US President Barack Obama warned the US east coast was in for a “long 72 hours” as he led his government’s response to Hurricane Irene at a disaster command center in Washington.

Obama on Saturday chaired a meeting at the National Response Coordination Center (NRCC) set up at the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) headquarters in Washington, which is marshaling federal and local hurricane-relief efforts.

“This is going to be a tough slog getting through this thing,” Obama said during a video teleconference including senior federal officials and local government agencies in the east coast path of Irene.

“It’s going to be a long 72 hours. Obviously a lot of families are going to be affected … the biggest concern I’m having right now has to do with flooding and power,” Obama said during the videoconference.

“(It) sounds like that’s going to be an enormous strain on a lot of states” that could last days, or even longer in some cases, he said.

Caroline Wozniacki wins New Haven

NEW HAVEN, Conn. –  No one has ever beaten Caroline Wozniacki in New Haven, and Hurricane Irene couldn’t do it either.

The world’s top-ranked player stayed ahead of the storm Saturday and won her fourth consecutive New Haven title, defeating Czech qualifier Petra Cetkovska 6-4, 6-1 in the finals.

Wozniacki, the top seed at next week’s U.S. Open, improved to 17-0 at Yale.

Caroline Wozniacki won her fourth straight New Haven title, tying Venus Williams’ record.

“I just have a good momentum every time I play here,” she said. “The balls are good. The tournament is nice. You always play better when you like to be around a tournament. I’m really pleased to be in this situation — win four straight times in a row, it’s really unbelievable.”

Cetkovska, who is ranked 40th, had won seven consecutive matches since the start of qualifying.  She beat fifth-seeded Agnieszka Radwanska, fourth-seeded Marion Bartoli and second-seeded Li Na.  But she couldn’t stop Wozniacki, who also is the top seed at the U.S. Open.

“I’m really happy to be here, to go so long, so far in the tournament,” Cetkovska said. “Now when we are in the final, we want to always go further. So obviously I wanted to try to win, to do even better. But today it was just a little bit too much. Caroline, she’s just playing great.”

The match, moved to 1 p.m. from 5 p.m. to avoid Irene, was played outdoors at the Connecticut Tennis Center. It included a 1 hour, 40 minute rain delay in the first set.

After that band of rain moved through the area, officials said they believed they would have a window of about 1½ hours for tennis, but had made contingency plans to move the match into the nearby Cullman-Heyman indoor tennis center, just in case.

The match lasted 1 hour and 20 minutes.

“I was like, ‘OK it looks like it’s going to start raining, let’s go indoors so we can go to New York,’ ” Wozniacki said. “We got a window and were able to finish. It was nice to play outside, in front of the crowd.”

It began raining again just after the awards ceremony concluded.

Wozniacki’s four consecutive championships ties the New Haven record set by Venus Williams from 1999 to 2002. This year, the tournament changed its name from the Pilot Pen and became a WTA-only event.

Wozniacki broke Cetkovska six times, including in the final game of the first set, and three times in the second set. It was the Danish star’s sixth tournament title this year, but the first since winning in Copenhagen in June. The 26-year-old Cetkovska was playing in her first WTA final.

“It was important for me to start well in the second set, just to get a little bit of a lead,” Wozniacki said. “Then I just kept my focus, didn’t let her back in.”

Wozniacki’s boyfriend, Rory McIlroy, spent the week with her on the Yale campus and the U.S. Open golf champion watched the match from the player’s box.

“When you have that little bit of confidence, that little bit of belief in yourself, it can take you a long way,” he said after the match. “It looked like Caroline found that belief and confidence this week and it obviously is great prep going into the Open next week.

The Danish star played with her right thigh wrapped, after feeling a twinge during Friday’s semifinals. She said it would not affect her play at the Open, which is scheduled to start Monday.

Tournament officials prepared for high winds by bringing in cranes overnight to remove the two-ton scoreboards from the top of the stadium and replaced them with two smaller scoreboards courtside.

Tournament director Anne Worcester said if play had been stopped one more time, they would have moved indoors.

As a rule, the press is the scourge of presidents.   They’re expected to endure unending scrutiny, mistrust, and badgering—plus hostility if they’re Republicans—by a hectoring herd of reporters and commentators in the mainstream media. But there’s an exception to the rule: President Obama.

It’s counterintuitive, but Obama has been hurt by the media’s leniency.   Both his presidency and reelection prospects have suffered. He’s grown lazy and complacent. The media have encouraged him to believe his speeches are irresistible political catnip, though they aren’t. His overreliance on words hasn’t helped.

The kind of media pressure that can cause a president to sharpen his game, act with urgency, or take bolder steps—that has never been applied to Obama.  If it had, I suspect he’d be a more effective, disciplined, energetic, and popular president today.  Ronald Reagan is a good role model in this regard.  When the media attacked him over gaffes in the 1980 campaign, “Reagan responded like all competitive men by working to improve himself,” says Reagan historian Craig Shirley.  “Experience taught him to be better and try harder.” He took this lesson into the White House.

I don’t want to exaggerate the media’s baneful influence on Obama.  It’s hardly the main reason for his decline.  It’s a secondary reason, and it continues to have an impact.

Absent pushing and prodding by the press, the Obama presidency has atrophied.   His speeches are defensive and repetitive and filled with excuses.  He passes the buck.  With persistently high unemployment and a weak economy, Obama recently declared, in effect, “I have a plan. See you after my vacation.” The press doesn’t goad him to lead.

On the contrary, the media have condoned Obama’s avoidance of leadership. It started when he let Nancy Pelosi draft the $800 billion stimulus and continued when congressional Democrats put together the health care, cap and trade, and financial industry reform bills. Few media eyebrows were raised. True, the press attacked his 2012 budget as inadequate. But when he replaced it with a partisan speech, the media’s criticism of this bizarre and unprecedented behavior was mild.

The White House disputes suggestions Obama isn’t leading.   Following a nationally televised speech by the president in July, Ed Henry of Fox News asked about the nonexistence of an “Obama plan” for solving the spending and debt problem. “Republican talking point,” press secretary Jay Carney said dismissively.

A few days later, Carney acted surprised at a Wall Street Journal reporter’s failure to understand how extending unemployment benefits once more would create jobs. “I would expect a reporter from the Wall Street Journal would know this as part of the entrance exam,” he said.

In Washington, the plight of the jobless has been underplayed, and not only by the media.   The White House has promised for two years to “pivot” to an agenda stressing job creation, but still hasn’t made the turn.   On his three-day bus tour in the Midwest, Obama seemed oblivious to the depth of the unemployment trauma.

“Private sector job growth is good,” he said in Alpha, Illinois.   In reality, it’s bad and getting worse.  “The economy is now growing again,” he said.  Barely.  Obama said trade deals and patent reform would promote hiring, if only Congress would approve them.  But it’s the president who has delayed the trade treaties, and both houses of Congress have passed patent reform measures.

The media routinely give Obama a pass on such stuff.   On the tour, Obama insisted, as he has many times before, that he saved the nation from a “Great Depression.”   So far as I know, the press has never challenged this dubious claim.   But it is belied by the fact the recession came to an official end in June 2009, months before Obama’s policies could have played more than a minimal role.

Ask yourself this: If unemployment were treated by the media today as the top national issue, as it was in 1982 and 1983 when Reagan was president, would Obama be dawdling? Not likely. The jobless rate then was only slightly higher than it is now. But in those days, the press focused relentlessly on the jobless.

“If Washington policymakers were reminded night after night of the real unemployment heartache in America now, they would forge a bipartisan jobs plan immediately,” says Washington consultant David Smick. “Here we have a real crisis and nobody’s talking about it.” At least not enough.

A saying of a friend of mine touches on why the media disserve Obama by tolerating his habit of offering excuses for every failure or shortcoming of his presidency. The saying goes, winners accept responsibility, losers make excuses.

When the negotiations over a $4-billion “grand bargain” on spending cuts and deficit reduction broke down in July, the White House blamed House speaker John Boehner for walking out rather than acceding to a hefty tax hike.  Who did the media blame?  Boehner, naturally.  (To err is human: to blame others is politics!)

But is the public mollified by excuses?  I don’t think so.  Had Obama summoned Boehner back to the White House, eased his demand for higher taxes, and wrapped up a deal, the public would have been impressed.   Obama would have gotten credit, just as he did last December when a bipartisan compromise was reached on spending and taxes.  This time, the notion that Obama, as president, might have a responsibility to forge an agreement was lost on the media.

Interviewed by Anthony Mason of CBS News last week, Obama offered a fresh excuse for failing to get his way with Congress.   People “want me to be able to wrangle Congress and get them moving,” he said. “And you know, we’ve got this thing, separation of powers. .  .  . It means that there are times where Congress is gonna do things” he opposes.   Separation of powers?   He might as well have blamed Hamilton and Madison.

His interviewer didn’t follow up on that unique alibi.  He asked Obama, were he a middle-class voter, if he would vote for him for a second term. “Well,” Obama said, “I actually would.”

Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.

US Open Women’s Draw Predictions

• //

  Your Royal Majesty and Highnesses,

There is a mighty storm gathering over the Arabian Gulf that if we continue to ignore will catch us by surprise with devastating consequences. However unsettling the Arab Awakening may be, it is nothing compared to the real and present danger Gulf States face from a neighbour that purports to be our friend while all the time is scheming against us behind the door. To my mind, this neighbour is in many respects an even worse threat than our historic foe Israel whose enmity towards Arabs is well-known and upfront.

For all its denials, the Islamic Republic of Iran has expansionist ambitions which its ruling clerics keep close to their chest. The clerics have been patient and subtle putting into motion a slow, insidious agenda to dominate the Gulf and the entire Arab region. For years, while we Arab patriots were sleeping, Iran has been flooding GCC states with rabble rousers, spies as well as sleeping cells, whose members use their stay in Gulf countries to increase their wealth while masquerading as our friends. Many are Arabs in name only; many have taken the nationalities of Gulf States while all the time their loyalties lie with Tehran.

Dancing to Iran’s tune

Worse, the Hezbollah Brigades in Iraq that holds allegiance to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and has links to the Revolutionary Guards’ Al Quds Brigade, has warned it will use surface-to-surface missiles to target workers building the port.   It seems that Iraqis have failed to learn lessons from the 1991 Gulf War; either that or they’re now dancing to Tehran’s tune.   It’s ironic that Washington’s drive to impose democracy on Baghdad has backfired on America; Iran has been the beneficiary of that ill-thought-out war without having to fire a shot.

The Iraqi prime minister’s reaction to the Syrian regime’s brutal attacks on dissenters is certainly out of tune with the rest of the Arab world as the New York Times reported under the headline “Iraqi leader backs Syria, with a nudge from Iran”.   Apparently, Al Maliki has “urged the protesters not to ‘sabotage’ the Syrian state…”

I fear that when all US troops have finally withdrawn from Iraq, the day will come when Iraq and Iran will form a federation whereby their collective oil and gas reserves will give their union unprecedented geopolitical clout.   In that event, it’s feasible that such federation could have the capability of closing our airspace, blockading our shipping lanes and preventing traffic from reaching us overland. Once we are isolated even our highly trained, well-armed militaries will be rendered ineffective. I’m saddened that Iraq’s pure Arab land has been gifted to Tehran by its own political leaders and pro-Iranian militias. Our Iraqi brothers — both Sunnis and Shiites — who love their country, the Cradle of Civilization, are pleading with you to rescue them from Iran’s tentacles. I believe it’s time for you to recognise that neither Persia nor Iran has ever been our ally and, accordingly, take the decision to keep the clerics influence from our shores, beginning with the cutting of all diplomatic links and inter-Gulf consultations on a unified strategy for dealing with Iran.

Iran’s instigation of Shiite unrest in Bahrain and its loud condemnation of Saudi Arabia and other GCC countries for rushing to help quell the uprising at the request of the Bahraini government should be seen as a wake-up call for the GCC to take action.  We must face up to the unpleasant reality that we’re on our own now that so many of our Arab allies are facing problems of their own which may take decades to resolve.  In comparison to the volatility in the Middle East and North Africa, GCC states are relatively stable, which is why I believe the headquarters of the Arab League should be relocated to Saudi Arabia (or another GCC member country) and its Secretary-General should be a Gulf national who isn’t afraid to take hard decisions. We can no longer afford to remain neutral during these tumultuous times and we must ensure that we have a say in everything that affects our own neighbourhood.

Sirs, our people rely upon you to preserve their independence but I would respectfully request you for the sake of your own children and grandchildren to act decisively before it’s too late. With the Arab world in disarray, you, Your Royal Majesty and Highnesses, are the only ones who can protect the house of Ebrahim from the Persian wolf in sheep’s clothing baying outside the door.

Yours sincerely,

Khalaf Al Habtoor is a businessman and chairman of Al Habtoor Group.

“Tell me again why Barack Obama has been such a bad president?” Jonathan Alter writes in his column.

Alter tells us he’s not talking here about Obama as a tactician and communicator, and he’s not interested in hearing ad hominem attacks or about people’s generalized “disappointment.” (Neither am I.) He wants to know on a substantive basis why Obama should be judged to have failed so far.

In Alter’s words, “Your mission, Jim [or anyone else for that matter], should you decide to accept it, is to be specific and rational, not vague and visceral.”

Consider the mission accepted.

In one sense, the answer to the Alter challenge is obvious: Obama has failed by his own standards. It’s the Obama administration, not the RNC, that said if his stimulus package was passed unemployment would not exceed 8 percent. It’s Obama who joked there weren’t as many “shovel-ready” jobs as he thought.

It’s Obama who promised to cut the deficit in half. It’s Obama who said if we passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the health care cost curve would go down rather than up. It’s Obama who promised us recovery and prosperity, hope and change. What we’ve gotten instead is the opposite.

What makes Alter’s challenge particularly delicious is during the Bush years he spoke out about the importance of a “reality-based” presidency (as opposed to a “faith-based” one). “They [Republicans] could end up winning in November by distorting the argument,” Alter said in 2006. “But on credibility and the facts, they’ve lost.”

With Alter’s devotion to credibility and facts in mind, let’s take an empirical, reality-based look at economic life in America during the Age of Obama:

* Under Obama’s stewardship, we have lost 2.2 million jobs (and 900,000 full-time jobs in the last four months alone). He is now on track to have the worst jobs record of any president in the modern era.

* The unemployment rate stands at 9.1 percent v. 7.8 percent the month Obama took office.

* July marked the 30th consecutive month in which the unemployment rate was above the 8 percent level, the highest since the Great Depression.

* Since May 2009 — roughly 14 weeks into the Obama administration — the unemployment rate has been above 10 percent during three months, above 9 percent during 22 months, and above 8 percent during two months.

* Chronic unemployment is worse than during the Great Depression.

* The youth employment rate is at the lowest level since records were first kept in 1948.

* The share of the eligible population holding a job has declined to the lowest level since the early 1980s.

* The housing crisis is worse than in the Great Depression. (Home values are worth roughly one-third less than they were five years ago.)

* The rate of economic growth under Obama has been only slightly higher than the 1930s, the decade of the Great Depression. From the first quarter of 2010 through the first quarter of 2011, we experienced five consecutive quarters of slowing growth. America’s GDP for the second quarter of this year was a sickly 1.0 percent; in the first quarter, it was 0.4 percent.

* Fiscal year 2011 will mark the third straight year with deficits in excess of $1 trillion. Prior to the Obama presidency, we had never experienced a deficit in excess of $1 trillion.

* During the Obama presidency, America has increased its debt by $4 trillion.

That is to say, Obama has achieved in two-and-a-half years what it took George W. Bush two full terms in office to achieve — and Obama, when he was running for president, slammed Bush’s record as being “unpatriotic.”

* America saw its credit rating downgraded for the first time in history under the Obama presidency.

* Consumer confidence has plunged to the lowest level since the Carter presidency.

*  The number of people in the U.S. who are in poverty is on track for a record increase on President Obama’s watch, with the ranks of working-age poor approaching 1960s levels that led to the national war on poverty.

* A record number of Americans now rely on the federal government’s food stamps program.  More than 44.5 million Americans received Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, a 12 percent increase from one year ago.

There is more that can be said, but you get the point.

What makes this record doubly horrifying is rapid growth is the norm after particularly deep recessions — but under Obama, our recovery has been historically weak. President Obama (and Alter) can blame his predecessor, the Tea Party, the Arab Spring, the Japanese tsunami, events in Europe, ATM machines and even athlete’s foot for his predicament. It doesn’t really matter, as even Obama conceded during the early months of his presidency, when he declared, “One nice thing about the situation I find myself in is that I will be held accountable.”

Indeed. Obama “owns” the economy, as both his senior aide David Plouffe and the chair of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, have said.

“If you lose a common ground of facts on which to move forward as a society, nobody can agree on anything, and you can’t pull together to solve problems,” Alter told Keith Olbermann during the Bush administration.

I agree. And it is on the common ground of facts that we can declare–in a calm, specific, reasonable, rational and empirical manner–Obama to be an utter failure.

No Obama Vindication in Libya