A. B. Stoddard is not sanguine about the prospects for the president’s reelection:

As the Republican race begins in earnest, and Obama kicks off his own reelection campaign, it is increasingly clear that the path to an Obama victory is anything but clear. Stubborn joblessness, soaring gas prices, the still-rising cost of healthcare insurance, the apathy of Obama supporters, the erosion of support from white working-class and suburban voters and the considerable sums of secret money conservatives promise to pour into the campaign all pose challenges to his plan to win again. Taken together, they might be insurmountable.

What’s encouraging to me (as someone who looks forward with great eagerness to a new resident in the White House in less than two years) is that their political ear remains as tin as ever. It should be getting more and more clear that the Obama people were never the vaunted political genii that the bien pensant proclaimed them to be in 2008. They were just in the right place, at the right time. With a candidate with the right skin color.

For some reason, awarding the transparency award to President Obama has been delayed.

Maybe the Nobel Committee should have waited a while, too.

[Update a few minutes later]

Heh. A report from shortly before they had second thoughts:

President Obama’s only event at the White House that isn’t closed to the press on Wednesday is a ceremony in which he’ll accept an award for being open to the press.

But why would they be having second thoughts? Maybe this?

The Associated Press reported this week that despite pledges of increased transparency, the Obama administration last year responded to fewer Freedom of Information Act requests than the year before.

In 2010 there were 544,360 requests filed at the 35 largest government agencies. The AP reported that the administration “refused to release any sought-after materials in more than 1-in-3 information requests.”

The Obama administration has developed a reputation for ruthlessly prosecuting whistleblowers for leaks to the press. The heavy-handed approach has prompted concern about a “chilling effect” that could discourage future government transparency.

But other than that, it’s the most transparent administration in history.

Will there ever be a point at which the media starts to point out what Bravo Sierra artists these people are?

[Update a while later]

The adminstration’s “openness” is a transparent lie.

Does this remind anyone else (anyone old enough to remember, that is) of the Clinton administration’s promise to be “the most ethical administration in history”? Complete with aides who tell Congress under oath that they lied to their own diary?

Issa’s hearings today should prove interesting, if appropriately uncomfortable for witnesses.

Allahpundit, on the president’s brackets:

This is a rare case where I think (hope?) that even our resident liberal trolls will admit that a Republican president in the same situation would be utterly destroyed by the media for wasting time on something so inane as NCAA brackets at a moment of global high anxiety. Libyan rebels holed up in Benghazi are preparing to make their last stand, with all that entails; cable news is wall-to-wall with updates on how much worse than Three Mile Island the situation in Japan is and whether Californians should be stockpiling iodide. And meanwhile, this guy’s talking about Pitt’s perimeter game. If you want to equivocate on world events that have captured the public’s imagination, okay (well, not okay), but can we at least deep-six the lighthearted photo ops until we know for sure that a cesium cloud isn’t headed for Tokyo? Says John Podhoretz, “We’re going on four weeks now, or more, that Barack Obama has been reading My Pet Goat.” Except he’s not just reading it. He’s doing ESPN segments about it.

But as I wrote earlier, given his general competence level, I’d prefer he stick to that sort of thing myself. He’s not good at it, either, but at least it won’t do much harm.