Inside Politics

THOSE ‘CLOWNS’

President Obama is “getting bad advice from … clowns” on Afghanistan and “sucking up to the wrong people” on health care, Rep. John Conyers Jr., Michigan Democrat and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, told a Detroit radio station Saturday, the Detroit Free Press reports.

Mr. Conyers made the comments during a discussion about the effects of the recession on urban poor people, radio host, the Rev. Horace Sheffield, told the newspaper.

The congressman expressed frustration that health care legislation is too solicitous of insurance companies and special interests, Mr. Sheffield said.

“He wasn’t angry. He was just deeply concerned that some of the issues being focused on don’t address the human reality,” said Mr. Sheffield, who hosts the program “On the Line” on WGPR-FM.

According to a news release from Mr. Sheffield, the congressman said: “President Obama is sucking up to the wrong people and insurance companies as Obama pushed a weak health care package.”

On Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr. Sheffield quoted Mr. Conyers as saying: “President Obama is getting bad advice from those clowns in the White House. We should be ending those wars now. America should be providing food instead of bombs from drones that kill innocent civilians.”

A transcript of the show was not available.

DANGER AHEAD

“For decades, a rule of thumb in Washington has said that there should be popular support and a bipartisan majority before approving an initiative that significantly affects tens of millions of Americans,” Fred Barnes writes in the Wall Street Journal.

“Health care reform - ObamaCare - has neither, yet Democrats want to impose it anyway. If they succeed, the consequences could be devastating for the country and probably for the president and his party,” Mr. Barnes said.

“The reasoning behind the rule is simple. Forcing drastic change on an unwilling public is likely to cause national disunity, stir angry protests, increase political polarization and deepen distrust of Washington. But if popular opinion and both political parties support the change, discord will be minimal.

“Discord is all but certain if ObamaCare in anything like its present form is enacted. A majority, or at least a large plurality, of Americans oppose it. Their opposition is raw and intense, as we’ve learned from the spate of contentious town-hall meetings held by Democratic members of Congress last summer. A Washington Post/ABC News poll of Oct. 19 confirmed the obvious: Far more Americans ‘strongly’ oppose ObamaCare (36 percent) than ‘strongly’ support it (26 percent).”

LOOSE CANNON

“After almost 30 years doing this, I shouldn’t be surprised by anything members of Congress do. But even I was taken aback when Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) referred to an adviser to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke as a ‘K Street whore,’ ” political analyst Stuart Rothenberg writes in Roll Call.

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