Thursday, August 30, 2012

Punching back twice as hard

Glenn makes a great point:

the Democrats’ media base has served two functions. One, of course, has been to misinform the people who don’t pay much attention. It can still do that, though with reduced efficacy. But the other was to demoralize or intimidate the opposition. That part seems to have pretty much fallen by the wayside.

It started with Rush.  Millions of people discovered that they were not alone.  Then bloggers.  Then the tea party.  People have figured out that DC is the Democrats' company town.  Waiting for a Republican inside the beltway to stand up against the news media onslaught and special interest money influence was a losing game.  So they started without them.

In a nutshell

Ryan:
The first troubling sign came with the stimulus. It was President Obama’s first and best shot at fixing the economy, at a time when he got everything he wanted under one-party rule. It cost $831 billion – the largest one-time expenditure ever by our federal government.

It went to companies like Solyndra, with their gold-plated connections, subsidized jobs, and make-believe markets. The stimulus was a case of political patronage, corporate welfare, and cronyism at their worst. You, the working men and women of this country, were cut out of the deal.

What did the taxpayers get out of the Obama stimulus? More debt. That money wasn’t just spent and wasted – it was borrowed, spent, and wasted.

Maybe the greatest waste of all was time. Here we were, faced with a massive job crisis – so deep that if everyone out of work stood in single file, that unemployment line would stretch the length of the entire American continent.

Ryan's best lines

According to Washington Free Beacon:

1. “The issue is not the economy as Barack Obama inherited it, not the economy as he envisions it, but this economy we are living. College graduates should not have to live out their 20s in their childhood bedrooms, staring up at fading Obama posters and wondering when they can move out and get going with life.”

2. "It all started off with stirring speeches, Greek columns, the thrill of something new. Now all that’s left is a presidency adrift, surviving on slogans that already seem tired, grasping at a moment that has already passed, like a ship trying to sail on yesterday’s wind.”

3.  “I’m the newcomer to the campaign, so let me share a first impression. I have never seen opponents so silent about their record, and so desperate to keep their power. They’ve run out of ideas. Their moment came and went. Fear and division are all they’ve got left. With all their attack ads, the president is just throwing away money—and he’s pretty experienced at that.”

4. " An obligation we have to our parents and grandparents is being sacrificed, all to pay for a new entitlement we didn’t even ask for. The greatest threat to Medicare is Obamacare, and we’re going to stop it.”

5. " None of us have to settle for the best this administration offers—a dull, adventureless journey from one entitlement to the next, a government-planned life, a country where everything is free but us.”

6. " They have no answer to this simple reality: We need to stop spending money we don’t have.”

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Never letting science interfere with political message

Pielke the elder points out how the global warming alarmists put the political message ahead of science.

BO's chickens

Victor Davis Hanson:
Nor did Obama think that a mesmerized Wall Street, from which he raised more cash than any prior candidate, would object all that much to his populist boilerplate against “1 percenters,” “fat-cat bankers,” and owners of “corporate jets.”
...
 Beneath the folksy veneer and the serial calls for “civility,” Obama proved vicious in his denunciations of George Bush, at one point calling him “unpatriotic” for adding $4 trillion to the national debt over eight years.
...

 Obama established a wink-and-nod type of negative attack. As he called in sonorous tones for hope and change and a new civility, he negatively stereotyped a stunning cross-section of Americans: The white working class became “clingers,” the police “stereotype” minorities and act “stupidly,” small-business owners “didn’t build” their own businesses, doctors lop off limbs and yank out tonsils, bankers are “fat cats” — apparently on the premise that such groups would never take all this invective seriously. At various times Mitt Romney has been reduced to a dastardly financial pirate, a killer of innocent cancer victims, a veritable racist, and now a misogynist. After the class-warfare card and the race card, we await only Obama’s use of the Mormon card.

BO has said a lot of mean things about a lot of people.

Top Quality Academic Research

Jo Nova is on the case.   An academic purports to show that climate skeptics are nutters by asking alarmists about them in an online survey.  It must be true cause it's peer reviewed and and published and everything.

Update -- Warren Meyer:
the Lewandowsky study ostensibly linking climate skeptics to moon-landing-deniers is perhaps the worst study I have seen in a really long time.   This is another sign of postmodernism run wild in the sciences, with having the “right” answer being more important than actually being able to prove it.
The whole story is simply delicious, given the atrocious methodology paired is paired with a self-important mission by the authors of supposedly defending science against its detractors.  I can’t do the whole mess justice without just repeating her whole post, so go visit the article.

The University Plantation

A retired professor has a new blog.  (noted at Q and O).  Interesting stuff:

I retired from academia in 2010, after 40 or so reasonably succesful years. I was glad to go, because the ideals I originally thought to serve have almost entirely been replaced by something I find repellent.....The proper metaphor for the university is no longer the "ivory tower," a shining refuge from daily life that promotes creative thought---if it ever was. A better metaphor is something more down-and-dirty. Like any metaphor, it only goes so far, but in its limited way may aid our understanding. 

The modern university is a plantation.
After a lot of interesting discussion, he explains some of the consequences:

The structure of the social and economic systems are similar, and it creates negative consequences for society. For example, there are few more conforming people than university faculty, despite their job security. They often seem terrified to oppose the prevailing opinion of other professors, let alone their bosses. Don't believe me? Read these:
http://pjmedia.com/blog/captive-minds-conformity-and-campus-intellectuals/
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/science/08tier.html


There's a lot of forelock-tugging going on there. It's hardly an environment where creativity can flourish, or one in which students can learn critial thinking.

There's lots, lots more.

Unexpectedly

Consumer confidence is tanking to a 9 month low.  "Unexpectedly."

U.S. consumer confidence unexpectedly weakened in August to its lowest in nine months as Americans turned more pessimistic about the short-term outlook, according to a private sector report released on Tuesday.


The Conference Board, an industry group, said its index of consumer attitudes fell to 60.6 from a downwardly revised 65.4 the month before. Economists had expected an increase to 66, according to a Reuters poll.
It was the lowest level since November. July was originally reported as 65.9.

Ramirez nails it

Michael Ramirez explores many of the ways the news media is lying to the people to help Obama and the Democrats.  Of course, he barely touched a tiny fraction of the evidence because he only had a column.  Justice would require the world's biggest encyclopedia.

Know what you can't do

Greenie on Mike and Mike in the Morning on ESPN2 talking about the problems caused by Jerry Jones interfering in the football aspects of running the Dallas Cowboy:

"Every successful person has to know what it is that you don't know, what you can't do."

(quote approximate based on my memory and likely to be somewhat off.  Paraphrase accurately captures his point, however)

Absolutely right. 

Hubris.  Jones' is why the Cowboys have one playoff win in the last 15 years.

Party of Immigrants' Children

Future of Capitalism blog:

Rick Santorum, the former senator from Pennsylvania, spoke about how his father had come to America from Italy at age 7 and worked as a coal miner until he was 72. Ted Cruz, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas, spoke of how his father fled Cuba in 1957 with $100 sewn into his underwear and, after arriving in America, worked washing dishes for 50 cents an hour. Nikki Haley, the Republican governor of South Carolina, spoke of her experience as the daughter of immigrants from India. Her parents started a small business out of the living room of their home. Ann Romney, the wife of the presidential candidate, spoke of her father who came to America from Wales at age 15. Mia Love, the Republican mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah, is the daughter of parents who came here from Haiti with just $10.

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

"The ego has landed"

Quip seen at Lucianne under the pic of Obama gazing at the moon in his tribute to Neil Armstrong.

More here from IBD.
One is that Armstrong had publicly opposed the gutting of the U.S. space program by the Obama administration, which has left us no current way of sending men into space except for paying the Russians for a ride while NASA conducts "missions" like a Muslim outreach program and observing earth for signs of climate change.
The other is that if you are going to honor the passing of the first man on the moon, an American, you do not post your words under a picture of yourself in silhouette gazing into the dawn sky.

The Deciders?

NRO has a story on Frank Luntz's focus group of undecideds.  It is encouraging and depressing, too.

Monday, August 27, 2012

Environmentalism's Amoral Disorder

Ben Pile fisks the usual suspects unusually well.  Read it all.


Uncommon sense on healthcare costs

Warren Meyer lays out some observations that get too little attention:
Over the last 50 years, real per capital health care spending has increased substantially.   Certainly there are multiple reasons for this, but the most obvious one is seldom every mentioned -- that the US has seen huge increases in personal wealth over this period, and unsurprisingly people choose to spend a lot of this extra wealth on their own health and life expectancy.  In an age where consumerism is often derided as shallow and trivial, what could be more sensible than spending money on more and better life?
The biggest factor which makes current approaches to control costs unworkable is that they don't focus on the most obvious of issues -- consumer shopping behavior.
One issue that does not get enough attention is the prosaic act of shopping.   I spend my own money, and I care about price.  I spend someone else's money, I don't give a rip. 

Yep.

Haley Barbour on the crisis

"You've got an obligation to your children and grandchildren to make sure Barack Obama goes back to Chicago… because we can't stand four more years of this," Barbour said. "Eight years of Obama is not twice as bad as four. There is an exponential damage that is done to our country if he gets four more years."
Robert Stacy McCain  also reports that Barbour said:

"This is the most important presidential election of anybody in this room's lifetime," Barbour told the conservative bloggers and activists crowded into the living room. "I'm the oldest person in here, and there's never been an election in my lifetime with the consequences or the stakes in this election, because there's never been an election where the difference between the candidates of the two parties was greater."
and this:

 "I grew up in the political world when, at 6:30 Eastern, 5:30 Central, 90 percent of the TV sets in the United States were on ABC, NBC or CBS," Barbour, 64, told the gathering, reminding them of a pre-Drudge, pre-Limbaugh, pre-Fox News media environment "where almost all the news that reached Americans was strained through the editorial boards of the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Associated Press. For conservatives, that was a bad model. We are blessed today where people have all sorts of sources of information. You are really an important one of those sources."

Yep.  Back then, conservatives had to get in a fetal position just to hope to survive the rhetorical beatings.  Then came Rush.  And then the internet.

Sunday, August 26, 2012

Obama decrees that race, not behavior, to dictate school discipline

Obama signs an executive order.

We can dream

Mikey Mann is threatening to sue.  Wouldn't that be great?!

How is Obama likeable?

Neo asks a question that has always had me wondering as well.

[h]ow is it that so many people still see Obama as likable? Or even saw him that way in the first place? To me, it became clear early on in the 2008 campaign that Obama had a petty nastiness that was extremely unlikable, as well as being a ruthless narcissist.

I agree with her -- it isn't about political disagreement.  Some people are just nasty con artists.  A lot of them are politicians.  Why is that so hard for people to see?

Hopeless Corruption of a News Media obsessed with High School

John Nolte reflects on lessons learned from the misery of having to hundreds of news media types on twitter and watching MSNBC and CNN.  I feel his pain.

Just like high school, there's a pecking order in the media -- a cool kids' table, and the requisite desire to be liked, need to be included, and a somewhat nauseating set of rules to it all. Glib, detached irony is a calling card as is an obsession with the fun and games of politics -- because that's all any of this is to them. It's as though taking the future of your country seriously immediately relegates you to the nerd table.
To be fair, though, some things they do take seriously. The RIGHT things, the politically correct things: same-sex marriage, the Congressional Black Caucus -- that kind of stuff. I'm not trying to throw a newsflash your way that the media is leftist, you already knew that, but what's fascinating to watch is the CONFORMITY.
Bottom line: Everything a vast majority of the media does is meant to impress their own. It has nothing to do with getting to the truth or informing the public. They're writing, reporting, and tweeting only to satisfy and aggrandize The Collective -- to continually prove they belong or to improve their standing.
Like I said, it's like high school, and wanting to be part of the cool kids' clique requires conformity – and this conformity isn't exclusive to only left-wing journalists. Media-approved conservatives like Joe Scarborough, David Frum, Peggy Noonan, and the like are just as bad; maybe worse because they should know better.
These unwritten rules and the Borg-like collective conformity that manages the media does, I think, explain at least part of the day-to-day corruption we face. The Narrative is everything -- it's the daily homecoming game where you better show up, look a certain way, speak a certain way, and not spoil the fun. And by "fun" I of course mean the thrashing of conservatives and conservative ideas.

Hey, "waddyagonnado?"

Glenn nails news media hypocrisy v.2012.0.  After agreeing with a reader that food prices are soaring:

The other thing that appalls me is how surreally low the interest rates banks are touting have gotten — 0.5% on a CD! Woohoo! If we had a Republican president, the press would be full of tear-jerking reports about senior citizens being squeezed between rising food prices and rock-bottom interest rates as a result of his horrible economic policies. But since we have a Democrat in the White House, it’s just one of those things that happen, waddyagonnado?


Crony Capitalism is not Pro-Market Free Enterprise

Luigi Zingales -- "There is not a well-understood distinction between being pro-business and being pro-market. Businessmen like free markets until they get into a market; once they are in it they want to block entry to others. Pro-marketeers want free markets at all times. The more conservative pro-marketeers are fearful of criticising business, because they assume they will be seen as criticising the free market. But we need to stand up and criticise business when business is not helping the cause of free markets.”

Narcissism on steroids

 Obama -- "It's all about me."

Obama asks eurozone to keep Greece in until after election day

US officials are worried that if Greece exits the eurozone, it will damage President's election hopes

That word doesn't mean what you think it does

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Billy Hollis exposes the left's 'flexibility' with definitions.  Obama's expressed willingness to 'compromise' gets fisked.

For the current crew in charge of the Democratic Party, plus their media comrades, “compromise” never means taking something away from collectivists or reducing the size and scope of government. Anything  of that nature is immediately branded “extreme”. And, of course, you just can’t reason with extremists, so the implication is that they don’t need to be a part of the political process.
That’s how they are trying to tag Mitt Romney right now.
"I can’t speak to Governor Romney’s motivations," Obama said. "What I can say is that he has signed up for positions, extreme positions, that are very consistent with positions that a number of House Republicans have taken.
That’s laughable! Mitt Romney, an extremist? He’s the very archetype of an establishment, go-along-get-along Republican. He proved it in Massachusetts.
But it doesn’t matter whether he’s really extreme. The word has the connotation they want, so they use it incorrectly to promote their point of view, without a shred of shame or guilt, because they don’t think doing that is wrong.

Loving America and its people

I doubt that this man would have ever sat through even 20 seconds of his minister spouting "G@#  D&*n America!" much less 20 years.
Almost every personal detail about Romney I found endearing. But my slowly softening opinion went instantly to goo when The Real Romney unfolded an account of his endless kindnesses—unbidden, unsung, and utterly gratuitous. “It seems that everyone who has known him has a tale of his altruism,” the authors write. I was struck by the story of a Mormon family called (unfortunately) Nixon. In the 1990s a car wreck rendered two of their boys quadriplegics. Drained financially from extraordinary expenses, Mr. Nixon got a call from Romney, whom he barely knew, asking if he could stop by on Christmas Eve. When the day came, all the Romneys arrived bearing presents, including a VCR and a new sound system the Romney boys set up. Later Romney told Nixon that he could take care of the children’s college tuition, which in the end proved unnecessary. “I knew how busy he was,” Nixon told the authors. “He was actually teaching his boys, saying, ‘This is what we do. We do this as a family.’ ”
Romney’s oldest son Tagg once made the same point to the radio host Hugh Hewitt. “He was constantly doing things like that and never telling anyone about them,” Tagg said. “He doesn’t want to tell people about them, but he wanted us to see him. He would let the kids see it because he wanted it to rub off on us.”
To this touching kindness and fatherly wisdom, The Real Romney adds other traits that will continue to grate—he’s a know-it-all and likely to remain so, and his relationship to political principle has always been tenuous. Which makes him a, uh, politician. But now I suspect he’s also something else, a creature rarely found in the highest reaches of American politics: a good guy.

Saturday, August 25, 2012

Best football column -- ever

ESPN's Ryan McGee on the Peyton Manning way.  Awesome.  It's all about leadership. The end of the article filled with lots of great stuff:


"If you came up here to the practice facility at dawn, you'd see two cars already in the parking lot: the guy who runs the building and Peyton Manning," says cornerback Tracy Porter, another free agent addition to the roster. "When someone loves the game as much as he does, it kind of takes over the whole team."
Porter spent the past four years in New Orleans, facing a different future Hall of Famer, Drew Brees, in practice every day. He also picked off Manning in Super Bowl XLIV, the play that iced the Saints' title. When practice started this spring, Porter quickly picked off Manning again. A few plays later, Manning burned Porter deep.
As he walked off the field, the defensive back felt a hand on his shoulder. It was the quarterback, who said: "You tell me what I did wrong on that first play and I'll tell you what you did wrong on that next play. That's the only way we're going to get better. Deal?"
Months later, Porter still shakes his head while telling the story. "Dang right, that was a deal," he says. "He wants me to be better so he can be better. And he wants to be better to help me get better. I'll follow a man like that into any game, anywhere, any way."
Not just any way. The Manning Way.

Are Romney and Ryan inside BO's OODA loop?

It would not surprise me if Romney has some familiarity with the work of Col. Boyd on the OODA loop in combat tactics.  The campaign lately has had the feel of one where Obama continues to be a day late and dollar short.  And issues that BO thought would be advantages (e.g. Ryan and medicare) are being turned into serious liabilities for him.

Earlier this summer I speculated on the possibility that Obama might melt down if the pressure became great enough.  We are certainly seeing more and more flubs and miscalculations.  It appears that Obama realizes that he has lost the initiative.  Even a sympathetic press pulling hard for him hasn't enabled him to gain control of the narrative.

I expect that Romney fully intends to score some unexpected points during the RNC.  It will be interesting to see if BO oversteps in an effort to strike back when he gets his turn at the DNC.

Because he thinks you're stupid

Republican Women for Obama?:

It happens all the time in talk radio: a caller will say that he is a lifelong Republican, and will recall fondly how he voted for Ronald Reagan. Then he says that today’s Republicans have gone too far, and for the first time ever he is voting for a Democrat! These callers are nearly always lying. If you look them up, you likely will find that they are Democratic Party precinct chairmen.

These are the facebook likes of one of the women Obama claims is a Republican:

 * Democracy For America
* Tar Sands Action
* Amy Goodman
* Barack Obama
* Costoftaxcuts.com
* Being Liberal
* MoveOn.org
* Bernie Sanders Tells You A Secret the GOP Would Rather You Didn’t Know
* Miss Piggy Delivers the Best Takedown of Fox News We’ve Seen All Month
* Think Progress
* The Best Quote From Barack Obama We’ve Seen This Week
* Dow and Monsanto Join Forces to Poison America’s Heartland
* Climate Reality
* Grist.org
* The Amazing Victory Scored With Obama That More People Should Be Talking About
* The Sierra Club
* The Buffett Rule
* Obama For America–Colorado
* UniteWomen.org
* Denver Young Democrats
* Obamacare
* Latinos For Obama
* Michelle Obama
* Veterans For Obama
* I Love It When I Wake Up In the Morning and Obama Is President
* Obama Truth Team
* Democratic Party

Legislative compromise

Legislative compromise -- the process by which 2 or more bills designed to pay off various special interests (but each so unwise that it has no chance of passage by itself) are bundled together to enable passage so as to inflict maximum damage on the populace.

Friday, August 24, 2012

Class Warfare Harms Poor and Jobless

CNBC just had a segment with several wealth advisors discussing the results of research they had done on attitudes and spending habits of the wealthy.  They found that the wealthy, who account of a sizeable percentage of overall spending, had reduced their expenditures as the class warfare rhetoric was ratcheted up by the president and the Occupy movement.  Feeling targeted, a significant portion of the wealthy simply chose to be less conspicuous about spending.  Of course, when they don't spend  people lose jobs.

This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.  When Obama demonized people for going to Las Vegas, tourism and convention business to Las Vegas dropped significantly.  A lot of people who worked there lost their jobs. People whose jobs depended on those people were hurt.  Pain snowballs.

Remember the Luxury Tax of 1990:

Every now and then Washington does something so breathtakingly stupid that you can't even whistle -- you can only shake your head. The ill-fated ''luxury tax'' -- enacted as part of the 1990 deficit reduction law and largely repealed in this year's budget bill -- is such a thing. The luxury tax crept quietly into the closed-door negotiations that led up to the 1990 budget deal. Its champions were Democratic Congressmen seeking to ensure that the rich would ''pay their fair share,'' as House majority leader Richard Gephardt put it at the time.
The people who paid were the workers who lost their jobs building small planes, yachts, etc.  Half of the workers in the boat industry lost their jobs. Many of the small family-owned businesses were forced into bankruptcy. The tax was a disaster all the way around.  It raised almost no revenue, yet cost the treasury substantial sums due to lost tax revenue and money paid out for increased food stamps, welfare, and other such benefits.  It was a great example of the dead weight loss created by taxes.

But taxation isn't required for class warfare to exact a heavy toll on the economy.  Obama's stupid Vegas comment demonstrates that.  Perhaps the worst example in American history was the demonizing of business, investors and the wealthy by FDR in his re-election campaign in 1936.  Amity Shlaes documented the disastrous results FDR's rhetoric wreaked on the economy in The Forgotten Man.  Net investment actually turned negative (something that didn't even happen after the 1929 crash and the worst of the early years).  The depression worsened.


Thursday, August 23, 2012

Intolerant about Toleration

Richard Samuelson explores different views on the nature of toleration.  I prefer the George Washington model myself.

The two sides in the Chick-Fil-A protests represented two models of toleration. For the sake of simplicity we can say that one side regards toleration as an idea–if you believe x you are tolerant and open minded, and if you do not, you are not. The other side regards it primarily as a practice–believe whatever you want, but don’t discriminate in hiring and firing, or in public accommodation.
...
Drawing an analogy with the civil rights struggle, the Mayors of Chicago and Boston see the cause of gay marriage as another case of the forces of toleration against the forces of backwardness and hate. They have zero tolerance for the other side’s views. 

Why are Liberals so damn stingy?

Jeff Jacoby takes a look.

You don't fail on your own

Mark Perry:

Look, if you’ve been unsuccessful, you didn’t get there on your own. If you were unsuccessful at opening or operating a small business, some government official along the line probably contributed to your failure.  There was an overzealous civil servant somewhere who might have stood in your way with unreasonable regulations that are part of our American system of anti-business red tape that allowed you to not thrive.  Taxpayers invested in roads and bridges, but you might have faced city council members who wouldn’t allow you to use them.  If you’ve been forced to close a business – it’s often the case that you didn’t do that on your own.  Somebody else made that business closing happen or prevented it from opening in the first place. You can thank the bureaucratic tyrants of the nanny state.

Smokey Bear causes forest fires

Duh.  The law of unintended consequences, steroid-enhanced government version.  Smokey the Bear causes more, bigger, hotter fires.

ESPN ranks Davidson #44 over last 50 years

ESPN has published a ranking of the top 50 major college basketball programs over the last 50 years.  Davidson College's Wildcats came in with a ranking of 44.  Not bad, just behind NC St and ahead of such names as Alabama and LSU. [scoring system here]

44. Davidson (190 points)

Positives: Under Lefty Driesell, the Wildcats were a powerhouse in the 1960s, racking up seven 20-win seasons in an eight-year span. The ’64-65 team was AP preseason No. 4 and boasted future NBA No. 1 pick Fred Hetzel. Nine combined conference titles since 2005.

Negatives: In the 38 seasons between heartbreaking two-point regional final losses in 1969 and 2008, Davidson amassed just 56 points. Between 1975 and 1992, the program lost 48 points just within the win percentage portion of scoring.

Fun fact: Within the first decade of our 50-year project, Davidson ranked fifth overall -- behind only blueblood programs UCLA, Kentucky, North Carolina and Duke.

Rank by the decade
1962-69: 86 (6th)
1970-79: 14 (T-87th)
1980-89: -9 (T-284th)
1990-99: 14 (T-110th)
2000-present: 85 (25th)

50 in 50 starting five (1962-present)
G – Stephen Curry (2006-09)
G – Dick Snyder (1963-66)
F – John Gerdy (1975-79)
F – Mike Maloy (1967-70)
F/C – Fred Hetzel (1962-65)

SportsNation
Which is Davidson's best team of the past 50 years?
  • 5%
  • 14%
  • 81%
Discuss (Total votes: 3,128)
Top options off the bench
Jason Richards (2004-08)
Brendan Winters (2002-06)
Derek Rucker (1984-88)

50 in 50 coach: Lefty Driesell (1960-69)

Best teams (1962-present)
1964-65 (24-2)
1968-69 (27-3, NCAA Elite Eight)
2007-08 (29-7, NCAA Elite Eight)

Bill Clinton -- one man war on women

It is really fascinating to observe the Obama campaign at work.  They are desperate to create the meme of a Republican "war on women" and will seize on the flimsiest excuses to push that narrative.  And yet, Bill Clinton is given a starring role at the convention.

Apparently in ObamaWorld, not forcing others to pay for a woman's birth control is waging war on women. Saying something stupid about rape is a war on women.  Actually raping, sexually assaulting, and sexually harassing a large number of women is not.

I'm not sure even a liberal Supreme Court justice could distinguish that kind of precedent.

Monday, August 20, 2012

Obama's Biggest Lie?

IBD has an editorial titled Obama's Biggest Lie: 'I'm Fighting for the Middle Class'.  I don't disagree with anything in the piece, but it's really hard to rank all the lies.  Has anyone even been able to keep up with all?

Our brother's keeper

It appears that Barack Obama is one stingy SOB:

Barack Obama has an actual brother, not a figurative one, who is living in poverty in Africa. His name is George Obama. Barack has met his brother George, but has no ongoing contact with him. George Obama is in trouble: he has a young son who is sick and has been hospitalized, and George, a poor man, has no way to pay the hospital bill.
...
George met D’Souza when Dinesh was in Africa, working on his blockbuster movie 2016, which is harshly critical of Barack Obama. D’Souza interviewed George Obama, and they spent a day together. Here is how Dinesh tells the story:
A few days ago I received a call from a man I recently met named George. He was a bit flustered, and soon informed me that his young son was sick with a chest condition. He pleaded with me to send him $1,000 to cover the medical bills. Since George was at the hospital I asked him to let me speak to a nurse, and she confirmed that George’s son was indeed ill. So I agreed to send George the money through Western Union. He was profusely grateful. But before I hung up I asked George, “Why are you coming to me?” He said, “I have no one else to ask.” Then he said something that astounded me, “Dinesh, you are like a brother to me.”

Davidson favored over Vandy, West Va?

Andy Glockner at SI:

Old Spice Classic

Bracket
Date: Nov. 22-23, 25
Teams: Clemson, Davidson, Gonzaga, Marist, Oklahoma, UTEP, Vanderbilt, West Virginia
Overview: This is one of those events where the relative lack of marquee teams and the general balance should make for a good tournament, albeit one that might not help the winner all that much. Gonzaga may be the nominal favorite but there are a number of teams in the field good enough to pip the Zags. The top half of the bracket, with West Virginia, Davidson and a rebuilding Vanderbilt, looks to be the better side, but Oklahoma and (especially) Clemson should have something to say in the bottom half.
Matchup to watch: Davidson-Vanderbilt. Brand recognition says to favor the Commodores here, but with Vandy having suffered significant personnel losses and Davidson bringing back a very good team, it would be surprising if the Wildcats were not favored in this game. This is one of those classic mid-major teams peaking with a bunch of seniors, including inside-outside big man Jake Cohen. It wouldn't be a shock at all to see a Davidson-Gonzaga final, with the Wildcats also picking off West Virginia.

(bold added)

More from Scott Henry:

 Davidson returns every player who averaged more than seven minutes per game last season.
Forwards De'Mon Brooks (pictured) and Jake Cohen form one of the best frontcourt duos that the casual fan has never heard of, while guards J.P. Kuhlman and Nik Cochran have a marked size advantage over the Zags' Kevin Pangos and Gary Bell Jr.
The matchup between Brooks and Elias Harris could be almost as fun as the potential second-round tussle between Cohen and Murray in the semifinals.
In the end, Davidson has a full lineup of shooters, including the 6'10" Cohen. If Gonzaga hasn't ratcheted its perimeter defense up to last season's level, the Wildcats could snipe their way to a pair of huge non-conference victories. Those could prove invaluable in case Davidson stumbles in the Southern Conference tournament.

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Clueless Joe

When details of the Black Sox scandal were coming public, a young boy supposedly asked his favorite baseball player to assure him that it couldn't be true.  The question, now famous, he asked of the great Shoeless Joe Jackson, "Say it ain't so, Joe."

Joe Biden, the hapless VPOTUS and daily gaffe machine, would appear to be well on his way toward going down in political history as "Clueless Joe."

When Clueless Joe says something, you know it ain't so.

Media in Obama's pocket

No surprise.

Culture of Corruption

The rules and laws don't apply to the elites in DC. Committe chairman  excluded members' loans from subpoena.

Edit -- I see that Glenn Reynolds chose the same title for his post on this story and the one about Harry Reid's very lucrative career in politics.

The choice of left or right

 Wisconsin law professor Ann Althouse, an Obama voter who's had some second thoughts, writes: "It's rough for people like me who fear both the right and the left."

My comment:

Ann fears the right because where the right is in control, gays can't marry.  And dope smoking isn't legal. They can't marry or legally smoke dope most places the left controls, but whatever. 

She fears the left because where the left is in control fiscal chaos and meltdown looms.

Damn.  That's a tough choice for the rational person in the middle.  
Not.  Liberals with a vague understanding of economics know that lefties are a train wreck that eventually destroy everything.  But they don't like conservatives because they've been brainwashed into thinking that they are icky.

Another Day, Another Democrat lies -- Wyden

Ron Wyden is getting lots of crap from his fellow travellers.  So he's trying to air brush history.
Since Ryan was named as the Veep pick, Democrats have been furiously denying history on the Ryan-Wyden Plan.  Think Progress searches for a big distinction between the Ryan-Wyden Plan and proposed legislation, but admits that there is a “striking resemblance”:
The plan Sen. Wyden co-authored with Ryan does bear a striking resemblance to the proposed Medicare changes in Ryan’s latest budget for the House GOP. Both keep traditional Medicare as a kind of public option, in an exchange where it would compete with private plans offering insurance to seniors. The government would give seniors support for purchasing these plans, and that support would be benchmarked to the cost of the second-least expensive plan. The plans would also be prohibited from discriminating based on pre-existing conditions.
The fact is that Ron Wyden built a plan with Paul Ryan to save Medicare while introducing a private marketplace for insurance for those who choose that option.
The Ryan-Wyden plan will resemble very closely the type of steps which will eventually have to be taken.
But, as Wyden predicted in the introduction to the plan, “the partisan attacks [will] begin to escalate and the 2012 election ads [will] start to air.”  And now Wyden is running for cover under air assault from Democrats once again.

Yep.  Wyden sure knew his fellow Democrats.

Smartest Commentary I've seen on Ryan

Someone named Keith Koffler gets it.

There’s been an almost Pavlovian reaction among President Barack Obama’s supporters in responding to Mitt Romney’s selection of Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate.
Obama’s spin doctors are salivating at the chance to dissect the Wisconsin Republican’s conservative record and politically disembowel him with it. But they don’t understand that Ryan’s conservatism is not going to hurt him anymore than Ronald Reagan’s did in 1980. Bearing, like Reagan, a specific plan of action for difficult times, Ryan may be just the man to ride his conservatism straight into the West Wing.

...
 Ryan lacks the lifetime of experience Reagan brought to his politics, his thinking and his persona. But the House Budget Committee chairman does have a grasp of detail and numbers that Reagan could not match.
Ryan also exudes the Midwestern sunniness Reagan could project, while harboring the same capacity to respond sharply when challenged.
But most like Reagan, Ryan stands implacably for something — something that, as with Reagan in 1980, is an alternative to the dismal state of affairs the country finds itself.
Reagan’s victory in the 1980 Republican primary initially lit up the pleasure regions of the brains of Jimmy Carter’s political operatives
But the Carter camp, like those working for Obama today, didn’t understand conservative ideas’ power to rouse the public to the Republican ticket. Because they hate these ideas so much, they can’t fathom that so many people could embrace them.

And the power of the Reagan and now the Romney/Ryan platforms is far more than their conservatism or their clarity. It is the suggestion that there is light at the end of the tunnel — and a map to get there.
Obama’s goals are opaque.
His campaign slogan is “Forward.” But forward to what? The president has offered no clear plan to deal with the greatest peril to the nation’s fiscal health: spending on entitlements. His campaign relishes the prospect of assailing Ryan instead of offering an alternative that the Republicans might attack.
But the earnest Ryan, like the avuncular Reagan, will be hard to demonize. He’ll also get credit for trying to solve the problem.

This guy gets it.  Obama can't vote present after the destruction he's unleashed.  He's offered no plan to address the looming disaster.  He's got nothing other than to defame and demonize.  Telling black voters that Romney intends to put them back in chains is unlikely to be the winning strategy.

Saturday, August 11, 2012

Ryan as VP pick

I wonder if there has ever been as wide an IQ differential as great as the number of IQ points by which Romney and Ryan likely exceed Obama and Biden.

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Blue Slime

Blue slime is poisoning America. We're are seeing this type of slimy politics from blue liberals more and more recently.

Added -- more Blue Slime.

The Mess that is California

WRM:
California is in a hole but can’t seem to stop its compulsive digging. Schools, universities, prisons, pensions, cities and towns: the state has lost the ability to manage even the most basic elements of communal living. But foie gras is now illegal there, grandiose plans for white elephant fast trains built with borrowed money waft through the air, and the state continues to boost the self esteem of affluent and cause-oriented gentry liberals by scattering scarce resources to the four winds, hunting unicorns when the cupboard is bare.
Someday, perhaps, California will be governed by people who care about governing: that is to say, educating the kids, balancing the books, enforcing the law. Until then, it offers the rest of us a spectacle and a warning. It is some spectacle and some warning. California remains awesome, even in decline.

Blue state liberals are just being blue state liberals and they're doing to California what lefty liberals always do.  See e.g. New York, Chicago, Illinois, Rhode Island, Boston, et al.  Or Italy, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain ......

Disturbing trends

There seem to be a lot of these changes being discovered.

Obama's Never Never Land

Victor Davis Hanson addresses the president's distance from reality.

Abby Wambach channels Johnny Evers

The US women's soccer team won a match vs. Canada with a big assist from Abby Wambach's heads up insistence on the rules.
It was no secret Canada's strategy against the deeper, more talented Americans was to slow the game down. That included, Wambach said, having goalkeeper Erin McLeod hold the ball as long as possible, even over 15 seconds at times during the first half. Soccer rules say the goalkeeper must get rid of the ball within six seconds.
During the second half, with the U.S. frantically trying to speed up the game while attempting multiple comebacks, Wambach began running near referee Christiana Pedersen and counting off the seconds that McLeod held the ball. She said she often got to 10 and into even the teens.
"I wasn't yelling. I was just counting," Wambach revealed Tuesday during an interview at the team hotel. "Probably did it five to seven times."
The last time came in the 78th minute, with Canada trying to milk a 3-2 lead. McLeod made a save, and Wambach began counting again.
"I got to 10 seconds right next to the referee, and at 10 seconds she blew the whistle," Wambach said.
The call was for delay of game. There was confusion on the field, because it was an exceedingly rare decision. Not another American or Canadian player or coach remembers the call ever being made, let alone in such crucial moments of an international tournament.
Regardless, the result was an indirect kick for the Americans inside the Canadian box. That kick wound up hitting a Canadian defender's hand, which meant a penalty kick for the Americans.
Wambach stepped up to the spot in the 80th minute and drilled a low shot off the left post and into the net to tie the game.

In a famous baseball game in 1908, Johnny Evers' smart play saved his Chicago Cubs from a loss that would prove to be the difference in the pennant race.  Evers, a hall of famer, was the second baseman in the celebrated double play combination of Tinker to Evers to Chance. In a critical game late in the season against rival New York Giants, Evers' insistence on applying a rule that was rarely enforced at the time saved the game and the season.  The game became regarded as the most controversial in baseball history and has become known as Merkle's Boner.  With 2 outs in the bottom of the ninth and runners on 1st and 3d in a tie game, the batter stroked a single to the outfield sending the runner on third base home with the apparent winning run.  Fred Merkle, a rookie running from first, saw the run score from third and failed to run all the way to 2d base.  This was typical of the day.
Official rule 4.09 states that "A run is not scored if the runner advances to home base during a play in which the third out is made ... by any runner being forced out".[18] However, in 1908, this force-out rule was usually not enforced on walkoff hits.[19][20]
Cubs second baseman Johnny Evers saw an opportunity to have the rule enforced. He shouted to center fielder Solly Hofman, who, amid the chaos caused by thousands of celebrating Giants fans, retrieved the ball and threw it to Evers. According to one account, Joe McGinnity, a Giants pitcher who was coaching first base that day, intercepted the ball and threw it away into the crowd of fans. Evers retrieved the ball—or found a different ball—and touched second base. Umpires Emslie and O'Day hurriedly consulted and O'Day, who saw the play from home plate, ruled that Merkle had not touched second base, and on that basis Emslie ruled him out on a force and O'Day ruled that the run did not score.[21]
The game was determined to have ended in a tie.  The teams would finish the season in a tie for first place, a playoff was required, and the Cubs won the playoff game and the pennant.


When did Obama renounce communism?

Dr. John Drew raises a question which I've been wondering about for several years -- what is Obama's conversion story from his embrace of communist revolution? 
The really crucial issue, however, is that Obama does not seem to have a conversion story which explains how he quit being a Marxist. In the experience of me and others, being a Marxist is sort of like being in a religious cult. It ends up controlling what you do with your life, the friends you choose, the mentors you pick and the careers that make sense to you. I have a fairly detailed conversion story. I remember the exact moment when I first realized I was no longer a Marxist. Obama, however, does not seem to have a conversion story in his autobiography.

We know his parents and grandparents were ardent marxists.  He acknowledges that Frank Marshall Davis, an active member of the party, was a key mentor for him as a teenager.  He admits he hung out with radicals in college.  Terrorists, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dhorn, played critical roles for many years in his life.  Ayers wrote his autobiography for him, got him his jobs, and launched his political career.  Obama even joined a marxist political party while in Chicago.

If he stopped believing, it would have been an incredibly life-changing event.  There doesn't appear to be any evidence that he did.  Certainly, his policies as president don't give us any indication that he did.

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

More Obama Corruption

Screwing non-union Delphi employees out of their pensions while giving sweetheart extras to Delphi union workers.  Obama's abandonment of the law and ad hoc interference with a bankruptcy was political corruption from start to finish.

I wonder if the news media will cover this.  Not.

Fracking

Richard Epstein.  Read it all.

Questions for the news media

Obama's college classmate poses issues that the news media should have had the answers to 4 years ago.

If anyone should have questions about Obama’s record at Columbia University, it’s me. We both graduated (according to Obama) Columbia University, Class of ’83. We were both (according to Obama) Pre-Law and Political Science majors. And I thought I knew most everyone at Columbia. I certainly thought I’d heard of all of my fellow Political Science majors. But not Obama (or as he was known then- Barry Soetoro). I never met him. Never saw him. Never even heard of him. And none of the classmates that I knew at Columbia has ever met him, saw him, or heard of him.
http://www.adsavvy.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/obama_youth_09.jpgBut don’t take my word for it. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2008 that Fox News randomly called 400 of our Columbia classmates and never found one who had ever met Obama.







...

Here’s my gut belief: Obama got a leg up by being admitted to both Occidental and Columbia as a foreign exchange student. He was raised as a young boy in Indonesia. But did his mother ever change him back to a U.S. citizen? When he returned to live with his grandparents in Hawaii or as he neared college-age preparing to apply to schools, did he ever change his citizenship back? I’m betting not.
If you could unseal Obama’s Columbia University records I believe you’d find that:
A)   He rarely ever attended class.
B)   His grades were not those typical of what we understand it takes to get into Harvard Law School.
C)   He attended Columbia as a foreign exchange student.
D)   He paid little for either undergraduate college or Harvard Law School because of foreign aid and scholarships given to a poor foreign students like this kid Barry Soetoro from Indonesia.

Saturday, August 4, 2012

A thought unapproved re:Nixon

Conrad Black on Nixon:


In January 1969, there were no U.S. relations with China, no arms control talks in progress with the U.S.S.R., no peace process in the Middle East, there were race or anti-war riots almost every week all over the United States, and the country had been shaken by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy (both in their early 40s). LBJ could not go anywhere in the country without demonstrations, as students occupied universities and the whole country was in tumult.
Four years later, Nixon had withdrawn from Vietnam, preserving a non-communist South Vietnam, which had defeated the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong in April 1972 with no American ground support, though heavy air support. He had negotiated and signed the greatest arms control agreement in world history with the Soviet Union, founded the Environmental Protection Agency, ended school segregation and avoided the court-ordered, Democratic Party-approved nightmare of busing children all around metropolitan areas for racial balance, and there were no riots, demonstrations, assassinations or university occupations. He started the Middle East peace process, reduced the crime rate and ended conscription.
For all of these reasons, he was re-elected by the greatest plurality in American history, 18 million votes, and a percentage of the vote (60.7) equaled only by Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936. His term was rivaled only by Lincoln’s and FDR’s first and third terms as the most successful in U.S. history.

Thursday, August 2, 2012

Global Warming Scientist Misleads Congress

Pielke, Jr. explains.  Steve Mc comments.

Giving a 'rat's ass' about Chick-fil-A

In 1977, Nazis announced plans to stage a march through the Chicago suburb of Skokie, Illinois.  They chose Skokie precisely because of its large Jewish population many of whom were survivors of Nazi concentration camps or people who had lost family members in the Holocaust.  The town refused a permit to march and the Nazis sued claiming that their right to free speech was wrongfully denied by the government.  The Nazis were represented by the ACLU and lead counsel was Jewish.  (This was back when the ACLU was actually interested in defending civil rights rather than simply serving as an attack dog for left-wing politics.)  As difficult as the decision was, the ACLU knew that even the most abhorrent speech must be protected from government interference.  It is precisely in cases where some disagree with the speech at issue that defenders of liberty must endeavor to stand strong and unyielding against the government bullies and thought police.  The ACLU won the Skokie case, but lost over 30,000 members.  And the Nazis never bothered to march.  Some consider it the ACLU's finest hour as a defender of constitutional rights.

Yesterday, millions of Americans chose to make a statement because government leaders in various large US cities threatened a business because its founder affirmed his Christian faith in an interview.  No doubt many of those who stood in long lines at Chick-fil-A did so because they agreed with Truett Cathy's views opposing governmental endorsement of gay marriage.  What needs to be emphasized, however, is that a large number of people did so despite disagreeing with his views.  They chose to make a statement against governmental bullying, against governments which threaten a business in its exercise of free speech.  This isn't anything remotely like the Skokie Nazi case.  But the principle is the same.  Liberty is fragile.  We must be vigilant in protecting it.  And if we choose to ignore it's deprivation for some because we don't agree with their views, we threaten its vitality and protection for all of us.

I would submit that the people who should most make a concerted effort to give a 'rat's ass' about Chick-fil-A in this instance are those who disagree with Mr. Cathy's views.

[the title of this post comes from a comment left by one of my loved ones on facebook that she didn't give a rat's ass about Chick-fil-A]