Obama curse works in NYC's favor

  Usually it's sports.
  Obama publicly roots for some team.
  And then they lose.
  This time Yahoo has a headline titled "Obama takes charge at hurricane command center," complete with a photo of the CIC instructing, um, someone about, um something:

  Having cut his vacation short by 7 hours, Obama in this photo is trying to appear very, very concerned about the storm and its impact on the country.

  How Obama "takes charge" is never quite explained, other than his saying, "this is going to be a tough slog" for a while.

  Gateway Pundit chortles that numerous Yahoo readers are not impressed with the photo op of Dear Leader's performance.

  The kind of sycophantic writing the press, in this case Yahoo/AFP, exhibits is a significant reason that Obama has so overwhelmingly underperformed in his job, according to Fred Barnes at the Weekly Standard:

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.

  Because no one challenges the royal presidency he does not change. Those who do challenge him, like the Tea Party, are immediately excoriated, mocked and denigrated rather than reasoned with or listened to as legitimate issues.
  But back to the curse.
  The curse has been discussed again and again.
  It usually entails a sports team being endorsed by Obama and then getting killed in the game.
  This time, however, the curse of the Obama endorsement of hurricane Irene worked for NYC and New England, as it continues to be downgraded and underperform from the original breathless reports of worst storm of the century, cat 5, then 4, then.....
  President Downgrade. It worked for NYC and New England.
UPDATE: Only two locations had 85 MPH wind gusts:

NOAA said that maximum average wind speeds at landfall were 85 MPH, hurricane winds stretching outwards for 90 miles. In fact, only two locations even had gustsover 85 MPH.
The 115 MPH is a mathematical outlier from a “trained spotter” – which is not credible and should be thrown out.  The nearby weather station at Beaufort, NC, had a max speed of 53 MPH and peak gust of 70 MPH.