The new economic order of things

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Recall how in David Brook’s “award-winning” column of a few weeks back, he contended that the Oval Office is somehow more shielded and therefore less susceptible to political interests than is Congress.


Here’s Brooks:

This is a good moment to advocate greater executive branch power because we’ve just seen a monumental example of executive branch incompetence: the botched Obamacare rollout. It’s important to advocate greater executive branch power in a chastened mood. It’s not that the executive branch is trustworthy; it’s just that we’re better off when the presidency is strong than we are when the rentier groups are strong, or when Congress, which is now completely captured by the rentier groups, is strong.

Now check this out from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required):

President Obama is calling in the political cavalry, notably John Podesta, who was Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff before he became America’s most powerful unelected liberal by founding the Center for American Progress. So it’s instructive to inspect the list of corporate donors that Mr. Podesta’s think tank released last month.

Mr. Podesta founded the alternative to the Heritage Foundation in 2003, but it has long resisted disclosing its donor list. The motivation to do so now seems to be that it would be embarrassing to keep mum amid the current Democratic political campaign against businesses that give to conservative candidates or causes. All the more so with Mr. Podesta in the West Wing. . . .

Whatever the motive, the list of 58 corporate donors is revealing about the ways of the modern regulatory state. It certainly blows apart the myth that corporate America is “conservative” in any modern political sense of that word. It’s more accurate to say that Fortune FT.T +8.00% 500 CEOs think they must buy political protection from the left. So it’s no surprise to see the list is heavily weighted toward the most politicized parts of the economy.

Health insurers are there in force (eight), befitting their new role as public health utilities. That includes the insurance lobby, America’s Health Insurance Plans, whose silence amid the make-it-up-as-you-go start of the ObamaCare shows it is now essentially a business partner of the Obama Administration.

A hat-tip to Instapundit who helpfully reminds us to add Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citigroup, Apple, General Electric, Google, Facebook to the list of the King's court.



Back during the great ObamaCare debate, before it became law, we heard the phrase “If you are not at the table, you are on the menu.” The health insurance lobby saw the writing on the wall back in 2009 and decided that rather than getting carved up by the new law, they would ante-up and play ball with the congressional and Senate Democrats and assist in writing the legislation in a manner that would benefit them to the greatest extent possible.


The individual mandate which was something that the President opposed on the 2008 campaign trail, was implemented at the insistence of Big Health as they knew that there was no way in hell they would be able to finance all the additional health insurance benefits without people paying into the system that would not burden the health care system in a disproportionate manner.


Never forget that the healthcare law is the direct result of the cozy relationship between Big Health and the White House and Congressional Democrats.


So, this interest pressure works both ways. You pony-up as donors to influence favorable legislation and you also pony-up for mob-like protection so that your interests don’t get hammered by additional regulatory burdens. This is the reality as it stands currently in David Brooks’ stronger-executive-branch world.


How sick is our nation when the large moneyed interests over which Brooks frets have effectively encamped themselves inside the "shielded" White House half out of opportunity and half out of fear.


This in no way resembles a free constitutional republic rather a banana republic practicing public-private economic fascism and cronyism and woe to anyone who attempts to stand up to it.

A few thoughts on what went down yesterday in D.C.

We're not sure if the President grasped just what the Senate (gun) control bill that went down in stunning defeat Wednesday evening was all about.



The President proved he could get elected President and then re-elected in a national race after uttering his "bitter-clinger" statement which was demonstrable of his condescension towards broad swaths of the American public. However, despite using his bully-pulpit of the highest office in the land and shamelessly exploiting the families of the Newtown victims, the President failed to grasp this was more of a local or regional issue and certainly more of a culture issue than he realized.


A recent Gallup poll showed that only 4% of Americans viewed gun control as the most pressing issue facing this country despite the fact that a majority of Americans favor more comprehensive background checks proving only that 96% of Americans don't really care that they themselves favor stronger background checks. (No shocker that the economy, jobs, dissatisfaction with government and government deficit/debt, in that order, topped the poll, so we assume the strategy here is that if you've failed miserably in addressing American's most pressing concerns, you just keep moving down the list until you hit legislative paydirt).


But back to this issue of culture and its many facets and interpretations. We scratch our heads when he hear the term "gun culture" Gun culture. We have no idea what that means. Are they talking about the gun culture of the inner city where gun play is glorified in music and which occurs in areas with the strictest gun control laws in the land? Or are they talking about the gun culture of pick-ups and gun racks that pretty much exists, geographically speaking, in 95% of the country excluding the D.C.-NYC-Boston corridor and that strip on the West Coast west of Interstate 5? We're not sure because gun culture has never been adequately defined for us.


Given that, we're left to assume that gun culture is merely a sloppy and scatter-shot short-hand pejorative used towards gun owners by gun control folks who don't know into what they are wading. And this is why the Senate (gun) control bill was doomed.


We can't link to it right now but there was an essay two or three weeks ago that was representative of a broader theme that has emerged recently regarding mass shootings in America and it is this: what's up with white males and why isn't there any examination of the white male culture that apparently leads to these shootings? A lazy and sloppy broad-brushing that we've come to expect from the (gun) control lobby but we give them credit for at least being in the ballpark.


What needs to be examined is the middle and upper middle class progressive, participation trophy culture to which we have subjected our white suburban males for the past 30 or so years and which may very well be a contributing factor in these shootings. In a nutshell: are we going to sit here and say those goofy win or lose, post-game victory tunnels do anything to prepare our children for the kick-in-the-teeth that life really is? Is it beyond the realm of possibility to wonder that after a lifetime of coddle culture (see, we can play the game, also), young, post-adolescent males that may be mentally afflicted, lose it when they find that their life no longer matches that vision given to them by their high school self-esteem coach? No one seems to be looking in that direction, which, perversely enough, is proof of its potential viability.


Accepting the premise of the coddle culture, it's not a stretch, then, to imagine much of America described above looking at the horrific slaughter that occurred in Newtown and thinking that's a "them" problem and not a "we" or "us" problem. Did not Adam Lanza get exposed to enough ass-kickings out on the baseball diamond or soccer field to give him a taste of the real world?


A couple of weeks back, when the imbecilic Joe Biden made the crack about the "black helicopter crowd" and how Special Ops were going to swoop down and take our guns, it confirmed in our mind this: we have never seen an administration hold more contempt towards its fellow citizens than this one. Again, you can win national elections after "bitter-clinger" remarks but you are not winning the hearts and minds of the electorate on more focused issues when you hold condescension towards law-abiding Americans who happen to own guns. And as social media has proved, those same law-abiding gun owners will become even less willing to be open to any sort of (gun) control legislation when they are charged with being complicit in the slaughters in Virginia Tech, Aurora and Newtown.

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Yes, there were certainly political considerations as defecting Democratic Senators were from rural states with large gun-owning populations but this was against a larger backdrop of a cultural battle and the President's petulance at the press conference yesterday revealed that it wasn't just a political battle he lost but a cultural one as well where the statist worldview of "do something... anything" in the wake of crisis lost out to a world view that is, frankly, weary of panic management by a culture that has nothing but disdain for them and, unfortunately, this is something the President, because he leads such an insular existence, will never figure out.


This wasn't so much about guns but about a public tired of being bullied and harried by the political class of this country that will stop at nothing to reshape the fly-over bumpkins in their image.

How the left stopped worrying and learned to love the drone

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During the first term of this current administration, we ran a series alternately titled “O > W” and “Constitutional Republics Are, Like, Hard” to illustrate just how closely President Obama’s domestic and foreign policies had mirrored that of his predecessor and to illustrate how often those policies represented an extension of executive power beyond that of Bush. (If you decided to go to the link, you will see there was no shortage of material)

Since the killing of Anwar-alAwlaki back in September of 2011 via a drone strike in Yemen, the practice of killing Americans overseas has been public knowledge… well at least as public as a compliant 4th estate would make it public.

Just last week, however, against the backdrop of the CIA Director confirmation hearings for John Brennan, a leaked white paper from the Department of Justice gave legal justification for the administration to kill Americans oversees with what we will feel free to describe as virtually zero oversight, due process and transparency. This, at last, put this long-overdue debate on the front burner and certainly, Peter Baker’s conveniently-timed Saturday commentary in the New York Times has finally given Paper-of-Record voice to our O > W contention.

The lede from the article:

Four years into his tenure, the onetime critic of President George W. Bush finds himself cast as a present-day Mr. Bush, justifying the muscular application of force in the defense of the nation while detractors complain that he has sacrificed the country’s core values in the name of security.

Oh, that he were as we have seen the establishment left in this country both in the press, government and celebrity, rush to the president’s defense with the lame defense that the president knows best.


And Baker makes the point of Obama’s use of drones as essentially being lazy; a point we have made for years:

By emphasizing drone strikes, Mr. Obama need not bother with the tricky issues of detention and interrogation because terrorists tracked down on his watch are generally incinerated from the sky, not captured and questioned. By dispensing with concerns about due process, he avoids a more traditional war that he fears could lead to American boots on the ground.

Glenn Greenwald penned an excellent column exposing the hackery of the left and the fact that progressive fans of the Obama drone killing program need to apologize and thank McBushChimpHitler, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest of the gang… because you can’t get to assassinating Americans from above without first going through warrantless wiretaps and enhanced interrogations. It’s all about process, you see, to achieve lack of due process.


But back to the “I (heart) Barack” defense…

Here’s MSNBC host Krystal Ball best exemplifying this line of reasoning:

Look, I voted for President Obama because I trust his values and his judgment. And I believe that he's a fundamentally responsible actor. Without gratuitously slamming ex-President Bush, I think he displayed extraordinary lapses in judgement in executing his primary responsibility as commander in chief, and put troops in harms way imprudently. President Obama would have exercised better judgment and he has exercised better judgment. The way it stands now, the drone program is exclusively in the domain of the executive. Their protocol, their judgment. So yeah, I feel a whole lot better about the program when the decider, so to speak, is President Obama.

That’s charming… it really is. And it also demonstrates an embarrassing lack of understanding as to what is required of a constitutional republic with its checks and balances, oversights and separation of powers.

What is wrong with the “I trust Obama (more)” line of reasoning is that precedent has now been set for all other future presidents. This logic locks in a very short term perspective based largely on a cult of personality that completely ignores the long-term ramifications of a single person having the go/no-go on terminating U.S. citizens without any oversight, process, review or transparency.

Hell… we just wrote “.. long-term ramifications…” for something that has happened 3 times already.


Saying you trust Barack Obama more than you trust George W. Bush or Mitt Romney is fine for matters such as the economy or tax policy but for matters of life and death and given the flimsy pretexts and controls that Justice Department legal document lay out for justification, you are effectively gutting the 4th amendment. The truism that (ideally) we are nation of laws and not of men seems to be lost on many of these folks.

Besides, Obama has only 4 more years left. We can’t wait to see what happens when someone as obviously less-saintly than he possesses these extraordinary powers and what he will do with them.

And we can’t wait to see what hacks like Kristal Ball will say about it then, as well.


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Seeing is believing

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From the President's speech yesterday in front of the General Assembly of the United Nations:

Efforts to restrict free speech can quickly become tools to suppress.

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To which @JimGeraghty tweeted:

That's why the filmmaker had a completely coincidental parole meeting.

To those of you out there thinking that perhaps were over-blowing this whole thing just a little too much, fair enough. However, count us squarely in the camp of those over-reacting to what we see as suppression of our 1st amendment rights as opposed to under-reacting to the same.


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Link of the day

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B-Daddy had a great post, here, on why it is that libertarians need conservatives and visa-versa. Here's the money paragraph on why it is that conservatives need libertarians:

It is less obvious that conservatives need libertarians, but they do. First, their votes and energy are necessary to do battle with the forces of statism. On any individual issue, the pressure for government to "do something" often seems compelling. Only a firm adherence to principles, which libertarians seem better equipped to do, can beat back these impulses. Second, conservatives forget at their peril that the use of government to achieve their desired social ends usually ends badly for them. From the death of the church because it was identified with the monarchy in old Europe to Republicans becoming identified as the party of big government before the 2006 elections, marrying conservative social ends to the coercion of big government has been a loser. Further, funding big government conservative programs undermines the principled arguments for limited government.

What B-Daddy speaks of is the "compassionate conservatism" that was peddled by the Bush administration for the entirety of its two terms and which led to the Democratic take-over of both houses of Congress in '06 as the Democrats were successful in both their "culture of corruption" and "corporatism" lines of attack.

We hated the term "compassionate conservatism" and its practical application being completely oxymoronic as there is nothing "conservative", i.e., "limited government" about a hyper-active government attempting to achieve limited government.

If you believe the narrative that the tea party came into existence solely because of the policies of President Obama, you have been mislead as the seeds of the groundswell of frustration were planted during the Bush administration and what was viewed as a pissing away of a golden opportunity from 2001-2008. Remember, it wasn't Obama that signed the $700 billion TARP (Wall Street bailout) into law but it was Obama who used that same money for programs of his own like the Chrysler and GM bailouts.

It was as if Bush was playing the role of John the Baptist hailing the arrival of the statist deity in Obama to complete what had been started, otherwise known as in '08 campaign-speak, the "transformation of America as we know it".

And, boy, don't we know it.


Go ahead and link to the article - we think you will enjoy it.

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Someone actually wrote this

(We extracted the below from our Quickies post yesterday as we wanted to give it a little broader circulation)

From the New York Times:

It’s so ironic, people. The national electorate is totally turned off by partisan standoffs. You can almost hear the public imploring, will you guys please just make some back-room deals? And, at that same moment, the Republican candidates are being pushed into being more and more intractable.

(italics, someone)


That someone is Gail Collins, columnist for the Times.

Can we officially stick a fork in Hopenchange? We knew it to be a farce all along but America's newspaper of record is, in print, championing business as usual.

What's ironic, Gail, is that Obama's two greatest legislative accomplishments were fashioned in the manner for which you are pining. Porkulus (aka: the American Recovery Act) and to a much greater degree, ObamaCare, were epitomized by back room deals, bribes, kick-backs and business as usual politics.

How sad that the Hopenchange set has been reduced to supporting the most shamelessly cynical politician in our lifetime.

If Bill Clinton was shamelessly cynical, and he was, he at least had the political sense to realize that to build his legacy he would have to work with the opposition party to achieve legislative goals that were popular with a majority of Americans (see: welfare reform and NAFTA).

If the current occupier of the Oval Office wins a second term, will he have a similar instinct? At this point, we have seen nothing in his behavior pattern that would suggest he is anything but a hard-line ideologue. Intractable, to use Collins' words.

The gift he keeps on giving

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If Team O wants the "You didn't build that" dust-up to go away, they certainly aren't acting like it. If we aren't mistaken, this is the first time we've ever heard a President re-visit ill-advised comments and feel resigned to relate to us rubes precisely what it is that he meant.

The greatest orator in U.S. history explains:




(insert "shovel-ready" job joke, here)

Out of context? You decide. From... good lord... two weeks ago:

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me, because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t -look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something – there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business. you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

(italics, ours, in case you weren't sure what all the commotion was about)


Not only are the criticisms valid because of the context of the comments, the criticisms are valid because that is precisely what you would expect a top-down, command and control, government-centric statist to say. That's who he is and no amount of backtracking and feeble attempts such as this to dig himself out of his self-made hole are going to convince folks otherwise.

His two greatest achievements, Porkulus and ObamaCare: odes to centralized planning at the expense of individual initiative and choice are the legislative epitomes of "You didn't build that (we did)". He can't help it - it's just who he is.

Tales from Bailout Nation

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In this case, it would be the tale.

For years, we have been chronicling the goings-on and happenstances of Bailout Nation and particularly that of TARP, the Troubled Assets Relief Plan. As long as tax-payers continue to bail out moneyed interests that should be allowed to sink or swim on their own, we will continue to do so but this post feels like a culmination of sorts.


The man charged with overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) as its Special Inspector General, Neil Barofsky, is coming out with a new book, "Bailout" which tells the story of his time serving in that capacity. TARP, initiated under President Bush was effectively the Wall Street bailout that was continued under the current administration and expanded far beyond its original scope to include everything from the Chrysler and GM bailouts to underwater home loan bailouts.

We have excerpted portions of an interview he did with the New York Times in advance of his book release.

As Mr. Barofsky writes, he had assumed that his assignment to oversee TARP meant that he should be fiercely independent from the Treasury Department, and vigilant against waste, fraud and abuse. But after canvassing other inspector generals for guidance, he writes, he learned of different priorities: maintaining and possibly increasing budgets, appearing to be active - and not making enemies.

"The common refrain went like this," Mr. Barofsky writes. "There are three different types of I.G.'s. You can be a lap dog, a watchdog or a junkyard dog." A lap dog is seen as too timid, he was told. But being a junkyard dog was also ill-advised.

"What you want to be is a watchdog," he continues. "The agency should perceive you as a constructive but independent partner, helping to make things better for the agency, so everyone is better off." He also learned, he says, that success as an inspector general meant that investigations come second. Don't second-guess the Treasury. Instead, "focus on process."

Thus the collision course was set between Mr. Barofsky and a crew of complacent, bank-friendly Treasury officials. He soon discovered that the department's natural stance of marching in lock step with the banks meant that he had to question its policies and programs repeatedly to ensure that taxpayers weren't at risk for fraud and abuse.

"The suspicions that the system is rigged in favor of the largest banks and their elites, so they play by their own set of rules to the disfavor of the taxpayers who funded their bailout, are true," Mr. Barofsky said in an interview last week. "It really happened. These suspicions are valid."

The failure of the underwater home loan bailout or HAMP (Home Affordable Modification Program) is explained as such:

Another skirmish involved the department's ill-conceived loan modification plan, known as the Home Affordable Modification Program. When the Treasury began discussing the program's outlines, Mr. Barofsky said he became concerned that it would open the door to fraudulent foreclosure rescue schemes, in which large upfront fees could be extracted from desperate borrowers eager to participate in what was supposed to be a free government program. When his office recommended fraud-prevention measures, several were ignored, he writes.

A few months after the modification plan was announced, his office began a preliminary audit of its rollout. "We soon verified what we had suspected," Mr. Barofsky writes. "Treasury had failed to ensure that the servicers had the necessary infrastructure to support a massive mortgage modification program." It barely got off the ground, and few homeowners have received the help they hoped for.

Barofsky explains that the Treasury Department/Wall Street relationship is the very epitome of regulatory capture whereby the regulatory nature of the department is gamed exclusively to favor the Wall Street financial firms and has become so self-serving that in Barofsky's words Washington had abandoned Main Street while rescuing Wall Street.
So, what's to be done to change the culture - to change the way the actual regulators do their jobs?

"We need to re-educate our regulators that it's O.K. to be adversarial, that it's not going to hurt your career advancement to be more skeptical and more challenging," he said. "It's implicit in so much of the regulatory structure that if you don't make too many waves there will be a job for you elsewhere. So we have to limit those job opportunities and develop a more professional path for regulators as a career. That way, they won't always have that siren call of Wall Street."

Barofsky doesn't expect any help to come from the Dodd-Frank law:

"So much of what's wrong with Dodd-Frank is it trusts the regulators to be completely immune to the corrupting influences of the banks," he said in the interview. "That's so unrealistic. Congress has to take a meat cleaver to these banks and not trust regulators to do the job with a scalpel."

And finally, because the system is rigged towards making sure Wall Street has a soft landing no matter what their transgressions, Barofsky sees the situation as ripe for another financial collapse.

Mr. Barofsky joins the ranks of those who believe that another crisis is likely because of the failed response to this one. "Incentives are baked into the system to take advantage of it for short-term profit," he said. "The incentives are to cheat, and cheating is profitable because there are no consequences."

Despite all of this, Mr. Barofsky ends on something of a positive note. Meaningful changes to our broken system may finally come about, he writes, if enough people get angry. His conclusion is this: "Only with this appropriate and justified rage can we sow the seeds for the types of reform that will one day break our system free from the corrupting grasp of the megabanks."

Terrific. The most heavily regulated industry in the nation is set up to take another dive precisely because of the regulatory regime under which it operates and a law that was supposed to fix things but has every appearance of further entrenching the same problems that led us to the disastrous results of 2008.

That old definition of insanity would appear to apply here.

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Quickies: the You Didn't Build That edition

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A round-up of news items, articles, columns and blog posts that caught our eye this past week.





Iowahawk has recently unearthed a Genesis-like manuscript describing the beginnings of a planet in an alternate yet all-too-familiar universe.

1 In the beginning Govt created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the economy was formless and void, darkness was over the surface of the ATMs, and the Spirit of Govt was hovering over the land.

3 And Govt said, “Let there be spending,” and there was spending. 4 Govt saw that the spending was good, and that it separated the light from the darkness. 5 Govt called the spending Investments, and this he did in the first day.

6 Then Govt said, “Let there be roads and bridges across the waters, and let dams divide the waters from the waters.” 7 Thus Govt made the infrastructure and the patronage jobs for eternity under the firmament from the Potomac which was above the firmament; and it was so. 8 And Govt called the firmament Washington. This Govt did on the second day.

9 Then Govt said, “Let the regulations and the guidlines under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the Bureaus appear”; and it was so. 10 And Govt called the Bureaus demigovts, and the gathering together of them He called AFSCME. And Govt saw that it was good.

Read the rest here.









The President's water-carriers and surrogates keep trying to explain away or otherwise rationalize his comment but they were ultimately instructive because that is precisely his world view - it's who he is.


Here's Charles Krauthammer:

To say all individuals are embedded in and the product of society is banal. Obama rises above banality by means of fallacy: equating society with government, the collectivity with the state.

Of course we are shaped by our milieu. But the most formative, most important influence on the individual is not government. It is civil society, those elements of the collectivity that lie outside government: family, neighborhood, church, Rotary club, PTA, the voluntary associations that Tocqueville understood to be the genius of America and source of its energy and freedom.

Moreover, the greatest threat to a robust, autonomous civil society is the ever-growing Leviathan state and those like Obama who see it as the ultimate expression of the collective. Obama compounds the fallacy by declaring the state to be the font of entrepreneurial success. How so? It created the infrastructure — roads, bridges, schools, Internet — off which we all thrive.

Absurd. We don’t credit the Swiss postal service with the Special Theory of Relativity because it transmitted Einstein’s manuscript to the Annalen der Physik. Everyone drives the roads, goes to school, uses the mail. So did Steve Jobs. Yet only he conceived and built the Mac and the iPad.

The rationalizing is about the most shovel-ready job this administration has produced.







The 2012 Olympic games open this Friday evening in London, England. To ensure we are all in the proper international spirit, we are proud to provide our readers with the stylings of Michelle Jenneke, Australia's 110 meter hurdler.






Alas, Jenneke did not qualify for the London Games. You're welcome, none the less.








And is the IOC caving to international pressure by not honoring a moment of silence during the opening ceremonies on the 40 year anniversary of the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the hands of Palestinian terrorists at the Munich Games?

International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge won't budge: There will be no minute's silence for the Israeli victims of the 1972 Munich massacre at the opening ceremony of the London Olympics.

Rogge rejected the latest calls Saturday for a special observance to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the murder of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches by Palestinian gunmen at the Munich Games.

"We feel that the opening ceremony is an atmosphere that is not fit to remember such a tragic incident," Rogge said.

The IOC has come under pressure from politicians in the United States, Israel and Germany to pay tribute to the slain Israelis during Friday's ceremony.

Gee, if still-somewhat reasonable outposts of sanity like the U.S., Germany and Israel are for it, one can only imagine the un-named cast of characters who have been lining up behind the scenes to oppose this.

Rogge's contention that the massacre will be honored in other forums at other times is weak soup. The most horrific event in the history of the Olympics needs to be remembered on the biggest stage. Anything other than the opening ceremonies is an absolute cop-out.


And not to be too flippant about it, this debate involves Ms. Jenneke as well. Cave on this, what else will you cave on?






James Taranto takes ABC News and "investigative" reporter (air quotes fully earned and warranted) Brian Ross to task for jumping to the conclusion that the Aurora, Colorado shooter James Holmes was a James Holmes who was involved with the tea party there in Aurora.

On ABC's apology:

This strikes us as insufficient. Simply as a matter of journalistic craft, the report was appallingly shoddy. Ross pointed the finger at an innocent man based on nothing but the coincidence of a common name and the man's residence in the same city of 325,000 where the crime took place.

Let us amend that. There was one other factor, and this is what makes the ABC error not just amateurish but sinister: the innocent Jim Holmes's involvement with the Tea Party. For more than three years liberal journalists have falsely portrayed the Tea Party as racist and potentially violent. After the January 2011 mass shooting in Tucson, Ariz., speculation immediately began that the suspect was a Tea Partier. Even after it was proved that he was not, the New York Times published a despicable editorial blaming conservatives anyway.

Ross and ABC were out on this limb alone. Either other journalists learned their lesson from Tucson, or it didn't occur to them to look for a political motive this time (it was a more plausible hypothesis in a shooting that targeted a politician).

It is reasonable to interpret Ross's hasty unsubstantiated report as an expression of hostility--bigotry--toward the Tea Party and those who share its values, which are traditional American ones. ABC's carelessness here is in sharp contrast with the way the mainstream media treat criminal suspects who are black or Muslim. In those cases they take great pains not to perpetuate stereotypes, sometimes at the cost of withholding or obscuring relevant facts such as the physical description of a suspect who is still at large or the ideological motive for a crime.

Oikophobia is no less invidious than other forms of bigotry. ABC and Ross have apologized for their irresponsible reporting, but they have something more to answer for here. Their careless and inadvertent falsehood was in the service of a big lie.

Taranto is right. For over 3 years, the legacy media has been fully vested in chasing a false and bigoted narrative. They so badly want for it to be true, they will sacrifice what ever shred of credibility they have left and endanger an innocent man's life while doing so. In a sense, it is the journalistic equivalent of SWAT-ting.







B-Daddy of The Liberator Today contends that the Obama administration is doubling-down on Nixonian thuggery:

Richard Nixon was rightly excoriated for keeping an enemies list. Barack Obama seems to have gone Nixon one better, keeping a kill list, of enemies, some of them U.S. citizens, that he can have whacked. However, because keeping an enemies list is just too much fun, Obama appears to have one of those as well.

Read more here.






Leslie at Temple of Mut has a great run-down of California ballot initiatives we will be asked to consider in November, here.






Here's David Harsanyi on the President's hostile-to-American-individualism comments:

Employing Obama's logic, one could argue that nearly everything the president uses in his everyday life exists only because of so-called profit-mongering and selfishness -- most often in spite of government. The Internet languished for years in obscurity because government is rarely sensitive to the needs of consumers. And does anyone believe that individuals working together voluntarily (maybe with the help of some fat cat private equity firms) would not have come up with similar technology -- or that they would be unable to build bridges or roads themselves?

Obama has it all backward. It is the charity of a prosperous free society that allows people to become community organizers or attain "free" health care. Washington rarely helps the free market prosper, but a prosperous private sector is what allows Washington to throw billions of dollars into unproductive but morally pleasing environmental projects and dependency programs favored by the president. Society needs the rule of law to function, not another parent.

Of course, Obama is not the first class warrior in politics. But has there ever been a major presidential campaign focused almost exclusively on ginning up class envy and fear (Teddy Roosevelt's third-party run excluded)? The attack on Romney also, almost exclusively, entails calling out the guy for being rich and then relying on the assumption that you can only get that wealthy by being corrupt.

It just struck us that the two people most responsible for whatever success we have had in life, our parents, weren't provided to us by the U.S. interstate highway system, the postal service or the Social Security Administration. Amazing. All that love and selfless devotion came from the heart and not a government program.

#They built that.



OK, gang. That's it for today. We'll see you all tomorrow.


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The gift that keeps on giving

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The President is still getting rightfully hammered* for his inane, idiotic and uninformed statement regarding small businesses. In case you've been living under a rock or are left-leaning and were unaware of the remarks and the fact that the President is an economic illiterate, here is what he told a campaign stop crowd in Roanoke, Va., last week.

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me -- because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t -- look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

The left's counter to the pointed criticism of not just the words but the overarching world view the President holds towards markets, free enterprise and capitalism that would produce those words is basically: Well, there goes those right-wing loons again, trashing the government and not wanting to pay any taxes for basic services such as roads, schools and national defense (that the government would limit themselves to that basic model).

B-Daddy of the Liberator Today provided a fine counter to the left's counter:

Where to start? This is rich, of course, coming from a guy who didn't build a thing, who didn't even get decent grades in college for all we know. But the outrage is really about his tone of arrogance in telling us that unless we support his big fat welfare state, we are being ungrateful to our third grade teacher. Entrepreneurs know who helped them and they already said thanks. And all of us know that some government is necessary. We know that government establishing a rule of law, including contract law, and preventing corruption are key features that allow business to succeed. We wouldn't mind paying for government that was limited, small and worked; a government that stayed within its constitutional boundaries and its means.

We wouldn't mind paying taxes if they actually built roads and dams. But as Mark Steyn reports, Obama's Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior has promised that "You will never see another federal dam." Ever.

We wouldn't mind paying taxes if they weren't squandered on green energy projects that lined the pockets of the President's campaign donors.

We wouldn't mind paying taxes if they weren't used to enable Mexican drug lords to gun down U.S. agents.

We wouldn't mind paying taxes if they didn't support an increasingly corrupt welfare state.

We wouldn't mind paying taxes if the government schools actually educated our kids.

We wouldn't mind paying taxes if the President supported the rule of law and didn't pass laws through executive order.

We wouldn't mind paying taxes if the military wasn't used as social experiment in diversity and biofuels.

We wouldn't mind paying taxes if state workers didn't have better salaries, benefits, pensions and job security than the average taxpayer.

We wouldn't mind paying taxes if the President wasn't so arrogant about demanding that we should pay more.

Well said, we think you would agree.

Solyndra, Beacon Power, A123 batteries, Fisker... they all didn't do it on their own, either. They had the help of hundreds of millions of tax dollars to assist them in their failings.

The Department of Energy's green energy loan program is simply a manifestation of the President's comments from last Friday. If success is defined by your relationship to the government, then, of course, the cronyistic, Peronist loan program makes perfect sense.


*It's now been a full 7 days and this thing still has legs. Good. It provides a stark contrast between a statist, confiscatory government-centric economy and a individual based one where innovation and hard work are rewarded. Guess which one tells the better (campaign) story?

What we were tweeting (yesterday)

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In response to the following, an interview of the President given by CBS News where the President reflects on his biggest mistake:

"When I think about what we've done well and what we haven't done well," the president said, "the mistake of my first term - couple of years - was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right. And that's important. But the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times."


Mr. Obama acknowledged the dissonance between others' perception of his strength as an expert orator, and his own.

"It's funny - when I ran, everybody said, well he can give a good speech but can he actually manage the job?" he said. "And in my first two years, I think the notion was, 'Well, he's been juggling and managing a lot of stuff, but where's the story that tells us where he's going?' And I think that was a legitimate criticism."

(italics, ours)


Tweet: Where's the story? Dude, where are the jobs?




Unreal. Persistent unemployment. Record debt and deficits. Anemic economic growth. Unprecedented amassing of executive power. And he thinks it's all a messaging problem.


Well, thankfully, we get to see just how things might've been and may still be once the President gets his story out.


Courtesy, Ace of Spades:

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@deanriehm #betterstories

Constitutional republics are, like, hard: the O > W edition

This is a re-post of a running series/theme we started around two years ago and which seems quite timely given the date on the calendar. Please feel free to share with your Bush-hating and/or undecided friends.



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You've waited six long months for it, but we've finally got around to our running post that either makes Bush-hating liberals squirm or perhaps develop a severe case of amnesia regarding what they were saying about the man from about 2003 to the very early part of 2009.



First, however, a totally related Fast and Furious update:

Prior to the miserable hack that runs the Justice Department getting a Congressional Oversight committee contempt charge leveled at him (House floor vote coming next week) for stonewalling on the upper reaches of the Justice Department's knowledge and involvement in Fast and Furious, the federal government's (contrary to what the article below says) highly successful gun-running scheme, he was granted Executive Privilege from his BFF, the President (perhaps a little pay-back for the home-work assignment Holder was tasked after the President said it would be unprecedented for the Supreme Court to strike down a law that was on the books).


From the NY Times (whose article at the link may constitute more column-inches on F&F than all other articles they published on the same subject combined):

Republicans on the House oversight committee voted on Wednesday to recommend holding Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in contempt of Congress in a dispute over internal Justice Department documents related to the botched gun trafficking operation known as “Fast and Furious.”

The 23-to-17 vote, which fell along party lines, came after President Obama invoked executive privilege to withhold the documents and communications among Justice Department officials last year as they grappled with the Congressional investigation into the case. As part of the operation, weapons bought in the United States were allowed to reach a Mexican drug cartel in an effort to build a bigger case.

It was the first time that Mr. Obama had asserted the privilege since taking office, and it sharpened the long-festering dispute between Mr. Holder and Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Democrats called for the panel to hold off voting on the contempt citation during an often acrimonious partisan debate, but Republicans pressed forward with it.

Now take a wild guess who wasn't too keen on Executive Privlege just a short 5 years ago? If you guessed the back-bench senator from the Land of Lincoln, take a seat at the head of the class.





You may have thought that the perfectly legal firing of political appointees to be somewhat unseemly but it's not even in the same ballpark when it comes to 2 dead federal agents, hundreds of dead Mexican officials and innocent civilians and scads of guns that are still un-accounted for.

Exit question before the roll call: If, as Holder has asserted, the President had no knowledge of Fast and Furious, how then does Executive Privilege apply?



And now, the O > W electric boogaloo (newbies set off by asteriks):

Closing Keeping open Gitmo.


Ending Formalizing the indefinite detention of suspected terrorists.


Ending Maintaining military tribunals.


Not letting unemployment get above 8 10.5 percent with a $800 billion stimulus package.


Discontinuing Continuing other Bush-era policies like rendition, Project Gunrunner and TARP.


Ending Throwing into warp drive the politicization of the Justice Department under the leadership of the biggest hack in the administration.


Engineering a bankruptcy cramdown of domestic auto companies that will most likely cost the U.S. tax-payers tens of billions of dollars.


Interpreting the Patriot Act to collect information on people via mobile phone geolocating


A crony capitalism that is disguised as a green jobs program.

Including Fisker, SunPower and Beacon Hill

Engaging in an act of war against a country that posed no threat whatsoever to the U.S. with without the consent of Congress.


Swift Painfully slow response to national disasters.


Ending Maintaining the practice of signing statements.


Subjecting our national security to an expensive green technology boondoggle that doubles down on the cronyism.


For you visual types, how about a federal government - Goldman Sachs Venn diagram? (thanks, W.C. )

Signing off on predator drone strikes for the ostensible purpose of assassinating a foreign head of state. And then doing so.


Using executive orders and administrative actions and generally subverting the role of Congress in order to enact his agenda.


Shutting down Operating a seeming revolving door between the White House and Wall Street and K Street.


Signing legislation that would allow the military to indefinitely detain terror suspects, including American citizens arrested in the United States, without charge. Got 4th amendment? Not anymore, you don't.


Pushing through health care reform legislation in the sleaziest, most cynical, un-hopenchangey and business-as-usual manner possible.


Authorizing a program to assassinate American civilians.


Actually authorizing a drone strike hit that killed American-born Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan (from this point forward, we never... never want to hear a peep about water-boarding)


And adopting another Bush-like tendency in combating the war on terror: refusing to provide the legal justification for the killing of U.S. citizens.

*Forcing Catholic institutions to violate their faith conscience by not only mandating them to provide coverage for contraceptives but making it completely free of charge as well.*



*End-running Congress in order to make (totally not) in-recess appointments to the National Labor Review Board.*



*End-running Congress to install immigration policy that countermands the laws that are on the books after claiming just a few months ago that he could not do so because, correctly, that's not how our system works.*

Our system of checks and balances and separation of powers was set up this way to prevent acts of tyranny, a lesson this part-time Constitutional law lecturer didn't forget - he just never believed it in the first place.

Please let us know if there is anything about the above that does not make him absolutely power-mad and Bush a complete rank amateur in that department by comparison.

The more we think about it, the more we think this Bush/Obama mash-up does an extreme disservice to President Bush.





Share it. Share it, brothers and sisters with friends, family and particularly all those alleged Bush-hating Obama supporters to see who it is are the hypocrites in your life. Maybe they aren't hypocrites, however. Maybe they were just jealous that all that Costitution-shredding and amassing of executive power wasn't being done by their guy. Well, they're getting back in spades, now.


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The problem is...

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... we just keep finding more of the stuff

From Zero Hedge:

The oil in the ground will run out some day. But as the discovery of proven reserves continues to significantly outpace the rate of extraction, the claims that we’re facing immediate shortages looks trashy.

Some may try to cast doubt on these figures, saying that BP are counting inaccessible reserves, and that we must accept that while there are huge quantities of shale oil in the ground, the era of cheap and readily accessible oil is over. They might cite the idea that oil prices are much higher than they were ten years ago. Yet this is mostly a monetary phenomenon resulting from excessive money creation beyond the economy’s productive capacity. Priced in gold, oil is still very cheap — almost as cheap as it has ever been:

So no. I’m not lying awake at night worrying about imminent peak oil. There’s plenty of extractable oil, and renewable energy will eventually supplement and replace it. But will politics get in the way of energy extraction? The United States has huge hydrocarbon reserves, yet regulation is preventing drilling and shipment, leaving America dependent on foreign oil. And the oil companies themselves are largely to blame — after Deepwater Horizon, should anyone be surprised that politicians and the public want to strangle the oil industry?

The President calls himself an "all of the above" sort but his actions betray his words. He has committed himself fully to the business of picking winners and losers in his energy policy. An aggressive pursuit of crude and shale oil and natural gas would jump-start and sustain a robust economy that could then, with private capital, fund the fledgling green energy sector instead of throwing tens of billions of dollars at the politically connected and technology that, quite simply, is not yet market-ready.




And somewhat related if we're talking politics: Hey, that speech on the economy on Thursday was a big flopper. How about an extra-constitutional executive order on illegal immigration to distract everybody?

Here's Leslie at Temple of Mut:

Dear Readers: While I usually strive to put some humor into my posts, as it helps sustain our emotional balance during these turbulent times, I find little to joke about today. President Obama, in an exceedingly cynical and politically-motivated move, has forgotten the basic tenets of the US Constitution and legislated by executive order.

Leslie predicts Obama will move on to forgiving student loan debts and underwater mortgages via EO sometime prior to November. Markets would necessarily take a dump but when you are on a re-elect panderfest run like this guy is, anything is possible.

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Enjoy your Father's Day, everybody. We'll see you tomorrow.

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Smack of the day

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Light day today as we are off to Orange County to be with family but before we left, we wanted to share some epic smack shot off by Charles Krauthammer this past week and which is consistent with pointing out the incoherence of the Obama administration's counter-terrorism policies:

So the peacemaker, Nobel laureate, nuclear disarmer, apologizer to the world for America having lost its moral way when it harshly interrogated the very people Obama now kills, has become — just in time for the 2012 campaign — Zeus the Avenger, smiting by lightning strike.

A rather strange ethics. You go around the world preening about how America has turned a new moral page by electing a president profoundly offended by George W. Bush’s belligerence and prisoner maltreatment, and now you’re ostentatiously telling the world that you personally play judge, jury and executioner to unseen combatants of your choosing and whatever innocents happen to be in their company.

This is not to argue against drone attacks. In principle, they are fully justified. No quarter need be given to terrorists who wear civilian clothes, hide among civilians and target civilians indiscriminately. But it is to question the moral amnesia of those whose delicate sensibilities were offended by the Bush methods that kept America safe for a decade — and who now embrace Obama’s campaign of assassination by remote control.

Moreover, there is an acute military problem. Dead terrorists can’t talk.

Drone attacks are cheap — which is good. But the path of least resistance has a cost. It yields no intelligence about terror networks or terror plans.

One capture could potentially make us safer than 10 killings. But because of the moral incoherence of Obama’s war on terror, there are practically no captures anymore. What would be the point? There’s nowhere for the CIA to interrogate. And what would they learn even if they did, Obama having decreed a new regime of kid-gloves, name-rank-and-serial-number interrogation?

This administration came out opposing military tribunals, wanting to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York, reading the Christmas Day bomber his Miranda rights and trying mightily (and unsuccessfully, there being — surprise! — no plausible alternative) to close Guantanamo. Yet alongside this exquisite delicacy about the rights of terrorists is the campaign to kill them in their beds.

You festoon your prisoners with rights — but you take no prisoners. The morality is perverse. Which is why the results are so mixed. We do kill terror operatives, an important part of the war on terror, but we gratuitously forfeit potentially life-saving intelligence.

Bingo.


And it's not just foreign terrorists. Team O has fashioned a legal construct whereby American citizens can be held indefinetely without cause and like Anwar al-Awlaki, even be killed without due process.

For you Obama supporters out there, how do you square that circle? How do you wack U.S. citizens based upon one's personal vetting procedure but desire to confer the rights of citizenship upon foreign terrorists? You can't, therefore, you are guilty of championing a system, a process that is far more egregious, far more non-sensical and far more dangerous than any policy put into place by Obama's predecessor. You have become what you so allegedly and righteously claimed to have despised.

As we have said before, we never, for obvious reasons, want to hear one peep about water-boarding ever again. Funny how that outrage has quietly dissapated, now isn't it?

The President, combating terror and the paper of record

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Alternate headline: How he stopped worrying and learned to love the drone.


Lengthy but fascinating read regarding Obama's, eh, evolving views and actions with respect to combating the war on terror in today's New York Times.

The Times goes to significant lengths to shade and nuance things... a treatment that we're positive would not be extended to the previous administration if a similar piece were to be written. To wit, behold the headline of the article: Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will. Puffery to follow?

Nothing else in Mr. Obama’s first term has baffled liberal supporters and confounded conservative critics alike as his aggressive counterterrorism record. His actions have often remained inscrutable, obscured by awkward secrecy rules, polarized political commentary and the president’s own deep reserve.

In interviews with The New York Times, three dozen of his current and former advisers described Mr. Obama’s evolution since taking on the role, without precedent in presidential history, of personally overseeing the shadow war with Al Qaeda.

They describe a paradoxical leader who shunned the legislative deal-making required to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, but approves lethal action without hand-wringing. While he was adamant about narrowing the fight and improving relations with the Muslim world, he has followed the metastasizing enemy into new and dangerous lands. When he applies his lawyering skills to counterterrorism, it is usually to enable, not constrain, his ferocious campaign against Al Qaeda — even when it comes to killing an American cleric in Yemen, a decision that Mr. Obama told colleagues was “an easy one.”

We suppose it's good to be the king but we don't know how comfortable we are with the Commander-in-Chief being so cavalier with respect to a life and death decision of a U.S. citizen.



The article sneaks in this paragraph before darting off in another direction:

His first term has seen private warnings from top officials about a “Whac-A-Mole” approach to counterterrorism; the invention of a new category of aerial attack following complaints of careless targeting; and presidential acquiescence in a formula for counting civilian deaths that some officials think is skewed to produce low numbers.

Wait, what? Did they just suggest they manipulate the body count to produce lower civilian bystander numbers? That's pretty much how we read it.


Later in the article they get around to how this was accomplished?

It is also because Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.

Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. “Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization — innocent neighbors don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.

This counting method may partly explain the official claims of extraordinarily low collateral deaths. In a speech last year Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s trusted adviser, said that not a single noncombatant had been killed in a year of strikes. And in a recent interview, a senior administration official said that the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under Mr. Obama was in the “single digits” — and that independent counts of scores or hundreds of civilian deaths unwittingly draw on false propaganda claims by militants.

But in interviews, three former senior intelligence officials expressed disbelief that the number could be so low. The C.I.A. accounting has so troubled some administration officials outside the agency that they have brought their concerns to the White House. One called it “guilt by association” that has led to “deceptive” estimates of civilian casualties.

“It bothers me when they say there were seven guys, so they must all be militants,” the official said. “They count the corpses and they’re not really sure who they are.”

We don't want to go off on a tangent but this fairly represents the hypocrisy both in the media and the President's water-carriers public and private. There is a legitimate discussion to be had regarding the legality and ethics of what's going on here but no one wants to have it. Where Bush and Cheney were seen as power-mad war-mongerers, Obama is seen as edgy but shrewd and cagey.


And dig this paragraph regarding his failure to close Gitmo:

It was not only Mr. Obama’s distaste for legislative backslapping and arm-twisting, but also part of a deeper pattern, said an administration official who has watched him closely: the president seemed to have “a sense that if he sketches a vision, it will happen — without his really having thought through the mechanism by which it will happen.”

That pretty much sums things up, now, doesn't it?



And not being able to close Gitmo has perhaps driven lethal drone policy:

Yet the administration’s very success at killing terrorism suspects has been shadowed by a suspicion: that Mr. Obama has avoided the complications of detention by deciding, in effect, to take no prisoners alive. While scores of suspects have been killed under Mr. Obama, only one has been taken into American custody, and the president has balked at adding new prisoners to Guantánamo.

“Their policy is to take out high-value targets, versus capturing high-value targets,” said Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the top Republican on the intelligence committee. “They are not going to advertise that, but that’s what they are doing.”

We've suspected all along that the President doesn't want the hassle of actually capturing suspected terrorists and interrogating them and would just rather wack them instead.

Here's Ann Althouse on the matter:

Is there really a paradox here? He has chosen not to close Guantanamo, but to make it a low-profile political issue by never sending anyone there, and to build his reputation as tough on terrorism by regularly blowing somebody away. The careful "moral calculation" in the individual cases isn't reexamining the general policy; it's about the risks of screwups.

More rubble, less trouble.


The tone of the article is starting to grate on us now. Read this:

The care that Mr. Obama and his counterterrorism chief take in choosing targets, and their reliance on a precision weapon, the drone, reflect his pledge at the outset of his presidency to reject what he called the Bush administration’s “false choice between our safety and our ideals.”

But he has found that war is a messy business, and his actions show that pursuing an enemy unbound by rules has required moral, legal and practical trade-offs that his speeches did not envision.

Oh for cryin' out loud. Even any implicit criticism of the President is pawned off on an abstraction related to the man.


We're running long so we'll try to wrap this up with some closing thoughts. The article touts Obama's professorial and lawyerly approach to the war on terror in order to preserve his principles but 3 years on, we are wondering just what his principles are. Remember, this is the man who wanted to try KSM in civilian court but when asked what would happen if KSM was actually acquitted, Obama assured us that, regardless, KSM would never see the light of freedom. Huh? I believe the term of art for that is "show trial".

Also, this is the same man who wants to confer the same legal rights enjoyed by U.S. citizens upon monsters like KSM but signed into law last November provisions that would give him the power to indefinetely detain U.S. citizens without cause and also the power to kill U.S. citizens overseas without traditionally recognized due process. How one goes about squaring these circles is beyond our comprehension.

While we do appreciate that the President realizes combating terrorism on a global scale is not for the dainty or meek of heart (somewhere, Dick Cheney is smiling and/or having a bemused chuckle), there are some glaring inconsistencies with respect to policy that lead us to believe that the President is playing politics with his tactics just as much as anything else.

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Video clip of the day

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We normally like to get to Reason.tv's Nanny of the Month on a regular basis but since we missed last March's edition and since the subject matter seems so relevant, we'll pick up the action from last year, here:








Funny. The guy seemed to get along quite well and it certainly doesn't appear that his career aspirations have been, uh, blunted by his affection for the stuff.

Oh well. Suppose we can chalk this up to more "evolving" in office.

Quickies: the Choom edition

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A round-up of news items, articles, columns and blog posts that caught our eye this past week.



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From ABC News:

Maraniss portrays the teenage Obama as not just a pot smoker, but a pot-smoking innovator.

“As a member of the Choom Gang,” Maraniss writes, “Barry Obama was known for starting a few pot-smoking trends.”

The first Obama-inspired trend: “Total Absorption” or “TA”.

“TA was the opposite of Bill Clinton’s claim that as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford he smoked dope but never inhaled,” explains Maraniss. Here’s how it worked: If you exhaled prematurely when you were with the Choom Gang, “you were assessed a penalty and your turn was skipped the next time the joint came around.”…

Maraniss also says Obama was known for his “Interceptions”: “When a joint was making the rounds, he often elbowed his way in, out of turn, shouted ‘Intercepted!,’ and took an extra hit.”

The Choom Wagon

Good lord. Far from being the blank canvass upon which we could project all our hopes or something, who knew the President's formative years were a combination of That 70s Show and Dazed and Confused?

Too bad he's still quite comfortable with throwing people in jail for an activity he pursued with the zeal of an Olympic demonstration sport athlete.




And speaking of Bill Clinton...

... quote of the week:

“I hope this doesn’t hurt his re-election or whatever he’s trying to run for."

Adult film actress, Tasha Reign, upon meeting and getting a photo-op with Bubba at a fund-raising event in Monaco.



Here endeth the People magazine portion of this edition of Quickies.








Our buddy Max lamented to us that management at Hoffer's simply refuses to hire any "hot chicks" to work behind the bar. We informed Max that it's just not his management getting in the way of the desired hiring opportunities.

The Obama Administration, which harps on its “War on Women” meme, has a war on women of its own: the EEOC is now investigating the coffee chain Marylou’s because the chain hires pretty young women dressed in pink to hawk its product. The investigators have been asking the female clerks about their co-workers’ gender, age, race and body type for over a year.

The company’s founder, Marylou Sandry wrote state Sen. John F. Keenan (D-Quincy): “We have never had a complaint against us for age discrimination or any kind of discrimination. We feel that the EEOC is on a witch hunt.” Keenan said he wouldn’t get involved, and EEOC officials would not comment.

(itlalics, ours)

Body type..? Completely inappropriate and quite possiblby akin to harassment if we understand the workplace rules correctly.

(Max was thinking purely from a business model standpoint as he is currently dating a beautiful young lady. We swear.)







And speaking of a solution in search of a problem...

House lawmakers will consider an international proposal next week to give the United Nations more control over the Internet.

The proposal is backed by China, Russia, Brazil, India and other UN members, and would give the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) more control over the governance of the Internet.

It’s an unpopular idea with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle in Congress, and officials with the Obama administration have also criticized it.
“We're quite concerned,” Larry Strickling, the head of the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration, said in an interview with The Hill earlier this year.

He said the measure would expose the Internet to “top-down regulation where it's really the governments that are at the table, but the rest of the stakeholders aren't.”

Normally, this amount of bi-partisanship is cause for skepticism (they're all too chummy up there on the Hill, wonder what they're up to?)

But considering the subject matter and the fact that both China and Russia are in favor of it, this is a wrap-yourself-in-the-flag All-American no-brainer.






Mark Steyn, once again, hits it out of the ballpark:

So how's that old Arab Spring going? You remember – the "Facebook Revolution." As I write, they're counting the votes in Egypt's presidential election, so by the time you read this the pecking order may have changed somewhat. But currently in first place is the Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi, who in an inspiring stump speech before the students of Cairo University the other night told them, "Death in the name of Allah is our goal."

Like!

Later on in the article:

But it is also a sign of desperation to talk up amiable diversions for pampered solipsistic Westerners as an irresistible force of modernity. One of the basic defects of the Bush administration's designation of a "war on terror" was that it emphasized symptoms (bombs and bombers) over causes (the underlying ideology). In the war of ideas, the West has chosen not to compete, under the erroneous assumption that the ever more refined delivery systems for its sensual distractions are a Big Idea in and of themselves. They're not. If you know your Tocqueville, they sound awfully like his prediction of a world in which "an innumerable crowd of like and equal men ...revolve on themselves without repose," a phrase which nicely distills the unending busyness of our gaudy novelties.

(italics, ours)

Back at Seminary, this was referred to as a "circle jerk".





Here's B-Daddy on prejudice, bigotry, racism, diversity and the ultimate dangers of suppression, speech codes and "acceptable thought."

Our society is creating a climate of persecution and victimization that diversity bullies use to impose their own agenda. Racial prejudice is certainly ugly, but the answer is not speech codes and racial quotas, which do harm to our freedoms and threaten our progress in insidious ways. Diversity is in fact a good thing, but by imposing only one kind of diversity, that of race, we exclude real diversity from our colleges and universities.

Later...

If America's universities are to remain the center of intellectual achievement for which they were once known, this false pretense of diversity has to end. The imposition of speech codes and all the Marxist-Orwellian claptrap regarding acceptable thought must end. The existence of racists, will be met, not with intolerance, but ridicule and well crafted argument. Ultimately, suppression of speech is incompatible with a free society. Suppression does not persuade, it only intimidates and drives behavior underground. Better to have the debate in the open and allow prejudice to sink or swim on its own merits.

Wasn't it Rosalynd Carter who said of Reagan: "He makes us comfortable with our prejudices."?

We're not sure what that meant but after reading B-Daddy's piece, was she possibly saying that Reagan didn't approach racism and bigotry in the normally-accepted Beltway/establishment manner. Reagan, as a defender of freedom probably felt, no, no, no...let the fools say their piece so there will be no doubt as to their foolishness.

Carter probably thought this was a form of tacit approval rather than allowing bigots, racists and their ilk to hoist themselves upon their own pitards.






KT: asking the questions that need to be asked:

Do you still use Microsoft Word?

Us: not so much.


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OK, gang. Time to grill. Hope everyone is enjoying their Labor Day Sunday!

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Of spiking the ball

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Hubris: exaggerated pride or self-confidence



After the capture of Sadaam Hussein, George W. Bush:

The success of yesterday's mission is a tribute to our men and women now serving in Iraq . The operation was based on the superb work of intelligence who found the Dictator’s footprints in a vast country. The operation was carried out with skill and precision by a brave fighting force. Our servicemen and women and our coalition allies have faced many dangers in the hunt for members of the fallen regime, and in their effort to bring hope and freedom to the Iraqi people. Their work continues, and so do the risks. Today, on behalf of the nation, I thank the members of our Armed Forces and I congratulate them.

Barack Obama, on Sunday, May 1, 2011:


And so shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda, even as I continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat his network. Then, last August, after years of painstaking work by my intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden. It was far from certain, and it took many months to run this thread to ground. I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan . And finally, last week, I determined that I had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice. Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad , Pakistan.



And this from B-Daddy of The Liberator Today:

I am almost sick to my gut today, over the blatantly political attempts that spilled previously classified information about the killing of bin Laden, including the identity of the Seal Team Six Commander. Our President has no shame, blatantly using classified information to lure Hollywood pals to make a film in which he will be portrayed as heroic, no doubt. And Democrats complained that Bush politicized the war.

It has become apparent that the man suffers from security issues in more ways than one.