While it isn’t necessarily about Obama…it is about the Obama apologists in the media and the general public that say kid gloves for HIS kids and let’s have a field day with Palin’s.

As I said before, I’m not a Palin fan, but this is rank hypocrisy.

SMITH: Leon Panetta intimated the former vice president was playing politics with national security issues. The former president has intoned his own displeasure with some of your policy changes. I think they feel like some of the things that you’ve done, in fact, are treacherous.

OBAMA: Well, I think when it comes to Vice President Cheney, he and I have a deep disagreement about what’s required to keep the American people safe. And I think that disagreement has been amply aired and certainly he has a right to voice his opinions. I would argue that our policies are making the American people safer, and that some of the policies that he’s promoted in the past have not.

Michael Barone has a great piece that speaks to this and other issues he sees with the Obama Administration:

But transferring large segments of the American economy from the private to the public sector has proved to be tougher than winning Democratic primaries and caucuses. And Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong Il have proved to be harder to charm than American mainstream media. It’s generally good for American presidents to have long-term strategies. But in setting public policy it’s important to get the details right. And in guiding the nation in a dangerous world it’s vital to adjust to face hard realities and adjust to unexpected events.

Apparently Barack Obama doesn’t want to run the tobacco industry either because he signed into law a new bill that does exactly that. It’s becoming a running joke that if the president says he doesn’t what to run something or doesn’t want the government running something it means that’s exactly whats going to happen.

From:

Obama to Sign FDA-Tobacco Bill Into Law

An anti-smoking bill that gives the U.S. Food and Drug Administration sweeping powers to regulate tobacco products will be signed into law Monday by President Barack Obama.

Under the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, the FDA will be able to ban labels such as “low tar” and “light,” outlaw candy flavorings, and order companies to reduce nicotine in tobacco products. The law also requires large graphic warnings on cartons of cigarettes, the Associated Press reported.

The FDA will also be able to regulate what goes into tobacco products, make those ingredients public, and prohibit marketing campaigns, particularly those that target children.

The legislation was opposed by former President George W. Bush, who said he would veto it after it passed the House of Representatives last year, the AP reported.

From

Obama Closes Doors on Openness

Critics say the president has left a huge loophole for himself on the issue of transparency

As a senator, Barack Obama denounced the Bush administration for holding “secret energy meetings” with oil executives at the White House. But last week public-interest groups were dismayed when his own administration rejected a Freedom of Information Act request for Secret Service logs showing the identities of coal executives who had visited the White House to discuss Obama’s “clean coal” policies. One reason: the disclosure of such records might impinge on privileged “presidential communications.” The refusal, approved by White House counsel Greg Craig’s office, is the latest in a series of cases in which Obama officials have opted against public disclosure. Since Obama pledged on his first day in office to usher in a “new era” of openness, “nothing has changed,” says David -Sobel, a lawyer who litigates FOIA cases. “For a president who said he was going to bring unprecedented transparency to government, you would certainly expect more than the recycling of old Bush secrecy policies.”

The hard line appears to be no accident. After Obama’s much-publicized Jan. 21 “transparency” memo, administration lawyers crafted a key directive implementing the new policy that contained a major loophole, according to FOIA experts. The directive, signed by Attorney General Eric Holder, instructed federal agencies to adopt a “presumption” of disclosure for FOIA requests. This reversal of Bush policy was intended to restore a standard set by President Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno. But in a little-noticed passage, the Holder memo also said the new standard applies “if practicable” for cases involving “pending litigation.” Dan Metcalfe, the former longtime chief of FOIA policy at Justice, says the passage and other “lawyerly hedges” means the Holder memo is now “astonishingly weaker” than the Reno policy. (The visitor-log request falls in this category because of a pending Bush-era lawsuit for such records.)

It’s becoming increasingly hard for the left to deny the NeoCon label being ascribed to President Barack Obama