In August it cost taxpayers an alleged $375,000 for her security detail - and two flights on Air Force One - on a holiday to Spain with her daughter, Sasha, and 40 friends.

Although the Obamas will pay for a portion of the skiing trip, taxpayers will still shoulder many of the costs.

A motorcade of about a dozen vehicles, including at least 15 police officers, travelled from Eagle County Regional Airport to Vail on Friday night when the presidential party arrived.

Roads were temporarily closed to make way for the cavalcade, which arrived at the hotel at about 9.30pm.

No public events have been scheduled for the visit.

‘I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,’ said one of the president’s most outspoken critics, conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh. ‘He’s got the single largest deficit in the history of the country and he’s trying to tell us that we really cut back here.’

Meanwhile, Vice President Joe Biden and his wife are spending the holiday weekend in the U.S. in Florida’s Key Largo resort town.

WASHINGTON — President Obama abandoned a contentious new air pollution rule on Friday, buoying business interests that had lobbied heavily against it, angering environmentalists who called the move a betrayal and unnerving his own top environmental regulators.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/science/earth/03air.html?_r=1&hp

see toon at top...

From Maureen Dowd, NYT...

...

Just as Obama miscalculated in 2009 when Democrats had total control of Congress, holding out hope that G.O.P. lawmakers would come around on health care after all but three senators had refused to vote for the stimulus bill; just as he misread John Boehner this summer, clinging like a scorned lover to a dream that the speaker would drop his demanding new inamorata, the Tea Party, to strike a “grand” budget bargain, so the president once more set a trap for himself and gave Boehner the opportunity to dis him on the timing of his jobs speech this week.

Obama’s re-election chances depend on painting the Republicans as disrespectful. So why would the White House act disrespectful by scheduling a speech to a joint session of Congress at the exact time when the Republicans already had a debate planned?

And why is the White House so cocky about Obama as a TV draw against quick-draw Rick Perry? As James Carville acerbically noted, given a choice between watching an Obama speech and a G.O.P. debate, “I’d watch the debate, and I’m not even a Republican.”

The White House caved, of course, and moved to Thursday, because there’s nothing the Republicans say that he won’t eagerly meet halfway.

No. 2 on David Letterman’s Top Ten List of the president’s plans for Labor Day: “Pretty much whatever the Republicans tell him he can do.”

On MSNBC, the anchors were wistfully listening to old F.D.R. speeches, wishing that this president had some of that fight. But Obama can’t turn into F.D.R. for the campaign because he aspires to the class that F.D.R. was a traitor to; and he can’t turn into Harry Truman because he lacks the common touch. He has an acquired elitism.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/opinion/dowd-one-and-done.html

see toon at top...

From Jimmy Carter...

...

No regrets?

"Not really. On balance, my life has been a constant stream of blessings rather than disappointments and failures and tragedies. I wish I had been re-elected. I think I could have kept our country at peace. I think I could have consolidated what we achieved at Camp David with a treaty between Israel and the Palestinians. But I left office, and a lot of things changed. I think we would have had a very successful energy policy in this country and maybe around the world if I'd stayed in office. But that's just dreaming. I'm willing to accept that."

But it's a tantalising prospect – to play alternative histories. To do a Jimmy Stewart with Jimmy Carter. The great what-might-have-been? Lots of different people tell me that the Middle East is his "unfinished business". Including him. "My constant prayer, my number one foreign goal, is to bring peace to Israel. And in the process to Israel's neighbours."

The Camp David Accords were a massive political gamble. He risked failure, but he succeeded where no one has before or since. In 2006 he published a book, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, that excited fury from the American right. Steven Hochman tells me: "He's used to criticism. But I think it did hurt him. Some friends broke with him." And yet it's hard in Britain to understand what's so controversial about the book. He recommends, as has pretty much everybody else who's ever considered the situation, a two-state solution.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/11/president-jimmy-carter-interview

see toon at top...

Susan Eisenhower appeared before a congressional committee hearing Tuesday to denounce designs by architect Frank Gehry for a memorial honoring her grandfather, the 34th president of the United States. She compared Gehry’s proposals for large metal tapestries that depict Dwight D. Eisenhower’s boyhood home of Abilene, Kan., to Communist-era decorations that honored “Marx, Engels and Lenin.” She likened large columns that will be used to hang the metal scrims to “missile silos,” mentioned Ho Chi Minh and Mao, and argued that Holocaust survivors were affronted by the similarity of the tapestries to the fences of Adolf Hitler’s death camps.

Representing the Eisenhower family, she called on the Eisenhower Memorial Commission, which has overseen the process of planning and designing a memorial since authorized by Congress in 1999, to go back and start...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/susan-eisenhower-denounces-designs-for-presidential-monument/2012/03/20/gIQAAhLzPS_story.html?hpid=z3

The design is ATROCIOUS and, I agree with the family, it looks like a soviet era monument... Meanwhile in Sydney:

THE $150 million landmark building by the internationally acclaimed architect, Frank Gehry, will be an evocative blur for most Sydneysiders.

The open harbour approach was already taken by Joern Utzon for his Sydney Opera House, perched atop its Bennelong Point pedestal.

Instead, the Los Angeles architect, described as the most significant of the age, is working within twisted alleys and streets laid out in convict-era Sydney.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/executive-style/culture/gehry-competes-with-ghosts-for-architectural-vision-20101217-1909i.html#ixzz1pjpByLco

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That's right cobber! remind us that our street and avenues have been drawn by goats of low virtue sent on the loose... What an idiotic design... Sure one can be sure that it would be a talking point — as if we need more talking points in this talking-point confused city? Crap!... Look at the crap extension to the museum of modern art sitting like a bunch of containers badly stacked up... We need a bit of rigour here, of course not like the tall UTS building that was designed to stop a plethora of student revolutions, but something with class... and elevation, without going sky-high... That ugly design reminds me of those vomit-inducing twisted mirrors at a roma fair...