Election reporting for the rest of the year

Billy Hollis at Q and O fills us in on the election reporting we will get for the rest of the year.  Straight from his "patented combination of cracked crystal ball, Ouija board, and leaky 8-ball. It includes short summaries of legacy media narratives at various points from roughly a month ago up until past the election."

"overpaid, egotistical blowhards"

Mead:

Concern about the climate, we continue to believe at Via Meadia, is not misplaced, but the crazy set of unrealistic objectives, laughable foreign aid boondoggles, Malthusian panic mongering and cockamamie treaty plans made this UN process a clown circus that was doomed to fail — and the sooner, the better.  There was a time — as recently as early 2010 — when the Great and the Good, the Champions of the Conventional Wisdom and the Oracles of the Davoisie identified this forlorn negotiation as the wave of the future and the last best hope of man.

Let the futility and failure to which all this led be a reminder to us and to them: those who guide the world’s destiny aren’t nearly as discerning as they think they are. Between the American housing bubble, the European meltdown and the climate disaster, it almost begins to look as if the Establishment consists mostly of overpaid, egotistical blowhards.

No 'almost' about it.

Heh.

Glenn Reynolds:

REMEMBER WHEN PROTEST WAS PATRIOTIC? AND WHEN IT WAS WRONG TO QUESTION PEOPLE’S PATRIOTISM? Van Jones:Tea Party out to destroy America.

For the record, let me say that I entertain no doubts whatsoever about the extent of Van Jones’ patriotism.

Grade Inflation

Liberals run America's colleges and universities.  Like everything else controlled and dominated by liberals (schools, government, unions, mainline protestant churches, et al), they've screwed up the grading system so much it has become meaningless.  'A' is the most common grade in college today.  In economics, bad money drives out good. Inflation devalues everything of merit.

On Liberty and Leadership -- our shortage of chains

“The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.” --Thomas Jefferson

We seem to have a shortage of chains.

“Are you serious? Are you serious?" -- Nancy Pelosi when asked where specifically did the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health insurance mandate?

Pelosi -- “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”

Issues which energize the GOP base and appeal to the middle

I love Via Meadia, but in a post about Romney and his opportunity to use the issue of education to his advantage, this line is just wrong:

  For Romney, this is a rare issue that both energizes the conservative base of the Republican Party and reaches out toward the center ground in an inclusive way...

Talk about ridiculous.  There are a large number of important issues, most of them in this election, which energize the GOP base and appeal to a majority of voters (which obviously includes the center).  My comment:

How clueless is this line?

Tax cuts, reducing government bureaucracy and spending, repealing Obamacare, upholding religious freedom, defeating cap and trade and other global warming boondoggles — the list of issues which energize the GOP base and appeal to a majority of US voters just goes on and on.

Rare? ‘Rare’ is a way to describe reporters who asked about Obama’s past, people who remember him from college, his girlfriends, Barack’s efforts to reach out to the GOP or Congress, or the times he’s opted out of a vacation or round of golf.

More evidence the Euro is toast

Via Meadia explains that Spain is even worse than they thought:

The problem is Spain, which dropped two stink bombs on the world. First, the cost of bailing out just one of Spain’s many doomstriken banks shot up from €4.5 billion ($5.6 billion) to €23.5 billion ($29.5 billion). This is money that Spain’s cash strapped government doesn’t really have; it is under orders from Brussels to reduce its budget deficits and has already slashed spending even as youth unemployment hits a Detroit-level 50 percent. This news isn’t just bad in itself; it means that the other zombie banks in Spain (and there are plenty of them) are going to be much, much more expensive to rescue than previously believed.
The other piece of bad news is potentially even worse. This came in the form of a statement of the president of Catalonia that his regional government is running out of money and needs a bail out of its own. Catalonia, a region in northeastern Spain which speaks its own language and hosts an independence movement, is as the FT notes bigger than Portugal in terms of GDP and accounts for one fifth of Spain’s economic activity.

Spain and Italy and others are not different from Greece.  Margaret Thatcher's truth still holds -- "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money."

What is beginning to look likely in Spain — that the financial meltdown of the country is imposing burdens that the political system cannot sustain — could also be true of Europe as a whole. Europe’s policy makers think they see a path — difficult, but possible — on which Europe could tiptoe past a Greek meltdown and still hold together. It has always been much more difficult to imagine a way to handle a meltdown of Spain with its much bigger economy and its greater population.
The greatest hope for a non-catastrophic outcome to the European crisis has for some time been that Greece really was sui generis and that the other Club Med members could somehow limp into port even as Greece sank. The recent news from Spain suggests that it, too, may be holed below the water line.

All talking points all the way down

Roger Simon asks if liberalism is dead.  He notes this:

An indication of this ideological flimflam is the recent braggadocio from various MSNBC hosts that Obama is really the King of Austerity and has spent less than other presidents.  Apparently, this assertion was based on the misleading figures of an economist who lumped nearly a year of Obama’s expenditures under Bush, including at least half the stimulus, but never mind.  What you have is MSNBC, of all paleo-liberal outlets, bragging about their man’s lower government spending.  Whatever happened to liberalism?

This is a great example of the 'talking point' mentality that has come to dominate the Democrats' actions. Obama's spending is a serious problem for his re-election campaign.  So a new talking point is created to address the problem.  It doesn't matter how divorced from reality it is.  Politics is some game, some high school debate trick, where truth got jettisoned so long ago that the Democrats lost track of it as a concept.  All that remains is the use of talking points.

For example, Obamacare was hugely expensive.  So they compared 6 years of expenditures with 10 years of revenue.  Since it still didn't balance, they double-counted a major source of savings.  And they made ridiculous assumptions that have no chance of being right.  Why?  They wanted a talking point -- that Obamacare would save money.  It didn't matter how many lies were baked in or how ridiculous the whole process.  It didn't even matter that everyone paying attention knew it was a fraud.  All that mattered was that they could repeat the talking point constantly with full confidence that the news media would cover for them and their faithful liberal voters would embrace it.

It's a looking glass world where talking points rule.  Humpty Dumpty would be proud.

Barack Obama's "Real World"

Those of us who live in the real world know how easy it is to make millions of dollars from sales of an autobiography you didn't write about a life you didn't live.

I think Barack's foolishness is probably just due to eating a dish of some undercooked dog.

Global Warming and Asymmetrical Warfare

I posted a comment this morning on Keith Kloor's blog on his post about corrosive spin in the climate debate. http://www.collide-a-scape.com/2012/05/22/have-you-had-enough-spin-yet/comment-page-1/#comment-109934

I wrote:

Spin does nothing to hurt the skeptics’ case.  It destroys the alarmist case.  The essence of the alarmist case is an appeal to authority.  Spin by those in authority wrecks their credibility.  The essence of the skeptic case is that the emperor has no clothes.  The little boy who points out the absence of clothes need have no authority to be correct.  He could, for purposes of argument, be the same boy who cried wolf and his point about the emperor would still be absolutely valid.  Climate science “authority” built on the gross incompetence seen in studies by Mann, Rahmstorf, Jones, Briffa, Steig, and the polar bear study was embraced by the science establishment.  Skeptics do not need any credibility of their own to point out the circular reasoning of the IPCC, the corruption exposed by the CRU emails, and the general failure to operate with any concern for quality.

Keith responded:

Stan,

The spin of Watts, Morano, Bishop Hill et al (to varying degrees) is just as corrosive as the spin from the other side. Like I said, both sides feed off each other.

Me:

 Keith, Yes, I understand that you think spin is corrosive.  My point is different.  My point is that one side suffers far more damage when its prominent scientists and spokesmen engage in spin.  Just like the prosecution and defense in a criminal case or the US military and guerrillas in war, the conflict is asymmetrical.  This is made particularly so in the case of CAGW because the alarmists have made the enormous tactical blunder of basing so much of their case on an appeal to authority.  The skeptics do not need credibility to win.  The alarmists cannot win without it.

I don't know why this seems so difficult for people to understand.  Global warming advocates want to make drastic changes in our way of life that will infringe on our rights to an enormous extent.  They have the burden of showing why this is necessary.  Like the prosecution in a criminal case, if there are holes in their evidence, they lose.  And if they base so much of their case on the credibility of their experts, their case fails when their experts say and do things which raise questions about their own credibility.

How Peyton did what he did

http://smartfootball.com/offense/peyton-manning-and-tom-moores-indianapolis-colts-offense#more-3525

What goes unsaid in this analysis is the advantage of a QB who routinely completed passes to receivers who were not open.  The most amazing part of 18's game was watching the Colts put up 30 points in games in which their offensive line got dominated.  They couldn't get any push in the running game.  They could barely provide a moment of protection before the pass blocking broke down.  The defensive backs would be climbing all over the receivers knowing that the pass rush would be on Manning very quickly.  And Peyton would step away from the first rusher, flip a quick pass to a receiver who was blanketed, and the ball would go right into the tiniest of windows where the receiver with reliable hands would hang on for a gain just long enough to move the chains.  The first time you saw it, you would consider it luck.  The second time, a QB having a career day.  But play after play, game after game, year after year?  It became the production of the most valuable football player to ever play the game.

Shoot, shovel and shut up

http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2012/05/today-is-endangered-species-day-don.html

Mark Perry links to a video explaining how government's good intentions can lead to unintended consequences.  This example (one of millions?) -- the endangered species act.

An Unsettling Feeling

Whoa.  I'm not sure if this is cause for celebration or sorrow, but I find myself in agreement with Bill Clinton and Caroline Kennedy.  It's unsettling simply to type that.

Bill Clinton:  "Barack Obama is an amateur."  He "doesn't know how to be president." He's "incompetent."


Caroline Kennedy on Obama: "I can’t stand to hear his voice any more. He’s a liar and worse."


Which simply goes to show that it's generally a bad idea to elect as president an incompetent, narcissistic egomaniac with no record of accomplishment and a penchant for taking liberties with the truth.

Incompetent Narcissistic Egomaniac with an Identity Crisis

Paul Mirengoff, with an assist from John Hindraker, looks at Obama's identity crisis:

Based on the record, the case can be made that Obama still has not resolved the fundamental identity issues that drove him to experiment with weird, obnoxious ideologies that are fundamentally hostile to America and what it has stood for. That’s scary.

The case can also be made, and has been by Stanley Kurtz, that Obama has resolved these issues in favor of a radicalism that, though less virulent than that of Rev. Wright, Frank Davis (the Communist who mentored Obama in Hawaii), and Bill Ayers, is ambivalent at best about America and what it has stood for. That’s very scary.

Yes, it is scary.  The son of radical marxists, raised by radical grandparents, mentored as a teen by a Stalin-loving communist, he was an active marxist with revolutionary goals while in college.  After college, he associated with other radicals.  He turned to unrepentant terror bombers to ghost write his autobiography, set him up in cushy positions and start his political career.  He identifies three incendiary rabble rousers as his spiritual mentors once he is an adult.

 Mirengoff continues:

But I’m hard-pressed to see a plausible case that Obama has resolved his identity issues by fully discarding the radical belief systems to which he was drawn both as a teenager and a mature adult. If he has genuinely done so, when did he do it and what prompted the change? His candidacy for high political office likely would have prompted only steps to conceal his ideology. His ascension to the presidency would have imposed constraints on his ability to act, but not necessarily any change in his underlying beliefs.

If he changed, where is the evidence?  He hasn't written or said anything to establish that his views are any different.  And of course, no one in the news media will ask him about it.

From Hindraker:

I agree with Paul that it is weird, at best, that there is apparently no documented process whereby Barack Obama “evolved” from an anti-American radical to a person who could possibly be fit for high office.

I suppose Obama supporters would wish they could point to his governance as president in an effort to minimize his radical roots, but that approach suffers from the inconvenience of a collision with the facts.  He said he was going to fundamentally transform this country (a fairly radical proposition) and his policy efforts are certainly in keeping with such a goal.

Scientific Truths Are Not Better Truths Than Just-Plain Truths

http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=5651

One of the key fallacies of scientism, in the sense of being the most destructive to common sense and personal wellbeing, is to suppose that any theory put forth in the name of science is therefore true, or certain enough to believe as true. The posited theory is, after all, scientific and, so scientism says, there is no better recommendation to truth than this.

This fallacy is field dependent, cropping up in some areas much more frequently than in others. It is rare, though still frequent enough in a mild sense, to find the speculations of chemists being refuted each new generation. But it is common as daylight to find the hypotheses put forth by sociologists, economists, and psychologists refuted not a generation after they are published, but often in the next issue of the same journal.

For example, the Weekly Standard’s Andrew Ferguson’s reviews the bad science and scientism behind the recent spate of experimentation “proving” conservatives are dumber/more inflexible/less compassionate/etc. than liberals, theories which are collected in Chris Mooney’s hagiography to scientism, The Republican Brain. (We began a collection of these studies here; please contribute. Also see Mike Flynn’s take on this.)

...

I’ll insert my usual plea that soft scientists act more like their hard (knock) brothers. Do not just assemble a one-time shot of data and compute some statistical model and tell us how well that model fits your data, and then assume because this fit is “good” that therefore your conjectures are true.  (emphasis added) This is formally a fallacy and is the weakest kind of evidence there is, but (almost universally) the only kind which is offered.

Instead do two things: (1) find very effort to discover evidence which refutes your conjecture (and then tell us abou it). And (2) as hard scientists (often) do, make predictions of data you have never before seen. If you do both these things, then you can ask us to believe your conjectures. Otherwise, keep quiet.

Republican brains and Democrats' backsides

Andrew Ferguson has lots of fun with the silliness that is so much of the academic crap about Republican brains that passes for science in today's academy.

We are entering the age of the psychopundit (we can thank the science writer Will Saletan for this excellent word). Thomas Edsall, for example, is a veteran political reporter widely admired by people who admire political reporters. He has become very excited by social science, as so many widely admired people have. Studies show—as a psychopundit would say—that Edsall is excited because social science has lately become a tool of Democrats who want to reassure themselves that Republicans are heartless and stupid. In embracing Science, the psychopundit believes he is moving from the spongy world of mere opinion to the firmer footing of fact. It is pleasing to him to discover that the two—his opinion and scientific fact—are identical.

...

The studies rely on the principle that has informed the social sciences for more than a generation: If a researcher with a Ph.D. can corral enough undergraduates into a campus classroom and, by giving them a little bit of money or a class credit, get them to do something—fill out a questionnaire, let’s say, or pretend they’re in a specific real-world situation that the researcher has thought up—the young scholars will (unconsciously!) yield general truths about the human animal; scientific truths. The scientific truths revealed in Edsall’s “academic critique of the right” demonstrate that “the rich and powerful” lack compassion, underestimate the suffering of others, have little sympathy for the disadvantaged, and are far more willing to act unethically than the less rich and not so powerful.

Read about the bizarre methodology and ridiculous assumptions.

It's a good news/bad news situation.  The good news is that these studies aren't anywhere near as ridiculous and idiotic as a lot of other academic studies lately.  The bad news is that they are still ridiculous and idiotic.

Best line

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/05/how_to_write_democrat_autobiographies_or_naked_came_the_kenyan_cherokee.html

Naked Came the Kenyan Cherokee.

Buying Puts on Facebook?

Facebook shares hit the market today.  The IPO fared worse than expected.  I was hoping it would run up big until the stock was ready for the options market in a week or so.  Then I was planning to buy some puts (probably leaps) and wait.

Legendary investor Peter Lynch advised investors to pay attention to the products and services we know something about.  I know my son and his friends have abandoned facebook for twitter.  If the cool teens in high school and college are gone, the company will never earn the kind of cash that it will take to support the absurd P/E is sports now.

Surprise! (not) -- States divert money intended for citizens

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/05/16/desperate-states-take-money-from-distressed-homeowners/

Many states are now taking money from homeowners to cover other budget shortfalls. In a recent settlement with the states, five of the country’s largest banks have agreed to pay a settlement of about $25 billion, which will be distributed among the states and earmarked for foreclosure prevention.

But homeowners shouldn’t expect those earmarks to trickle down to them anytime soon: the New York Times reports that only 27 states are actually putting the funds toward housing programs as intended. The rest are diverting the money toward plugging other budget holes in higher education, prisons, and energy.

I am shocked, shocked.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjbPi00k_ME&feature=related

Barack Obama -- historical figure

Barack Obama has been inserting himself into the official biographies of other presidents.  So I thought about how he would go down in history -- the authenticity of Elizabeth Warren, the honesty of Bill Clinton, the empathy of Marie Antoinette, the tactics of Saul Alinsky, the racial healing of Al Sharpton, the Congressional outreach of Hillary Clinton, the foreign policy of Jimmy Carter, the economic policy of the Kremlin, the integrity of Chicago politics, the ego of Alexander and the bipartisanship of Genghis Khan.

Internet back up

Cable provider had "issues" over the weekend.  I had withdrawal symptoms.

Why girls dig bad boys

Glenn Reynolds linked to this  http://www.livescience.com/20294-women-choose-bad-boys.html

I'm not saying the research is wrong (although much, if not most, academic research is flawed).  But the biggest reason women want bad boys is no great secret.  Women will say they want the nice guy, the sensitive guy, the guy who cries at movies and calls his mom regularly.  Then they'll pass on the nice guy and chase the bad boy.

It's all about the fantasy.  Deep down, women want to think that their beauty, sex appeal and overall desirability will be just what it takes to entice the bad boy to give up his bad ways and allow her to domesticate him.  She alone possesses the female essence that will tame the wild beast.

Of course, she's wrong.  But that's why girls are girls and boys are boys; why girls are complicated and impossible to understand; why boys are as simple as an off/on switch.

Feeling like Cleveland State

Watching the news media reminds me of an old Tark the Shark quote -- "the NCAA is so mad at Kentucky, it will probably slap another two years' probation on Cleveland State."  Today, the more crimes, riot threats and terrorist acts we see from left-wing protesters like Occupy et al, the more the news media slanders the tea party.  After massive rallies all over the country involving millions of people over the last 3 years, the only threat posed by tea party folks has been to the litter on the ground before they got there.

The news media works so furiously to cover for their left-wing friends that they have to come up with bizarre phrases like "mostly peaceful" for Occupy protests.  Rapes, some assaults, some robberies and arson = "mostly peaceful".  If a Democrat lies about what some tea party protesters said to him = "racist and dangerous".

So out of touch ...

When an 80 year old man has been a senator for 6 terms (36 years) and has become so entrenched in DC that he doesn't even bother to own or rent a home in his 'home' state, I should hope it is never surprising that he should lose an election.  And when it is revealed that he uses taxpayer money to pay for his hotel room when he does bother to return to the state? 

Toast.  Well-burned.

Update:

Lugar can do commercials now -- "I don't really live in Indiana, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express!"

Will Obama choose America?

David Maraniss' new biography of Obama tells us that Barack, upon reaching adulthood, began asking himself whether he was an American, whether he wanted to be an American.  http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/article/new-biography-obama-asks-am-i-american/526196

We know that his wife was never proud of being an American.

I think the most interesting question is what Obama will decide.  When it's all said and done, will Obama choose to be an American?

Obama's Election Fraud

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/05/dubious-donations-theory-and-practice.php

Obama has deliberately set up his fundraising for credit cards so that it is easy for people to make fraudulent donations and easy for illegal foreign donations to be made.  This would be a story if we had any serious journalists in America.

Now there is some evidence that the fraud may be more active than passive.

The Heartland billboard ad

The Heartland Institute put up a billboard with a picture of the unabomber and this text:  

I still believe in global warming.  Do you?

All kinds of bedwetters have soiled their britches over the ad.  It was to be expected from the usual suspects.  However, I didn't expect some people to join the bedwetters in overreacting.  That was a disappointment.  Here is the text of an e-mail I sent to Jeff Id, who runs the excellent blog, The Air Vent http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/   Jeff hasn't expressed an opinion that I am aware of.

My take:

Wow. Rationality took a vacation this weekend. What's with all the normally sane people losing their heads over a silly billboard?

I don't give a damn about Heartland one way or the other. And I don't care about left-wing idiots like Keith Kloor who think the billboard is the worst thing ever. I expect the wingnuts, wackos and opportunists to wet their pants and have the vapors. What is disturbing, however, is for people I trust and respect to lose all sense of proportion and grossly overreact.

The billboard is silly and it makes a dumb argument. If people want to distance themselves from silly and dumb, I won't argue with them. But it isn't reprehensible. Michael Mann is reprehensible. Fraud and slander are reprehensible. People need to take a deep breath and look at what the ad says and what it doesn't say. The ad is factually correct. It isn't dishonest. It isn't fraudulent. It doesn't defame anyone (defamation being far worse than simple lying). It is merely political speech making a silly argument. Silly and dumb.

Political speech -- that's the first thing that needs to be noted. This isn't about science. You don't do science on billboards. This is politics. And it should be judged by the same standards we apply to politics. By political standards, it's pretty tame. No one is being called a racist or sexist or homophobe. No one is being accused of wanting to starve kids or kill seniors or rape the planet. No one is being slandered as e.g. doctors were slandered when Obama accused doctors of cutting off limbs needlessly because they wanted the extra pay for doing an operation. There is a whole bunch of nasty reprehensible political speech out there lately. The Heartland ad isn't even in the ballpark with that kind of ugly stuff. Again, no lies, no fraud, no slander. Pretty tame by comparison.

The ad says the unabomber believes in global warming. True statement. Irrelevant and silly, but true. Everyone with at least a room temperature IQ knows that politicians and political causes have no control over who votes for them or supports them. Everyone with a pulse recognizes that millions of people will vote for either Obama or Romney in November. Each of those groups of voters will include a whole bunch of folks who are nasty, ugly, mean, rotten and terrible. And not one of them, by virtue of his vote, will be a reflection on whichever candidate he supports. If we all know this, why have so many people lost their minds condemning Heartland for a silly political ad?

The ad does not say that everyone who believes in global warming is a murderer and terrorist. Doesn't even imply it. Not to anyone with a whit of intelligence. If Obama ran an ad that says Bubba Cracker, head of the KKK, endorses the GOP, we would all laugh. Who cares? Unless the GOP solicited Bubba or catered to him, his support would be meaningless -- no different than if a Bill Ayers wannabe endorses Obama. Does anyone past kindergarten age really think that tenuous arguments of guilt by association have any persuasive power? Really?!

If the people who have gotten their panties in a bunch want to point a finger at reprehensible actions in the climate wars, let's focus on fraud, defamation, and dishonesty. When Michael Mann dishonestly says a particular scientist is a shill paid by fossil fuel companies to be a 'denier', he is guilty of something exponentially more reprehensible. When scientists fraudulently misrepresent their own work or lie about the state of the science in an IPCC assessment, they are guilty of moral turpitude far, far worse than a silly political billboard ad.

Some people need to get a sense of proportion. If this is the reaction to a silly billboard ad, I can only wonder why lynch mobs haven't descended on the homes of a number of alarmists to extract appropriate justice for their sins.

Despicable Press

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/his-fulltime-job_643193.html

Fred Barnes runs through some of the many unsavory and unprecedented tactics employed by Obama in this campaign.  And he notes briefly how the press allows the president to get away with it all.  As despicable as Obama has been, the real story here is the press.  It should be the focus.

As a general rule, politicians will try to get away with whatever they can.  We can assume that Obama would stop with a lot of the stuff that is out of bounds, if the press would do its job and blow the whistle on it.  (Note however, that with the amateur hour that is the Obama White House one could make a reasonable argument that he might continue to screw up by overstepping, even if the press were performing its role properly.) 

We have the disasterous leadership that currently afflicts the nation, in part, because the press refused to do its job of vetting politicians.  It is a tragedy that the press worked harder to learn about Joe the Plumber's background than it did Obama's.  That incompetence and/or corruption has consequences.  Today, people are giving up and dropping out of the work force because of the policies of the current president.  The press deserves a lot of the blame.

Barack -- BS all the way down

Tom Maguire reminds me of something that was discussed back before the election -- Obama's BS in his book about his girlfriend is matched by his BS about his job.  http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2012/05/a-composite-blast-from-the-past.html

He points us to this blogpost from way back in 2005.  http://www.analyzethis.net/2005/07/09/barack-obama-embellishes-his-resume/

 I have to say that Barack engages in some serious exaggeration when he describes a job that he held in the mid-1980s.I know because I sat down the hall from him, in the same department, and worked closely with his boss. I can’t say I was particularly close to Barack – he was reserved and distant towards all of his co-workers – but I was probably as close to him as anyone. I certainly know what he did there, and it bears only a loose resemblance to what he wrote in his book.

After explaining how all the facts are wrong, he sums it up:

 All of Barack’s embellishment serves a larger narrative purpose: to retell the story of the Christ’s temptation. The young, idealistic, would-be community organizer gets a nice suit, joins a consulting house, starts hanging out with investment bankers, and barely escapes moving into the big mansion with the white folks. Luckily, an angel calls, awakens his conscience, and helps him choose instead to fight for the people.

Play action

This is true.  http://smartfootball.com/passing/a-very-wise-coach-once-told-me-if-you-really-want-play-action-you-better-pull-a-guard

“A very wise coach once told me, ‘If you really want play-action, you better pull a guard"

Obama's girlfriends -- fake but accurate

Anyone who's been paying attention knows that much of what is in Obama's autobiography is fiction.  According to Jack Cashill, the fiction even includes his authorship.  So it isn't a surprise that Obama told David Maraniss that the supposed girlfriend in the book is actually a composite.  Like most of what we get from Obama and his friends these days, the operative line is "fake, but accurate."

With Obama, the 'fake' part is always easy to see.  The accurate part?  We're still waiting.