Oops. We meant surplus government. Here is an agency of the federal government whose budget should be on the chopping block. Ad Age:
The Federal Trade Commission is once again handing out subpoenas to companies that market food to children and teens. Three years after initially delivering what is technically known as “orders to file special report” to 44 marketers, the FTC last week began sending subpoenas to 48 companies…
Twelve companies on this year’s list are new, but 36 companies are once again receiving subpoenas — including Yum Brands, which was called out by FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz in a December 2009 speech in which he said, “Many companies that market heavily to children and teens have yet to join or make a commitment. Why, for instance, hasn’t Yum Brands, with its KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut chains, stepped up? Or Chuck E. Cheese and IHOP? Or the marketers of Air Heads and Baby Bottle Pops?”
Unlike the companies the FTC sues, the FTC’s own 80-page Annual Report has no financial disclosures. These have to be found elsewhere. The FTC has 1200 employees or so and a budget that amounts to $260,000 for each person employed.
The FTC is not the biggest source of waste in Washington of course. But it seems like a no-brainer to us that its budget and personnel could be substantially if it is spending its time investigating Chuck E. Cheese. HT: GP
in its application to the Securities and Exchange Commission — which, guess what, will come through just in time to make an IPO possible before the November elections! — GM admits that its “disclosure controls and procedures and internal control over financial reporting are currently not effective.” And this “could materially affect our financial condition and ability to carry out our business plan.”
Companies include all kinds of outlandish mea-culpas in their IPO applications to cover their derrières in the event of investor lawsuits. However, this one goes to the heart of the information that investors need to determine whether GM is a good investment, especially since it is going public after only two good quarters as opposed to the usual four…
outgoing CEO Ed Whitacre…thinks that the IPO is a dumb idea. He apparently wanted to wait until GM could command a better share price and then have the company go fully public at once instead of in several installments as per the current plan. Whitacre expressed his misgivings at a recent Management Briefing Seminar in Michigan’s Traverse City, according to Sean McAlinden of the Ann Arbor-based Center for Automotive Research. “And then 48 hours later he was gone,” McAlinden says.
Same old, same old. Everything is political with these guys (you’d think they would be better at it!). First there’s the new and even more absurd Arab / Israeli peace talks in September. At the end of October there might be a GM IPO to celebrate the Dear Leader and his heavenly accomplishments. What’s planned for the beginning of October we wonder….
This video, via Powerline, shows some splendid chaps raising money in the US for Hamas. And here’s another splendid chap: Ahmed Mohamed Nasser al Soofi. And the poor lambs are all victims, don’t you know. This weird 30 / 70 America, where a smallish group in the political/educational/media establishment preach nonsense to the majority, is inherently unstable. It sure feels like things are going to go all one way or all the other, and soon.
The NYT describes the unusual way the President made key decisions regarding Afghanistan in December of 2009 — apparently they were about getting Obamacare passed:
One adviser at the time said Mr. Obama calculated that an open-ended commitment would undermine the rest of his agenda. “Our Afghan policy was focused as much as anything on domestic politics,” the adviser said. “He would not risk losing the moderate to centrist Democrats in the middle of health insurance reform and he viewed that legislation as the make-or-break legislation for his administration.”…
A former adviser to the president, who like others insisted on anonymity in order to discuss the situation candidly, said that Mr. Obama’s relationship with the military was “troubled” and that he “doesn’t have a handle on it.” The relationship will be further tested by year’s end when Mr. Obama evaluates his Afghanistan strategy in advance of his July deadline to begin pulling out.
If the NYT report is accurate, whatever domestic political issues are the administration’s priorities in December 2010 will determine war policy for next year. How reassuring for soldiers and military families.
Obama’s behavior is even more bizarre and disgraceful when it is obvious that the administration should have been focusing in the national jobs emergency instead of the economically ruinous sideshow that became Obamacare. HT: BOTW
President Obama apparently made an appearance on NBC news:
Obama doubled down on his support for a mosque and community center planned for a site two blocks north of ground zero in lower Manhattan — and denied reports that he tried to back away from backing the controversial project. “I didn’t walk it back it all,” he said.
It sure sounded that way to us, but perhaps we’re too obtuse to understand him.
A Newsweek story on a recent poll points to good news for Democrats in November:
NEWSWEEK Poll: Democrats May Not Be Headed for Midterm Bloodbath…Obama’s approval continues to slide, but Bush’s legacy still haunts the GOP…Democrats’ perceived weakness may not be so simple for the GOP to capitalize on this fall. Republican leaders still must deal with the Bush legacy, which 38 percent fault for today’s economic problems (compared with 19 percent who fault Obama’s policies). The public also strongly opposes extending the Bush tax cuts
On the other hand, that was a pretty large (here and here) and fired-up crowd the other day. We’ll see who’s right shortly.
A poll by PPP reports some results that illustrate that the political/media establishment of the left has totally lost control of the narrative:
Given what we now know about the monolithic and rather militant partisanship of the media, the Katrina narrative seems even worse than it was at the time. People had adequate notice to get out of New Orleans, but did not, and the local political officials were grossly negligent. Mayor Nagin’s behavior was utterly incompetent, and the deplorable Blanco’s first acts were to keep the feds out and hire a Democratic consultant to shape the media messaging. (Remember how Blanco stiffed both the President and Mayor Nagin at a critical juncture?) But turn on the TV or read the paper and it was all Bush’s fault.
Would it surprise anyone to learn that there was active collusion between Democratic politicians and the MSM to make Bush look bad? And yet the media today seem to be totally unable to control the narrative in a way that helps their team, as the polling results above show. No wonder they have gone berserk.
Philosopher Roger Scruton, writing about England a few years ago, used the title of this post to describe a certain sort of intellectual (and quite a few pretend-intellectuals) who
have repudiated the national idea. This repudiation is the result of a peculiar frame of mind that has arisen throughout the Western world since the second world war, and which is particularly prevalent among the intellectual and political élites. No adequate word exists for this attitude, though its symptoms are instantly recognised: namely, the disposition, in any conflict, to side with ‘them’ against ‘us’, and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours’. Being the opposite of xenophobia I propose to call this state of mind oikophobia, by which I mean (stretching the Greek a little) the repudiation of inheritance and home. Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But it is a stage in which some people — intellectuals especially — tend to become arrested.
It is no accident that, while most of America toils by the sweat of its brow to make a profit, the faculty lounge and the newsroom seem a world apart from business. So perhaps it is only natural that it is now, when economic conditions are difficult, that the distinctions between the two worlds have become so plain.
According to Rasmussen, 46% of likely voters still approve of President Obama’s performance, a shockingly high number in our opinion. (We are less surprised that 44% of likely voters strongly disapprove of his performance.) What could explain the persistence of the large 46% who still approve of him?
In 2008 16 million African Americans voted out of 131 million total voters, and 96% of this group voted for Obama. If African-Americans have continued that level of support until now, it would put some interesting numbers into play.
Since African-Americans comprised about 12% of voters in 2008, and were nearly unanimous in supporting Obama, the President’s approval numbers would be almost 12% lower among the rest of the electorate if he retained the loyalty of this core group of supporters. In other words, his support among non-African-American likely voters would be around 35%.
35% is an interesting number because the number of people who favor Obama/Democrat/MSM policies (suing Arizona, favoring the Ground Zero mosque, enacting Obamacare, opposing Prop 8, etc.) is consistent with a popularity rating in the mid-30′s. Prop 8 is an interesting example, since 70% of black voters supported that initiative.
Would it surprise anyone if the key support demographics of young voters in 2008 (who aren’t that likely to vote in 2010), and African-American voters, who may like Obama but oppose many of his policies, artificially skew the President’s approval numbers to make him seem more popular than he actually is?
Charles Krauthammer discusses the Tea Party, Arizona’s illegal immigration law, Prop 8, etc., and the hysterical response they have drawn from the Left:
Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. Majorities — often lopsided majorities — oppose President Obama’s social-democratic agenda (e.g., the stimulus, Obamacare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage and reject a mosque near Ground Zero.
What’s a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that preempts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument. The most venerable of these trumps is, of course, the race card. When the Tea Party arose, a spontaneous, leaderless and perfectly natural (and traditionally American) reaction to the vast expansion of government intrinsic to the president’s proudly proclaimed transformational agenda, the liberal commentariat cast it as a mob of angry white yahoos disguising their antipathy to a black president by cleverly speaking in economic terms.
Then came Arizona and S.B. 1070. It seems impossible for the left to believe that people of good will could hold that: (a) illegal immigration should be illegal, (b) the federal government should not hold border enforcement hostage to comprehensive reform, i.e., amnesty, (c) every country has the right to determine the composition of its immigrant population.
As for Proposition 8, is it so hard to see why people might believe that a single judge overturning the will of 7 million voters is an affront to democracy? And that seeing merit in retaining the structure of the most ancient and fundamental of all social institutions is something other than an alleged hatred of gays — particularly since the opposite-gender requirement has characterized virtually every society in all the millennia until just a few years ago?
And now the mosque near Ground Zero. The intelligentsia is near unanimous that the only possible grounds for opposition is bigotry toward Muslims. This smug attribution of bigotry to two-thirds of the population hinges on the insistence on a complete lack of connection between Islam and radical Islam, a proposition that dovetails perfectly with the Obama administration’s pretense that we are at war with nothing more than “violent extremists” of inscrutable motive and indiscernible belief. Those who reject this as both ridiculous and politically correct (an admitted redundancy) are declared Islamophobes, the ad hominem du jour.
We think that Democrats and the media have been surprised that the old way of silencing the opposition finally and all of a sudden stopped working, and that this explains (in part) why they have become really unhinged about the Ground Zero mosque.
The process began when the Tea Party = Racist meme failed, most notably in the shameful attack launched against the Obamacare protesters early this year. People are tired of being talked down to and lied about (it’s gotten so very, very old). Moreover, when these citizens looked around and saw that they were a pretty strong majority on issue after issue, there was no reason to put up with the accusations anymore. And so their betters are reduced to nothing more than calling them “freakin’ morons.”
The passage below is from the first report submitted by the USA to the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights — note the way the administration divides up Americans and implicitly attributes the differences to some groups taking advantage of other groups:
The people who spend day in and day out thinking this way must be really charming dinner companions. (Speaking of charming companions, the nations comprising the UN Council on Human Rights include some of the worst of the worst.) The report is incredibly tacky and self-serving of course — bonus points for guessing how many times The Exalted One is referred to by name.
The results above are from a CBS poll. The most interesting aspect of this matter to us continues to be that the MSM almost unanimously support a position opposed by a supermajority of Americans — and feel perfectly free to insult their fellow citizens in vile terms (and in ways that are often comically wrong). It’s nice to finally know, once and for all, what the media really think about ordinary Americans. The MSM need never be taken seriously again. (BTW, it would be nice if CBS could learn to spell “don’t”.)
A Republican civil war is raging, with righter-than-thou conservatives dominating more and more primaries in a fight for the party’s soul. And the Democrats hope to benefit…tea party-backed candidates might be a godsend to desperate Democrats elsewhere — in Nevada, Florida and perhaps Kentucky, where the Democrats portray GOP nominees as too extreme for their states…
That’s “the Republican tea party” that’s “offering more of the past but on steroids” and is “out of step with where the American people are,” Vice President Joe Biden told the party’s rank and file last week.
Ron Sims, the Deputy Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, posted this on the White House website two months ago:
A Summer of Recovery…With tens of thousands of projects funded and millions of Americans on the job today, it’s hard to believe that it’s only been 16 months since President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. And with so many jobs saved and created already, you might think that the Recovery Act’s greatest impact is behind us. But it’s not. As the summer heats up, it is becoming clear that it could quite possibly be the most active season yet when it comes to recovering our economy…
with thousands of road, bridge, rail and housing projects –- like the one I saw today -– under construction across the country this summer, the American people will get to see first-hand the full force of Recovery Act dollars being put to work in their community – including at Wayland Village – making long-overdue infrastructure improvements, creating new opportunities for local economic growth and supporting well-paid jobs. I am proud to say that the Recovery Act is working!
Christopher Hitchens, who, at last observation, was not a salivating right-wing rube, writes on the GZM and the sponsoring imam:
here is Rauf’s editorial on the upheaval that followed the brutal hijacking of the Iranian elections in 2009. Regarding President Obama, he advised that: He should say his administration respects many of the guiding principles of the 1979 revolution — to establish a government that expresses the will of the people; a just government, based on the idea of Vilayet-i-faquih, that establishes the rule of law.
Coyly untranslated here (perhaps for “outreach” purposes), Vilayet-i-faquih is the special term promulgated by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to describe the idea that all of Iranian society is under the permanent stewardship (sometimes rendered as guardianship) of the mullahs. Under this dispensation, “the will of the people” is a meaningless expression, because “the people” are the wards and children of the clergy. It is the justification for a clerical supreme leader, whose rule is impervious to elections and who can pick and choose the candidates and, if it comes to that, the results.
It is extremely controversial within Shiite Islam. (Grand Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq, for example, does not endorse it.) As for those numerous Iranians who are not Shiites, it reminds them yet again that they are not considered to be real citizens of the Islamic Republic. I do not find myself reassured by the fact that Imam Rauf publicly endorses the most extreme and repressive version of Muslim theocracy…
Let us by all means make the “Ground Zero” debate a test of tolerance. But this will be a one-way street unless it is to be a test of Muslim tolerance as well.
Hitchens mentions Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who is a rather remarkable man. Also remarkable nine years after 9-11 is that most Americans have very little understanding of the cultures of traditional Islamic societies. The media’s willful ignorance has been on display in its unappealing lectures to the majority of Americans.
The WSJ had a fascinating piece on Wikileaks that shows just how highly organized, legally savvy, intensely secretive and well funded many Leftist institutions are:
The linchpin of WikiLeaks’s financial network is Germany’s Wau Holland Foundation. WikiLeaks encourages donors to contribute to its account at the foundation, which under German law can’t publicly disclose the names of donors. Because the foundation “is not an operational concern, it can’t be sued for doing anything. So the donors’ money is protected, in other words, from lawsuits,” Mr. Assange said.
The German foundation is only one piece of the WikiLeaks network. “We’re registered as a library in Australia, we’re registered as a foundation in France, we’re registered as a newspaper in Sweden,” Mr. Assange said. WikiLeaks has two tax-exempt charitable organizations in the U.S., known as 501C3s, that “act as a front” for the website, he said. He declined to give their names, saying they could “lose some of their grant money because of political sensitivities.”
Mr. Assange said WikiLeaks gets about half its money from modest donations processed by its website, and the other half from “personal contacts,” including “people with some millions who approach us and say ‘I’ll give you 60,000 or 10,000,’ ” he said, without specifying a currency.
Kind of sounds like an organized crime syndicate, doesn’t it? Belmont Club has a lot more on the Professional Left.
Some commentators are wondering if Obama wants to get re-elected. Other commentators note that the polls show a stunning lack of support for the administration’s policies, but no mid-course correction in sight. Others say that Obama is as bad a politician as he is a chief executive. The Washington Post says that 2010 could be a worse massacre than 1994. Yet the President seems unperturbed. How does this picture make sense?
One possibility is that it doesn’t make sense, and that we are witnessing a series of spectacular blunders on the part of the administration and the Democrat Party. But there’s another possibility as well. If the administration’s roots come from the far left and if there is an iron will to advance that agenda after November, having an obstructionist Congress is far from the worst thing that could happen to the Obama administration.
If we were the President and a committed radical, and if we also knew that the media would give us cover by calling our opponents every name in the book (as they have recently), we’d chart a bold course. We’d create millions of new instant citizens to support our plans. It would be an incredibly risky stroke, but the dividends would be fantastic if we got away with it.
Frank Rich damns the “virulent Islamophobic hysteria of the neocon and Fox News right — abetted by the useful idiocy of the Anti-Defamation League, Harry Reid and other cowed Democrats.” Maureen Dowd says this:
The country is having some weird mass nervous breakdown, with the right spreading fear and disinformation that is amplified by the poisonous echo chamber that is the modern media environment. The dispute over the Islamic center has tripped some deep national lunacy. The unbottled anger and suspicion concerning ground zero show that many Americans haven’t flushed the trauma of 9/11 out of their systems — making them easy prey for fearmongers.
Many people still have a confused view of Muslims, and the president seems unable to help navigate the country through its Islamophobia.
It is a prejudice stoked by Rush Limbaugh, who mocks “Imam Obama” as “America’s first Muslim president,” and by the evangelist Franklin Graham, who bizarrely told CNN’s John King: “I think the president’s problem is that he was born a Muslim. His father was a Muslim. The seed of Islam is passed through the father, like the seed of Judaism is passed through the mother.” Graham added: “The teaching of Islam is to hate the Jew, to hate the Christian, to kill them. Their goal is world domination.”
A poll last week by the Pew Research Center tracked a strange spike in the number of Americans who believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Obama is a Muslim. And even the ones who don’t think he’s a Muslim don’t necessarily believe he’s a Christian.
There sure is a crack-up going on, as Maureen Dowd said. However, the crack-up seems to us to be that of the MSM, so shocked to find that the vast majority of their countrymen are sick and tired of being insulted, lectured and talked down to by people who, for no good reason, are convinced of their own importance and moral superiority.
Indeed, it probably goes further than that. We think there is the shocking realization by the MSM that they find themselves with so little power in setting the journalistic agenda and dictating what the public should think. Note Dowd’s and Rich’s ascribing the political opinions of a supermajority of Americans to the influence of a cable news channel and a talk show host. The MSM have lost their power so they think it has flowed into some other centralized source, when in fact they have been undone by the decentralization of news availability. No wonder they sound so over-the-top and lost.
(More: Richard Cohen in the WaPo and a report from NPR make the Times commentators look almost moderate by comparison. HT: BOTW)
Back in 2008, the Politico noted — with apparent skepticism — the genuineness of the sprint towards the center by Presidential candidate Obama:
Obama’s relationship with Ayers is an especially vivid milepost on his rise, in record time, from a local official who unabashedly reflected a very liberal district to the leader of national movement based largely on the claim that he can transcend ideological divides.
In one sense, Obama’s journey toward the cultural and political center is not unusual among national politicians. But its velocity is…The relationship with Ayers gives context to his recent past in Hyde Park politics. It’s milieu in which a former violent radical was a stalwart of the local scene, not especially controversial.
It’s also a scene whose liberal ideological features — while taken for granted by the Chicago press corps that knows Obama best — provides a jarring contrast with Obama’s current, anti-ideological stance.
We read a piece that said the discussion of Obama-Ayers had matters backwards: the interesting question wasn’t why Obama got mixed up with Ayers, it was why Ayers bothered to get mixed up with Obama. If you ask the question that way, its meaning becomes quite different.
For example, what price did Ayers charge Obama for editing/ghosting “Dreams”, as Jack Cashill has asserted and Ayers has admitted? And don’t this scene and this scene seem a little different to you, given all that is transpiring in America today? (HT: Larwyn)
Are One-Quarter of Americans Freakin’ Morons?…That’s not a rhetorical question, although the way some people have reacted to yesterday’s TIME and Pew polls about the percentage of Americans who think Obama is a Muslim, I wouldn’t be surprised if they took it as such. Sure, it’s possible that one-in-four (or five, depending on the poll) Americans actually believe in their hearts of hearts that Obama is a Muslim, despite the fact that he became a Christian in his twenties, has spoken during the presidential campaign and since about his Christian faith — even referencing his belief in “our risen Savior” — and attends Christian worship services.
He is not, despite what Franklin Graham thinks, a Muslim who converted to Christianity. If anything, Obama was a secular agnostic by default who became a Christian once he reached adulthood and started thinking seriously about faith.
There’s something odd about the tone of this piece. Its author Amy Sullivan is so insistent and categorical in her writing. What’s up with that? And then there’s the matter of TIME creating the basis for a story — it ran the poll and asked the question after all — and then shrieking about the results. It’s like TIME had an agenda or something.
As for the issue at hand, we don’t care whether Obama is Zoroastrian — we just wish he knew as much about events in American history like the Berlin Airlift and D-Day as he obviously does about Islam. (Super fun bonus: American Jews leaving the Democrat Party in droves.)
