No joke:So they are in favor of open borders, presumably so that exotic Third World peasants can perform the labor to which they are noticeably averse. Of the 13 items on that "proposed list of demands," Demand Four calls for "free college education," and Demand Eleven returns to the theme, demanding debt forgiveness for all existing student loans. I yield to no one in my general antipathy to the racket that is American college education, but it's difficult to see why this is the fault of the mustache-twirling robber barons who head up Global MegaCorp. Inc. One sympathizes, of course. It can't be easy finding yourself saddled with a six-figure debt and nothing to show for it but some watery bromides from the "Transgender and Colonialism" class. Americans collectively have north of a trillion dollars in personal college debt. Say what you like about Enron and, er, Solyndra and all those other evil corporations, but they didn't relieve you of a quarter-mil in exchange for a Master's in Maya Angelou. So why not try occupying the Dean's office at Shakedown U?
KUDLOW: So you're looking for a defeat of Obama?
Mr. WELCH: I want to take this administration out. They don't understand how to create jobs. They don't understand to grow this--America is on fire. America is still the greatest country in the world. And we have everything going for us except a government that is not supportive of capitalism.
Writing as a Georgian and a former civil rights fighter, it’s hard for me to remain purely objective when it comes to Herman Cain’s candidacy. My heart swells every time I hear him speak. There are days when I practically get weak-kneed just imagining a debate between him and Barack Obama. I’ve got a deep-down feeling that Obama would leave that debate stage feeling as though he had just had a very painful woodshed experience with a mature father wielding a rhetorical paddle.
That’s just me, of course. But from the looks of the way this is going, a whole lot of American voters are sensing the same thing – or something very close to it.
3 killed, 17 injured in overnight shootings
We are the 99 percent. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we're working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent.
The dense shroud around it suggests the “secret panels” are either about much more than taking out Anwar al-Awlaki and his wannabees or a paranoid excess. As Tapper himself suggested, but did not pursue, the entire process and the secrecy around it would be absurd in the context presented; it would be like shooting a squirrel with an institutional elephant gun. But an elephant gun, once glimpsed, implies an elephant or bigger game than squirrels. If that is speculative, it is only because so little information about what the program actually consists of exists and hence the temptation to put on a tinfoil hat. Speculation on the panels will end, of course, when hard information about it begins.
What ended the Star Chamber system was the metamorphosis of the Star Chamber system itself. It eventually evolved away from a special way to get at “untouchables” to become a system of political vendetta and corruption.
Let’s say the problem is we have a golf course and a gopher is tearing it up. Is Obama, then, Bill Murray? No…Obama makes the dynamite look like a good idea. Obama is the guy who comes along and says “Step one, give Me and My friends all the money you can afford, Step three, gopher problem solved.” What’s step two? Dunno. So Obama is more like an underpants gnome sort of character. And this is why He has to become a one-termer. It isn’t that His solutions are overly expensive or that they don’t work…although they are, and they don’t. It’s that getting rid of the goddamn gopher never was the agenda in the first place.
No, Obama is there just to give speeches that make it seem like a swell idea to suck all the money and power away, to confuse lightweight thinkers into thinking this will somehow address whatever problem happens to be under discussion at the moment. But you’ll notice no matter what that problem is, the contorted jumbled-up mess of ObamaLogic keeps leading back to the common central point, of “put lots of money under control of Obama and His friends.”
Other successful politicians seem to approach every problem by defining certain favorite segments of the population as sympathetic, and others as not-sympathetic. So a good solution for the gopher problem would be: Tax the rich, put the money in a new program which will employ some minimal number of fill-in-the-blank…women, ethnic minorities, gay, handicapped…and at some point the gopher drops dead of old age or something.
Sarah Palin would have just shot the fucking gopher. And that would be the fallback plan, I think, after trying to poison it. Point is, the gopher would be dead, and the golf course would be fine.
That’s what we need, I think.
There go the Hispanics again, taking jobs americans wont do
ASTROTURF: Organizer admits to paying ‘Occupy DC’ protesters
If Cain is going all the way, he needs to staff up and this is a very good start.Saturday, I was the first to report that former Pentagon spokesman J.D. Gordon was taking over as de facto press secretary in the wake of Ellen Carmichael’s resignation. Today, I had my first phone interview with Commander Gordon, USN (Retired) — a career Navy man, like my co-blogger Smitty — and was quite impressed.
FACT CHECK: Obama claims miss some evidence
WASHINGTON (AP) — In challenging Republicans to get behind his jobs bill Thursday, President Barack Obama argued Republicans have supported his proposals before, demanded that they explain themselves if they oppose him, and challenged others to come up with a plan of their own. The rhetoric in the president's quick-moving press conference dodged some facts and left some evidence in the dust.
OBAMA: "If it turns out that there are Republicans who are opposed to this bill, they need to explain to me, but more importantly to their constituencies and the American people, why they're opposed, and what would they do."
THE FACTS: While Republicans might not be campaigning on their opposition to Obama's plan, they've hardly kept their objections a secret.
In a memorandum to House Republicans Sept. 16, House Speaker John Boehner and members of the GOP leadership said they could find common ground with Obama on the extension of certain business tax breaks, waiving a payment withholding provision for federal contractors, incentives for hiring veterans, and job training measures in connection with unemployment insurance.
They objected to new spending on public works programs, suggesting instead that Congress and the president work out those priorities in a highway spending bill. And they raised concerns about Obama's payroll tax cuts for workers and small businesses, arguing that the benefits of a one-year tax cut would be short-lived. The memo also pointed out that reducing payroll taxes, which pay for Social Security, temporarily forces Social Security to tap the government's general fund. And it opposed additional spending to prevent layoffs of teachers, police officers and other public workers.
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OBAMA: "Every idea that we've put forward are ones that traditionally have been supported by Democrats and Republicans alike."
THE FACTS: Obama proposes to pay for his jobs bill by raising taxes, something traditionally opposed by Republicans and, in the form Obama proposed it, even some Democrats. Senate Democrats were so allergic to Obama's approach, which relied largely on limiting deductions that can be taken by individuals making over $200,000 a year and couples making more than $250,000, that they're eliminating it and replacing it with a new tax on millionaires.
In claiming bipartisan support for the components of his proposal, the president appears to be referring just to what the plan would do, not how it's paid for, but that's a crucial distinction he doesn't make.
Some of tax-cutting proposals offered by Obama have received significant Republican support in the past. But some of the new spending he proposes has received only nominal Republican backing. Evidence of bipartisanship provided by the White House includes legislation last year that provided $10 billion to prevent teacher layoffs. It won the support of only two Republican senators — Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, both of Maine and among the most moderate Republicans in Congress. Another example cited by the White House was proposal last year to offer tax breaks to businesses that hire new workers — it passed the House 217-201 with six Republican votes.
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OBAMA: "The answer we're getting right now is: Well, we're going to roll back all these Obama regulations... Does anybody really think that that is going to create jobs right now and meet the challenges of a global economy?"
THE FACTS: Well, yes, some think it will. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce last month submitted a jobs proposal to Obama that included a call to ease regulations on businesses. It specifically called for streamlining environmental reviews on major construction projects and to delay the issuance of some potentially burdensome regulations until the economy and employment have improved. In the letter, Chamber President Thomas Donohue also called on Congress to pass legislation that would require congressional approval of major regulations. The chamber did not indicate how many jobs such regulatory changes could create, but it said: "Immediate regulatory relief is required in order to begin moving $1 trillion-$2 trillion in accumulated private capital off of the sidelines and into business expansion."
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OBAMA: "We can either keep taxes exactly as they are for millionaires and billionaires, with loopholes that lead them to have lower tax rates, in some cases, than plumbers and teachers, or we can put teachers and construction workers and veterans back on the job."
THE FACTS: True, "in some cases" wealthy people can exploit loopholes to make their tax rate lower than for people of middle or low income. In recent rhetoric, Obama had suggested it was commonplace for rich people to pay lower rates than others, a claim not supported by IRS statistics. But on Thursday, Obama accurately stated that it only happens sometimes.
In 2009, 1,470 households filed tax returns with incomes above $1 million yet paid no federal income tax, according to the IRS. Yet that was less than 1 percent of returns with incomes above $1 million. On average, taxpayers who made $1 million or more paid 24.4 percent of their income in federal income taxes; those making $100,000 to $125,000 paid 9.9 percent; those making $50,000 to $60,000 paid 6.3 percent. The White House argues that when payroll taxes — paid only on the first $106,800 of wages — are factored in, more middle class workers wind up with a higher tax rate than millionaires.
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OBAMA: "China has been very aggressive in gaming the trading system to its advantage and to the disadvantage of other countries, particularly the United States. .... And currency manipulation is one example of it, or at least intervening in the currency markets in ways that have led their currency to be valued lower than the market would normally dictate. And that makes their exports cheaper and that makes our exports to them more expensive."
THE FACTS: While Obama complained about China's efforts to keeps its currency undervalued to gain trade advantages, his administration has repeatedly refused to brand China as a currency manipulator in a report that the Treasury Department is required to send to Congress twice a year.
Such a designation would trigger negotiations between the two countries and could ultimately lead to U.S. trade sanctions against China.
The administration has been reluctant to brand China a currency manipulator, as have past administrations, because the United States depends on China to buy U.S. Treasury securities to help finance America's budget deficits. China owns $1.17 trillion in U.S. Treasury securities, making it the largest foreign holder of Treasury debt.
Herman Cain is running for president. He’s not a career politician (in fact he has never held political office). He’s known as a pizza guy, but there’s a lot more to him. He’s also a computer guy, a banker guy, and a rocket scientist guy.
Here’s his bio:• Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics.• Master’s degree in Computer Science.• Mathematician for the Navy, where he worked on missile ballistics (making him a rocket scientist).• Computer systems analyst for Coca-Cola.ENTAL• VP of Corporate Data Systems and Services for Pillsbury (this is the top of the ladder in the computer world, being in charge of information systems for a major corporation).
All achieved before reaching the age of 35. Since he reached the top of the information systems world, he changed careers!• Business Manager. Took charge of Pillsbury’s 400 Burger King restaurants in the Philadelphia area, which were the company’s poorest performers in the country. Spent the first nine months learning the business from the ground up, cooking hamburger and yes, cleaning toilets. After three years he had turned them into the company’s best performers.• Godfather’s Pizza CEO. Was asked by Pillsbury to take charge of their Godfather’s Pizza chain (which was on the verge of bankruptcy). He made it profitable in 14 months.• In 1988 he led a buyout of the Godfather’s Pizza chain from Pillsbury. He was now the owner of a restaurant chain. Again he reached the top of the ladder of another industry.• He was also chairman of the National Restaurant Association during this time. This is a group that interacts with government on behalf of the restaurant industry, and it gave him political experience from the non-politician side.Having reached the top of a second industry, he changed careers again!• Adviser to the Federal Reserve System. Herman Cain went to work for the Federal Reserve Banking System advising them on how monetary policy changes would affect American businesses.• Chairman of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank. He worked his way up to the chairmanship of a regional Federal Reserve bank. This is only one step below the chairmanship of the entire Federal Reserve System (the top banking position in the country). This position allowed him to see how monetary policy is made from the inside, and understand the political forces that impact the monetary system.After reaching the top of the banking industry, he changed careers for a fourth time!• Writer and public speaker. He then started to write and speak on leadership. His books include Speak as a Leader, CEO of Self, Leadership is Common Sense, and They Think You're Stupid.• Radio Host. Around 2007—after a remarkable 40 year career—he started hosting a radio show on WSB in Atlanta (the largest talk radio station in the country).
He did all this starting from rock bottom (his father was a chauffeur and his mother was a maid). When you add up his accomplishments in his life—including reaching the top of three unrelated industries: information systems, business management, and banking—Herman Cain may have the most impressive resume of anyone that has run for the presidency in the last half century.
Saving the country is all that matters, and the first step required for that task is to totally reverse our current course. Of course, that includes removal of the current occupant in the White House.
[Palin]: "I will continue driving the discussion for freedom and free markets, including in the race for President where our candidates must embrace immediate action toward energy independence through domestic resource developments of conventional energy sources, along with renewables."
[Palin]: "We must reduce tax burdens and onerous regulations that kill American industry, and our candidates must always push to minimize government to strengthen the economy and allow the private sector to create jobs. Those will be our priorities so Americans can be confident that a smaller, smarter government that is truly of the people, by the people, and for the people can better serve this most exceptional nation."
Most of what I found at the Occupy Wall Street protest in Zuccotti Park this morning was inchoate. I met anti-capitalists who berated the federal government for regulating drugs, I learned that Alexander Hamilton was a tireless crusader against a central bank, and I was exposed to the usual 9/11 truthers and conspiracy theorists; and their kinder cousins, the terminally dumb.Unfortunately, however, a small part of the protest was downright unpleasant. Moments after I arrived, I saw a Jewish gentleman being berated when he criticized a protester. (Shortly after my video camera was switched off, he (inexplicably) shouted the N-word at the same man.)
At the start of the summer, I attended a graduation ceremony in Vermont, for which a bigshot speaker had been flown up from New York. "Your world is changing so fast!" he told them, as is traditional on these occasions....Imagine that Vermont class a century ago, the summer of 1911. The Model T had just gone into production a couple of years earlier, the age of manned flight had gotten off the ground. And they had their version of Justin Bieber downloads, too: Do you know Lady Gaga's smash hit "Telephone"? It was the latest thing for ten minutes a year or so back. But they had telephone songs at the turn of the 20th century, too! "Hello, Ma Baby!" "Hello, Central, Give Me Heaven." They had lots of songs about other exciting new inventions, too: There were telegraph numbers ("There's a Wireless Station Down in My Heart"), automobile numbers ("Come Away with Me, Lucille, in My Merry Oldsmobile"), aeroplane numbers ("Come, Josephine, in My Flying Machine"). There were so many inventions for singers to sing about, they had no time left to sing about the novelties of their own industry, in which the wax cylinder was about to be superseded by the 78-rpm phonograph record. In the years that that Vermont Class of 1911 had been in college, the Nickelodeon had led to a boom in what we would soon call motion pictures. And yet, what with all the other things going on — with electrification and the internal-combustion engine enabling man to conquer both night and distance, time and space, and other footling stuff — these exciting showbiz novelties were generally regarded as peripheral to progress. Instead of the be-all and end-all of it. In the second decade of the 21st century, technological innovation means we're thrilled if Apple invents a device for downloading Katy Perry that's an eighth of an inch slimmer than the previous model. So today, instead of songs for the age of invention, we have inventions for an age of songs.
Most of what we mean by progress in our "fast moving" world falls into a kind of James Bond gizmo category. Things that half a century back were issued to 007 by Q at the start of his mission are now available for $19.95 at Wal-Mart...Air travel went from Wilbur and Orville to biplanes to flying boats to transatlantic jetliners in its first 50 years, and then for the next 50 it just sat there... Yet that graduation ceremony in Vermont caused me to wonder if we're not stuck in mid-century in a more profound sense: We have the attitudes not of the young capitalist who builds the assembly line for the mass-production automobile but of the elderly titan half a century later preoccupied with his memorial foundation to "effect social change worldwide." Indeed, in its attitude to both foreign policy and domestic priorities, America operates less like a nation-state prosecuting its interests and more like one of those non-profit foundations funding various unwatchable offerings on PBS. A great nation can coast for a while on the accumulated inheritance of a glorious past. But, as the Wright brothers could have explained, gliding doesn't really meet the definition of "fast moving."
Now let's repeat the non-conformists' oath:
I promise to be different! (audience repeats)
I promise to be unique! (audience repeats)
I promise not to repeat things other people say! (audience repeats, laughs)
- Steve Martin
Remember when the media was obsessed with how many minority members attended Tea Parties?Need it be said that it seems to attract every granola-nut-and-fruit eating, drumming, aging hippy within driving distance?
While Samuel L. Jackson is calling the Tea Party racist, the Daily Caller reports that #OccupyWallStreet is desperate to attract minorities.
Will the media report that the #OccupyWallStreet protesters are as white as Joe Biden’s hair plugs?
Why do these people look so much like the people that were at the Wisconsin protests? They look like a mishmash of Code Pink, SEIU, Green Peace, and AFL-CIO. In fact, I think these guys might even be the same drummers that were in the Madison rotunda during the whole Scott Walker thing.Indeed, they all look the same. At this point you can take a picture of one protest sell it to "stockphoto" and the media can use it as the generic file photo for all of these Leftist protests. Drums, puppetheads, long hair, beads. There has to be a thriving business somewhere selling uniforms to these clowns.
(1) Plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to own and use a dairy cow or a dairy herd;This is the state that harbors Madison, which was recently the scene of teachers (and other anarchists) occupying the capital building for weeks to stop as bill designed to stop Wisconsin from insolvency from becoming a law.
(2) Plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to consume the milk from their own cow;
(3) Plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to board their cow at the farm of a farmer;
(4) The Zinniker Plaintiffs’ private contract does not fall outside the scope of the States’ police power;
(5) Plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to produce and consume the foods of their choice;
(6) DATCP [Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection] . . . had jurisdiction to regulate the Zinniker Plaintiffs’ conduct.
6:05 - Laura: So they were literally screaming at you?Attkisson: Yes. Well the DOJ woman was just yelling at me. The guy from the White House on Friday night literally screamed at me and cussed at me. [Laura: Who was the person? Who was the person at Justice screaming?] Eric Schultz. Oh, the person screaming was [DOJ spokeswoman] Tracy Schmaler, she was yelling not screaming. And the person who screamed at me was Eric Schultz at the White House
Wait wait wait... you mean it's wrong to sell automatic weapons to Mexican Narco-Terrorists to make the case that we need more gun control laws? That is just crazy talk. Democrats can't get laws passed for the people's own good if you cloud the debate with facts.They will tell you that I'm the only reporter--as they told me--that is not reasonable. They say the Washington Post is reasonable, the LA Times is reasonable, the New York Times is reasonable, I'm the only one who thinks this is a story, and they think I'm unfair and biased by pursuing it.
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that they cost for this bribe was moderate.European Union To Penalize “Ethical Oil:” “The European Union’s executive body will propose that oil extracted from sands should be treated as dirtier than conventional oil, a move that will inflame a spat with Canada, a major producer of oil from sands, an EU official familiar with the matter said Tuesday. The European Commission, which has executive powers within the EU, agreed Monday to set a higher value for carbon-dioxide emissions from tar sands compared with crude oil extracted from conventional wells, the official told The Wall Street Journal. This would discourage the use of oil from sands in Europe, where companies have an obligation to cut their CO2 emissions by 2020. To do so they will have to use the cleanest fuels. Monday’s decision is likely to deepen the EU’s dispute with Canada, which is negotiating a free trade agreement with the bloc and says such a provision discriminates against one of its key exports.” Am I too cynical?
President Barack Obama’s “green jobs” initiatives suffered another major blow late Monday, as the nonprofit National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colorado, announced a plan to lay off roughly 10 percent of its staff through a voluntary buy-out plan.
According to the Denver Post, the lab plans to eliminate between 100 and 150 of its 1,350 jobs. The Obama administration supported the NREL in 2009 with roughly $200 million in stimulus grants. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu visited Golden in May 2009 to promote the NREL as a beneficiary of those funds.
At one recent House oversight committee hearing, Republicans prodded Obama’s Labor secretary Hilda Solis to explain why a bus driver who happens to drive a vehicle powered by “green” or “renewable” energy is classified by Obama administration officials as holding a “green job.” Solis struggled with the answer, instead arguing with Florida GOP Rep. Connie Mack, who asked her the question.
“DOE ... has one loan guarantee to monitor and they seem completely oblivious to this issue,” one OMB analyst said to another in an April 2, 2010, email.
“What’s terrifying is that after looking at some of the ones that came next, this one [Solyndra] started to look better," another OMB e-mail exchange said of Solyndra. "Bad days are coming.”
The 2016 Chu GT–Car of Your Dreams! Edward Niedermeyer of Truth About Cars tries to make sense of President Obama’s reported claim that
“[Energy] Secretary [Steven] Chu has assured me that within five years, we can have a battery developed that will make a car with the equivalent of 130 miles per gallon.’”
What does “130 miles per gallon” even mean in a car that doesn’t use gallons at all?
File under "how fast can you shovel taxpayer dollars out the door and into the pockets of your contributors."In late autumn of 2010, company executives confided to the Energy Department that they were running out of cash and could not make a required payment to a cash-reserve account. The company was supposed to begin making the first of $5 million payments to create a $30 million cash reserve on Dec. 1.
Solyndra officially defaulted on its loan that day. Chu approved a softening of the loan requirements so that the company could continue receiving loan installments.
“Ultimately, the choice was between imminent liquidation or giving the company and its workers a fighting chance to succeed,” LaVera said in the statement, first reported by Politico.
The Obama cool made for a reassuring contrast with his campaign's warm-and-fuzzy appeals to hope, change and being the ones we've been waiting for. But as the American writer Minna Antrim observed long ago, "between flattery and admiration there often flows a river of contempt." When it comes to Mr. Obama, boy does it ever.
We caught flashes of the contempt during the campaign. There were those small-town Midwesterners who, as he put it at a San Francisco fund-raiser, "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who are not like them." There were those racist Republicans who, as he put it at a Jacksonville fund-raiser, would campaign against him by asking, "Did I mention he's black?" There was the "you're likable enough, Hillary," line during a New Hampshire debate. But these were unscripted digressions and could be written off as such.
The gratuitous return of the Churchill bust to Britain. The slam of the Boston police officer who arrested Henry Louis Gates. The high-profile rebuke of the members of the Supreme Court at his 2010 State of the Union speech. The diplomatic snubs, petty as well as serious, of Gordon Brown, Benjamin Netanyahu and Nicolas Sarkozy. The verbal assaults on Wall Street "fat cats" who "caused the problem" of "10% unemployment." The never-ending baiting of millionaires and billionaires and jet owners and everyone else who, as Black Entertainment Television's Robert Johnson memorably put it on Sunday, "tried rich and tried poor and like rich better."
Now we come to the last few days, in which Mr. Obama first admonished the Congressional Black Caucus to "stop complainin', stop grumblin', stop cryin'," and later told a Florida TV station that America was losing its competitive edge because it "had gotten a little soft." The first comment earned a rebuke from none other than Rep. Maxine Waters, while the second elicited instant comparisons to Jimmy Carter's "malaise" speech. They tell us something about the president's political IQ. They tell us more about his world view.
When a good history of anti-Americanism is someday written, it will note that it's mainly a story of disenchantment—of the obdurate and sometimes vulgar reality of the country falling short of the lover's ideal. Listening to Mr. Obama, especially now as the country turns against him, one senses in him a similar disenchantment: America is lovable exactly in proportion to the love it gives him in return.
Hence his increasingly ill-concealed expressions of contempt. Hence the increasingly widespread counter-contempt.
As the U.S. Supreme Court begins its 2011-2012 term, Americans' approval of the institution is now 46%, a drop of 5 percentage points in the last year and 15 points in the last two years. Since 2000, Gallup has recorded only one approval rating of the high court that is lower than today's: 42% in June 2005.
He’s been learning from His mistakes!
Read the whole thing.Here’s how the go-to guy works. Let’s say you’re a reporter on a deadline and you need a quote right this minute about how Republicans have rendered Congress dysfunctional. Well then, your go-to guy is Norman Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Perhaps you want to give readers a little historical perspective, something eggheady about, say, how smoothly leaders of both parties used to work together before the lunatics (you know who they are) started running the asylum on Capitol Hill? Quick: get “presidential historian” Douglas Brinkley on the phone before he goes live on the NewsHour! He’ll be sure to tell you, with a wistful air, that Tip O’Neill and President Reagan were always friends after five o’clock.
If it’s the economy you’re writing about, it’s Mark Zandi. He has all the qualities that go into making a go-to guy of the very first rank. He is fluent on television and keeps his sentences short. His demeanor is pleasant. He uses the word “narrative” with abandon—“narrative” being the hottest word in journalism since “transparency”; it’s this year’s “accountability.” And he’s a liberal. All go-to guys are liberals. They can’t be identified as such, lest their authority as disinterested observers be undermined and the reader or viewer begin to get ideas. Ideological fuzziness is good; ideological hermaphroditism is better.
All of which is boring and complicated and none of which makes it into the stories of reporters who rely on go-to guys. The job of the go-to guy transcends accuracy. It is instead to confirm the circular reasoning that underlies so much of modern liberalism. A stimulus will create jobs because that’s what a stimulus does. In a budget standoff, Republicans and not Democrats are stubborn and unyielding, because stubborn and unyielding is how Republicans are. Ask Norman Ornstein, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Ask Mark Zandi, a Republican economist. The go-to guys are here to help. Always.
Republican U.S. Rep. David McKinley, who owns an architecture and engineering firm in Wheeling, attended the rally for Maloney. He won his seat in November despite a more than 18 percentage point Democratic registration edge, and he is asking people to vote Republican again.
"People have been voting for Democrats in this area for generations, and where's it gotten them?" he asked.
Which brings up another point. We are not fighting a War on Terror any more (it always was a dreadful term). What is Team Obama calling this kinetic action?The President has created some of the confusion in our debate. Frequently during the campaign, sometimes even in office, he has spoken as if he is the head of a criminal investigation team. When it comes to actual decisions, however, he acts like a military leader at war. Greenwald and Paul appear to believe that he is a policeman and needs to start acting more like one; I believe he is a war leader and needs to start talking more like one.
Via Meadia applauds President Obama for killing America’s enemies as fast as he can — and I have no fear that a future US President will use that precedent to send a Hellfire missile through the windows of the stately Mead manor in Queens. I don’t even think American stock market swindlers and tax evaders lounging on the Riviera need to worry about a Predator strike bringing their peaceful retirements to a premature close. Roman Polanski does not need to move to an undisclosed bunker underground. This isn’t a slippery slope; it is war.
Two years ago, the idea that America was in a war might have seemed like one of those anachronistic Bushisms which could be swept underfoot by the New Age of Light and Reason—Guantanamo and military tribunals would have to go as well. With Anwar al-Awlaki dead, the Obama Administration has again demonstrated that it can fight the Lord Voldemort War pretty well; it just can’t quite bring itself to make the case for what it must do.
Obama would not have withstood scrutiny in any society with a healthy, skeptical press. Yet, like the high-rolling Wall Street moneybags, they failed to do due diligence.
Three years on, nothing has changed. Obama is proposing to raise taxes because of some cockamamie yarn Warren Buffett has been peddling about his allegedly overtaxed secretary. Yet the court eunuchs of the media persist in taking Buffett seriously as an archetypal exemplar of the "American business community" rather than as an especially well-connected crony.
Sometimes, Obama cronyism is merely fiscally wasteful, as in the still underreported Solyndra "green jobs" scandal. One sympathizes with reporters assigned to the story: It's hard to get all the public monies and Solyndra-exec White House visit logs lined up in digestible form for the casual reader.
But sometimes Obama cronyism is murderous: Eric Holder, a man unfit to be attorney general of the United States, continues to stonewall the "Fast and Furious" investigation into taxpayer-funded government gun-running to Mexican drug cartels.
It is alleged that the administration chose to facilitate the sale of American weapons to crime kingpins south of the border in order to support a case for gun control north of the border. Evidence keeps piling up:
The other day, a letter emerged from ATF supervisor David Voth authorizing Special Agent John Dodson to buy Draco pistols to sell directly to known criminals. Over 200 Mexicans are believed to have been killed by "Fast and Furious" weapons — that is to say, they were killed by a U.S. government program.
Doesn't the New York Times care about dead Mexicans? Doesn't Newsweek or CBS News? Isn't Obamaism with a body-count sufficiently eye-catching even for the U.S. press? Or, three years in, are the enablers of Obama still so cynical that they accept it as a necessary price to pay for "change you can believe in"? You can't make a hopenchange omelette without breaking a couple hundred Mexican eggs?
Obama says America has "gotten a little soft." But there's nothing soft about a dead-parrot economy, a flat-line jobs market, regulatory sclerosis, "green jobs" multibillion-dollar squandering and a mountain of dead Mexicans. In a soft nation, "centrist" government is hard and cruel. Only the coverage is soft-focus.
En el teléfonoRead the whole thing at Iowahawk.
Juan? Hola, amigo! Como esta?
Fine, fine. And how are Lupe and the kids?
College already? Boy, how time flies. Has she picked a major?
Splendid. And how is Juan Jr.? He's what now, 13, 14? The last time I saw him he was only...
Oh.
Oh.
My goodness. Boy, that's... that's just terrible. My deepest sympathies to you and Lupe on your loss. I'll have my secretary arrange for a memorial bouquet. I know he was a fine boy, and...
Now, Juan, let's not jump to conclusions here. We both know there are lots of machine gun murders in Mexico, and it doesn't necessarily mean that they're all...
Yes, Juan, I got your messages. As a matter of fact that's why I'm calling this afternoon. I've had my people look into this thing and...
Mmhmm.
Mmmhmm.
Now... now Juan... let's just calm down here a minute. Just, okay.. okay... let me please explain, okay? See, the funny thing is, it turns out, a couple years back there was, well, this stimulus program money, and then there were these brainstorming sessions, where, well, there were some ideas what to do with it. So, anyhoo, one of the ideas that happened was, 'hey, what if there were, say, 2000 machine guns that got sent to Mexican drug lords?' and so forth.
Well no, of course we couldn't tell you. It would have ruined the surprise.
