and should be given even more opportunities to intervene in the exercise of Second Amendment rights!

That’s the World According To Elijah Cummings, anyway.

The tactic here is transparent — Cummings and his fellow Democrats want to stage a distraction from the stupidity and incompetence that Fast and Furious revealed at the ATF and DoJ. They don’t want the public to focus on how high up the approvals went on this gunrunning operation conducted by the Obama administration, nor whether the stupidity and incompetence led to obstruction and perjury before Congress on the part of Obama appointees in the DoJ. They would much rather pretend that the real reason at least two American agents are dead from weapons the ATF allowed to cross into Mexico is that Americans can buy and use guns in a lawful manner in the US.

If they’re that desperate for a distraction, then Darrell Issa must be close to exposing something rather significant in the DoJ.

Mika: Palin and Paris Hilton have a lot in common

Is Sarah Palin as “significant” as Paris Hilton? So says Mika Brzezinski in what has become a rather notorious episode of MSNBC’s Morning Joe. My good friend Matt Lewis appeared on the show this morning to discuss his new book, The Quotable Rogue: The Ideals of Sarah Palin in Her Own Words, and made the argument that Palin has “driven the debate” on a wide range of public policy for the last two years, especially with her Tea Party activism. Brzezinski scoffed and said that Palin might be no more significant than a lightweight celebrity more known for a sex tape than deep political thinking:

Joe Scarborough read Brzezinski out for her comment, noting that Palin is only one of two women to have run on a major-party ticket for Vice President:

GEIST: You said a minute ago, Matt, she’s the most significant woman of the 21st century. I can just hear our viewers screaming at their TVs. What about Hillary Clinton? Do you really think she’s the most significant, more so than Hillary Clinton?

BRZEZINSKI: I can’t, I can’t –

LEWIS: I said arguably, and I think you could make a case for Nancy Pelosi, as well, by the way, and Hillary Clinton and I’m sure some others. But I think you could make a good case for Palin because of the way — look at the Tea Party movement, which she was sort of at the forefront of. I think you could make a good case that Sarah Palin was in fact the most significant woman in terms of driving the debate, and certainly in terms of media coverage Sarah Palin has dominated it.

BRZEZINSKI: Yeah, but so does Paris Hilton, but that doesn’t mean they’re significant.

SCARBOROUGH: Hold on one second, don’t — let me stop right here. Don’t compare her to Paris Hilton.

BRZEZINSKI: I didn’t. I’m just saying –

SCARBOROUGH: You said so is Paris Hilton. You put her in the same category.

BRZEZINSKI: No. I’m saying there are people who get media coverage that maybe shouldn’t?

SCARBOROUGH: She’s one of two women — hold on a second, Matt.

LEWIS: The death panel comment is –

SCARBOROUGH: Hold on, hold on, hold on. Okay, let’s put it in perspective. I’m tired of her. People ask, “Why do we bring her up.” They’ll ask, “Why are we talking about her here.” You talk about Paris Hilton. I think that feeds into that narrative. Here’s the bottom line: She is one of the two only women who have ever been nominated for vice president of the United States of America. That ain’t nothing. It’s just like Dan Quayle for four years after he was vice president –

BRZEZINSKI: Okay, you’re going to have to let me respond.

SCARBOROUGH: — garnered more attention than that. That is why she remains significant.

BRZEZINSKI: No. I’m going to tell you there already was one and given the women that we have on the global landscape today, like Hillary Clinton, I mean, my lord. I’m sorry.

SCARBOROUGH: She’s in the top 10. I’m not saying she’s the most significant. You compared her to Paris Hilton.

BRZEZINSKI: No. I compared his statement about media coverage to Paris Hilton, okay? So, you know, you can jump on that like some of the –

Scarborough’s right, and even undersells his point. Her significance started as governor of Alaska, and then progressed as a national-party nominee for VP. But she’s done even more since then. Her PAC supported a number of Republicans in the 2010 midterms, most of whom won their elections in part due to her support. Palin has done as much as anyone has in the past two years for political organization in both grassroots and traditional party structure, all while being ridiculed by media figures like Brzezinski, whose main claim to fame is … being on television, and being the daughter of a former National Security Adviser in the Carter administration. If anyone has less standing to make a point about superficial celebritydom on Morning Joe, I’d like to know who it might be.

Besides, let’s not sell Paris Hilton short, either. She managed to sound more coherent than Barack Obama on economics during the 2008 campaign.

Yesterday Iowa with Palin, today Pennsylvania with Romney

GOP presidential frontrunner and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney today will hold a press conference outside Allentown Metal Works, a factory President Barack Obama visited in 2009 to tout the stimulus — about a year before the factory closed its doors. That’s pretty stagey — but it also effectively dramatizes Romney’s oft-repeated point, “Obama isn’t working.”

To underscore that point and complement his visit to the Keystone State, which will also include two fundraisers in Philadelphia, the Romney campaign today also released this 40-second web video:

Neither the video nor Romney’s visit will go unmatched by the president, however. Obama will also be in Pennsylvania today, for two Democratic National Committee fundraisers in Philadelphia. This is far from Obama’s first attempt to woo the religion-and-gun-clingers of the state. CNN Political Ticker reports:

Thursday’s trip is his thirteenth trip to the Keystone State since taking office and his third since announcing his re-election campaign April 4. …

The president was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania last week and Philadelphia on April 6. According to a recent Quinnipiac University poll, 48 percent of voters in the state approve of Obama’s performance as president and 48 percent disapprove.

He won the politically important state in the 2008 presidential election with 55 percent of the vote to GOP candidate Sen. John McCain’s 44 percent. Former President George W. Bush lost the state’s 21 electoral votes in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, to former Vice President Al Gore with 50 percent in 2000 and Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts with 51 percent of the vote in 2004.

However, 2010 was a good year for Pennsylvania Republicans. Republican Pat Toomey won election to the Senate and voters ousted four incumbent House Democrats.

Clearly, Pennsylvania could go either way. But Romney’s sounding pretty confident. ”Two and a half years ago, President Obama said that if he didn’t get the economy back on track, then he would be a one-term president. He is right,” Romney said in a statement. “Pennsylvanians have run out of patience.”

If they have, that seems pretty fair. As the Romney web video points out, Pennsylvanians have borne with more than most: Nearly 500,000 Pennsylvanians are looking for work. And in the Keystone State alone, 100,000 jobs have been lost, nearly 40,000 of which were manufacturing jobs.

Reid cancels Senate recess

Even before Barack Obama scolded Congress yesterday for planning a recess in the middle of a debt crisis, Republicans had pressed Harry Reid to keep the Senate in session over the scheduled July 4 recess. Sen. Ron Johnson had announced earlier in the week that he would block any other business from the Senate floor until the Democratic majority finally produced a budget, and Sen. Jeff Sessions warned that he would rally all 47 Republicans to block an adjournment — which would have forced Democrats to vote in lockstep to leave Capitol Hill with their budgetary work still incomplete.

Reid finally surrendered to reality this morning:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced Thursday morning that he will cancel the July 4 recess so that lawmakers can continue to focus on deficit-reduction negotiations. …

“There’s still so much to do to put Americans back to work, to cut our deficit and [get] our economy back to work,” Reid said on the Senate floor. “It is really important that we do this. That moment is too important, the obstacle is too steep and the time too short to waste even a moment.”

It’s now Day 792 in the budget-less Reid Senate, so this realization comes just a wee bit late for any credit. Reid didn’t act until he was completely isolated on the issue, under attack from both parties for his lack of action on the primary business for Congress. Democratic leadership in the Senate has been an utter failure, and this is Reid’s attempt to pretend like it doesn’t reflect on him personally.

Good luck with that.

Meanwhile, Obama’s odd scolding has some people steamed:

“Leaders are going to lead, … that’s why they are called leaders,” he added, making an unmistakable reference to House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), who withdrew from the negotiations with Vice President Joe Biden last week.

Those cracks, along with Obama’s tart suggestion that Congress scrap its cherished July Fourth vacation, do nothing to endear him to GOP House leaders who have balked at his calls to accept tax hikes on the rich.

“It’s time for the president to stop lecturing and start doing his job,” responded Cantor spokesman Brad Dayspring.

Another GOP aide was more blunt. “It’s counterproductive schoolyard crap. … [It’s] awfully childish for the ‘adult in the room,’” the aide told POLITICO.

A better point to make is why Obama has been silent about the 792 days Reid has gone without producing a budget. If leaders lead, then where is Reid? Where is Obama in demanding that his party’s “leadership” do its job in the Senate?

For that matter, where will the “get to work” Obama be this summer when the debt limit deadline approaches?

For the first family, their Vineyard haven is taking on the flavor of a summer White House. President Obama, for the third straight year, is planning to return to Martha’s Vineyard for vacation this summer, according to a White House official.

The Obamas are scheduled to spend seven to 10 days on the island in mid- to late August, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of security concerns.

Of course. Thar’s where the adults go when the going gets tough, apparently.

QE2 finally pulls into port

Almost eight months ago, the Federal Reserve announced their intention to launch a second round of “quantitative easing,” otherwise known as printing money. In the absence of policies that promote economic growth, the Fed used the one tool they had to encourage investment and enhance exports, which was to devalue the dollar in a way that discouraged cash hoarding. That project comes to an end today, and the Washington Post notes that the results are less than appealing:

The effort, which became known in financial circles as the second round ofquantitative easing, or QE2, was the Fed’s effort to avert a slip into another recession and toward deflation, or falling prices. As it ends, it shows more than anything the limits of the power of monetary policy to correct what ails the U.S. economy.

Economic growth is set to be somewhere around a 2 percent pace in the first half of 2011, when the QE2 bond purchases took place. That is slower than the economy’s long-term growth path and nowhere near enough to dig out of the nation’s deep economic hole.

It’s not that QE2 had no impact. Inflation was well below the Fed’s unofficial target of around 2 percent last summer, and the chance that deflation, or falling prices, might take hold seemed real. That risk is now minuscule, and inflation is roughly in line with the Fed’s target. …

“If you come at it from the point of view that you think deflation risk was significant last summer and you want to avoid that, QE2 was a success,” said Michael Gapen, senior U.S. economist at Barclays Capital. “If you look at it from the point of view that you wanted to make the recovery stronger and more durable, you would have a lingering bad taste in your mouth.”

How successful has QE2 been? Let’s look at the meta numbers for the economy. In 2010Q3, the annualized GDP growth rate was 2.6%, and in Q4 just before the purchases began, it was 3.1%. The QE2 purchases began in January, and the final 2011Q1 number is 1.9% and Q2 is looking at falling below that.

Employment numbers don’t look very good, either, although it’s not as bad at the GDP series. In November 2010, the unemployment rate was 9.8%, which equaled a high for the year. That fell a full percentage point by March, but has since risen again to 9.1%. We have added about 160,000 jobs a month since November, which barely exceeds what is needed to keep up with population growth. Meanwhile, the latest indicators suggest that we’re going to start shedding jobs and may be tipping perilously close to recession.

Some will argue that the problems in 2011 are more external, with gas prices soaring. But that’s part of QE2. One of the motives of the Fed was to encourage exports at the expense of imports by weakening the dollar. The US imports most of its oil, which means that a weaker dollar makes fuel more expensive, leading to inflation in retail markets as well. A few people predicted this very outcome when the Fed announced its QE2 project — one of whom was Sarah Palin, who got roundly ridiculed for her prediction, which turned out to be all too accurate.

The Post notes that the stock market did well during QE2, which is true enough. It’s also true that the rise isn’t as impressive because of the weakened dollar. Artificially inflating the dollar means that price rises don’t indicate a real increase in value, since the dollar doesn’t have the same buying power. On January 1, when the Fed began its QE2 spree, the Dow Jones was at 11670.75; it’s now at 12261.42 as of yesterday’s close. That’s an increase of 5% in six months, which is decent but not terribly impressive, considering the inflation conducted by the Fed to boost it. Now that QE2 has come to an end, we’ll see how much of that momentum continues; I’m betting on not much.

It’s not the Fed’s fault that this didn’t work, and it’s still worth noting that the Fed mainly wanted to avoid deflation, which it did succeed in preventing. The Fed has no other tools left in its bag to boost the economy. The money policy is as loose as it could possibly be at the moment. The problem with the economy is not the money supply, but the economic and regulatory policies of the Obama administration. Until those change, we won’t pull out of the stagnation cycle we’ve seen for the past two years.

Does Durbin need a refresher course on the Constitution?

I never thought I’d long for the days of Robert Byrd and his “pocket Constitution,” but alas, Dick Durbin has managed to eke out that much nostalgia after his DREAM Act gaffe yesterday. Real Clear Politics and Doug Powers at the Boss Emeritus’ site caught this tender moment from Durbin as he addressed school-age “undocumented” aliens and promised that his DREAM Act would allow them to become tomorrow’s Congressmen, Senators, and … Presidents?

“When I look around this room, I see America’s future. Our doctors, our teachers, our nurses, our engineers, our scientists, our soldiers, our Congressman, our Senators and maybe our President.”

I know that reading the Constitution has fallen out of fashion on Capitol Hill; Democrats pitched a fit when the new Republican majority in the House wanted to start the 112th Session by reading it aloud. But Durbin might want to read Article II, Section 1 of the founding document, as it’s pretty clear on eligibility for the nation’s top executive position:

“No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President.”

Durbin’s Constitutional illiteracy explains a lot, including his DREAM Act.

Weekly jobless claims remain flat

When I first looked at the weekly report from the Department of Labor on initial jobless claims, it didn’t look like news to me. The number remained virtually unchanged from last week, going from 429,000 to 428,000, which barely qualifies as statistical noise:

In the week ending June 25, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 428,000, a decrease of 1,000 from the previous week’s unrevised figure of 429,000. The 4-week moving average was 426,750, an increase of 500 from the previous week’s unrevised average of 426,250.

The advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was 2.9 percent for the week ending June 18, a decrease of 0.1 percentage point from the prior week’s revised rate of 3.0 percent.

The advance number for seasonally adjusted insured unemployment during the week ending June 18 was 3,702,000, a decrease of 12,000 from the preceding week’s revised level of 3,714,000. The 4-week moving average was 3,703,500, a decrease of 11,250 from the preceding week’s revised average of 3,714,750.

The near-equality of the claims number to the weekly average speaks to the consistency seen in the numbers since early April. Claims rose as the second quarter began, with a significant spike from the Q1 range of 380K and spiked upward to over 470K before settling in around 425K. As I noted last week, the data is as consistent and predictable as anything we’ve seen over the last six months.

So, it’s not really news, or it wasn’t — until news outlets decided to spin the results a little, as Steve Eggleston caught. The AP didn’t try making this week’s numbers look good or overstate the miniscule drop of 1,000 claims, but the outlet did spin the Q1 level:

Applications had fallen in February to 375,000, a level that signals sustainable job growth. They stayed below 400,000 for seven of nine weeks. But applications then surged to an eight-month high of 478,000 in April and have shown only modest improvement since that time.

The four-week average, a less volatile measure, has been stuck at about 426,000 for a month.

Reuters was even worse:

It was the 12th straight week that claims have been above 400,000, a level that is usually associated with a stable labor market. Employment stumbled badly in May, with employers adding just 54,000 jobs — the fewest in eight months.

No, the 375K level does not signal sustainable job growth, and the 400K level doesn’t signal job-market stability, either. I covered this in last week’s analysis, where I used actual DoL data to determine what initial jobless claims level was associated with growth and stability. The only time we’ve gotten to 400K before Obama took office was when we were heading into unemployment crises. And periods associated with sustainable job growth had averages and medians at the 325K level, not the 375K level:

Take a look at the historical series of weekly claims between December 2005 and December 2007, the last time we really had “stability” in the labor force. The highest number in that period was 355,000 in a week, and that was in December 2007 when the economy slid into recession. In fact, between January 2004 and January 2008, we had only two weeks of 400K-level weekly claims, both in September 2005, and they were very much the exception. The average for that four-year span is 326,735, and the median number is 324,000 — which is why I usually use the 325K number in my analyses. We actually didn’t get to the 400K level until July 2008, at which point no one considered the labor market “stable.” …

Think I’m fudging those baseline expectations by using the supposedly “overheated” Bush economic expansion? Well, take a look at the same series for the four years between 1996 and 1999. The average number of initial jobless claims per week in that period was 321,986, and the median was 317,500. There was exactly one week of 400,000 or more claims in a week, and that took place in January 1996.

Perhaps if the AP and Reuters used actual data rather than listen to White House shills on economics, they wouldn’t have to use “unexpectedly” in their reports so often.

Update: CNBC switched to the Reuters report, so I updated the AP link.

Halperin: Obama was a …......

I’ve been in radio for a few years now, and the first rule in broadcasting is this — always assume the microphones are hot and that you’re going live. (The second rule is never assume that the incoherent caller is drunk, but that’s a story for another day.) Mark Halperin apparently forgot that first rule this morning on MSNBC, and decided to give a rather blunt assessment of Barack Obama’s performance in yesterday’s press conference. Halperin’s use of language went out live, thanks to a producer who couldn’t operate the seven-second delay:

Mark Halperin, editor-at-large for Time, called President Obama “a dick” on Thursday on a popular MSNBC morning show and then quickly apologized.

“I thought he was a dick yesterday,” Halperin, who also is a senior political analyst for MSNBC, said on Morning Joe, referring to the President’s conduct during his press conference.

Halperin later apologized for his language, but the fuss seems a little overblown. “Dick” isn’t a word that needs to be censored; for one thing, it’s a proper name used by a number of politicians, including Dick Durbin, who’s second in Democratic leadership in the Senate. It’s also a playground word for “jerk” or “penis,” but hardly an obscenity. Either way, the producer shouldn’t be blamed for missing the delay button.

Halperin should be apologizing for a lack of imagination. He’s right in that the President acted like a pouting, sullen adolescent during the press conference, whining about having to answer for the constitutionality of sending men and women into combat without asking Congress for authorization. Obama bizarrely blamed the fiscal crisis on a small coterie of corporate-jet owners, a heretofore unknown juggernaut of economic destruction. Instead of acting presidential, Obama gave us a hissy fit for over sixty minutes. And the best Halperin can do is “dick”?

Maybe Halperin is just channeling his inner Spicoli:

Obamateurism of the Day

I have to admit it. I really look forward to Barack Obama’s press conferences. Why? They tend to create a lot of OOTD entries, and yesterday’s was no exception. I was wondering where best to start when this catch by Politico’s MJ Lee settled the question. If Barack Obama can’t get his daughter’s age correct — twice — how credible can he be on scolding Congress for budget battles?

President Obama, who has expressed his fears about his daughter Malia becoming a teenager next month, is apparently dreading her birthday so much that for a brief moment on Wednesday, he thought she had already turned 13.

At a press conference at the White House, Obama suggested that his daughters, who “generally finish their homework a day ahead of time,” could serve as role models for members of Congress.

“Malia’s 13, Sasha’s 10,” the president said, even though 12-year-old Malia still has a few days to go until her July 4 birthday. “It is impressive. They don’t wait until the night before. They’re not pulling all-nighters. They’re 13 and 10.”

Well, time does tend to pass by quickly when you’re a parent, but sometimes not quickly enough.

Got an Obamateurism of the Day? If you see a foul-up by Barack Obama, e-mail it to me at obamaisms@edmorrissey.com with the quote and the link to the Obamateurism. I’ll post the best Obamateurisms on a daily basis, depending on how many I receive. Include a link to your blog, and I’ll give some link love as well. And unlike Slate, I promise to end the feature when Barack Obama leaves office.

Illustrations by Chris Muir of Day by Day. Be sure to read the adventures of Sam, Zed, Damon, and Jan every day!