Hard though it may seem to imagine, the Obama administration has decided to go to war with the San Francisco Chronicle - one of his most reliably supportive newspapers (among a crowded field, admittedly) - and, more generally, with the overall White House pool reporter contingent.
To briefly summarize, the Chronicle's Carla Marinucci is part of the White House pool of reporters. But, earlier this week, Ms. Marinucci enraged the administration by using her cell phone to take pictures of anti-Obama protesters outside the St. Regis Hotel in New York City, where the President was making a speech.
For this "offense", the White House threatened to banish Ms. Marinucci from the reporting pool.
Needless to say, the Chronicle strongly objected. And it went public with the incident.
Now the administration is claiming it never made any such threat in the first place. And the Chronicle is calling them liars.
Excerpted from a statement from the Chronicle's Phil Bronstein:
In a pants-on-fire moment, the White House press office today denied anyone there had issued threats to remove Carla Marinucci and possibly other Hearst reporters from the press pool covering the President in the Bay Area.
Chronicle editor Ward Bushee called the press office on its fib:
Sadly, we expected the White House to respond in this manner based on our experiences yesterday. It is not a truthful response. It follows a day of off-the-record exchanges with key people in the White House communications office who told us they would remove our reporter, then threatened retaliation to Chronicle and Hearst reporters if we reported on the ban, and then recanted to say our reporter might not be removed after all.
The Chronicle's report is accurate.
If the White House has indeed decided not to ban our reporter, we would like an on-the-record notice that she will remain the San Francisco print pool reporter.
I was on some of those calls and can confirm Ward's statement.
Messy ball now firmly in White House court.
Is the White House guilty of being thin-skinned, and lying about what really happened? It sure looks that way.
If this was meant to intimidate reporters into submission, it obviously was a miserable failure.
And for what? Do these geniuses think that we don't know people are protesting President Obama? Maybe someone over there should read his political approval numbers.
The Obama administration would be better served by leaving the pool reporters alone (why would you make enemies there), and trying harder to understand why those protesters were out there in the first place.
In earlier blogs I referred to Donald Trump as Carl Paladino to his logical conclusion.
I would like to thank Mr. Trump for making my point so well in his speech to supporters in Las Vegas.
Excerpted from a report at myfoxphoenix.com:
At a rally of almost 1,000 Republican supporters in Las Vegas on Thursday night, the real estate mogul called the US leadership "weak, pathetic and incompetent."
He also used seven expletives in his well-received 40-minute speech, the Las Vegas Sun reported -- one of many media organizations to note his language.
Forgetting good taste and decorum for just a moment, why would Mr. Trump think that barfing out one f-bomb after another makes him sound like presidential material? It doesn't. It makes him sound like a classless, clueless loudmouth.
Now add in the good taste and decorum. What do you wind up with?
I respect Donald Trump as an enormously successful businessman and a brilliant self-promoter. Unfortunately, I would say the same about Phineas T. Barnum. (And he, to my knowledge, never made profanity-laden speeches.)
I want Donald Trump to be President about as much as I want an advanced case of impetigo. I certainly hope, and expect, that most Republicans feel the same way.
Call it the "excuses recovery." President Obama and his administration have been warning for the last week that the just announced first quarter GDP growth rate of 1.8 percent would be weak, and they have been quick to blame it on the recent spike prices in oil. The problem is that this whole recovery has been anemic, not just one or two slow quarters of economic growth.
Seven quarters into the Obama recovery, GDP growth has averaged an annual rate of only 2.8 percent. In contrast, since 1970, the first seven quarters of previous recoveries averaged 4.6 percent. The poor growth rate is especially surprising since the preceding recession was so severe, there should have been ample room for high growth as the unemployed returned to work. For example, the Reagan recovery followed a similarly high unemployment rate and saw the economy grow at an average annual growth rate of 7 percent (see graph here).
The slight decrease in unemployment – currently at 8.8 percent -- has been touted as good news. Yet that slight drop has largely been the result of job-seekers giving up looking for work and leaving the labor force. On top of that, the new jobs that have opened up have primarily been temporary jobs, the number of permanent jobs has actually fallen.
There is more. Much more. Mr. Lott's piece is a true must-read. But even if you stop right here, is it not clear that this is no recovery at all?
Economies work in cycles. There are down times and there are up times. The "growth" we have experienced during this administration is so weak that it might well have happened if Mr. Obama had done nothing at all.
And, compared to the "stimulus package", which has put us trillions of dollars in debt, how I wish he and his Democrat-majority congress had done nothing at all.
My one dispute with Mr. Lott's analysis is his characterization of 8.8% unemployment as a "slight decrease". Decrease from where? The day the "stimulus package" was enacted, unemployment was 8.1%. It quickly jumped over 10%, then sat in the mid-9's for over a year and is now 8.8%.
That is not a slight decrease. That is a considerableincrease over where it was in the first place.
We can argue over why the economy was in bad shape when Barack Obama took office. But it seems unarguable that Mr. Obama and his cohorts have taken that bad economy and made it a lot worse, while saddling our children and grandchildren with an impossible level of debt.
In short, Mr. Obama is having about as much success with his economic policy as he is with his foreign policy.
Racism - real racism - is ugly, dumb, ignorant and abhorrent.
Unfortunately, three of those adjectives also apply to people who use the term "racism" as a way of deflecting legitimate questions or concerns about President Obama. What they are doing is ugly, dumb, and abhorrent.
But, for the most part, it is not ignorant. They know exactly what they're doing.
This brings me to the latest example (among countless others) of using an accusation of racism to protect Barack Obama: David Letterman calling Donald Trump a racist for questioning Mr. Obama's academic credentials.
Letterman calls Trump a racist and says he should apologize
Suggesting real estate billionaire and controversial potential Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is a racist, late night television talk show personality David Letterman believes Mr. Trump should apologize for remarks the candidate made regarding President Obama's ability to get into HarvardLawSchool.
"I heard he was a terrible student, terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?" Trump told AP on Monday, according to a CBS News report. "I'm thinking about it, I'm certainly looking into it. Let him show his records."
"If the sons of his presumably wealthy friends couldn't get into Harvard with great credentials, then how could a person from Mr. Obama's humble background and academic achievements get into Harvard? Trump's inference is that Mr. Obama is a cipher, cannot be trusted and is concealing a dark secret," Dan Farber reported for CBS News.
But David Letterman is not seeing Trump's remarks through the same lens.
"It's all fun, it's all a circus, it's all a rodeo, until it starts to smack of racism. And then it's no longer fun," Letterman told Dr. Phil McGraw, a friend of Mr. Trump.
David Letterman is a very successful late night personality. But comments like this indicate that he is also a world class putz.
Through over 2 years of repeated inquiries, Barack Obama refused to make his long term birth certificate public. He still is refusing to make his college records and passport information public.
When the President of the United States hides significant parts of his life, it is fair to ask whether there are things about those parts of his life that cast him President in an unfavorable light, or worse.
When President Bush was accused of missing a few national guard meetings in the early 1970's, media (I am certain this included Mr. Letterman) were all over him - even after he agreed to the release of whatever documentary evidence existed. I do not recall anyone claiming the Democrats calling Mr. Bush every name in the book, including "draft dodger" and "coward" were bigots.
So how is it that when Barack Obama intentionally hides his birth certificate, college records and passport information, to question it is somehow to be a racist?
I have news for Mr. Letterman and others like him: it is not racist to question the credentials Mr. Obama is withholding from us. But it is racist to claim that any inquiry into his background must be for racial reasons.
For that reason, Mr. Letterman, you are the racist. Not Donald Trump, but you. I do not mean this as a clever little turn of phrase, either. I mean it 100% literally and 100% sincerely.
And the worst part about your brand of racism is that it trivializes the real racism that we all should be appalled by. Because of people like you, the term itself has lost almost all meaning.
So the next time you hear someone blowing a charge of racism off as nothing more than a mindless little political strategem? Congratulate yourself. Because you, and people like you, made it happen.
This unbelievably sick story of public sector union abuse comes to us via an editorial in today's New York Daily News. Please read it with appropriate disbelief - especially the parts I've put in bold print:
Crazy rules let ex-cop keep scammed, tax-free disability pension because of a positive cocaine test
How ridiculously stacked is the city's pension system against taxpayers? So ridiculously stacked that an ex-cop who was caught faking a disability and abusing cocaine still gets to collect benefits of $52,000 a year, triple tax-free.
That was the upshot of a blood-boiling ruling from the state's highest court yesterday - further evidence that New York's retirement system for government workers is out of control.
The outrageous story began in December 2003, when James Seiferheld, an 11-year NYPD veteran, put in for a line-of-duty disability pension. He reported slipping on ice and claimed constant pain in his arm, shoulder and neck made work impossible. His application was granted in May 2004.
But just one month later, the city discovered that Seiferheld was working construction jobs - and videotaped him lifting, carrying and nailing building materials "without apparent difficulty."
The Police Pension Fund's Medical Board recommended canceling Seiferheld's disability payout in May 2005.
Despite slam-dunk evidence, the board of trustees, which is half-controlled by union representatives, failed to take action for almost two years.
In April 2007, the Bloomberg administration finally persuaded the board to invoke its only real option in such situations - a law that requires disability retirees to go back to their old jobs if they regain their health and reduces or replaces their pensions with a regular salary.
Pinning a badge on a man whose pension proved undeserved was hardly an ideal outcome, but at least taxpayers would have gotten something for their money.
Before the NYPD could follow through, though, Seiferheld tested positive for coke - creating a Catch-22. The city couldn't offset his undeserved pension unless it hired him. But it couldn't hire him because he was disqualified.
Logically, the Law Department told the pension fund to cut him off - a decision that survived a first round of litigation.
Seiferheld appealed and, believe it or not, won.
The Court of Appeals' hair-splitting decision found that Seiferheld's benefits could be revoked only by a vote of the fund's board of trustees and that its prior decision to send him back to work didn't count.
Dissenting Judge Eugene Pigott applied a common-sense analysis and reached the opposite conclusion. He was right.
So a former cop gets paid even when found to be able-bodied, even when he can't be rehired because of drug use. The pension system is efficient about nothing other than doling excessive tax money to retirees, whether they deserve it or not.
Could this possibly be more outrageous?
Now tell me how come the system is not immediately being overhauled? Do you think it just might have something to do with the power of public sector unions?
Maybe, just maybe, they have to be reigned in.
And maybe, just maybe, when Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker took a stand regarding less latitude for public sector unions, he had a point.
Remember our wonderful “neutral” media rhapsodically telling us how “freedom and democracy” were coming to Egypt – and all it would take is the removal of that terrible Hosni Mubarak from power?
Have you noticed how little was written about any of that since Mr. Mubarak stepped down?
Well, the New York Times can’t hold the truth back any more. And to its credit (however belatedly) has afront page article by David D. Kirkpatrick in today’s paper about what is really happening there.
Here is the beginning of Mr. Kilpatrick’s article:
Egyptian officials, emboldened by the revolution and with an eye on coming elections, say that they are moving toward policies that more accurately reflect public opinion. In the process they are seeking to reclaim the influence over the region that waned as their country became a predictable ally of Washington and the Israelis in the years since the 1979 peace treaty with Israel.
The first major display of this new tack was the deal Egypt brokered Wednesday to reconcile the secular Palestinian party Fatah with its rival Hamas. “We are opening a new page,” said Ambassador Menha Bakhoum, spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry. “Egypt is resuming its role that was once abdicated.”
Egypt’s shifts are likely to alter the balance of power in the region, allowing Iran new access to a previously implacable foe and creating distance between itself and Israel, which has been watching the changes with some alarm. “We are troubled by some of the recent actions coming out of Egypt,” said one senior Israeli official, citing a “rapprochement between Iran and Egypt” as well as “an upgrading of the relationship between Egypt and Hamas.”
“These developments could have strategic implications on Israel’s security,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the issues were still under discussion in diplomatic channels. “In the past Hamas was able to rearm when Egypt was making efforts to prevent that. How much more can they build their terrorist machine in Gaza if Egypt were to stop?”
Israel had relied on Egypt’s help to police the border with Gaza, where arms and other contraband were smuggled to Hamas through tunnels.
Balancing its new independence against its old allegiances, Egypt is keeping all its commitments, including the peace treaty with Israel, Ambassador Bakhoum emphasized, and she said that it hoped to do a better job complying with some human rights protocols it had signed.
But she said that the blockade of the border with Gaza and Egypt’s previous enforcement of it were both “shameful,” and that Egypt intended soon to open up the border “completely.”
At the same time, she said, Egypt is also in the process of normalizing its relations with Iran, a regional power that the United States considers a dangerous pariah.
“All the world has diplomatic relations with Iran with the exception of the United States and Israel,” Ambassador Bakhoum said. “We look at Iran as a neighbor in the region that we should have normal relations with. Iran is not perceived as an enemy as it was under the previous regime, and it is not perceived as a friend.”
Does that look like the kind of “freedom & Democracy” our media were telling us about just a couple of months ago?
Does it make you wonder what happened to all those well-bred, well-fed, English-speaking idealists media sought out and interviewed in Tahrir Square during the protests? You know, the ones who were going to take over Egypt on the basis of their sterling personalities along with their facebook and twitter accounts.
How do you think this situation compares to the admittedly cold and tenuous, but sustained, 30 year peace that used to exist between Egypt and Israel – but clearly is in its death throes?
Do you think Egypt is a better place today than it was when Hosni Mubarak was Egypt’s head of state?
Do you think the Middle East is a safer place today than it was when Hosni Mubarak was Egypt’s head of state?
I’ve said it repeatedly over these months, but I have to say it again:Mubarak’s government may have been bad, but some alternatives are worse. A lot worse.
And that is where Egypt is right now, even if our media – the ones who perpetrated this starry-eyed “freedom & democracy” hoax – have skulked away and barely talk about it any more.
The next time these "journalists" build up a story or a cause, you would do well to remember how disconnected their Egypt reporting was from reality.
And you would also do well to remember what happened in Egypt the next time a "journalist" suggests that President Obama or Secretary of State Clinton have the slightest idea of what they are doing foreign policy-wise.
We have house guests today, who put on the royal wedding.
I caught a bit of the Today show, with Meredith Viera.
She was wearing what I suppose was a hat. But, so help me god, it looked like a squirrel on her head. Greyish, furry....lucky for her it didn't have a bladder problem.
Are you as bored by "news" of the royal wedding as I am?'
Based on the most recent CBS/New York Times poll, the answer is probably yes:
According to a New York Times/CBS poll, Americans aren’t interested in the much-hyped royal wedding that will be broadcast live on Friday.
According to that poll, only 6 percent have been following coverage of the wedding “very closely,” while only 22 percent are following it “somewhat closely.”
To our wonderful news media, which have obsessively reported just about everything related to the wedding, short of the color of Kate Middleton's wedding-day underwear..................
WHO CARES?
Thanks for listening (reading). I feel much better now.
UPDATE: It is morning in New Jersey, but afternoon in London. The wedding is on. And it is absolutely inescapable - every network and every cable news venue other than CNBC is carrying it live.
The royal wedding is going to take place in April, during the baseball season. If Mark Teixeira suddenly is put on the disabled list and is out of the Yankee lineup during the honeymoon? We have our answer!
Well, guess what? The Yankees played last night, and Mark Teixeira was not in the lineup!!!! Just enough time to catch a plane for the UK!!!!!!
Here's what Obama had to say during his post-birth certificate release press conference:
…two weeks ago, when the Republican House had put forward a budget that will have huge consequences potentially to the country, and when I gave a speech about my budget and how I felt that we needed to invest in education and infrastructure and making sure that we had a strong safety net for our seniors even as we were closing the deficit, during that entire week the dominant news story wasn’t about these huge, monumental choices that we’re going to have to make as a nation. It was about my birth certificate. And that was true on most of the news outlets that were represented here.
It's worth noting that the president's statement was factually inaccurate. The dominant news story during the week after his budget address was, as one might expect, the economy. In fact, the Obama administration only accounted for about four percent of media chatter during that week - behind unrest in the Middle East and natural disasters in Japan, in addition to the economy - and only a portion of that four percent had to do with his birth certificate.
That data was gathered by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, which also calculated those numbers for cable news coverage during that week. As quoted by Poynter:
MSNBC
including “The Ed Show,” “Hardball,” “The Last Word,” and “The Rachel Maddow Show”
- 28% of airtime studied was devoted to the 2012 election
- 10% of airtime studied was devoted to Obama
- A subset of that Obama airtime was coded “citizenship and religion rumors” to include “birther” coverage, which was 92% of the Obama coverage
Fox
including “Special Report w/Bret Baier,” “Fox Report w/Shepard Smith,” “The O’Reilly Factor,” “Hannity”
- 16% of airtime studied was devoted to 2012 election
- 5% of airtime studied was devoted to Obama
- A subset of that Obama airtime was coded “citizenship and religion rumors” to include “birther” coverage, which was 8% of the Obama coverage
CNN
including “The Situation Room,” “John King, USA,” “In The Arena,” and “Anderson Cooper 360″
- 11% of airtime studied was devoted to 2012 election
- 5% of airtime studied was devoted to Obama
- A subset of that Obama airtime was coded “citizenship and religion rumors” to include “birther” coverage, which was 100% of the Obama coverage.
Ace crunched the numbers and found the following breakdown of birther stories as a percentage of total coverage for each cable news channel:
- Fox News: 0.4 percent
- MSNBC: 9.2 percent
- CNN: 5 percent
MSNBC devoted 23 times as much airtime as Fox to cover the birther issue. CNN devoted 12.5 times as much. So, as mentioned above, one was 35.5 times more likely to see a birther story on Fox's competition than on FNC itself.
Hmmmmm.
That sort of blows the image of Fox as the primary force behind "birther" coverage, doesn't it?'
And who was pushing this fraudulent claim? Well, the Obama administration, of course. But also the exact same networks that, in reality, were saturation-covering the "birther" issue.
Then they wonder why more and more people call them biased. Then they wonder why more and more people do not take them seriously.
I just saw another email from Guy Cecil, of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. It is standard Democrat fare: Instead of solving the problem, create and demonize a bogeyman or two.
This time the issue is oil. And - hint, hint - the solution is not utilizing our vast domestic resources, it is.....well, here's the email. See for yourself:
Dear XXXXX,
Big Oil is profiting off the American people to the tune of billions.
We’re paying $4.09 a gallon so BP and ExxonMobil can earn massive profits and keep the mega-bonuses flowing for execs. Yet Senate Republicans still want to shovel huge tax breaks to Big Oil.
Medicare for seniors? Poor women who need prenatal care? Sorry, your funding is on the chopping block. But nobody better touch those Big Oil tax breaks.
Enough! The DSCC is organizing 100,000 Americans to tell Republicans exactly how they feel, and you need to add your voice right away.
You know BP's lobbyists are all over Capitol Hill getting Republican senators to support their talking points. The only way we end this nonsense is to organize a massive wave of grassroots anger and energy to end these tax breaks and end them now.
See the game? It isn't that we are grossly underusing our domestic oil resources. It is those big bad oil executives. So let's punish them, which not only will solve the energy crisis, it will solve the medicare crisis and give poor women prenatal care (Can Cecil possibly be implying that Planned Parenthood, the country's single most prolific abortion provider, is primarily a prenatal care venue?)
Let me ask you something: If every oil executive were denied every penny he or she gets in bonuses:
-Would it in any way alleviate the oil crisis?
-Would it in any way lower the pump price for gasoline?
-Would it in any way address the fact that we get about 60% of our oil from foreign countries, many of which hate our guts?
-Would it in any way encourage oil companies to increase domestic production?
If the answer to those questions is "no" - and it, of course is no - then Guy Cecil is full of crap. He is using the old "bogeyman" trick to try and make fools out of us.
I promise I won't let him do it to me. Don't you let him either.
PUBLIC SECTOR UNIONS: GRIM REALIZATION GOES BIPARTISAN
Ken Berwitz
It is hard to find a bluer state than Massachusetts. So what happens when the Democrats of deep-blue Massachusetts are forced to realistically deal with the runaway, impossible-to-continue, benefits enjoyed by the state's public sector unions?
Here is your answer, via the following excerpt from an article by John J. Monahan in yesterday's Worcester Telegram & Gazette:
BOSTON — Hundreds of police and firefighters from across the state swarmed around the entrance to the House Chamber at the Statehouse today, cheering lawmakers who opposed a budget amendment that would strip municipal unions of bargaining rights over health care, and complaining to those who backed the measure.
Having lost a battle in the House late last night to stop the so-called “plan design” authorization to allow cities and towns to unilaterally change health insurance coverage, co-payments and deductibles, union leaders said they would now carry the fight to the Senate.
While backers of the House budget amendment, including House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo, D-Winthrop, said the bargaining changes would allow cities and towns to save up to $100 million statewide, union leaders claimed they were willing to agree to those savings, without sacrificing cherished historic rights to bargain over wages and benefits.
Gov. Deval L. Patrick called on labor leaders to “dial down the rhetoric” and continue working on the legislation as it goes over the Senate.
“This is not Wisconsin. That is not what the House did. I am not going to sign a Wisconsin-type bill,” Mr. Patrick said at a press briefing in his office.
“In the end, we are going to have a meaningful role for labor, and we are going to deliver on the savings for municipalities,” the governor said.
Nice try, Governor Patrick. But no cee-gar.
Evidently you think the public sector unions in your state are comprised of dummies and ignoramuses, who can't figure out that you are doing exactly what was done in Wisconsin. You are removing some of their collective bargaining rights, instead of allowing the unions to agree to cost savings while keeping their collective bargaining rights intact.
It is called reality. And the grim reality is that, even in Massachussets, there is a limit to what public sector unions can have in a bad economy.
Truth be told, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker have a lot of common ground - even if it is political suicide for Governor Patrick to admit it.
OBAMA'S BIRTH CERTIFICATE: THE REPUBLICAN STRATEGY
Ken Berwitz
Yesterday, President Obama showed us what he purports to be his long-form birth certificate.
Let me start by saying that - at least according to numerous sites I have read (none of which I can personally vouch for, it should be noted) - there is a lot to question about this so-called birth certificate. Among the claims:
-It is not a "flat copy" (i.e. a simple scan of an existing document).If you know how to examine an adobe PDF file you will find that it has "layers" on it, suggesting that the original document had different information which subsequently was changed. That would not occur if the document had just been copied as-is;
-It lists Mr. Obama's father's race as "African", which while possibly a definition by 2011 standards, is not the terminology that would have been used in 1961. At that time he would have been identified as Negro or Negroid. It would be very helpful to find any other Black birth in Honolulu from that year to see what term was used, wouldn't it?;
-The birth certificate is out of numerical sequence. It is numbered 61 10641, but a birth certificate has been found from August 5, 1961, a day later, with a lower number:61 10637 (see for yourself). How could that be?;
-Etc. (yes, there are more issues. I'm just listing a few).
The bottom line, therefore, is that what Mr. Obama showed us a) does not end the issue, and b) actually makes the circumstances of his birth even more questionable than they already were.
Now, what should Republicans do about it?
It is clear that Republican leaders want to drop this like a hot potato. They feel it is a bad issue, one which makes them look like they are less interested in presenting alternative ways of addressing the country's problems than they are in whining "no fair".
Unfortunately, however exasperating it is that Mr. Obama may be an illegitimate President, they are right.
If Republicans as a party (not individuals who are, of course, free to pursue this any way they can) subordinate their views on how the country should be governed to a wild goose chase aimed at un-electing Barack Obama, they will look ridiculous and will lose rather than gain support.
Is that awful? Completely unfair? Absolutely yes and absolutely yes. But, like it or not, that is the way of things.
So the Republican strategy, it seems to me, should be twofold:
-The party should declare that, while serious questions remain about the veracity of Mr. Obama's birth certificate, it is not worth years more of trying to "prove" that he had no right to be President.The time is better spent on addressing his disastrous legislative program and inept, incompetent, damaging “foreign policy” (if you can even call it a policy).
-Republicans should also intensely attack President Obama for not releasing his birth certificate until now. They should tell voters that he - not them, but he - caused this issue to fester. All he had to do was show the document years ago, and the issue would have ended.They should position it as another egregious example of Mr. Obama’s bad judgment.In other words, put Barack Obama on the defensive and force media to ask how come he waited all this time to do it.
But once that point is made? Let it go.
If, in the future, some entity, outside of the Republican Party, makes an unassailable case that the birth certificate is fake, that would change things. But unless and until that happens?Swallow hard and move on.
If you read this blog, you certainly know I am 100% supportive of gay rights, and of gays to be married (or in civil unions, if you prefer) with the same rights as heterosexuals.
With that in mind, I will now provide a link to a report at pajamasmedia.com, about an "Easter celebration" enthusiastically enjoyed by part (not all, I assure you) of San Francisco's gay population.
It is appalling. It is disgusting. It is full of hatred. It should make any decent person sick, regardless of sexual orientation.
If you have a very strong stomach,click hereto experience this sick-fest in all its "glory" - along with a clever little twist in how it is described, which you'll understand if you use my link..
Warning: The images are exceedingly graphic and exceedingly blasphemous.
The sick bastards who put this "show" on should (but won't) be ashamed of themselves. But I hope they are happy with their contribution to religious hatred.
And I hope they understand that the next time there is an attack on members of the gay population, the sick filth they are spewing here just might be a contributing factor.
Mr. Wexler was a perpetually angry hard-left congressperson from Southern Florida -- until one day he suddenly resigned his safer-than-safe seat and disappeared from elective politics.
Why did he do that? Maybe this excerpt of a story in the Miami Herald will help to explain. The bold print is mine:
An aide and fundraiser to former Congressman Robert Wexler has pleaded guilty to providing false information to the Internal Revenue Service about a $15,000 kickback she received for a controversial real estate investment by the South Florida Democrat’s campaign.
Daniella Howard, 44, of Pompano Beach, was sentenced by a federal judge to serve one year on probation and pay the government $3,200 in restitution. She could have drawn up to a year in prison and a fine of $10,000 on the misdemeanor charge.
Howard still faces possible civil tax penalties, according to charging documents.
Prosecutors kept Howard’s case low-key and moved it swiftly through the court system. Charges were filed on April 11, a Monday. By Friday, April 15, Howard’s plea was taken and a judge had pronounced sentence. No press release was issued by the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Authorities would not answer questions about the case, or say whether the joint FBI/IRS money laundering investigation that led to the criminal charge against Howard is now concluded.
Wexler, a self-described “fire-breathing liberal” whose district included parts of Broward and Palm Beach counties, surprised the political world in October 2009 when he announced that he was quitting his politically safe seat in Congress to take a job as president of a Washington-based Middle East think tank founded by Slim-Fast founder S. Daniel Abraham. His final day was Jan. 2, 2010.
Wexler could not be reached for comment.
In November, Broward Bulldog reported that Wexler stepped down after federal agents interviewed at least four persons about his campaign’s unconventional $150,000 investment in the same real estate deal that has now led to Howard’s guilty plea.
Do you wonder, as I do, if Wexler stepped down because federal prosecutors were getting too close to his involvement in this "real estate deal"?
How could you not?
I certainly hope Mr. Wexler eventually will be reached for comment. I'd love to hear it.
Here is the latest in the continuing series detailing Democrat and left wing (often one and the same) "civility".
This is the beginning of an email sent out today under James Carville's name. The subject is "Idiocy".
Dear XXX,
You know Republicans. Give ’em an inch and they’ll take billions in tax cuts for the wealthy.
So far, they’ve tried to kill Medicare, scrap health care reform and gut clean energy investments. Why? To give big, fat tax cuts to billionaires and corporations.
Democrats can block this idiocy in the Senate, for now. But Republicans only need 4 seats for the majority. If they get them, then guess what? Tax breaks for billionaires, a defunded Planned Parenthood, and the end of Medicare could become a reality.
Funny thing: The same media that jumped all over every example of Republican incivility, real or imagined, seem never to have a problem with this kind of rhetoric when it emanates from the other side of the aisle.
If this spurs someone to take a potshot at a Republican - maybe a Paul Ryan, who has proposed major changes in Medicare - will these media immediately condemn the tidal wave of such rhetoric that has been aimed at him (Carville's email is the latest example, but far from the only one)?
Or will they assure us that, no, they're not biased at all?
Evidently the heat was becoming unbearable and they had to do something (with thanks to Donald Trump, who I'm not a big fan of but was clearly instrumental here, and to Jerome Corsi, whose new book on the subject will get a huge sales boost from what you are about to read).
Suddenly, out of nowhere, we have a long form birth certificate.
I will wait a day or two for people more knowledgeable than me to scrutinize this document, which has magically appeared after years of zealously being guarded during which time we occasionally were told it didn't even exist.
But, as of now, am I suspicious? Yes.
If tyhe birth certificate were presented two years ago I probably would not have been. But now, only after all this time and only after the issue became too hot to continue stonewalling? That is pretty opportune, wouldn't you say?
Look, I am not claiming the birth certificate is a phony. But what I am saying is that the circumstances under which it has materialized out of thin air make its veracity less than convincing.
What an amazing coincidence. Hawaii suddenly puts a lid on getting this kind of birth certificate - i.e. even someone requesting his/her own birth certificate now cannot have it - and, just two days later, Barack Obama shows us what he claims is his original birth certificate (the one we were told didn't even exist), with absolutely no way to check it. If that doesn't raise red flags, I give up.
FYI: Here is what I wrote about the birth certificate issue on July 28, 2009 - almost two years ago. I stand by it now:
BARACK OBAMA'S ORIGINAL BIRTH CERTIFICATE: DR. FUKINO'S NEW STATEMENT
Ken Berwitz
"One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to show you a brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. Then this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of this brand-new deck of cards and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do not accept this bet, because as sure as you stand there, you're going to wind up with an ear full of cider": Guys & Dolls: Sky Masterson, relating his father's advice about making bets.
When there were a bunch of going-nowhere lawsuits, but no likelihood that any of them would result in Barack Obama's original birth certificate being made public, the Director of Hawaii's Department of Health, Dr. Chiyome Fukino, issued this statement:
"There have been numerous requests for Sen. Barack Hussein Obama’s official birth certificate. State law (Hawai‘i Revised Statutes §338-18) prohibits the release of a certified birth certificate to persons who do not have a tangible interest in the vital record"
"Therefore, I as Director of Health for the State of Hawai‘i, along with the Registrar of Vital Statistics who has statutory authority to oversee and maintain these type of vital records, have personally seen and verified that the Hawai‘i State Department of Health has Sen. Obama’s original birth certificate on record in accordance with state policies and procedures"
As you can see, Dr. Fukino said that Barack Obama's original birth certificate is on record in accordance with state policies and procedures. She did not say that it shows Barack Obama is eligible to be President of the United States.
Since Mr. Obama's eligibility was the only reason anyone was clamoring for a look at his original birth certificate, I conclude Dr. Fukino intentionally worded her response to make it seem as though this issue was addressed, without actually saying one way or the other.
If so, it certainly worked. Countless talking heads have claimed her statement ended the eligibility issue, even though it clearly did not.
But now that mainstream people are increasingly insistent (have increasingly been embarrassed into acknowledging) that the issue remains unresolved, and are wondering out loud why the birth certificate is being hidden at all costs, Dr. Fukino has made another statement:
“I, Dr. Chiyome Fukino, director of the Hawai’i State Department of Health, have seen the original vital records maintained on file by the Hawai’i State Department of Health verifying Barrack Hussein Obama was born in Hawai’i and is a natural-born American citizen. I have nothing further to add to this statement or my original statement issued in October 2008 over eight months ago ... “
Based on this new statement, I no longer believe there is any value to seeing Barack Obama's original birth certificate. Because as sure as you stand there, the document Dr. Fukino produces will say exactly what she is now claiming.
ADDENDUM: It just hit me: I am not predicting this. But:
-If in the near future Barack Obama - who spent a fortune over the past year to hide his original birth certificate - comes out with something along the lines of "Look, I've tried not to do this because I know I'm natural born and the whole thing was so silly, but since it isn't ending I'm instructing Dr. Fukino to release my original birth certificate, then I don't want to hear about this again"...
-...and an original materializes that confirms he is natural born, which he could just as easily have shown us all this time...
-...I will smell a rat from here to Seattle (and I live in New Jersey).
My only regret? That I didn't state it as an actual prediction.
1. A number of internet sites are already claiming President Obama's "birth certificate" has been altered. I cannot speak for any of the sites making this claim - yet - but the people doing so clearly have more knowledge of how to manipulate a PDF file than I do (that's not exactly an accomplishment) and seem very certain of what they are saying. Click hereto see one such site, again keeping in mind that I am not able to vouch for its credibility.
2. Note to dailycaller.com, which declared Jerome Corsi a "loser" because the birth certificate would make his book "Where's The Birth Certificate" irrelevant: As I write this, almost 7 hours after the birth certificate was made public, Mr. Corsi's book is #37 on Amazon's best-seller list. And it isn't even out yet (its publish date is May 17).
That doesn't suggest people think of it as irrelevant. Or, if it does, I wish people considered my book just as irrelevant.
FURTHER UPDATE: It is now 7:30AM on Thursday - a day after Mr. Obama's release of what he purports to be his long-form birth certificate (more on this later, as a separate blog).
Here is how Jerome Corsi's book, "Where is the Birth Certificate?", is doing on Amazon:
Would you like to see how newly-elected congressperson Alan West handles a small group of hecklers who attended his town hall meeting, apparently positioned themselves at different locations in the hall, and attempted to disrupt the meeting any way they could?
Here is the video (if you have trouble seeing it, click here). It is a classic - not only in how Mr. West handles this distasteful situation, but how one of the hecklers tries one standard "I'm not the problem, I'm the aggrieved party" tactic after another when she is prevented from her intended disruption.
I especially like the part, at about 1:17 when, after West has and the audience (those who came to actually hear what he had to say, that is) had endured the disruptions and provocations for a period of time, he says "I'm just going to tell you this. You're not going to intimidate me". The audience spontaneously erupts with a wildly enthusiastic, prolonged round of cheering and applauding. It is great.
And much thanks to the police for handling the disruption - especially the disrupter noted earlier - with consummate professionalism. I don't know how they did it.
Alan West is not some career politico. He is a military man who has faced combat and risen through the ranks. Did these obnoxious, crude, rude and obvious weenies really think they could get the better of him? Not a chance.
West rose up tall, while they looked small.
We are lucky to have a man like Alan West in congress.
NOTE: As commenter "zeke" has correctly pointed out, the female heckler who was removed, and who worked so hard to create an incident, was Nicole Sandler.
Ms. Sandler used to have a show on Air America (which, given Air America's ratings, might explain her apparent lack of comfort interacting with several hundred people). These days, she toils for something called radioornot.com (not what you'd call a great leap forward).
If you view the above video, and then look at the picture of Ms. Sandler at radioornot.com, you may note that there appears to be a near-generational age difference. A little like putting up a picture of Yul Brynner with hair. In fairness, a lot of entertainment people do the same, so she gets a free pass on that one.
Additionally, Ms. Sandler sometimes fills in for Randi Rhodes - another radio personality with a near-moribund career who is no stranger to brushes with the law. Make of it what you will.
If you get the idea that Nicole Sandler does not impress me, you just may be onto something.....
This blog is for anyone who still harbors even the slightest hope that the state of Hawaii (now governed by hard-left Obama toady neil abercrombie) will allow anyone to see Barack Obama's original birth certificate. (I don't mean the "Certification of Live Birth", which so many of our wonderful "neutral" media have lied about by claiming it is his birth certificate, I mean the birth certificate itself. )
Bob Unruh of worldnetdaily.com has written an excellent piece about this, complete with copious documentation. I hope you click on the link I'm providing, read every word and look at every supporting document. But, for now, please read this excerpt to see how completely Hawaii is putting a lid on Mr. Obama's past:
Hawaii slams door on birth certificates
2 days before Trump questions, no problem getting long-form document. Today, no way
With billionaire and possible GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump ratcheting interest in Barack Obama's Hawaiian birth documentation to its highest level ever, the State of Hawaii is suddenly enforcing a policy that no one – not even the president of the United States – can obtain a copy of his own birth certificate from the state's Department of Health.
Although the policy of denying the public access to copies of long-form original hospital birth certificates was announced in 2001, it wasn't enforced for years. But with Trump's recent pointed questioning of the circumstances of Obama's birth – and whether he was even born in America – Hawaii officials have apparently determined that the long-overlooked state procedure now requires enforcement.
Since then, Trump has been on a talk show tour suggesting he might run for president in 2012 and saying if Obama is not eligible, it's one of the biggest hoaxes ever. He even suggested the 44th president's tenure in the White House could be "illegal."
The controversy points directly back to the state of Hawaii, where officials previously have maintained they have viewed Obama's birth "records," but have steadfastly refused to disclose what they say or even in what form those records exist. Nor has Obama been willing to seek the information and release it himself; in fact, he's dispatched both private and tax-paid attorneys to fend off dozens of court cases across the country to make certain his records are kept secret.
Let me reiterate what I have been blogging for years: the time to have found out about President Obama's eligibility was before he ran for the presidency, won and took office. If he is not legally President, the consequences start at catastrophic and go downward from there. Does it mean that every piece of legislation requiring the President's signature is null and void? Every executive order? What about his military decisions as commander in chief? Etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.
Let me also say that the so-called "birther" issue is almost certainly a loser for Republicans, who (unfairly) have been tarred as right wing, vindictive, mindless idiots for daring to ask that Barack Obama simply prove he is who and what he says he is. In this regard, it should be remembered that Mr. Obama's birth certificate is far from the only documentation being withheld. So are his school records, passport information, any explanation of why his social security number is within the sequence that should have come from Connecticut (where Mr. Obama never lived or worked) instead of Hawaii or Illinois, and plenty more.
But what does any of this have to do with media seeking out the truth about Barack Obama, whatever it might be?
Regardless of its timing, and regardless of the political consequences, aren't media supposed to be finding, and reporting, the truth?
Well, the truth here is that our media - a media which had no problem working triple-overtime to investigate whether President Bush missed a few meaningless national guard meetings in the early 1970's - have almost completely abrogated their journalistic responsibilities in an effort to shield President Obama's past from scrutiny.
Ironically, if you believe anything Barack Obama says (which, I admit, is an issue unto itself), he doesn't need to contact Hawaii at all to provide his original birth certificate. He already has it.
From page 26 of his own book, "Dreams of my Father", Mr. Obama writes:
“I discovered this article, folded away among my birth certificate and old vaccination forms, when I was in high school.”
In other words, Barack Obama mentioned, in passing, that he already has the long form birth certificate in his possession.
Do you think one or another of our intrepid, ever-vigilant media might ask him to provide it? After all, if you believe Mr. Obama, it does nothing but reiterate what he has already told us about himself, right?
The fact that, through over two years of controversy they have not done so, tells us all we need to know about the state of media in this country. And of how far most of them are willing to go to protect him from even the most nominal scrutiny.
This is the beginning of an interview segment on MSNBC the Sunday before last.I don’t want it to go unnoticed:
“Health care, job discrimination, education,equality across the board. Everything that you have done in your career has been for equality.Has been for opportunity for all.”:Ed Schultz, fawning over career racist, Black supremacist and anti-Semite al sharpton.
Does cable news have a dumber man with a bigger mouth than Ed Schultz?
BARACK OBAMA'S BROKEN PROMISE TO UNEMPLOYED BLACK CITIZENS
Ken Berwitz
I don't often agree with USA Today columnist DeWayne Wickham. And, truth be told, I don't agree with all of his latest column, which I am excerpting below.
But credit where credit is due. Within that column, Mr. Wickham has hit on some very painful truths which this country - particularly its Black citizens - has to deal with, regarding the difference between what Mr. Obama promised to do about unemployment and what actually has happened.
Here is the excerpt. See what you think (the bold print is mine):
"(From a speech in July, 2007:) "Today's economy has made it easier to fall into poverty. … Every American is vulnerable to the insecurities and anxieties of this new economy. And that's why the single most important focus of my economic agenda as president will be to pursue policies that create jobs and make work pay," Obama said that day to his mostly black audience.
At that time, the nation's overall unemployment rate was 4.7%. Whites had a jobless rate of 4.2% while the black unemployment rate stood at 8.1%. Today, the black rate is 15.5%, nearly double that of white job-seekers.
I don't blame Obama for the economic conditions that are responsible for so many blacks being out of work. The seeds of this problem were planted long before he moved into the Oval Office. But I do fault him for not doing more to fix this problem.
The poor in urban America, he said in that 2007 speech, "suffer most from a politics that has been tipped in favor of those with the most money, and influence, and power." And then he asked rhetorically, "How can a country like this allow it?" To which he answered, "We can't."
But so far, under his leadership, he has allowed it.
Finding work for the jobless is the best anti-poverty program this nation can mount. But while the Obama administration spends $608 million during the first 17 days of its involvement in Libya's civil war — it can muster neither the money nor the will to combat black unemployment.
The president's failure to fight this problem as vigorously as he wages war abroad gets a pass from black leaders, many of whom complain to me privately but remain silent in public.
I certainly agree with DeWayne Wickham -- as far as he goes. But he is letting others off the hook.
Let's remember that, for two years, until just a few months ago, President Obama also had huge Democrat majorities in both houses of congress. And, because of those majorities, he was able to pass the so-called "stimulus package", which was supposed to lead us - Black and White both -to some kind of economic "Promised Land".
Did that happen? No it did not. The only place it has led us to so far is "Impossible, Unsustainable Deficitland". After three trillion-dollar-plus budgets, unemployment is still higher than when the so-called "stimulus package" was enacted.
Thank you, Mr. Wickham, for your honesty. It is not easy to be this candid about someone you so clearly root for.
And thanks, also, for acknowledging how many other leaders (not just Blacks either) cannot bring themselves to muster a similar level of honesty about this disastrous presidency.
BARACK OBAMA BORN IN THE USA? THE PEOPLE ARE NOT BUYING IT.
Ken Berwitz
The following is excerpted from an article by Susan Page in today's USA Today. Please keep in mind that the headline ("What kind of president would Donald Trump Make") has nothing to do with what is being excerpted, and you would have to read down to the 8th paragraph - and past a dishonest evaluation of what the poll data actually say - to even find it, let alone have a chance to grasp its meaning.
Here are the 6th, 7th and 8th paragraphs of the article:
Though Trump initially got attention by expressing doubts whether Obama was born in the USA, that issue is not driving his support. Among those who say they definitely or might vote for Trump, only about a third question whether the president was born in the USA.
Support from the “birthers” is stronger for Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney. The issue has persisted even though Hawaii has released an official Certificate of Live Birth showing Obama was born there, a fact confirmed in non-partisan investigations by FactCheck.org and others.
Still, in the USA TODAY poll, only 38% of Americans say Obama definitely was born in the USA, and 18% say he probably was. Fifteen percent say he probably was born in another country, and 9% say he definitely was born elsewhere.
Ms. Page must think you and I have the reading comprehension and analytical skills of rutabagas.
The data say that 38% believe President Obama definitely was born in the USA. The rest have at least some level of doubt (that's what "probably" instead of "definitely" means, Susan), think he "probably" or "definitely was born elsewhere, or are too ambivalent about it to come to a conclusion.
Let me put it a different way, to make it as plain as possible. 62% of the sample is not convinced Barack Obama was born in the United States.
Now let's think about this some more: Republicans comprise far less than 62% of the population, so it is not just Republicans expressing doubts. The sample is far less than 62% supportive of Donald Trump, so it is not just Trump fans expressing doubts.
What do these findings tell us? They tell us that the "birthers" who mainstream media have sneered at and worked so hard to ridicule/marginalize, a) are plentiful, b) transcend party lines, and c) remain unconvinced.
Their doubts exist, I would surmise, because of the proverbial 800 gorilla in the middle of the road: namely that Mr. Obama and his people have zealously withheld not only his original long-form birth certificate, but just about every other piece of information that would give us any clue regarding his background, whether he got foreign aid to go to school, etc. etc. etc.
When Barack Obama tells us he is not hiding a thing about his past, but then hides everything about his past, it stands to reason that people will be suspicious. A lot of them. Even if the Susan Page's and other mainstream media protectors of Mr. Obama try everything they can to convince us otherwise.
So keep burying those data, Ms. Page. And keep writing phony analyses of what the data say. Most of us may not be buying what you're selling, but at least you're doing what you apparently think to be your job.
And feel free to squeal like a stuck pig if someone (like me, for example) calls you biased.........
Despite the AP's ridiculous claims about Egyptian "moderation", it does get a modicum of credit for at least publishing somethine about this horror show, however unacquainted it is with reality.
The bold print is mine:
CAIRO – A majority of Egyptians believe laws in their country should observe the teachings of Islam's holy book, the Quran, according to the results of an opinion poll by a U.S.-based research center.
Overall, the results of the poll paint a picture of Egyptians as a people who prefer religious moderation over extremism and prize democratic values even if they come at the risk of some political instability.
Islamic parties are expected to make a significant showing in the crucial vote, with 50 percent of people saying it was "very important" for religious parties to be part of a future government and as much 37 percent have a "very favorable" view of the Muslim Brotherhood, the country's largest and best organized Islamic group.
Another 62 percent of Egyptians believe laws in their country should strictly follow the teachings of the Quran, though 27 percent thought it was enough that the laws reflect Islam's general values and principles.
In a result that doesn't bode well for the country's lingering sectarian issues, the poll showed that only 36 percent of those questioned believe it is "very important" for Christians and other minorities to freely practice their religions, suggesting the influence of these militant groups, who have incited hatred of the country's 10 percent Christian minority.
The poll results also showed that more than half of all Egyptians would like to see the 1979 peace agreement with Israel annulled, highlighting the deep unpopularity of the treaty, which is central to U.S. policy in the region and was scrupulously adhered to by Mubarak.
Former presidential candidate Ayman Nour trailed with a 70 percent rating while Nobel Prize Laureate and reform leader Mohamed ElBaradei only had 57 percent rating.
The United States, Egypt's strongest foreign backer since the mid-1970s, continued to garner low approval ratings, with only 20 percent of Egyptians seeing it in a positive light, up from 17 percent in 2010.
Help me out here. How can these data "paint a picture of Egyptians as a people who prefer religious moderation over extremism", when:
-62% believe Egypt should become a strictly Islamic state,
-Almost 2/3 do not consider it very important that non-Islamic people have religious freedom, and
-A majority want to end Egypt's peace with neighboring Israel.
Does that look like moderation to you?
Does that look like the "freedom and democracy" our media assured us was afoot when those protesters filled Tahrir Square?
And why are almost all our media ignoring what is going on in Egypt?
Can it possibly be that they are in protect-Obama-at-all-costs mode?
Nah, that couldn't be. They'd never do that............
If you are wondering why some folks are starting to question whether a college education is worth the cost, the video below goes a long way towards explaining it. Recently, the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL) and the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) sponsored two college courses: Introduction to Labor Studies and Labor Politics and Society, to be taught simultaneously through a video conference between to two campuses. (if you have trouble seeing the video, just click here):
The Professors are Judy Ancel, Director of Labor Studies at UMKC and Don Giljum, business manager for the International Union of Operating Engineers at Ameren UE in St. Louis. (Bonus: he is a member of the Communist Party.)
In the class, the Professors not only advocate the occasional need for violence and industrial sabotage, they outline specific tactics that can be used. As one of our colleagues pointed out, its the matter-of-factness of it all that is so disturbing.
And yes, the schools, and the professors’ salaries, are funded by taxpayers.
If you consider a crash course on how to utilize violence in the name of the union movement to be tax money well spent, this should please you no end.
But if you find it another appalling demonstration of what "education" has sunk to in some colleges, you will feel a lot differently.
The late Gilda Radner's classic Saturday Night Live character, Roseanne Rosannadanna used to say (paraphrased) "If it isn't one thing, it's another".
Republicans who care about the quality of candidate they field in 2012 must feel that way today. No sooner does the unasked-for, thoroughly unelectable Haley Barbour announce he will not run for the Presidency, the unaacceptable, thoroughly execrable ron paul makes it clear he will.
Rather than rewriting the reasons I feel this way, I will repost my blog of April 14th, 2010- which, in turn, references my blog of December 21, 2007. The points I made at those times, which are every bit as true now as they were then, will give you the full picture:
RON PAUL AND THE 2012 PRESIDENTIAL RACE
Ken Berwitz
I have good news and bad news about the 2012 presidential race:
-The good news is that there is a Republican challenger who, if you believe the latest Rasmussen poll, is running virtually even with President Obama.
-The bad news is that the challenger is the single most objectionable Republican I am aware of - the hate-filled darling of White supremacists and neo-nazis (often one and the same), ron paul.
I blogged a lot about ron paul during the 2008 primary season. I talked about the fact that he was supported by the White power, neo-nazi crazies of "stormfront" (its web site literally had a link to donate money to paul -- one that he never disavowed). I cited the newsletter that went out under his name which was so sickeningly anti-Black. And more; a lot more.
Illustratively, here is a letter I wrote the now-defunct New York Sun about paul:
It is eating me alive that almost no one is talking about the sickening group of nazis and white supremacists that ron paul attracts, or the reasons they are atrracted to him.
Do you support ron paul? Congratulations. So does a voluminous list of nazis and White supremacists, including (but not limited to) david duke, hal turner, don black, jamie kelso, hutton gibson (Mel's looney-tune holocaust denying father) and those wonderful folks at www.stormfront.org, whose home page provides you with a convenient link to donate to the paul campaign.
ron paul has never disavowed one penny from stormfront.org nor said he would refuse it. Are you comfortable with this? Is this the candidate you would support?
Did you know that, last year, paul voted against re-authorizing the 1965 voting rights act? Did you know that he also voted against the house resolution condemning hezbollah?
Did you know that, at one time, paul published a newsletter which contained overtly racist material in it which, among other things,called 95% of all Blacks in WashingtonDC criminals and advocated trying 13 year old Black children as adults? Years later, he claimed he wasn't the writer of that material, that someone else wrote it. But that doesn't wash; the newsletter was all of 8 pages long and went out under his own name. Even if he didn't write the words themselves he allowed them to be published under his name. You know better than to think he wasn't aware of the content of an 8 page document he'd be responsible for. Personally, I assume he wrote the racist garbage himself.
paul also had columns published by "American Free Press" which is put out by willis carto. Do yourself a favor; google the name "willis carto" and see who he is. If you have any decency at all, you'll be sick to your stomach. While it can be argued that carto was able to publish ron paul's material without his ok, it is also true that paul could have publicly disavowed its presence in "American Free Press". He has never done so.
Bottom line: There are good reasons for nazis and White supremacists to flock to ron paul. You support him and you support them and their reasons. That's how they'll position it, and they have a point.
If all this is ok with you, congratulations again. If not, I suggest you think harder about ron paul.
It would not at all surprise me if ron paul made another presidential run in 2012. And it would not at all surprise me if the same hate groups and assorted nutcakes and freaks came running to support him again.
I can only hope that the information posted above is blasted all over our media so that people understand who and what he is.
We need ron paul about as much as we need an advanced bowel virus. And the bowel virus would have a better smell.
That says it all.
If Republicans are smart (some are, some aren't), they will quickly and decisively send ron paul back under the rock he crawled out from.
Does Donald Trump know something about Barack Obama's academic history, or is he bluffing, to smoke Mr. Obama out and force him to either produce his academic records or explain why he won't?
Excerpted from Beth Fouhy's piece for NBC News:
Manhattan real estate mogul Donald Trump suggested in an interview Monday that President Barack Obama had been a poor student who did not deserve to be admitted to the Ivy League universities he attended. Trump, who is mulling a bid for the Republican presidential nomination, offered no proof for his claim but said he would continue to press the matter as he has the legitimacy of the president's birth certificate.
"I heard he was a terrible student, terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?" Trump said in an interview with The Associated Press. "I'm thinking about it, I'm certainly looking into it. Let him show his records."
What if?
What if Barack Obama was, in fact, a lousy student whose academic record could not have gotten him into Harvard? Then you have to question how he did get it, and you have to question how he managed to become the editor of the Harvard Law Review (without one published piece of any kind that we have ever seen). That would stink to high heaven.
And what if, regardless of academic achievement, his records show him to have received foreign aid, which he would not have been eligible for unless he declared himself a citizen of the country that provided it?
Let me again point out that I don't know whether Donald Trump is onto something or is just trying to smoke Mr. Obama out.
But I do know that our supposedly neutral media should have demanded the answers to those "what if" questions long before Barack Obama was elected President. It is a disgrace and a travesty that they were so enchanted by Mr. Obama that most of them intentionally looked the other way.
My last "what if" is the killer: what if we find out, after the fact, that Barack Obama is not a legal President, and that every action he has ordered and every bill he has signed is therefore meaningless?
Haley Barbour, today, announced he will not seek the Republican nomination for President of the United States.
My guess is that this news severely disappointed.......Democrats throughout the country. And that audible sound you heard was Republicans collectively yawning.
Now, I suspect, they are hoping Newt Gingrich, another "candidate" no one but himself is interested in, will follow suit.
Yeah, I know. I've asked this a couple of times already. But it needs to be asked again.
When President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton immersed us in the Libya mess (submerged is more like it), we were told that it was being done for strictly humanitarian purposes, and there would be bombing for "a matter of days, not weeks" (something our wonderful "neutral" media have never get around to calling him on. Would they have done the same for President Bush? Did they do the same for President Bush?)
Now, as the "matter of days" has become weeks and months, we see that the same thing is happening in Syria - i.e. a head of state is willing to kill as many of his own people as it takes to stay in power.
But in this instance we do nothing.
Roger Simon has written a mostly excellent piece on this subject (though I do not at all like his generalization about "liberals", which I have exorcised from the first paragraph). Here is how he begins:
...it was only weeks ago that Hillary Clinton was calling Bashar al-Assad a “reformer” and Vogue magazine was proclaiming his wife a “rose in the desert.”
As we know, and the horrific videos from Syria on PJM show conclusively (they look like living versions of Goya’s The Third of May ), the ophthalmologist is as much a reformer as Josef Mengele and Asma as much a rose as Eva Braun.
Since his father Hafez brutally imposed his will over Syria in the Hama massacre, the Assads have been a family of secular fascist torturers and murderers in league with religious fascist torturers and murders in Lebanon (Hezbollah), Gaza (Hamas), and Iran (the mullahs), not to mention North Korea (also secular). They assassinate democratically elected foreign leaders (Hariri), encourage and facilitate global terrorism, and shoot as many of their own people as necessary to maintain power while exploiting the best of their country’s resources for personal gain. In other words, pure evil.
Nothing new there — yet, for some reason, our liberal leadership and their media allies were never able to acknowledge fully something so obvious. Always — as Obama did with Ahmadinejad while the Iranian democracy demonstrators were being shot in their streets and tortured in prison cells — they sought to reason with despotism. Or, more likely, pretended to do so because it was all game for the aggrandizement of the self, for image. The policy itself never made sense.
When the Middle East street started to rebel, our government had no plan. They didn’t know what to do about Egypt and then went into Libya willy-nilly when things started to look bad. So now we are left with the odd situation where Gaddafi — clearly also a murderous sociopathic dictator — is despot number one, with NATO intervening and the U.S. providing Predators, while Assad, demonstrably a much more active and dangerous enemy of the U.S. and its allies, is merely verbally chastised by our president and secretary of State.
Something wrong here?
Yep.
We go after moammar qaddafi - dishonestly ("matter of days", huh?), ineptly (he's still there, isn't he?) with no clear objectives and no clue as to who "the rebels" are, other than that they hate qaddafi, but have an apparent affinity for al-qaeda.
And Syria? bashar al-assad, who kills his own people with gleeful abandon, gets nothing more than a strongly worded statement from Mr. Obama and Ms. Clinton which, if he paid attention to it at all, probably perforated it for use after his next meal.
Is Syria less a "humanitarian" situation than Libya?
Either they changed the definition of "humanitarianism" the day al-assad started his reign of terror, or the premise that we bombed Libya for humanitarian purposes was, like so many other things Obama & Co. tell us, an absolute lie.
The price for a gallon of gasoline in Chicago is now the highest in the nation.
According to the Lundberg survey, the average price for a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline in Chicago now stands at $4.27–a 12 cent increase in the past two weeks. And that’s just the average. Several stations in Chicago were selling gasoline for between $4.60 and $4.70 a gallon, According to chicagogasprices.com.
Given President Obama's connection to Chicago, this may be consolation - albeit small consolation - to some people. Maybe you are one of them.
Me? I wish no ill to Chicago at all. I just want Mr. Obama to stop preventing the USA from exploiting its own resources.
Suppose I told you that, in the eyes of the Obama administration, a company can only build a plant in states where it is forced to hire union workers, and that it is illegal to build the plant in states where it is not forced to do so. Would you believe that possible?
Well, you better. Because it not only is possible, it is happening.
In perhaps one of the Obama administration’s most transparent efforts to burnish its pro-union credentials for the 2012 election, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is suing the Boeing Corporation, claiming its effort to move some of its 787 Dreamliner production from Everett, Washington to its $750 million aircraft plant in North Charleston, South Carolina represents “unfair labor practices.” South Carolina is a “right-to-work” state, whereas Washington remains a union stronghold of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW). The NLRB claims Boeing’s move is “retaliation” for a series of IAMAW strikes between 1989 and 2008. Boeing says it will ”vigorously contest” the lawsuit, and a June 14th hearing in Seattle has been scheduled.
“A worker’s right to strike is a fundamental right guaranteed by the National Labor Relations Act,” said NLRB acting general counsel Lafe Solomon in a statement released Wednesday. “We also recognize the rights of employers to make business decisions based on their economic interests, but they must do so within the law.” J. Michael Luttig, Boeing’s general counsel disagreed: “This claim is legally frivolous and represents a radical departure from both NLRB and Supreme Court precedent,” he countered.
If you like insanity, this article should put you in seventh heaven. A Boeing has been told it has to restrict its manufacturing to places where workers belong to a union. It cannot manufacture in a state with "right to work" laws.
This, in the severely compromised eyes of the Obama NLRB, is somehow fair.
-Is it fair to the workers in "right to work" states, who the NLRB is shutting out of employment? Is it fair that they are being told by the United States government that they must either join a union and pay union dues, or not work at all? Can this possibly be constitutional?
-Is it fair to Boeing, which, due to the significantly higher labor costs, will have to charge more for its Dreamliners and therefore be less price competitive versus other plane manufacturers? Is it good for the union workers if this results in fewer orders? Maybe the closing of the plant altogether? Is it good for the US economy? Or...will the NLRB "solve" the problem by forcing Boeing to keep the same number of workers regardless of how many Dreamliner orders the company gets?
Not long ago, I was blogging about the fact that almost 1,200 waivers were issued so that companies and unions could avoid giving employees ObamaCare (which, we were told, was so superior to the alternatives that everyone would want it). We discussed the fact that a hugely disproportionate number of the waivers were handed to unions - so they could avoid "desirable" ObamaCare, while the rest of us were stuck with it.
And now we have this.
Ok, Mr. Obama and fellow Democrats. We get it. In your world, unions are a favored, protected species. And as long as unions keep supplying Democrats with the money and organizing manpower to get votes, that isn't going to change. We understand that one hand dirties the other (I hesitate to use the phrase "one hand washes the other" because it connotes something clean).
Now, tell me: Where are our wonderful "neutral" media on this? Is it not a major story? Why is it not on, or near, the front page, and either the lead story, or one of the major stories, on network news?
Oh, wait. This is the OBAMA administration, not the BUSH administration. Sorry, I forgot.
Question: What do you do about a tax policy that is hurting your state?
Answer: Make it a tax policy that hurts everyone else too.
Excerpted from Patrick Ishmael's article at hotair.com:
Illinoishas budget problems. It also has a job problem. So as blue-state governments are wont to do, Illinois’s political class took on the “how could we possibly make things worse?” challenge and… successfully made things worse, imposing an internet sales tax on online retailers that has not only cost the state jobs, but ultimately makes Illinois a less attractive place to live and do business.
As NPR reported last Friday in a segment entitled “Illinois-based Amazon affiliates go dark,”
TONY ARNOLD: Brad Wilson runs the aptly named BradsDeals.com — a coupon web site based in downtown Chicago.
BRAD WILSON: Ultimately, Amazon and Overstock hold the trump card in this situation.
Wilson says after today — Amazon will boycott business with BradsDeals — and roughly 9,000 other retailers in Illinois to skirt the tax. Illinois residents can still go online and get the latest best seller from Amazon, they just won’t be getting that book from any Amazon affiliate in Illinois.
WILSON: We’re looking at a lot of options that I wouldn’t want to have ever had to think of, unfortunately.
Wilson says he’s considering picking up shop and relocating to another state to make up for the money he’ll lose. He wouldn’t say how much.
“But Patrick,” you say, “surely Illinois would just lift the job-destroying taxes they’ve imposed.” But nay, friends, we must remember the challenge. Why would Illinois’s political class fix its state’s problem, when they can make its problem America’s problem.
Which is why, as the segment notes, Sen. Dick Durbin will imminently introduce legislation to do just that.
The e-tax man cometh.
As early as this week, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) told The Post he will propose sweeping legislation to tax all online purchases — in a move aimed at closing state budget shortfalls.
Such a tax would plow more than $1 billion in tax revenues into the state coffers for the 2012 budget, according to some estimates….
Durbin’s bill, dubbed the Main Street Fairness Act, is being portrayed as an end to the tax holiday that online shoppers on major Internet vendors like Amazon.com, Overstock.com and even Apple’s App stores have been enjoying for years.
Leaving Illinois because its economic policies are destroying you? No worries. Illinois will come to you.
This is roughly equivalent to treating a toothache by having someone punch every other part of your body, so the toothache is no longer a specific problem because everything else hurts too.
It is also the kind of thinking that caused voters to rise up last year and make mincemeat of the party of Obama, Reid, Pelosi and Durbin.
Did they learn anything from it? If you think they did, I urge you to reread the above excerpt.
Dick Durbin notwithstanding, Democrats used to deal in reason and logic, and it can do so again. But this kind of mindless "tax 'em, that's the answer" crap indicates that they have a long way to go before it happens.
A passenger screener at PhiladelphiaInternationalAirport is facing charges that he distributed more than 100 images of child pornography via Facebook, records show.
Federal agents also allege that Transportation Safety Administration Officer Thomas Gordon Jr. of Philadelphia, who routinely searched airline passengers, uploaded explicit pictures of young girls to an Internet site on which he also posted a photograph of himself in his TSA uniform.
Homeland Security agents arrested the TSA officer March 24, and he is being held without bail.
Although the case was unsealed Thursday, neither the indictment nor the news release mentioned Gordon's job searching airline passengers for TSA.
I would call this unbelievable; but, frankly, it is all too believable.
We are taking semi-skilled people, paying them a relatively low wage, and entrusting them with what often amounts to physically intimate activity with people of both sexes and all ages. That just begs for abuse.
And the "officer" in question? If guilty of the charges (and it sure looks that way) he is either too stupid to stay anonymous....or so certain that the TSA is incapable of acting that he didn't think it necessary to hide who he was. You have to think that, if it is the latter, TSA gave him plenty of reason to make such an assumption.
Oh, and how nice that neither the indictment nor the news release mentioned that he is with the TSA. Do you just possibly think they might be trying to hide that fact from the public?
When do we start looking at alternative means of screening passengers? When do we look to countries that have kept themselves safe without engaging in this ridiculous lunacy, and base our screening techniques on what actually works?
Andrew C. McCarthy of National Review has written a scathing expose of what passes for "charity" in the Muslim world.
It is well worth reading every word: I hope you click hereand do just that.
Meanwhile, here are the first few paragraphs of Mr. McCarthy's piece:
"In the United States, rules on charitable givinghave made it harder for Muslims to fulfill their religious obligation,” President Obama claimed during his 2009 Cairo speech. “That is why I am committed to working with American Muslims to ensure that they can fulfill zakat.”
This statement contained two falsehoods. One, as I’ve previously detailed, was obvious: There are, in fact, no American laws or rules that make it harder for Muslims to give to charity. What we have are laws against material support of terrorism — against using devices like charitable fronts to channel money to jihadists. Those laws are not directed at Muslims. They apply to everyone but are applied most often to Muslims, because Muslims carry out most anti-American terrorism.
The other falsehood was more subtle: the president’s suggestion that the religious obligation of zakat — one of the “five pillars of Islam” — is the equivalent of “charitable giving.” It is not. Zakat is every Muslim’s obligation to contribute to the fortification of the ummah, the notional worldwide Islamic nation. And that very much includes the funding of violent jihad against non-Muslims.
When an earthquake devastated Haiti last year, the West, led as always by the Great Satan, instantly opened its heart and pocketbook. Within days, as the Foundation for Defense of Democracy’s Claudia Rosett reported, the U.S. government had pledged $90 million in public funds, 44 percent of the total anted up by governments worldwide. That was just a fraction of the true American contribution. Despite a deep recession and widespread unemployment, private citizens contributed tens of millions of dollars to the relief efforts. In addition, our armed forces mobilized to provide food, medical treatment, and other humanitarian aid. Untold additional millions in American aid backed relief efforts by the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and the World Bank. The economic downturn was global, but still European, Canadian, Japanese, and South American governments and citizens also donated millions.
What of the world’s Muslims? Over the same period of time, they accounted for a whopping 0.1 percent of the total donations committed by governments — basically, a rounding error for a Saudi sheikh’s weekend in Vegas. Drawing a telling contrast, Ms. Rosett noted that the House of Saud’s annual contribution to ICRC operations in 2008 came to a grand total of $216,460 — less than a penny per Saudi, though quite generous compared with the $50,000 kicked in by Iran, whose population is three times larger. By contrast, the United States gave $237.8 million.
Please be assured that I don't mean to say every Muslim is uncharitable. I have no doubt at all that a great many people of the various Muslim faiths are concerned about, and generous toward, the needy.
But from an institutional standpoint - i.e. Muslim countries and organizations - their contribution is pathetic. It is a disgrace upon those entities.
And it's not like money isn't there. Some Muslim countries are fabulously wealthy. Some Muslim charities collect huge amounts of donations.
If the money is not being used to help people in dire need, what is the money being used for?
Mr. McCarthy cites the earthquake in Haiti last year, and points out that Muslim aid there was virtually nonexistent. Sadly, he is 100% correct.
To further illustrate his point, Let's consider that, by contrast, Israel was in Haiti almost immediately with desperately needed medical personnel and supplies. (And that is far from an anomaly: as this article details, providing such aid is nothing new to Israel.)
Contrast that with the Muslim countries and Muslim charitable organizations Mr. McCarthy alludes to - not just for Haiti but for disaster after disaster over the years, including the most recent one in Japan. See how they stack up.
And remember that Israel is a tiny country of about 7 million people, while the Muslim world is comprised of almost 60 countries with a population of well over a billion and most of the world's proven oil reserves.
Why is this so?
Is it that Muslim countries and Muslim charities just don't help needy non-Muslims?
Is it that Israel is amazingly involved in helping the needy?
My sister sent me the article from which this is excerpted. Please read it and tell me, as I asked earlier today, how Israel is supposed to make peace with Palestinian Arabs:
Jewish settlers in Israel “are not normal people” and therefore there is no need to apologize for the murder of a Jew who prayed at Kever Yosef (Joseph’s Tomb) Sunday morning, according to Palestinian Authority security forces’ spokesman General Adnan Damiri.
He also claimed the victims of Kever Yosef attack may have been armed.
In an unusually provocative interview with Voice of Israel government radio, he said he could not confirm or deny eyewitness reports that Palestinian Authority policemen shot at five Jews who were on their way home from praying at Kever Yosef (Joseph’s Tomb) early Sunday morning.
“We have not said they were or were not” PA policemen, Damiri said, contradicting all reports in both Arab and Israeli media, where the attackers were identified as PA policemen.
Asked if the PA will apologize for the murder of Ben Yosef Livnat, he answered, “You know that settlers are not normal people. Every day, they shoot at innocent Arabs.” This, of course, is a blatant untruth, as the news anchor realized.
News anchor Estie Peres, who may agree with the usual Voice of Israel’s criticism of Jewish presence in most of Judea and Samaria, responded that she could not agree with his statement that “settlers are not normal” and asked Damiri if there was justification in shooting at people who had been praying and were on their way home.
“Maybe they were armed,” Damiri responded.
Further questioned if the PA will "make peace with settlers,” he declared, “There is no room in the Palestinian Authority for settlers.”
You want to try making peace with that? Well, the world demands that Israel do it.
PRESIDENT OBAMA'S PLUMMETING RATINGS: THE MSNBC VIEW
Ken Berwitz
After over two years President Obama, we have an awful economy, trillion dollar-plus deficits, still-high unemployment, soaring gas prices and real estate values which continue to drop.
And since Mr. Obama's only defense seems to be that it is somehow George Bush's fault, more and more people are coming to the realization that he is full of beans - or their byproduct, and expressing dissatisfaction with his performance in office, especially his handling of the economy.
But at MSNBC, the reasons for his significantly lower numbers just might not coincide with what you just read.
Here, pulled from a blog at www.newsbusters.org, is host Lawrence O'Donnell discussing the plummeting Obama poll numbers with the twin towers of reliable left wing propaganda, Richard Wolffe (always a left wing tool) and (the formerly far more sensible) Howard Fineman:
LAWRENCE O'DONNELL, HOST: The latest "New York Times"/CBS News poll shows the number of people who think the U.S. is on the wrong track is at 70 percent, the highest it has been since the final days of George W. Bush’s presidency. President Obama now gets low marks across the board -- 57 percent disapprove of how he’s handling the economy, 59 percent disapprove of how he’s handling the deficit, 45 percent disapprove of how he’s handling the situation in Libya. His overall job approval is at 46 percent compared to 45 percent of those who disapprove.
O’DONNELL: Richard, did these poll numbers hit the White House by surprise? Did they -- did they understand there was a trend building with these kinds of negative numbers?
WOLFFE: No, they have known this is building for awhile. Gas prices haven’t just suddenly spike. But they also know that in spite of all vulnerability they have on the economy, there’s only one set of numbers that are actually worse than this, and that’s what voters say they think about Republicans and specifically about the Republican plans on things like budget or on cutting taxes for the super wealthy.
So, you know, people talk about hope and change here -- you know, yes, they are hoping gas prices come down and people feel better about the economy. But they also know the risk of change is what’s going to drive people in this dynamic we’re going to see over the next year or so.
O’DONNELL: Howard, the president does have some high disapproval numbers in there for a president running for re-election. But the Congress has a disapproval number of 75 percent.
How do you think voters are balancing that out -- their disapproval of the Congress and the disapproval of the job done by the White House? Where does that leave them when it comes time to vote for president?
FINEMAN: Well, it leaves them in a quandary. And it leaves them very upset that the Washington hasn’t changed. It is true that the gas price numbers are hurting the president right now. It’s true that there’s a lot of uneasiness still about the economy. As a matter of fact, it’s growing again.
But I think it’s also true that people are a little disappointed in the president because he hasn’t been able to change the way Washington works at all. Indeed, Congress is even more poorly regarded. Everybody wanted a bigger deal than was done the last budget go around.
And so, in an odd way, the fact the Republicans and Congress are so poorly regarded, that the whole system is so poorly regarded drags everybody down, including the president.
There you have it.
Richard Wolffe appears to think that when you pull up to the pump for gas that averaged $1.84 a gallon the day President Obama took office, but is almost $4.00 a gallon now, your reaction most likely won't be "dammit, why doesn't President Obama do something about these gas prices"; it will be "dammit, why doesn't President Obama tax the rich more".
And Howard Fineman assures you that President Obama's numbers are down because people don't like Republicans.
This is what passes for intelligent political analysis at MSNBC these days.
Personally, I had a colonoscopy on Thursday, and what Mr. Wolffe and Mr. Fineman are saying reminds me a lot less of intelligent political analysis than it does of what had to be cleared out of my colon before the procedure.
PA Arabs Celebrate Murder by Desecrating Joseph’s Tomb
by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu
Palestinian Authority Arabs set fire to Kever Yosef (Joseph's Tomb) near Shechem Sunday morning several hours after PA policemen gunned down Jewish worshippers, killing one of them. Eyewitnesses saw smoke billowing over the tomb, which Arabs have frequently desecrated in the past.
The murder victim, 24-year-old Ben Yosef Chai, a nephew of Likud Minister Limor Livnat, was buried Sunday afternoon, several hours before the beginning of the last day of the seven-day Passover holiday Sunday evening.
PA police killed Livnat and wounded four others by opening fire on their cars after they prayed at Kever Yosef and were returning home.
The IDF and mainstream media reported the shooting spree as an "incident” and not an attack although the worshippers were known to the PA as frequent visitors to the holy site. Monthly visits are coordinated with the IDF, which hurriedly stated after Sunday’s murder that the victims of the PA police assault did not confirm their visit to the site with the military. The IDF called the shooting attack an "incident."
Defense Minister Ehud Barak condemned the murder and said that the lack of coordination did not justify the Palestinian Authority police attack. He demanded that the PA investigate the shooting. Pictured is a bullethole in one of the vehicles targeted by the PA.
Shoot the worshippers and set fire to the religious site. Just another "incident" in the Palestinian Arab-controlled west bank.
These are the people Israel is supposed to make peace with.
Just a quick reminder so you won't wonder what's jacking up the traffic in NYC next Wednesday:
From White House spox Jay Carney:
"On Wednesday, the President and the First Lady will travel to Chicago to tape an episode of the 'Oprah Winfrey Show.' The President will then travel to New York to deliver remarks at two DNC events."
As you know, Winfrey -- whose influence in the media world absolutely can't be underestimated -- has been a big proponent of President Obama and his policies.
Michelle Obama appeared on Winfrey's program in January.
We previously noted the NYC events will be a gala at the Waldorf-Astoria and a Town Hall concert featuring The Roots.
And you thought Mr. Obama wasn't on top of the situationsin Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, gas prices, high unemployment and an out-of-control federal deficit? Why, oh why?
Being President is really hard. So I guess you just have to unwind now and then.
From thehill.com:
A round of golf for President Obama
By Jamie Klatell - 04/23/11 02:42 PM ET
Once the rain cleared in the Washington area Saturday, President Obama and three playing partners left the White House for a round of golf at Andrews Air Force Base.
White House staffers Ben Finkenbinder and Marvin Nicholson and David Katz of the Energy Department are playing with the president.
Poor Mr. Obama.
Libya is an absolute mess, Syria is blowing up, unemployment is still way above where it was when the so-called "stimulus package" was enacted (about 3 trillion deficit dollars ago), our soldiers are dying in record numbers in Afghanistan, and he has just spent a week doing little other than campaigning to raise money for 2012.
Obviously, he deserves his 65th round of golf since taking office.
What do you expect? That he should do something about any of those issues? Or, at least, try to look like he is doing something about any of them?
Heck, it's all George Bush's fault anyway, so why bother?
The bottom line? This is who we elected, and this is who we have to suffer with until at least January 20, 2013. We have no one to blame but ourselves.
But will we do something about it on election day 2012?
It is not often that I agree with an LA Times editorial. When it happens, therefore, the point it makes must be so clear that even people who usually think differently can agree on it.
Sadly, that is just about 100% true of the Libya mess.
Here are some key excerpts (the bold print is mine):
Lost in Libya
Kadafi's still there, and so are the rebels and their Western allies. So what's the endgame?
What's happening in Libya? When we last checked in, President Obama had said that the United States would participate in the U.N.-sponsored no-fly zone but that this was not — repeat not — a war to oust Moammar Kadafi. Rather, the narrow purpose of the operation was to avert humanitarian disaster. He acknowledged that he would like to see Kadafi go, but said that under no circumstances would ground troops be sent in to make that happen. Instead, the U.S. would use nonmilitary means to hasten the strongman's departure. The president tied it all up in a neat package and made it sound promising and uplifting, like a victory for morality, for democracy, for innocent civilians at risk and for the whole idea of limited humanitarian intervention.
But now, several weeks later, that neat package is coming undone. The war rages on. The rebels, disorganized and underequipped, are neither winning nor losing; Kadafi is neither firmly entrenched nor on his way out, as far as anyone knows. NATO, its members still squabbling among themselves, has no formal mandate to oust the Libyan leader but is unwilling to walk away either. Hundreds have died, while the diplomatic and economic squeeze has so far proved unsuccessful.
What a mess.
For our part, we'd rather see the ambitions narrowed than the means expanded. We don't see the upside in getting more deeply involved in a third distant war on behalf of rebels we know little about, even against the repugnant Kadafi government.
Where do we go from here? Certainly the United States should continue its diplomatic efforts, economic sanctions and nonlethal aid; by all means, ratchet up the pressure on Kadafi. But whether those tactics will succeed in forcing him out is unclear. Maybe he'll decide to cut his losses and conclude that resettling in some out-of-the-way capital and living off whatever he can salvage of his stolen millions is a better option than going down with the ship.
But even if he doesn't, it's time for the Obama administration to begin recalibrating its objectives. It's time to think about brokering a cease-fire, a negotiated solution that includes protections for the rebels and civilians. Perhaps this will mean a de facto division of the country. Perhaps some democratic reforms can be negotiated. Those steps can be taken even as the world continues its nonmilitary efforts to urge Kadafi out.
The United States is fighting two other wars at the moment, both of which have proved long and frustrating, and there's little appetite for a third. American resources are limited, and a compelling case has not been made. Let's not get sucked in any further.
Implicit in this editorial is the frightening level of ineptitude shown by President Obama and the people around him - very much including the equally inexperienced, equally inept Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.
For all their talk and all their self-confidence, these people have shown that they do not have even the beginning of an idea about what they are doing or how to proceed from here.
As the LA Times has belatedly realized, Libya is a war with no stated objective, no clear direction, which we are not even running anymore because we handed stewardship over to the ridiculously incapable hands of NATO, and which we are fighting on behalf of people who probably are just as much our enemies as qaddafi is.
At least 90 people were reportedly killed and dozens were injured when Syrian security forces fired live bullets and teargas to disperse “Good Friday” protests in several cities, witnesses reported. The death toll seemed to be rising late Friday.
The reported deaths have created a new crisis for the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, raising questions about whether he is fully in control of Syrian security forces. The deaths raise questions about how far Mr. Assad is prepared to go to stay in power, and if the international community will take steps to prevent a humanitarian disaster in this geopolitically strategic Arab country.
The deaths on Friday also bring back memories of large numbers of political opponents who were mowed down by security forces in the city of Hama when Mr. Assad’s late father, President Hafez al-Assad was in office. Mr. Assad’s brother, Rifaat al-Assad, personally conducted a “scorched earth” campaign in February 1982 against Sunni Muslims who protested against the Alawite regime of Hafez al-Assad. Estimates of those killed in Hama range from 10,000 to 40,000.
Hundreds, maybe thousands, have been slaughtered by this subhuman sack of manure, who apparently intends to follow in the footsteps of his mass-murdering father.
And what is the USA's response so far? Nothing, other than words. President Obama, today, said:
"This outrageous use of violence to quell protests must come to an end now"
Look, I do not want us to bomb Syria. As ugly as the situation there is, it remains a civil war that we have no business nosing into. President Obama said the right words about it. And unless things become far worse, he should go no further.
But if the criterion for bombing Libya is "humanitarianism", then we shouldn't we be bombing Syria as well?
What an unholy mess Libya is. What a hypocrisy it is to bomb there on "humanitarian" grounds, while doing nothing about Syria.
And whose fault is this? It is ours. We put a man with no experience in foreign policy and no capability to oversee a military operation into the White House, and made him Commander In Chief.
I have always enormously admired John McCain as a man, and expect that I always will.
But as a Presidential candidate, I thought he ran an unhinged, erratic, often incomprehensible campaign; one that guaranteed he would lose. I only voted for him because I thought Barack Obama was even worse - a thought which, unfortunately, has been more than borne out by the last two years.
And now, in the middle of the Libya mess, we have Senator McCain going to Libya and saying about the rebels fighting qaddafi, that "they are my heroes".
Who is he saying this about? He is saying it about a ragtag group of "soldiers", with no stated goal other than the overthrow of qaddafi, who have been cobbled together, in part, with members of al-qaeda. In short, all we know about "the rebels" is that they have no problem aligning themselves with people who hate us and want us dead.
Nice going, John.
I'm sorry to have to say this, but maybe it is time for John McCain to pack it in. He is not making sense anymore. He hasn't made sense for some time.
And maybe he can do us a favor by taking his obnoxious daughter, Megan, with him. The only reason anyone pays even one iota of attention to her is that she has his last name.
Hey, I have an idea. Maybe Megan McCain can join Ron Reagan. They could put a stage act together and go on an "I Am Nobody, But You Know Who My Dad Is" tour.
I mean, if Charlie Sheen can draw crowds by offering absolutely nothing of any value, why can't they?
Why do we fight radical Islam? Because of things like the Poco-Poco dance fatwa.
The Poco-Poco dance is a silly, funny, entirely inoffensive line dance. A little like the Macarena of years ago. But what is it in radical Islam?
Here is your answer, excerpted from an article in the Malaysia Star:
SEPANG: The special meeting or muzakarah of the National Fatwa Council has decided not to put a ban on the "poco-poco" dance among Muslims in the country as long as it is practised according to the stipulated regulations.
National Fatwa Council chairman Tan Sri Dr Abdul Shukor Husin said the regulations referred to the guidelines issued by the council in 2007, which reminded the Muslims not to conduct the worshipping rituals of other religions, minding relations between men and women and wearing proper attire while dancing the "poco-poco".
"If they can adhere to the regulations...and if it can bring about positive impact to health, then we have no objection on that matter," he told reporters after chairing the special meeting, here Friday.
However, he said the National Fatwa Council would remain respectful of the decision made by the Perak Fatwa Council to ban the dance in the state as their research showed that it had elements of Christianity and soul worshipping.
The ban was announced by the Mufti of Perak Tan Sri Harussani Zakaria early this year. Harussani, who was also present at the special meeting, explained that the edict banning the "poco-poco" dance was issued after several Muslim associations in Perak started questioning the dance and its rituals.
"That's why the research was conducted. In other states, there is no request for the dance to be studied, and thus, there is no edict issued on the matter," he said.
If we fight radical Islam we may win and we may lose. But if we don't fight, we will most assuredly lose, because radical Islam will keep fighting regardless.
And if that were to happen, western civilization as we know it would end.
To be replaced by what? A society where something as innocuous as a silly line-dance is scrutinized, and or/banned, because a "fatwa (religious edict) council) decides it has elements of a non-Muslim religion, and (gasp!) maybe men and women would dance it together - along with a demand that "proper attire" be worn ("proper attire" to be determined by the same anal retentives who thought it was important enough to investigate this dance in the first place).
Obviously there are people who, for whatever their reasons, want to live this way. And if they do, they're welcome to it.
Yesterday's Investors Business Daily had an excellent, truly unsettling, editorial about how we are progressing (or regressing) in Libya.
Since I do not want to excerpt this editorial, I waited one day to post it, so IBD would get maximum web traffic. Now that the day is up, here it is. (The bold print is mine):
Are We Losing In Libya?
Military: When the U.S. goes to war, it must always be with crystal-clear objectives, plus an ironclad commitment to winning. In Libya, our objectives are muddled while our resolution is in doubt.
When the Pentagon brass and Defense Secretary Robert Gates let President Obama know they opposed his Libyan adventure in multilateralism, Obama sweetened the idea for them by promising that U.S. involvement would be limited.
That says it all, because as a disquieting analysis last Monday by Los Angeles Times reporters David Cloud and Ned Parker put it, "If the alliance's most powerful member isn't willing to escalate, few other members will be eager to do so."
Indeed, prominent members of the British and French governments have publicly opposed what they fear will be a Vietnam-style escalation; France's foreign and defense ministers both made strong statements against deploying ground forces.
Americans, too, are ambivalent about going it alone. A recent IBD/TIPP Poll shows they think it was important to get U.N. approval for action in Libya (see chart).
So what to do now, with Moammar Gadhafi so uncooperative about losing a war with America?
As in eras gone by, the U.S. is expected to lead; the Euro dawdlers just aren't going to fill any responsibility vacuums we leave for them.
Whether the problem is Hitler or Brezhnev or Ho Chi Minh, history shows that if Superpower America doesn't do the job, the job goes undone. And this is the case even when the threat to other free nations is an existential one, as in the Cold War.
According to David Barno, the former NATO Afghanistan commander, "We rushed into this without a plan" and are now "going in circles." News reports say things like "no one seems certain how to break the stalemate."
Obama's belief that hundreds of U.S. and NATO airstrikes would oust Gadhafi has been exposed as a gross miscalculation. What a vindication for columnist Charles Krauthammer, who warned 2 1/2 years ago that Obama was "a novice with zero experience and the wobbliest one-world instincts."
Yet about 1,000 freelance jihadists are at large in Libya. Links could exist between the Libyan opposition and al-Qaida while the U.S. gives $25 million in "nonlethal" aid to the rebels.
Did someone tell the State Department that Osama bin Laden has gotten into the business of building hospitals and grammar schools?
Surveying the mess in a New York Post article, former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton advises that "we must identify anti-Gadhafi figures who are pro-Western and find ways, overt or covert, to strengthen their hands."
But when the White House, in near-comic fashion, made such a fuss last month about publicly announcing that our "secret" spy agency was rushing their operatives to Libya to find out all about the rebel forces, it was as clear a signal as any that the U.S. wasn't serious.
According to the L.A. Times, the intelligence gathered said Gadhafi is "still much better organized than the rebels and still has the upper hand."
The CIA's ex-Moscow station chief, Stephen Kappes, led the successful 2003 initiative to get Gadhafi to abandon Libya's nuclear weapons program. Now Gadhafi is discovering personally what the now-incarcerated Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the South Vietnamese and many others know: No deal with the U.S. goes unpunished by the U.S.
Gadhafi may have the last laugh, however: As of right now, he's winning this war.
What did we expect from Barack Obama? What should we have expected?
We elected a Chicago machine politician, with no qualifications to be President, and an academic's view of how a war should be fought:
-No specific objective,
-no plan other than to bomb (hoping that the bombs hit the bad guys instead of civilians),
-no ground troops,
- and no idea of how to proceed if it doesn't work.
You may have agreed or disagreed with President Bush when he went to war in Iraq, and then Afghanistan (which has rapidly turned from a Bush success to another Obama mess). But you sure as hell knew why we were there, on whose behalf we were fighting, and that we were not going to subordinate the fight to someone else until our objectives were achieved.
Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) abruptly announced on Thursday he will resign from the Senate, effective May 3.
In a statement released by his office, Ensign cited the ongoing Senate ethics investigation stemming from his extramarital affair with the wife of his former top aide as the reason he was stepping down now as opposed to the end of 2012, when he was not seeking re-election.
“While I stand behind my firm belief that I have not violated any law, rule, or standard of conduct of the Senate, and I have fought to prove this publicly, I will not continue to subject my family, my constituents, or the Senate to any further rounds of investigation, depositions, drawn out proceedings, or especially public hearings,” Ensign said. “For my family and me, this continued personal cost is simply too great.”
Mr. Ensign did the wrong thing when he had the extramarital affair. And, it seems to me, the only reason he is resigning now is because he doesn't want to deal with the ongoing humiliation he brought on himself.
You can take the crap he's spewing about not violating any law, rule or standard of conduct and toss it in that bathroom bowl, the one with the seat. That's where it belongs.
Goodbye and good riddance. I only wish a few other politicians were embarrassed enough by their actions - which in some cases are far worse than Ensign's - to do the same.
If you want to hear some very interesting dialogue, just talk about the voter ID issue to a leftist.
Leftists feel that requiring a voter ID is terribly unfair. And y'know? They have a point.
Let me show you, by posting the following exchange between Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, a dour, hard-left Representative from Florida, and MSNBC talk show host Rachel Maddow, while they are discussing the new voter ID law just enacted in Kansas:
MADDOW: Is making it harder to register to vote, which many Republican-controlled states are pursuing right now -- is that a partisan tactic?
WASSERMAN-SCHULTZ: Well, I think it's sending a very strong signal that Republicans don't think they can win elections in a fair fight. So, they need to go systematically state-by-state rigging it so that it makes it much more difficult for all voters, regardless of political party affiliation or philosophical approach can get to the polls.
Ok, let's review. According to Rachel Maddow:
-Expecting people to show proof of who they are is "making it harder to register to vote". Ok, she's got a point. People without IDs, who are trying to vote illegally, will definitely find it harder to vote.
-Expecting people to show a valid ID might be a partisan tactic. Well, yes - if one party stands to gain a lot more illegal votes than the other. If that is the case, making sure voting is done only by people who have a legal right to vote will hurt the party that illegal voters gravitate to.
See? You can't understate Ms. Maddow's veracity, can you? She was right both times.
Now let's review what Ms. Wasserman-Schultz said. According to her:
-Republicans who feel voters must show proof that of who they are, don't want a "fair fight". That's true - if a fair fight means people with no legal right to vote should vote anyway. If that's the case, Ms. Wasserman-Schultz has a point.
-Expecting people to show a valid ID is rigging the election. Yes it is - assuming that elections are unfair if illegal voters are denied the ballot.
-Expecting people to show a valid ID makes voting more difficult for all voters, regardless of political party. Uh, sure. As we saw with Ms. Maddow's earlier comment, people who have no right to vote will certainly find it much more difficult.
-At this point, Wasserman-Schultz goes on to complain that a newly married woman (i.e. one whose ID might not have the same last name) would need to bring her marriage certificate. Right again: everyone knows how heavy those are to carry. I think by now you get the idea.
So let's not be hard on Rachel Maddow and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz for their attitude about voter ID's. They are clearly right. That new Kansas law is going to make it much tougher for people who have no legal right to vote.
Legal voters, of course, will find it just as easy to vote as always. No problem at all.
But that doesn't count, does it? Restricting elections only to people who have a legal right to vote is ...what were those words? Oh yeah: partisan, an unfair fight and vote-rigging.
I strongly suggest that Ms. Maddow and Ms. Wasserman-Schultz make their points known to Kansas Governor Sam Brownback. I'm sure he will immediately see the error of his ways and aggressively work to make illegal votes as easy as they were before. Aren't you?
According to the Associated Press, Wisconsin's Department of Regulation and Licensing, along with the Medical Examining Board, will investigate 8 doctors (so far) who are accused of writing medical excuse notes for teachers who protested Governor Walker's then-pending legislation in February.
Good.
I hope every doctor who was guilty is assessed the appropriate punishment.
I used to greatly admire Turkey. To my knowledge it is the oldest Muslim democracy there is (about 90 years), and has long been a paradigm of peace and tolerance for non-Muslims.
Until recently.
Now, sad to say, Turkey is becoming more and more Islamicized. The country still has a democratic system of government but - I hope I'm wrong - its days may be numbered.
In any event, the President of Turkey is Abdullah Gul. And Mr. Gul has written an op-ed piece for today's New York Times, which addresses his view of how peace can be obtained.
Here it is, in rust - with my comments in blue. Trust me, it won't take long for you to see what I think of Mr. Gul's proposals:
The wave of uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa is of historic significance equal to that of the revolutions of 1848 and 1989 in Europe. The peoples of the region, without exception, revolted not only in the name of universal values but also to regain their long-suppressed national pride and dignity. But whether these uprisings lead to democracy and peace or to tyranny and conflict will depend on forging a lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement and a broader Israeli-Arab peace. There you go. Arabs have taken to the streets in Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Tunisia and everywhere else because they want a lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement and a broader Israeli-Arab peace. That stuff about national pride and dignity? Strictly second-tier. It's all about Israel. That's why the protesters aren't screaming "down with Mubarak" or "down with qaddafi", they're all screaming “We demand a peace deal with Israel”. Yeah, right.
The plight of the Palestinians has been a root cause of unrest and conflict in the region and is being used as a pretext for extremism in other corners of the world. Israel, more than any other country, will need to adapt to the new political climate in the region. But it need not fear; the emergence of a democratic neighborhood around Israel is the ultimate assurance of the country’s security. Nah, Israel shouldn’t fear a population that has been taught all their lives to believe Jews have no right to be in Israel or anywhere else, and that they are the spawn of monkeys and pigs who Allah wants either converted or dead – preferably dead.I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
In these times of turmoil, two forces will shape the future: the people’s yearning for democracy and the region’s changing demographics. Sooner or later, the Middle East will become democratic, and by definition a democratic government should reflect the true wishes of its people. Like an Islamic state – which is what Egypt is about to get?Oh, ok. Such a government cannot afford to pursue foreign policies that are perceived as unjust, undignified and humiliating by the public. For years, most governments in the region did not consider the wishes of their people when conducting foreign policy. History has repeatedly shown that a true, fair and lasting peace can only be made between peoples, not ruling elites.Then explain the enduring 30 year peace (cold though it was) between Israel and Egypt during the Sadat-Mubarak era. I'll wait.
I call upon the leaders of Israel to approach the peace process with a strategic mindset, rather than resorting to short-sighted tactical maneuvers. Like protecting itself from hamas, which attacks Israel every day and is committed in writing to its destruction?How shortsighted those Israelis are.This will require seriously considering the Arab League’s 2002 peace initiative, which proposed a return to Israel’s pre-1967 borders and fully normalized diplomatic relations with Arab states. You left out the part where they demand that there be a “law of return” so that every Arab who claims to have roots there can “return”, and presumably get land back. That, of course, would make Israel an Arab state. What a great offer for Israel.
Sticking to the unsustainable status quo will only place Israel in greater danger. History has taught us that demographics is the most decisive factor in determining the fate of nations. In the coming 50 years, Arabs will constitute the overwhelming majority of people between the Mediterranean Sea and the Dead Sea. The new generation of Arabs is much more conscious of democracy, freedom and national dignity. What’s your point? That Israel cease to be Israel because there are a lot of Arabs?Wakeup call:there are already 50 times more Arabs than there are Jews in Israel, so you have no point at all – just like the rest of this idiotic drivel.
In such a context, Israel cannot afford to be perceived as an apartheid island surrounded by an Arab sea of anger and hostility. Bullshit.Since Israel is not apartheid– which certainly can’t be said of the so-called Palestinian Territories and many Arab states, by the way – this fraudulent perception can only be changed if Arab countries tell their people the truth:i.e. that Israel has a large Arab population, they are citizens, they can vote (women and men both), own property, serve in government, etc, etc, etc.Why aren’t you asking for that to happen, Mr. Gul?As if I didn’t know.Many Israeli leaders are aware of this challenge and therefore believe that creating an independent Palestinian state is imperative. A dignified and viable Palestine, living side by side with Israel, will not diminish the security of Israel, but fortify it.A dignified Palestine would be a Palestine that accepts and respects Israel’s right to exist.I notice you haven’t demanded that of Palesinian Arabs, Mr. Gul.In fact you haven’t demanded anything of Palestinian (or non-Palestinian) Arabs at all.Only of Israel.Amazing how “peace” can only be obtained if Israel changes its ways. Boy, those Arab countries must be models of everything that is good.....
Turkey thinks strategically about the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, not only because it knows that a peaceful Middle East would be to its benefit, but also because it believes that Israeli-Palestinian peace would benefit the rest of the world. If this is your idea of strategic thinking, god help you.
We are therefore ready to use our full capacity to facilitate constructive negotiations. Turkey’s track record in the years before Israel’s Gaza operation in December 2008 bears testimony to our dedication to achieving peace. Turkey is ready to play the role it played in the past, once Israel is ready to pursue peace with its neighbors. Yep.The once-secular but increasingly Islamic state of Turkey is happy to facilitate the end of Israel as we know it.Thanks for the heads-up, Abdullah.You’re a regular prince.
Moreover, it is my firm conviction that the United States has a long-overdue responsibility to side with international law and fairness when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The international community wants the United States to act as an impartial and effective mediator between Israel and the Palestinians, just as it did a decade ago. Securing a lasting peace in the Middle East is the greatest favor Washington can do for Israel. Ahhhh, we knew that was coming.If anyone besides Israel was going to be told what to do it was going to be the Great Satan.The USA and Israel have to change their ways, and the Arab world is juuuuust perfect as it is, with nothing to be done except wait for those two awful transgressors to come around. I guess we can all learn a valuable lesson about how to live from the peaceful, tolerant, progressive Arab world.
It will be almost impossible for Israel to deal with the emerging democratic and demographic currents in the absence of a peace agreement with the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world. Turkey, conscious of its own responsibility, stands ready to help. Thanks Abdullah.I’m sure Israel will give your offer all the serious consideration it deserves.
Well, there it is. Now: who do you think has a better handle on reality? Your call.
I won't be blogging for part of the day, because I am having a colonoscopy this morning.
And the prep for a colonoscopy - which entails (accent on "tails") drinking quarts of something that looks and has the consistency of anti-freeze, then eliminating it from the other end - is probably worse than the procedure itself.
The way I see it, my doctor (a good friend - we used to umpire little league baseball together) will be dealing, medically, with what I often write about, politically.
Later today I will blog about this morning's impossibly nonsensical New York Times op-ed piece written by (or ghosted for) Abdullah Gul, the President of Turkey.
I have never had a Papa John's pizza. But I will in the near future, just to say thanks.
Until today, Papa John's advertised at the left wing web site, wonkette.com.
Today that site posted a genuinely vile blog about Sarah Palin's child, Trig, who has down syndrome.
I won't post an excerpt from it - if you want to see what was said you'll have to go to that site on your own. But it was vile enough so that Papa John's has summarily pulled its advertising. And maybe others will follow.
Good.
Thank you Papa John's. Thanks, also, to whichever other advertisers decide to follow suit.
And who knows? Maybe some good can come of this. Maybe it will cause our wonderful "neutral" media, to reflect on their own relentless attacks on Ms. Palin for anything and everything - even a deranged lunatic's shooting spree. Maybe they will reflect on what they have done and start acting like professional journalists again, instead of mindless hit-men. That, at least, would put a thin silver lining on this otherwise dark cloud.
-Several other major advertisers summarily left wonkette.com..
-And suddenly the writer, jack stuef, came forth and apologized. Not to Ms. Palin or her husband, of course - both of whom were disgustingly attacked in the blog - but because its tone "sounded like it was mocking the child".
Tom Blumer, of newsbusters.org, hit the nail on the head. He said "Looks like $omeone talked some $ense into him".
Right on, Tom. If not for the do-re-mi, that apology would never have come.
Joanne Kloppenburg, who lost her race for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to David Prosser, wants a recount.
Keep in mind that Ms. Kloppenburg's losing margin - 7,316 votes - is just shy of the number that would have prevented her from even being able to ask. Also keep in mind that every county has been fully canvassed, and that largest change this kind of recount has ever yielded in Wisonsin history is 489 votes - less than 7% of what Ms. Kloppenburg would need to win.
So why is Joanne Kloppenburg demanding a costly, time-consuming recount, that will get her nowhere?
Well, this is the same Joanne Kloppenburg who declared victory on election night - when she was leading by a microscopic 204 votes before the results were official or the counties had been canvassed.
So maybe the answer is that Ms. Kloppenburg, horribly embarrassed by her ridiculously premature claim of victory on election night, figured she might as well double down and demand a meaningless recount. Hey, the election night fiasco already made her look bad, so all the recount could do (apart from keeping Mr. Prosser off the bench a bit longer) is put the taxpayers of Wisconsin further in debt. And who cares about them, right?
Or maybe it is because Ms. Kloppenburg has been given reason to believe that the Democratic machines in Milwaukee or Madison can find a way to invent more than 7,316 formerly-non-existent votes in a recount. God knows, it has happened in Democrat-run major cities before. (FYI: In case you are unaware, Mr. Prosser's winning margin was not provided by newly found votes, it was provided by adding in votes that were there already and had been reported, but were inadvertently omitted from the original count.)
Either way, this tells me that Ms. Kloppenburg does not have the judgment necessary to be a Supreme Court justice. Or, for that matter, a traffic court judge.
Ms. Redmatn is a key International Red Cross official, currently based in Gaza. And here, via an excerpt from israelnationalnews.com, is what she has to say about the conditions there:
Mathilde Redmatn serves as the deputy director of the Red Cross in the Gaza Strip. Redmatn has had the opportunity to see with her own eyes what most of us only see on television screens.
On previous assignments, Redmatn has lived in the Congo and in Colombia. Her activities in Gaza are completely different, she says.
"Of course the work is different everywhere, but here the fabric of life is problematic," she says. "There are two peoples, one living under closure and one living under daily rocket fire, which violates international law.
Redmatn has a lot to say about problems related to the closure Israel has placed on Gaza but she also talks about the surprising normalcy in one of the most explosive regions of the world that receives extensive media attention.
"There is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza," she explains.
"If you go to the supermarket, there are products. There are restaurants and a nice beach. The problem is mainly in maintenance of infrastructure and in access to goods, concrete for example. But above all, it is important to remember that the Israeli army has the right to protect the civilian population in its country. Israel is also hurt on a daily basis by violations of international law by Hamas."
Hello, what's that? Gaza - which Israel haters and lefist activists (very often one and the same) incessantly describe as a thoroughly impoverished area due to Israel's military blockade - has plenty of the basic necessities, and then some? How did that happen?
And how safe is Ms. Redmatn after saying it? Isn't Gaza where, less than a week ago, an Italian pro-hamas agitator named Vittorio Arrigoni was killed by Gazan militants? If they kill the people who agree with them, what might happen to Redmatn, for blowing the usual Gazan claims about Israel to smithereens?
It certainly is not hard to understand why an Israeli news agency would be eager to trumpet Ms. Redmatn's findings. But don't expect to see them reported in what passes for media in hamas-controlled Gaza. Or, for that matter, in fatah-controlled Judea and Samaria (the west bank).
And, sadly, do not expect to see any statements from the Obama administration complimenting Israel on its humanitarian discretion in allowing these goods into Gaza - a place run by terrorists committed, in writing, to Israel's destruction.
Just one question, Mr. President: do you think that hamas would allow passage of these goods into Israel if the situation were reversed? We both know the answer, don't we? Then how about saying something about this. How about condemning the far-left, Israel-hating lunatics who claim otherwise - like the ones my wife and I saw just a week or two ago in Manhattan's Union Square, and then down Broadway.
You would think that an organization comprised of police professionals would have sniffed this out a long time ago. But better late than never.
Call it an educational experience.
Excerpted from Kyle Olson's blog at townhall.com:
The Fraternal Order of Police isn’t happy that their union brethren in Californiarecently passed a resolution in support of cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. Now sitting in prison for executing Philadelphia policeman Daniel J. Faulkner, Mumia has become a rallying point for the left.
On April 14, FOP National President Chuck Canterbury issued a scathing letter to American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. In part, it read:
“I cannot understand why the CFT, which like us represents rank-and-file employees, would support a murderer. In fact, Abu-Jamal’s victim was a rank-and-file law enforcement officer and a member of F.O.P. Local Lodge #5 in Philadelphia. I can only assume that the membership did so out of ignorance of the facts or that they were misled by this killer’s propaganda machine. I want to set the record straight and would respectively, yet urgently, request that you and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) publicly reject this repugnant resolution.”
Not likely. According to PublicSchoolSpending.com, an AFL-CIO spokesperson said the union had no plans to respond to the FOP letter. The AFT had no comment after repeated attempts.
I hope for Chuck Canterbury's sake that he does not expect any serious backtracking by the AFT. Because, other than possibly a watered-down statement that drips with insincerity, he isn't about to get one.
The moral of this story is that there are unions and there are unions. They do not necessarily share the same values. They do not necessarily act in each others' interests. And some of them are anything but sympathetic to cops.
So, to people who call for "solidarity" between unions because they assume one is no different in its outlook than another, I suggest they remember the old saying about what you do when you assume.
During the Egyptian protests in Cairo's Tahrir Square, when protesters were demanding that Hosni Mubarak step down as the head of state, media assured us that post-Mubarak Egypt would be a far better place. "Freedom and democracy" would take hold and we'd all float on a cloud of happiness.
To this end, the Obama administration put its enthusiastic stamp of approval on the removal of Mr. Mubarak.
As regular readers know, I have written blog after blog about the likelihood of an Islamist takeover of Egypt, and how naive it was for anyone to think the well-off, well-fed, English-speaking idealist-philosophers in that square would supersede what Egypt actually is - a horribly poverty-stricken country where destitution, hopelessness and fundamentalist Islam predominate (interesting how often we see that triumvirate).
In any event, the protesters got their wish. Hosni Mubarak resigned.
So how are things working out?
Sad to say, the following excerpt from an article in today's Wall Street Journal provides our answer:
CAIRO—Iran and Egypt's new government signaled Monday they were moving quickly to thaw decades of frosty relations, worrying the U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia that the overtures could upset the Mideast's fragile balance of power.
Iran said it appointed an ambassador to Egypt for the first time since the two sides froze diplomatic relations more than three decades ago, the website of the Iranian government's official English-language channel, Press TV, reported late Monday.
Also Monday, officials at Egypt's Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed that new foreign minister Nabil Elaraby is considering a visit to the Gaza Strip—an area controlled by Hamas, a militant Palestinian Islamist group backed by Tehran and until now shunned by Cairo.
The announcements follow a rare meeting earlier this month between a high-level Iranian diplomat and Mr. Elaraby, after which the foreign minister told reporters that Egypt has "opened a new page" with Iran.
American officials said they are concerned that Egypt's apparent determination to re-establish relations with Iran is part of a broader reordering of its foreign policy. They worry that such a turn could empower Iran and its regional clients Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon, both of which are labeled terrorist groups by the U.S.
Egypt's outreach has also extended to Syria, a close ally of Iran. In early March, Egypt's new intelligence chief, Murad Muwafi, chose Syria for his first foreign trip. It remains unclear what was discussed at the meeting, previously reported by The Wall Street Journal
There you have it. Egypt's new pals: USA-hating, Israel-hating, terrorist Iran, and USA-hating, Israel-hating, terrorist Gaza.
How could media not have seen this coming?
How could the Obama administration not have seen this coming?
Or worse still, maybe the Obama administration did see this coming, and was ok with it.
I've never much liked New York Times' columnist Thomas Friedman's writing - in no small part because of the frequency with which he uses the word "I" and makes himself, instead of events, the focus of his commentaries.
That said, Mr. Friedman has three pulitzer prizes under his belt. So, his ego aside, you'd think he would know what he's talking about.
Obviously, he often does. But not always.
Rob Long, at richochet.com, unearthed a 1999 column by Mr. Friedman on what he saw as the apparent fast track to oblivion for a little start-up company called, ahem, amazon.com. Mr. Long gleefully wrote about this monumental goofup at his web site.
Then John Hinderaker of powerlineblog.com jumped on Long's find and added his own touch, which is excerpted below:
Tom Friedman isn't the worst pundit at the New York Times. On the contrary, in that group he may be above average. Still, Friedman must be one of the most overrated people in the world.
At Ricochet, Rob Long resurrects a 1999 column in which Friedman predicted the demise of Amazon.com:
...if you really want to be ''concerned'' about the levels of some of these profitless Internet stocks, such as Amazon.com, you should pay less attention to Mr. Greenspan and more attention to what's going on in a small house in Cedar Falls, Iowa.
There, a single Iowa family, headed by Lyle Bowlin, is re-creating Amazon.com in a spare bedroom. I tell you this not because they're an immediate threat to Amazon.com, but to underscore just how easy it is to compete against Amazon.com, and why therefore I'm dubious that Amazon and many other Internet retailers will ever generate the huge profits that their stock prices suggest.
As Rob notes, Friedman is a "lifelong journalist with no business experience," but that didn't deter him from pontificating on Amazon's future:
In 1999, Amazon wasn't doomed, but the New York Times was. This chart shows the price of Amazon stock from 1998 to the present. It is currently around three times as valuable as it was when Friedman wrote his column; click to enlarge:
Compare and contrast: this is a similar chart for stock in the New York Times Company, which is now worth less than one-third as much as when Friedman predicted Amazon's demise:
The Times has declined for a number of reasons, but one of the important ones is that citizen journalism turned out to be not just a viable alternative, but a superior alternative, to the myopia that Friedman and his colleagues represent. Friedman was perceptive enough to diagnose the problem that micro-competition could cause for Amazon (albeit incorrectly) but not perceptive enough to apply the same reasoning to his own industry. That fact speaks volumes about how much trust we should put in the pundit class, especially when it opines about business matters.
Look, I admit that Thomas Friedman is an extremely talented writer and knows a lot about a lot.
But it is always worth noting that even at the highest echelons a) people can get it all wrong and b) sometimes personal hubris results in people thinking they know about about things they really don't have any expertise in, which leads to ridiculous commentaries. Like the one Mr. Long and Mr. Hinderaker allude to above.
BENGHAZI, Libya — As NATO struggles to break a deepening stalemate in Libya, the British announced on Tuesday that they were sending military advisers to help build up a rebel army that has stumbled against the superior forces of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
The first question the British will face is “Whose army?”
For they will find themselves advising a ragtag rebel force that cannot even agree on who its top officer is, amid squabbling between two generals who both come with unsavory baggage.
The dysfunction was on full display here this week. “I control everybody, the rebels and the regular army forces,” one of the two, Gen. Khalifa Hifter, said in an interview on Monday. “I am the field commander, and Gen. Abdul Fattah Younes is chief of staff. His job is to support us in the field, and my job is to lead the fighting.”
The rebels’ civilian leadership, the Transitional National Council, has insisted, however, that General Younes remains in charge of the military. “This is not true,” an official close to the council said Tuesday when told of General Hifter’s claims. “General Younes is over him, this is for sure, and General Hifter is under him.”
The Transitional National Council’s leadership role has also been diffuse and unclear. A self-appointed body that claims to have 31 members from around Libya, the group has formally divulged the names of only 10 of its members, claiming a need to protect them and their relatives from retaliation by Colonel Qaddafi’s forces. For the same reason, council members say, their meetings are held in secret.
The Obama administration maintains that the rebels are making progress, albeit slowly, toward creating a coherent chain of command. “It was a group of disparate individuals that has formed in the face of Colonel Qaddafi’s onslaught and oppression and has done a good job, frankly, at coalescing, at forming a leadership, at creating certain values and communicating those values and ideals,” a State Department spokesman, Mark C. Toner, said Tuesday. “We’re encouraged by what we’ve seen.”
While NATO’s mandate calls for protecting civilians, not aiding rebels, General Hifter said the best way to protect Libya’s citizens was to assist rebels in liberating those cities that were still controlled by Colonel Qaddafi.
Ok, we get it. There is no organization and no structure to the anti-qaddafi forces, nor is there any clear line of command.
But that is not the worst part.
The worst part is that, other than deposing moammar qaddafi, we do not know what kind of government "the rebels" want to replace him with.
I put this in bold, underscored italics because it is the key issue of our so-called "humanitarian" action.
If it is humanitarian to bomb a country and kill its people, wouldn't it be nice to know on whose behalf we are doing it? Don't you think that should be of at least some passing interest to us?
I have repeatedly written about a leader of "the rebels", abdel-hakim al-hasidi, telling London's Daily Telegraph that he recruits al-qaeda to fight with his forces because "they are also good muslims". And I have repeatedly asked whether we - and now NATO, with us in a subordinate position - are bombing on behalf of people who hate our guts and will be every bit as disastrous for Libya as qaddafi, maybe even worse.
When do our wonderful "neutral" media start asking this and other such questions?
The fact that this front-page story in the New York Times talks about the issue of who is in charge without once posing this question, and the fact that virtually all the rest of mainstream media are doing the same, tells me that there is a conscious effort on their part to avoid it.
Why?
Can it possibly be that media's level of support for Barack Obama is so great that as basic a question as this doesn't make the cut? If there is a different expanation I would love for you to supply it, because I can't come up with one.
Would these same media have avoided that question if the President bombing Libya were named Bush instead of Obama? Did these same media have any problem questioning President Bush on his actions in Afghanistan and Iraq?
But listen to these so-called "journalists" squeal like stuck pigs if you call them biased.
The ratings agency Standard and Poor’s warned the United States on Monday that it could lose its coveted status as the world’s most secure economy if lawmakers don’t rein in the nation’s nearly $14.3 trillion debt.
S&P changed its outlook on the United States from “stable” to “negative” and said the federal government could lose its AAA rating if officials fail to bring spending in line with revenues.
The AAA rating identifies the United States as one of the world’s safest investments — and that has helped the nation to borrow at extraordinarily cheap rates to finance its government operations including two wars and an expensive social safety net for retirees.
Stock prices fell nearly 2 percent in the hours after the report’s release, before ending the day down about 1 percent. The dollar and Treasury bond also slid in the wake of the report, but recovered by the end of the day.
Got that? We could lose our triple-A rating if we "fail to bring spending in line with revenues".
That is what happens when you spend over a trillion more dollars than you have every year. And that is what happens when a proposal to end this fiscal carnage is attacked as meanspirited pennypinching.
The reality of the situation is that we have to either live remotely near within our means, or suffer the consequences. Even if Barack Obama and his acolytes think otherwise.
Oh, one other thing. Please do me a favor: if Mr. Obama, who has been President for over 2 years and is the progenitor of three $ trillion-plus deficits (and counting), tries blaming it on Bush again? Either turn down the sound, turn off the TV or throw a brick through the screen. I don't want to hear his BS anymore.
Mr. President, do us all a favor: play a little less golf and do a little more homework on the economy. Invoking the ghost of President Bush doesn't cut it.
This is for anyone who thinks the story of the New Black Panthers ended at the point when President Obama's disgraceful toady and sock puppet, Attorney General eric holder, declined to accept a default judgment against their thugs, who intimidated voters in Philadelphia during the 2008 election.
The New Black Panther Party – an organization known largely for their intimidation of voters outside a Philadelphia precinct- has announced plans for a “National Day of Action and Unity,” – ironically urging followers (on their day of unity) to boycott all “non-black business” on April 23.
The New Black Panthers plan to protest non-black establishments and entities via “rallies, marches, demonstrations, programs, and confrontations” in over 60 cities.
“Because blacks worldwide are dissatisfied at their current condition,” the Panther’s announcement explains.
The group urges the authorities to leave them be, not to worry about the late April protests.
Will our wonderful "neutral" media express their outrage that a group, with its history of intimidation aimed at preventing voters from coming to the polls, is now engaged in a specifically racist activity such as this - one in which they promise "confrontations" in over 60 cities? Media certainly would show such outrage if this were a White supremacist group doing exactly the same thing, wouldn't they?
Will President Obama condemn this group in the strongest terms? The President certainly would if this were a White supremacist group doing exactly the same thing, wouldn't he?
We'll find out the answers to both of those questions very quickly. But - honest answer - if you were betting money, would you be betting "yes" or "no"?
And if the answer is "no" (which I'm betting it is), then I would urge you to a) think about why you would make that bet and b) understand just how far you believe our media, and our President, have descended.
Passover is a Jewish holiday which celebrates how Jews were freed from slavery in Egypt. The Jews in question did not aspire to taking Egypt over and turning it into a fundamentalist Jewish state, they just wanted to be free people. Let the Egyptians do whatever they wanted, just don't make us their slaves.
Do you see a link between that, and what is happening in Egypt today - where a government was toppled and "the guys with the beards" as one disillusioned protester referred to them, now are working to turn the clock back and make Egypt a religious Islamic state? Does that sound like freedom to you?
And in Libya, we have "the rebels" trying to remove moammar qaddafi from power - not because they want to be free, but because, like Egypt, they want an Islamic state. When rebel leader abdel-hakim al-hasidi tells a reporter that he has recruited al-qaeda members to his ranks because they "are also good Muslims....", does that sound like a seeker of freedom to you?
With these grim realities in mind, here is part of President Obama's annual messsage regarding Passover:
“The story of Passover…instructs each generation to remember its past, while appreciating the beauty of freedom and the responsibility it entails. This year that ancient instruction is reflected in the daily headlines as we see modern stories of social transformation and liberation unfolding in the Middle East and North Africa.”
Is that some kind of a sick joke?
Is getting rid of a dictator, even a murderous dictator, to put a country under the thumb of religious fundamentalists an example of "liberation"???????? Is this what Jews, or anyone else, could possibly learn from the story of Passover?
Maybe in the mind of Barack Obama it is. But, to me, this is one of the many (and increasing) number of reasons that Jews (I don't mean Jews by accident of ancestry, I mean Jews who care about being Jews) who voted for Obama in 2008 should think long and hard before doing it again in 2012.
Want to see a fun video that just might be a wakeup call for college students?
Here's one. It is a young filmmaker confronting students at UC-Merced, asking if they would be willing to give up part of their Grade Point Average (GPA) and have it transfer to students not doing as well. The reasoning is that the students with lower GPA's need it more than they do.
President Obama went golfing this weekend. I assume he enjoyed doing so, since it is the 64th time he has gone golfing since becoming President.
I'm sure the tornado victims, who are busy burying their family members and friends (45 deaths that we know of so far, maybe more) while trying to pick up the pieces of their own lives, must be thrilled that he found the time to do so.
And the fact that he has yet to issue a statement about the awful tragedies these tornadoes have spawned? That is a small price to pay for Barack Obama's personal pleasure.
Besides, since our wonderful "neutral" media barely ever report Mr. Obama's frequent golfing expeditions - and have almost completely buried news of this latest one - maybe the victims don't even know. Maybe they think he's busy working on a statement of sympathy and compassion for them, not on his putting skills.
I have no idea how well or poorly Barack Obama's golf game went. But if he is lucky, it will be like the quality of his judgment.
In the halls of American power, the Arab Spring has brought Al-Jazeera in from the cold.
Seven years after then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called the broadcaster’s reporting “vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable” and President George W. Bush joked about bombing it, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised it as “real news” in her recent Senate testimony.
Not only that, her staffers, as well as those of the CIA and the Obama White House, were attending the Congressional Correspondents’ Dinner as Al-Jazeera’s guests.
“They are a really important media entity, and we have a really great relationship with them,” said Dana Shell Smith, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for international media engagement, who speaks Arabic and has frequently appeared on the channel. “This administration has empowered those of us who actually do the communicating to be in a close relationship with Al-Jazeera. They understand that the relationship can’t consist of complaining to each other about the differences we have.”
The differences also have shrunk as the big story in the Middle East has shifted from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the democratic movements sweeping the region. In the recent uprisings, U.S. interests tended to line up with Al-Jazeera’s, and President Barack Obama alluded to both the network’s influence and its pro-democracy bent in remarks caught on an open mic during a closed-door fundraiser last week.
“The emir of Qatar come by the Oval Office today, and he owns Al-Jazeera basically,” Obama said in remarks recorded by CBS News’s Mark Knoller. “Pretty influential guy. He is a big booster, big promoter of democracy all throughout the Middle East. Reform, reform, reform. You’re seeing it on Al-Jazeera.”
You read this stuff and you don't know whether to laugh, to cry or just to shake uncontrollably.
al-jazeera is an anti-West anti-Israel, anti-Jewish cesspool. It is osama bin laden and ayman al-zawahiri's mouthpiece of choice when they put out their "tapes" (assuming either of them is still alive and the tapes are real).
And despite Mark Knoller's idiocy, the "pretty influential guy" who owns it is not "a big booster, big promoter of democracy....".
Tell me, Mark: How many votes did the emir of Qatar win his last election by? Oh, what's that you say? There wasn't any election, he is just the emir of Qatar come hell or high water?
And what about the fact that this "constitutional monarchy" (whatever that is) has a parliament of 45 seats - 15 of which are appointed by the emir, not elected.
And what about the fact that Qatar has a state religion (which one? Hint: It ain't Christianity and it sure as @*&%# ain't Judaism).
And what about the fact that it is illegal for anyone to proselytize a Qatar citizen away from Islam.
Can't answer any of that, Mark? Then do us all a favor and stick your fawning adoration for the emir of Qatar's love of democracy right where it belongs. Don't forget to bring the Charmin.
But wait. Mark Knoller is not the issue here. He's small potatoes. What about the apparent love affair between President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton and al-jazeera?
Can it be possible that we have a President and Secretary of State singing the praises of this hate-mongering sewer posing as mainstream media?
The answer: It not only is possible, it is a fact.
James Lewis, the excellent blogger at americanthinker.com, has written a Passover/Easter blog(as I would call it, or an Easter/Passover blog as my Christian friends might), which touches on a number of issues, events and the people and groups responsible for them. A must-read.
Within Lewis' excellent piece is as good an explanation of "J Street", and the far-left moneybag who funds it, as I have seen anywhere. This being the case, I thought I would share it with you:
J Street is the George Soros front for radical Leftists who have the shocking gall to claim to speak for all American Jews. Nobody elected J Street to anything. Except Mr. Soros's checkbook. Like Joe Kennedy, Sr., Soros will give you all the agit-prop his money can buy.
J Street is a classical propaganda front, like the NAACP and NOW. If those groups were legitimate they would speak up for black people and women in places like Afghanistan and Africa. They never do. Never. The NAACP doesn't care about black slavery and genocide in Africa, and NOW doesn't care about honor killings of teenage Muslim girls in London.
If that doesn't tell you who they are, then nothing will.
Divide-and-conquer fronts like J Street are an old Stalinist agit-prop tool. George Soros grew up in Hungary during the Stalin-Hitler time, when the radical Left forged a bloody alliance with the Nazis, just as today they have forged an alliance with Radical Islam. The American Thinker and other reliable sources have traced that alliance step by step. Just look it up.
Soros is just doing today what he did when he sold the furniture of Jewish families who were deported from Budapest to the concentration camps. It could be a sort of repetition compulsion for Mr. Soros. He has told the world that he feels no survivor guilt about the Nazis. Instead of guilt, Mr. Soros attacks open societies wherever they can still be found. Where's Dr. Freud when we need him? I'll bet Freud knew all about the Soroses of this world.
Beautifully said. Thank you Mr. Lewis, and please keep it coming. People need to know - especially people who rely on mainstream media for their information.
"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.": Thomas Jefferson
Here, straight from Madison, Wisconsin is the latest demonstration of left wing "civility" - and the respect the unions there have for free speech. It occurs during a "Tea Party" rally, when a young (13 or 14 year old) girl is speaking (if you have trouble seeing it below, just click here):
There you have it. A group of organized thugs trying everything they can to scream down fellow citizens doing nothing other than expressing a different point of view. And one "man" (maybe others as well) screaming and gesticulating profanities at a teenaged girl for daring to share that point of view.
As noted above, this is a demonstration of left wing "civility" - and the respect the unions there have for free speech.
Sadly, it is also another of the seemingly countless examples of what our wonderful "neutral" media decline to show the country.
"Journalists" who bury episodes like this are disgraces to their profession - and valuable assets for the propaganda arms of the people they so clearly side with.
But listen to them squeal like stuck pigs if you call them biased.
Nobody whines as pathetically as Paul Krugman: New York Times Columnist, left wing ideologue and a man consistently cited for factual errors - either intentional or unintentional.
Here is the beginning of one of Mr. Krugman's latest blog posts -- with my comments in blue:
Civility is the Last Refuge of Scoundrels
At the beginning of last week, the commentariat was in raptures over the Serious, Courageous, Game-Changing Ryan plan. But now that the plan has been exposed as the cruel nonsense it is (Exposed?By whom?Do you really believe that because your kindred spirits on the left don’t like Rep. Ryan's plan, everyone else has definitively rejected it as cruel nonsense?Let me add arrogance to the whining), what we’re hearing a lot about is the need for more civility in the discourse. (Er, we have been hearing that far more from Democrats and the left – often one and the same – ever since you frauds dishonestly tried to pin the Gabrielle Giffords shooting on Republicans in general and Sarah Palin in particular.Let’s add lying to the list).President Obama did a bad thing by calling cruel nonsense cruel nonsense; he hurt Republican feelings, and how can we have a deal when the GOP is feeling insulted? What we need is personal outreach; let’s do lunch! (This is exactly what I mean by whining as an art form.)
The easy, and perfectly fair, shot is to talk about the hypocrisy here (on this we agree….but the hypocrisy is Democrats first screaming there has to be civility and then ignoring their own screams by calling Republicans every name in the book); where were all the demands for civility when Republicans were denouncing Obama as a socialist (redistribution of wealth is socialist), accusing him of creating death panels (bureaucracies deciding which medications seniors can and cannot get are death panels) etc..? Why is it OK for Republicans to accuse Obama of stealing from Medicare (because he specifically gutted it of $500 billion dollars to cook the books on ObamaCare and make it look like something other than the money pit that it is), but not OK for Obama to declare, with complete truthfulness, that those same Republicans are trying to dismantle the whole program?(You call it dismantling.Others – correctly – point out that medicare cannot possibly continue as it is, and call Ryan’s proposal a restructuring of the program so that it can continue to exist. That’s a little something you somehow left out.)
Beyond that, are we dealing with children here? (A self-reference?). Is one of our two major political parties run by people so immature that they will refuse to do what the country needs because the president hasn’t been nice to them?(What the country needs is a President with his head out of the collective rectums of left wing drones like you, Paul).
But the main point is, what are we supposed to have a civil discussion about? The truth is that the two parties have both utterly different goals and utterly different views about how the world works(Hey!!Finally a true statement.This is a DIFFERENCE IN POLITICAL VIEWS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF GOVERNANCE. Not what you are arrogantly whining and lying about. I’ll stop now, because I want to cut you a break and leave at the point where you said something that makes sense. It doesn’t happen that often.)
Ok, that's enough. Any piece by Paul Krugman is a potential treasure trove of ridiculous material, and this latest one is no exception.
So if you want to read the rest of Mr. Krugman's blog and continue the dismantling job yourself, just click here. Happy hunting.
SCHOOL CHOICE IN D.C.: A GOP VICTORY FOR CHILDREN WHO WANT TO LEARN
Ken Berwitz
Anyone who reads this blog knows I have a lot of problems with Barack Obama and his administration.
But some problems are in a different league than others. And Mr. Obama's intentional killing of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which subsidized the cost of private schools for parents who want to rescue their children from the impossibly disastrous D.C. School system, was one of them.
At Mr. Obama's insistence, that program died last year, leaving 1,700 motivated students with the joy of being subjected to the tender mercies of a school system that, at best, will severely hold back their education and, at worst, will not educate them at all.-- while Mr. Obama's children enjoy their stay at the Sidwell Friends school, one of D.C.'s very best.
Enter John Boehner and the Republican Party.
Here is what they did, courtesy of the following excerpt from an article by Caroline May at dailycaller.com:
School choice advocates applauded a provision in the continuing resolution that funds the government for the rest of the year, which restores and strengthens the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program for five years.
“Today’s reauthorization of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program should send a strong message to parents across the country who seek to fight for their children’s rights: if you fight for your children and you never give up, the road will not always be easy, but in the end—justice will prevail,” said Virginia Walden Ford, executive director of D.C. Parents for School Choice. “This reauthorization provides hope and opportunity to thousands of children in the District of Columbia whose parents only seek to provide them with better futures and a chance to succeed and achieve their dreams.”
The program provides low income students with scholarship money to attend the private school of their choice. The D.C. public schools rank 51st in the nation and are considered to be among the most dangerous in the country.
According to the Heritage Foundation, students who in the past have received a voucher and attended a private school had a 91 percent graduation rate, compared to the 55 percent graduation rates in the D.C. Public Schools.
Will Republicans get any credit for accomplishing this? Almost certainly, the answer is no.
D.C. will still vote almost monolithically Democrat. The teachers unions, which hate the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (because it cuts in on their monopoly) will still hate Republicans just as much as they always do. And President Obama isn't about to thank Republicans for reversing his policy.
It is my hope, however, that a great many people learn about this program, what it does, who it benefits - and who brought it back from the political graveyard. That way they can understand just how important it is to the future of disadvantaged, mostly Black, young men and women who want to learn, and who cared enough about those children to resurrect it.
I assure you I am not counting on mainstream media for this. But maybe you can mention it to your friends.
An Egyptian court ordered the dissolving of the country’s former ruling party and the confiscation of its assets on Saturday, meeting a major demand of the protest movement that ousted President Hosni Mubarak.
Activists have been pressing Egypt’s ruling military to abolish the National Democratic Party, fearing that even after the fall of Mubarak on Feb. 11 - and the arrest of many of its top leaders - remnants of the party could still try to hold power in the country. In particular, the NDP could still have been a powerful contender in the first post-Mubarak parliament elections due in September.
As you can see, the "freedom and democracy" Egypt is now experiencing says "We got rid of the ruling party we didn't want. So you can't vote for that party, even if you want to"
Does that seem like freedom to you? Democracy? Or does it seem like what Hosni Mubarak did while he was in power?
Who is making these rules? That's worth knowing, because whoever is doing so is a) in power right now and b) making damn sure that they will stay in power once the "elections" are held.
That is what happens when the opposition is eliminated. That is what happens in every dictatorship in the world.
In the Obama Administration’s latest move to protect illegal immigrants while an amnesty plan gets worked out, Homeland Security officials said they won’t take action against a group of outlaws arrested in Georgia last week.
The illegal immigrants participated in a disruptive Atlanta demonstration to protest a state measure that bans undocumented students from attending some public colleges. The seven self-described activists, who proudly boasted about their illegal status, were arrested by local police for blocking traffic in bustling downtown Atlanta for about an hour.
Local media followed up this week by inquiring about the arrested demonstrators and the Homeland Security agency responsible for removing illegal aliens, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), confirmed that it was not taking any “enforcement actions against the student demonstrators.” One ICE official pointed to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s well-documented stance on not deporting illegal immigrant students.
Last summer the Obama Administration ordered authorities to stop removing illegal immigrants who are students while lawmakers craft legislation to officially shield them from expulsion. The move, which has spared an estimated 700,000 illegal aliens, came in response to nationwide rallies by defiant illegal immigrants protesting their eminent removal or that of their undocumented parents.
The Obama administration refuses to secure our borders (and sues a state which tries to do so). It ignores a ruling against ObamaCare. It ignores a legislative agreement which prevents the creation of more unvetted "Czars". And now we find out that it declines to act against illegals who break the law while flaunting the fact that they are illegals.
Tell me: On the day we elected Barack Obama President did we also vote to nullify the constitution? We must have, because it is clear that this administration has no intention of abiding by it.
And it is just as clear that most of our wonderful "neutral" media are happy to look the other way on Mr. Obama's behalf while his administration acts as if they can make up the laws as they go along. The "journalists" who do this are a disgrace to their profession - and apparently could not care less.
Did we have an election in 2008, or was it a coronation?
I ask this because Barack Obama is not acting as an elected official, but as a king who answers to no one - certainly not to the constitution, with its separation of powers.
We saw this with ObamaCare when, after federal judge Roger Vinson ruled it unconstitutional, President Obama and his Democrat cohorts moved right along with its implementation as if the judge and his ruling did not exist.
And now we are seeing it with the just-passed legislation regarding "Czars" who are appointed by the President without any congressional oversight.
In marked contrast to vows as a candidate not to use presidential signing statements as “an end run around Congress,” President Obama released a statement on the just-signed spending bill saying despite the law’s restrictions on “czars,” he will “construe” the law not to interfere with “presidential prerogatives.”
The move is an aggressive power play by Obama to gain an added advantage from the deal struck a week ago between the president, Republican House Speaker John Boehner and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to narrowly avert government shutdown.
The legislation prohibits government money being spent on four Obama “czars,” newly created positions with far-reaching sway over federal agencies but facing no confirmation vote in the Senate.
What the hell is going on here? Did someone redo the Oval Office and install a throne?
And where are our wonderful "neutral" media? Why must I go to a political web site to read this? Why isn't it lead-story news in the mainstream print and broadcast media?
Would these same media have ignored it if George Bush were appointing Czars this way?
How do these toadies have the nerve to wonder why people hold media in such low regard? How do they have the nerve to wonder why people call them biased?
Like hafez assad, his father before him, bashir assad is the dictator of Syria
And, like his father before him, bashir assad has no compunctions at all about murdering his own people to stay in power. In 1982, hafez murdered something like 10,000-20,000 to quell an uprising against him in the city of Hama. bashir's butchery of his own people is nowhere near that number - yet. (Let's remember that he still has time to make up the difference.)
What do the protesting/rebelling Syrians want, and how far are they willing to go to get it? Read this excerpt from today's dispatch from Reuters:
(Reuters) - Protests against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad swept into the capital Damascus on Friday for the first time since a growing wave of pro-democracy unrest began to put pressure on his 11-year rule.
Thousands of protesters marched elsewhere across the country despite a fierce crackdown and some political concessions announced by Assad in an attempt to quell spreading unrest.
Shouting "God, Syria, Freedom," protesters repeated the same demand for democratic reform and freedoms across many cities.
In Damascus, security forces used batons and teargas to prevent thousands of protesters marching from several suburbs from reaching the main Abbasside Square.
"I counted 15 mukhabarat (secret police) busloads," one witness said.
"They went into the alleyways just north of the square chasing protesters and yelling 'You pimps, you infiltrators, you want freedom? We will give it to you'."
God, Syria, Freedom? Knowing they are facing a brutal dictator who won't think twice about killing his own people, but going to the streets anyway? That's pretty strong stuff.
What do you suppose the protesters are after?
Yes, we know they want assad removed as their head of state, one way or the other. But then what? How can anyone tell?
Well, let's look at what has happened since Hosni Mubarak was forced out in Egypt (relatively peacefully, unlike what is happening in Syria)? Egypt is now lurching toward an Islamic law state, far from the "freedom and democracy" our media proclaimed they would get - media that have become deadly silent about Egypt now that reality is showing itself.
And what do "the rebels" want in Libya? Well, one of their most important leaders says he has recruited al-qaeda fighters into their ranks because "members of al-Qaeda are also good Muslims and are fighting against the invader". That doesn't look any more like freedom and democracy than what is happening in Egypt.
Then there is Syria. Is it desirable that bashir assad, the optometrist-by-trade who was handed a country by his dicatator father, be removed from power? The answer is yes - just as it was desirable for Mubarak and is desirable for qaddafi to be removed.
But it can never be forgotten that, when one head of state leaves power, someone else takes over. And if the new leader is even worse than the one who was ousted, what then?
That is what appears to be happening in Egypt, and could very well happen in Libya as well.
But, for Syria, there is a difference.
In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak actually had something to recommend him. While it is easy to see what was wrong with his regime, Mubarak also managed to be at peace with Israel for 30 years and to sometimes be a good ally of the United States. (No wonder President Obama was so eager to see him deposed!).
By contrast, Libya and Syria are run by subhuman murdering scum. There is nothing good about qaddafi or assad. The only reason for wanting them to remain in power is that, bad as they are, the alternative might even be worse.
In Libya, that is a very real possibility, given that "the rebels" actively recruit al-qaeda to their ranks. This, obviously, leads to the question of why the USA and NATO are bombing Libya on their behalf - a question our wonderful "neutral" media are not asking (thus protecting the Obama administration while defaulting on their jobs as journalists).
In Syria, however - with its murderous dictator and Iran as his major protector - an even worse government is far less likely. Even if post-assad Syria becomes a non-democratic Islamic state, how much worse is that than being led by a dictator/mass murderer who is backed by an even bigger dictator/mass murderer?
The one caveat here is that Syria is not currently engaged in a war with Israel, and a new leader conceivably would be crazy enough to try it. But a) given Israel's military strength relative to Syria as an individual country, that is highly improbable, and b) if there were a multi-country attack on Israel in the future, Syria under assad would have joined in anyway.
Personally, I would love to see a truly free, democratic Syria - a western-style democracy like Israel. But I understand that it is a near-impossibility at this time. Realistically, the best we can hope for right now is that assad is ousted, even if the new government is undesirable, on the grounds that it will almost certainly be less undesirable than assad.
Is that an ugly choice? Yes. But things are as they are.
And as for the Syrians who really, truly do want freedom and democracy? God help them. Maybe someday........
This is not a comparison of financial assets or length of hair. Donald Trump beats me on both (though I have a feeling he loses on number of strands).
This is a comparison of political and social outlooks, based on the statement Mr. Trump made to Sean Hannity during his interview.
Trump: "I'm Christian, pro-life, against gay marriage and so for the death penalty"
Berwitz: I'm Jewish, pro-choice (until there is a beating heart and brain activity), in favor of gay marriage (or civil union if that's the terminology you prefer) and almost always against the death penalty.
Add to this the fact that, while I admire Donald Trump's talents as a businessperson and a self-promoter, I consider him a master of hyperbole who frequently shoots from the hip and talks right out of his rectum. Add in a few other characteristics I'm not especially fond of, and I think you probably have a pretty good idea of how I view his possible presidential run.
In an earlier blog, I referred to Donald Trump as "Carl Paladino to his logical conclusion". That stands as originally written.
I have zero expectation that Republicans will nominate Donald Trump. But god help them if they do.
I haven't seen Mike Papantonio much - certainly not as much as the regular cable news hosts on Fox, MSNBC and CNN.
But what I have seen of Mr. Papantonio tells me that he is a hard-left ideologue with a penchant for viciously offensive personal insults against people to his right (which is just about everyone).
Yeah, I know this description fits a lot of media “personalities”, but Papantonio happens to be the one I’m talking about today.
Today's poster child for (the strategy of smears, not facts) is notorious Floridatrial attorney / libtalker Mike Papantonio.
Papantonio used an Ed Schultz Show guest appearance to repeatedly call (Rep. Paul) Ryan "a freak" and "boy", used and abused by the all-powerful, eminently-evil Koch Brothers (cue sinister musical score).
Then, just when his rant was growing especially tiresome, we were suddenly jarred awake: the Papster says he still supports Obama because he's "carrying our spear."
JUST IMAGINE the reaction to a conservative host using "Obama" and "spear" in the same sentence! It would dominate the news cycle for days.
But don't expect Sharpton & Friends to protest this one.
Imagine that terminology - unintentionally racial as it probably was - had come from, say, Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh. Do you think there just might be a media outcry?
Well, it wasn't Hannity or Limbaugh, it was Papantonio. So there won’t be.
Among the prevailing poobahs of our wonderful “neutral” media, it is a near-guarantee that Mike Papantonio's comment about Barack Obama "carrying our spear" will be seen as perfectly acceptable; just a cute little turn of phrase. It can’t be racial, because Papantonio's left wing credentials are impeccable. So he’s one of the good guys. After all, isn't every leftist a paradigm of racial tolerance?
Leaders send mixed messages as French say there is 'no military solution'
David Cameron, Barack Obama and Nicolas Sarkozy upped the stakes in the Libya conflict last night as they vowed to fight on until Colonel Gaddafi is ousted.
In a joint article, the British, American and French leaders warned it would be an ‘unconscionable betrayal’ were Nato to stop bombing with the dictator still in power.
Gaddafi must ‘go and go for good’ before rebuilding of the country could begin, they said, rejecting calls for an immediate ceasefire.
However the highly unusual joint statement did little to paper over behind-the-scenes bickering over how to advance the military mission.
It will also fuel the concerns of critics who say the aims of the conflict are becoming dangerously blurred.
And French foreign minister Alain Juppe added to the confusion today when he said that air strikes alone wold not topple Gaddafi.
He said: 'In reality, we have the same objective - this objective is to allow the Libyan people to enjoy democratic freedom.
So we weren't going to depose qaddafi, but now we are -- oh, wait a minute, "they" weren't going to depose qaddafi but now "they" are. I forgot that "we" aren't in charge of anything anymore.
And, while we know we are fighting against qaddafi, we still have no idea of who we are fighting for. There is convincing evidence that "the rebels" are al-qaeda sympathizers: i.e.one of their major leaders, abdel-hakim al-hasidi, has stated he recruits al-qaeda to fight with him because they are "also good muslims". Can we possibly be bombing Libya to replace qaddafi with that?
Does anyone in the Obama administration have even the slightest idea of what they are doing in Libya? Does President Obama? Does Secretary of State Clinton?
Can they possibly agree with French foreign minister Juppe that "this objective is to allow the Libyan people to enjoy democratic freedom"? How can that be, if all we know about "the rebels" who would replace qaddafi is that a) they can't fight him effectively but b) they are happy to fight alongside the "good muslims" who belong to al-qaeda?
Do Mr. Obama, Ms. Clinton or Mr. Juppe remember those "democratic freedom" protests in Egypt just months ago? Have they noticed what Egypt is becoming, now that Hosni Mubarak is gone? Have they noticed who is taking over that government? Is this "democratic freedom" to them? Do they have any guarantees that Libya would not follow exactly the same path?
Libya is a mess. A complete, unadulterated mess. And the Obama administration is a clueless participant in it.
Oil is well over $100 a barrel - and may be going higher.
Gas prices are poised to hit a national average of $4.00 - and may be going even higher.
These factors affect far more than cars at the pump. They affect the cost of products which are transported - which means just about every product you can think of.
And higher oil prices enrich the countries which produce oil, which - in the case of the USA, means about 60% of what we use. And many of the countries we are enriching this way, absolutely hate our guts.
So who is for, and who is against, the USA increasing its domestic oil production?
A bill requiring the U.S. to open areas off the Virginia coast and in the Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas exploration cleared a key hurdle in the U.S. House Wednesday. The House Natural Resources Committee voted to approve the leasing measure, paving the way for a vote by the full House next month. Earlier Wednesday, the committee also voted to establish a 60-day maximum for the Interior Department to approve or deny offshore drilling permits. If Interior took longer, the permit would be deemed approved.
The bills are part of an effort by House Republicans to support domestic oil and gas production, which they have stepped up in recent months in the face of rising gasoline prices. Democrats have pushed back, saying that Congress should focus on providing incentives for non-traditional energy sources and reducing energy consumption.
All but two Democrats voted against the bills on offshore leasing. The bills' prospects are less certain in the Senate, where Democrats hold a majority.
Summarizing: Republicans strongly favor drilling to increase the amount of oil we produce domestically. Democrats strongly oppose such drilling.
Can you see a wedge issue here? A huge wedge issue that literally mean millions of votes? I assume you can.
Can Republicans see a wedge issue here? About that, I make no assumptions.
You might wonder how it could be possible for them not to see something that is this plainly obvious. But let's remember that these are Republicans we're talking about.
Remember that "Peanuts" comic strip at the start of every football season -- the one where Lucy convinces Charlie Brown to try kicking the football that, every other year, she pulled away at the last second? Remember how he fell for it again anyway, and wound up flat on his back, muttering how he had been taken?
With this in mind, why would any Republican be surprised if President Obama made nice to them as if he had a serious interest in working together, and then sandbagged them by going 100% partisan?
They expected a peace offering, a gesture of goodwill aimed at smoothing a path toward compromise. But soon after taking their seats at George Washington University on Wednesday, they found themselves under fire for plotting “a fundamentally different America” from the one most Americans know and love.
“What came to my mind was: Why did he invite us?” Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.) said in an interview Thursday. “It’s just a wasted opportunity.”
The situation was all the more perplexing because Obama has to work with these guys: Camp is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, responsible for trade, taxes and urgent legislation to raise the legal limit on government borrowing. Rep. Jeb Hensarling (Tex.) chairs the House Republican Conference. And Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is House Budget Committee chairman and the author of the spending blueprint Obama lacerated as “deeply pessimistic” during his 44-minute address.
At a time when the parties risk economic catastrophe unless they can come together to raise the debt limit, Obama’s partisan tone made no sense, Republicans across Capitol Hill said Thursday. Even some Obama allies wondered whether the president had made a tactical error.
“Yes,” the tenor of the speech was surprising, said Erskine Bowles, who headed Obama’s fiscal commission and is working with a bipartisan group of six senators to develop a compromise plan to rein in borrowing.
When do Republicans finally figure out that this is the nature of the man? How many times are they going to be "surprised" to find out that Barack Obama places partisanship over just about everything else - certainly over working with members of the party he wants defeated in 2012.
Have they forgotten his "bipartisanship" after the 2008 elections (not 2010 as I originally posted. Thanks, sis), when Democrats put together the so-called "stimulus package" and "ObamaCare" without any input from Republicans because, in his words "We won"?
Take the hint, guys. If you want bipartisanship you've come to the wrong place. Don't expect it. And, until and unless things change, don't offer what won't be reciprocated. It just makes you look like a bunch of suckers.
THE NEW YORK TIMES VS. THE KOCH BROTHERS: RETRACTIONS
Ken Berwitz
With apologies to John Hinderaker at www.powerlineblog.com, I am posting his latest blog in its entirety. I am doing so because a) it is so important, b) I can't find a way to cut it down without losing something important and c) if you read it, you will probably be persuaded to go to his web site every day (or so I hope). Please pay special attention to the last paragraph, which I have put in bold print.
Mr. Hinderaker can certainly feel free to lift anything I write for powerlineblog.com (as long as he spells my name right):
We summed up here our coverage of the New York Times' smear campaign against Charles and David Koch and their company, Koch Industries. The Times has printed one false or misleading claim after another about the Kochs. On April 7, the paper issued a correction of its own editorial attacking the Koch brothers. Today came correction number two, which related to an op-ed column by David Callahan, an employee of a left-wing advocacy organization:
An Op-Ed article on April 4, about disclosure rules for nonprofit groups that engage in political advocacy, imprecisely described contributions by the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch to such groups. While they contributed to a predecessor of the conservative group FreedomWorks, they say they have not contributed to FreedomWorks itself.
As we pointed out, the Callahan column contained at least two more factual misrepresentations that the Times has yet to correct. But note the grudging nature of the one correction the paper did issue today. The Times says that the op-ed "imprecisely described" the Koch brothers' contributions to certain nonprofit groups. Actually, this is what Callahan wrote:
One such group is FreedomWorks, which has received significant amounts of money from the Koch brothers and is a force behind both the Tea Party political movement and the conservative libertarian policy agenda it espouses.
Given that the Koch brothers have in fact contributed nothing to FreedomWorks, the claim that that organization has "received significant amounts of money" from them is not an imprecise description, it is a flat misrepresentation.
Note, too, the paper's implied doubt about whether its correction is really necessary: "they say they have not contributed to FreedomWorks itself." The Times acts as though there is some doubt about the matter, but, as a one-minute Google search will reveal, FreedomWorks has confirmed that it has received no money from the Kochs.
The Times should be deeply embarrassed that its vendetta against the Koch brothers, two of America's most respected businessmen, has been so sloppily executed that it has already resulted in two corrections--with more, perhaps, to come. The paper should be embarrassed, but it probably isn't. The Times long ago signaled its willingness to sacrifice whatever journalistic reputation it once possessed in order to advance its far-left political agenda. Lying in the service of leftism is, in the world of the New York Times, no sin.
The New York Times of today reminds me of what Henry Drummond (Spencer Tracy) said about Matthew Harrison Brady (Frederic March) to E. K. Hornbeck (Gene Kelly): "A giant once lived in that body".
The New York Times once was, or at least conveyed the impression of being, a great newspaper. It no longer is. Now The Times is a left wing propaganda sheet which regularly embarrasses itself, due to its lack of professionalism and its outright dishonesty.
(Reuters) - Too little is known about Libya's rebels and they remain too fragmented for the United States to get seriously involved in organizing or training them, let alone arming them, U.S. and European officials say.
U.S. and allied intelligence agencies believe NATO's no-fly zone and air strikes will be effective in stopping Muammar Gaddafi's forces from killing civilians and dislodging rebels from strongholds like Benghazi, the officials say.
But the more the intelligence agencies learn about rebel forces, the more they appear to be hopelessly disorganized and incapable of coalescing in the foreseeable future.
U.S. government experts believe the state of the opposition is so grave that it could take years to organize, arm and train them into a fighting force strong enough to drive Gaddafi from power and set up a working government.
The realistic outlook, U.S. and European officials said, is for an indefinite stalemate between the rebels -- supported by NATO air power -- and Gaddafi's forces.
Someone. Please. Tell me why we have any involvement in this mess.
Someone. Please. Tell me what our objectives are there?
Someone. Please. Tell me why our media have not absolutely skewered President Obama over this. Do you think President Bush would have gotten the "look the other way and don't ask" treatment from these so-called "journalists"?
This is a mess. One we are dead in the middle of. We need to know why.
And maybe, while we're at it, we can get some explanation of what we have gained from President Obama's near-quadrupling of our troops in Afghanistan - other than a huge jump in casualties and a huge jump in military costs?
Is there anyone in mainstream media who still wants to be a journalist? If so, why isn't he/she asking these questions?
Joy Behar has a show on Headline News Network (HLN) weeknights at 10PM. Its ratings would need transfusions to reach anemic status.
Illustratively, last night's Neilsen data show Fox's Greta Van Susteren with 1,748,000 viewers, MSNBC's Ed Schultz with 1,005,000, CNN's Anderson Cooper with 716,000........and Joy Behar at 301,000.
I think it is fair to say that when you have less than half as many viewers as the next to last show, you are not doing very well.
In case you wonder why Ms. Behar gets ratings this low, maybe the following exchange from this morning's The View will give you a hint. The topic was air traffic controllers who fall asleep on the job:
WHOOPI GOLDBERG: No, this is an issue, this has been ongoing I think for quite some time. But I think-
JOY BEHAR: Reagan- Ronald Reagan.
WHOOPI GOLDBERG: It sort of started with the- Ronald Reagan saying, you know, you guys asking for too much money. He fired everybody. He cleaned them all out.
BEHAR: He busted the union, the air controllers' union. And they probably would have been strict about having two people there. The main thing about the unions is they want more people to work.
There you have it. According to Joy Behar, air traffic controllers who fall asleep on the job in 2011, are a direct result of President Ronald Reagan's actions against the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) in 1981.
Why wasn't this happening (that we know of) for the 30 years from 1981 to 2011? You'll have to ask Ms. Behar. But don't expect an answer any more informative than her remarkably ignorant explanation of why President Reagan did what he did (which you can read all about by clicking here).
That, I would think, explains why Ms. Behar's ratings are so disastrously low -- and why Whoopi Goldberg doesn't have any show at all.
This latest example of left wing "civility" comes to us from the more or less anonymous keith olbermann.
In case you don't know it (and it's a good bet you don't), olbermann is slated to do a show for something called "Current TV" - which ain't what you'd call a major player in the cable news game. There are likely to be more fans at Yankee Stadium tonight than listeners to a typical Current TV show.
But sinking into near-oblivion does not prevent olbermann from being who and what he is, which leads us to this excerpt from Tommy Christopher's post at mediaite.com:
Maybe he’s trying to drum up attention for the launch of his Current TV show, but Keith Olbermann is embroiled in another nasty Twitter fight, this time with Glenn Beck protege´ SE Cupp. Responding to a tweet about Cupp’s Planned Parenthood remarks on The Joy Behar Show, Olbermann tweeted “On so many levels she’s a perfect demonstration of the necessity of the work Planned Parenthood does”
When I first saw the tweet (forwarded to me by a colleague), I was certain that Olbermann had laid a clever trap, and that when Cupp’s supporters inevitably slammed Olbermann for wishing she’d been aborted, he would point out that as a woman, SE could benefit from the other 97% of Planned Parenthood services that Sen. John Kyl didn’t seem to know about.
Close. Olbermann did deny wishing an abortion on Cupp, and did reference Kyl, but said “I never mentioned abortion. I said her parents could have used counseling by PP rather than get the results they did”
Christopher, incidentally, is not much of an S. E. - Sarah Elizabeth, if you care - Cupp fan. He calls her a protegé of Glenn Beck, whom he doesn't like at all (we have common ground there). But Christopher is honest enough to recognize that olbermann pumped out a truly nasty comment, which he then seemed to try weaselling back from.
It didn't work.
In any event, this is the kind of "incivility" and "heated rhetoric" that our wonderful "neutral" media are more than happy to condemn....when it comes from Republicans, that is, which means olbermann is perfectly safe.
Too bad for keith. On Current TV he is going to need all the publicity, very much including bad publicity, that he can get.
A 25-year-old accountant has found Kate Middleton's face in a jelly bean. Yep. Wesley Hosie and his girlfriend, Jessica White, noticed that a mango bean in the jar they had purchased from the Jelly Bean Factory featured an uncanny resemblance to Prince William's future bride, the Telegraph reports.
"As Jessica opened the jar, I saw her immediately. She was literally lying there staring back at me," Hosie said.
And the pair immediately saw an opportunity in their blessed jelly bean.
"Given that the royal wedding is only a few weeks away, we hope to make a few pounds out of it by selling it on the internet to a collector."
What's next? A rutabaga that looks like Winston Churchill? (Come to think of it, if you've ever seen a picture of Mr. Churchill, you'll probably conclude that the possibility may not be so far-fetched).
Hey, I don't know if the jelly bean in question really looks this way, or was doctored to make some hoax money. But since I have no interest whatsoever in the wedding itself (other than the fact that Prince William looks unsettlingly like New York Yankee first baseman Mark Teixeira), this is about the extent of what I intend to write about it.
After all, if the Prince can look like a major league ballplayer, why shouldn't the Princess-to-be look like a jelly bean? At least we know she's sweet........
WOMEN'S HEALTH SERVICES: DO OBAMA & CO. CARE AT ALL?
Ken Berwitz
If President Obama and his administration are so concerned about women's health services, can someone explain this to me? It it excerpted from Caroline May's article at dailycaller.com:
The American Principles Project (APP) Wednesday criticized the Obama administration for allowing the elimination of $600 million for Community Health Centers while protecting funding for Planned Parenthood as part of last week’s budget deal agreed to by Congress and the White House.
Touting Planned Parenthood as a key women’s health-care provider, Democrats held firm to their promise not to allow cuts to the nation’s largest abortion provider. Community Health Centers, which do not perform abortions, provide health services to the needy — including mammograms and pre- and post-natal care.
According to the American Principles Project last year Community Health Centers performed 320,000 mammograms while Planned Parenthood did none.
“Coating its ideology in flowery language about women’s health and alleged Republican mean-spiritedness, liberal Democrats refused to cut one dime out of Planned Parenthood’s plump federal purse during the budget debate,” said the president of APP, Frank Cannon. “All the while a sharp knife was being taken to community health centers that actually perform full-scale exams for the needy. These health centers offer prenatal care to women and their babies – 480,000 times in 2009 alone. Planned Parenthood? Their 850 clinics average less than one prenatal visit a month, in other words, it’s not their line of work.”
If this is true, then how can anyone believe one word President Obama or his left wing cronies are saying when they justify funding Planned Parenthood on the grounds that it provides women's health services.
If it is true, the sickening reality is that Planned Parenthood gets taxpayer money because it is an abortion mill, which suits the Democrats' hard left just fine. But organizations that provide non-abortion health services to women don't count for spit. Which means that women's health needs don't count for spit. And I don't mean spit.
If we had a media in this country even remotely invested in finding out the truth, they would be all over this, demanding backup from dailycaller.com and/or the American Principles Project. And, if they get it, then demanding an explanation from the Obama administration.
But we do not have such a media. So I do not at all expect dailycaller.com or the APP to be challenged on this. Because if they are, and the information turns out to be correct, it forces media to demand answers from Obama & Co.
I would love to be pleasantly surprised by media's reaction to this story. But three years of observing how they treat Barack Obama - from his candidacy to the present - makes me very skeptical.
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Piracy hit an all-time high worldwide in the first three months of 2011 led by a surge in incidents off the coast of Somalia, a maritime watchdog said Thursday.
The International Maritime Bureau said a record high of 142 attacks in the first quarter came as Somalian pirates become more violent and aggressive.
The International Maritime Bureau's piracy reporting center said 97 of the attacks occurred off the coast of Somalia, up sharply from 35 in the same period last year.
It said attackers seized 18 vessels worldwide, including three big tankers, in the January-March period and captured 344 crew members. Pirates also murdered seven crew members and injured 34 during the quarter.
The Kuala Lumpur-based center's director Pottengal Mukundan said Thursday that there was a "dramatic increase in the violence and techniques" used by Somali pirates to counter increased patrols by international navies.
Mukundan said that Somali pirates were holding captive 596 crew members on 28 ships as of March 31 this year.
Foreign navies have been deployed off the Gulf of Aden — used by ships traveling between Asia and Europe — since the start of 2009, but the number of attacks has increased with pirates striking further away from Somalia's shores to avoid naval patrols.
The pirates are typically motivated by the potential for millions of dollars in ransom money.
Am I surprised? No, not in the least.
And to prove it, much as I hate to do so, I will repost this excerpt from a blog originally written in April, 2009. It is maybe the 6th time I'm doing so - but, damn it, the points I raised then are more important now than ever before:. And I am adding the additional dialogue I posted months ago because, sadly, it is just as meaningful today:
Another day has passed without the USA acting against Somalian thugs/terrorists/pirates.
But the thugs/terrorists/pirates remain in full operation. How long before they take another one of our ships? And what do you think they will do with a US crew?
Every day this is allowed to continue is a day that every American crew member on every ship is at mortal risk.
Are we planning to act against them where it counts - i.e. where their boats are docked? Or are we waiting for Americans to join the nationals of so many other countries and become hostages - or be killed outright, which is specifically what is being threatened?
Are we waiting for the rest of the world to act? Are we waiting for the UN? What have they done through all the Somalian hijackings so far, besides nothing? What will they do if an American crew is taken, besides nothing?
The time is now. Right now.
Send in our planes. Send in our troops. Not to the cities, but to the ports and contiguous areas around them.
Wipe these bastards out. blow up every ship that cannot 100% prove it is not engaged in the pirate/thug/terrorism trade. Put them the hell out of business.
