Eye on the left: Obama Proclaims 'Government Never Better'

A supremely confident President Barack Obama told Jon Stewart of "The Daily Show" last week that government has never worked better and said that people who don't like what was going on just "don't understand." At any rate, he said, he sleeps better at night because he's made things better.
A supremely confident President Barack Obama told Jon Stewart of "The Daily Show" last week that government has never worked better and said that people who don't like what was going on just "don't understand." At any rate, he said, he sleeps better at night because he's made things better.

Stranger than fiction, part one

President Obama, in a conversation last week with "The Daily Show's" Jon Stewart, said government has never worked better.

"Government works better now than it probably ever has, given what we ask it to do," he said, adding that he'd been able to improve many functions of government during his time as president.

Naturally, Obama didn't mention the problems with Obamacare, the Department of Veterans Affairs, immigration and the Internal Revenue Service, just to name a few.

Any problem with government, he said, is due to the fact it is a "human enterprise."

"When you got two million employees, there's gonna be places where this slips," Obama said.

Despite running up huge deficits in his first few years in office and mightily increasing the debt, he opined it was "scandalous" the government wasn't spending more.

"If we're under-resourcing our government and not staffing it the way it needs to be, to do everything that's done, then we shouldn't be surprised that there are going to be gaps," Obama said.

People who don't like what is going on just "don't understand" and feel threatened by things, including him, he said.

But the supremely confident chief executive didn't worry about ever being wrong.

"The reason I can sleep at night," he said, "is I say to myself, 'You know what? It's better.'"

Stranger than fiction, part two

White House press secretary Josh Earnest needs to open a new can of excuses.

Last week, he blamed the murder in San Francisco of 32-year-old Kathryn Steinle by an oft-deported illegal immigrant on Republicans. Asked about the policies of sanctuary cities like San Francisco that many believe lead to crimes, he actually said Republicans have "no one to blame but themselves" because they refused to pass President Obama's comprehensive immigration package several years ago.

In reality, the one has so little to do with the other that it's mind-boggling. Ernest made some reference to "enforcement provisions," presumably about sanctuary cities, included in the package. But San Francisco always has been allowed to uphold the law about illegal immigrants and never needed a new provision to do so.

Erasing history

It's official. Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson are nonpersons in Connecticut. The author of the Declaration of Independence and the valiant War of 1812 general, slaveholders both, have had their names banished by the Democratic Party of Connecticut from its annual fundraising dinner.

Party leaders, under pressure from the NAACP in the aftermath of last month's fatal shooting of nine worshipers at an historic black church in Charleston, S.C., voted unanimously last week in Hartford to rename the Jefferson Jackson Bailey dinner.

The move is thought to be the first one of such changes and is expected to prompt Democrats in other states with similarly named events to follow suit.

"I see it as the right thing to do," Nick Balletto, the party's first-year chairman, told Hearst Connecticut Media. "I wasn't looking to be a trailblazer or set off a trend that's going to affect the rest of the country. Hopefully, they'll follow suit when they see it's the right thing to do."

Rumble on the left

Reliably liberal Hollywood clashed with liberal New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio last week, and it was an Uber battle.

Literally, it was.

DeBlasio said the ride-sharing service that allows customers to find a ride through a smartphone app caused additional street congestion and pollution, and he proposed legislation to restrict its use in the Big Apple.

Actors Neil Patrick Harris, Kate Upton and Ashton Kutcher, among others, took to Twitter to voice their displeasure.

"Why do you want to return to days when only those in Midtown & Lower Manhattan could get a ride?" wondered Upton.

"25K new residents use [Uber] each week," Harris said. "How is a fixed [number] of cars supposed to serve this demand for rides?"

"This isn't a conservative or liberal debate," said Kutcher, "it's about politicians representing their personal interests and not their community."

Not surprisingly, de Blasio has received more than $350,000 in campaign contributions from New York City's taxi industry, for which Uber is an alternative.

Kutcher also took to Facebook, pointing out that Uber fills gaps in the city's cab industry and that de Blasio was crushing innovation.

"I am beside myself with the regulation that [he] is trying to force upon Uber," he said. "He clearly has his pockets lined by the cab [companies]. He talks about discrimination but has no idea how hard it is for ethnic people to get a cab. He talks about protecting drivers but has no idea about the people who drive for Uber to subsidize their income. He talks about congestion but doesn't even recognize that Uber is a fraction of a fraction of the traffic in the city. He's trying to regulate a problem without providing a single solution other than putting a target on a company's back so he can keep getting political funding from another."

Eventually, de Blasio backed down, at least temporarily dropping his plan for placing a cap on the number of vehicles Uber operates in the city.

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