The BBC has told its journalists not to call Abu Qatada, the al-Qaeda preacher, an “extremist”. In order to avoid making a “value judgment”, the corporation’s managers have ruled that he can only be described as “radical”…A British court has called Qatada a “truly dangerous individual” and even his defence team has suggested he poses a “grave risk” to national security…Daily Telegraph, journalists were told: “Do not call him an extremist –- we must call him a radical. Extremist implies a value judgment.”

For what it’s worth, nineteen audio cassettes of Abu Qatada’s sermons were found in the apartment of one Mohamed Atta some years back.

the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, the tragedies of the civil-rights movement was because the civil-rights movement became so court focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of powers through which you bring about redistributive change.

You’ve got to give the guy credit. He’s been consistent and disciplined, if unusually quiet about his agenda. Taxes aren’t about revenue but about fairness and so forth. And none of it is news, in part because 9 out of 10 reporters take what he’s saying for granted.

Is it fair that federal employees receive benefits that are nearly 50% higher than those of private-sector workers whose taxes pay their salaries?…Is it fair that thousands of workers won’t have jobs because the president sided with environmentalists and blocked the shovel-ready Keystone XL oil pipeline?…Is it fair that wind, solar and ethanol producers get billions of dollars of subsidies each year and pay virtually no taxes, while the oil and gas industry — which provides at least 10 times as much energy — pays tens of billions of dollars of taxes while the president complains that it is “subsidized”?…Is it fair that roughly 88% of political contributions from supposedly impartial network television reporters, producers and other employees in 2008 went to Democrats?…Is it fair that our kids and grandkids and great-grandkids — who never voted for Mr. Obama — will have to pay off the $5 trillion of debt accumulated over the past four years, without any benefits to them?

Mr. Moore has compiled quite an extensive list. Life is unfair, JFK famously said (though apparently not always for him during his days in the White House).

Examiner:

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney explained that the number of people dropping out of the work force, which artificially depresses the unemployment rate, can be regarded as an “economic positive.” “A large percentage of that is due to younger people getting more education, which in the end is an economic positive,” Carney said. “This increase in the number of people leaving the work force has been a trend and a fact since 2000, because of an aging population”

This chart tells a different story:

An unemployment rate doesn’t drop two points in a month because kids are staying in school longer. And the amount of the “aging population” still in the workforce is near historic highs, since they can’t afford to retire. Once again we feel like we’re living in a world where it’s Opposite Day from the politicians and their captive media every single day. HT: GP

The Labor Department reported a loss of 2,689,000 jobs in January…In January 2010, as I said, there was an actual, unadjusted job loss of 2,858,000 jobs. To make it simple, the government computers were expecting a bigger unadjusted loss than the 2,689,000 jobs because last January’s decline was 2,858,000. Why weren’t there as many job losses this January? Very likely because the weather throughout the country is a lot milder this year than during the past two Januarys. A loss of jobs that isn’t as bad as expected turns into a job gain. Does that mean there really are 243,000 new jobs out there? Absolutely not.

Let’s say there are rumors in your company that 300 people are going to be laid off. Instead, management decides to fire just 200. Two hundred people, of course, have lost their jobs. But, adjusting it for expectations, 100 people didn’t get fired. Using this analogy, the government would say that, on an expectation-adjusted basis, 100 jobs were created. That’s sort of what happened in the January employment report because of seasonal adjustment.

Let’s get this straight. Jobs went down 2.7 million instead of 2.9 million in January and this is a job gain of 243,000 jobs? Okay. The labor force lost 1.7 million people, which trnslated into a seasonally adjusted 1.2 million people, so the labor force participation rate continued its drop to historic lows among prime age workers.

Meanwhile, the actual non-seasonally adjusted jobs number for December and January is a loss of 2.9 million jobs (which the BLS translated, using a methodology that we were unable to determine, into a job gain of 446,000 jobs). And these jobs losses and labor force losses are a cause for celebration? Huh? It’s all kind of confusing to us, and not in a good way.

when I talk about our financial institutions playing by the same rules as folks on Main Street, when I talk about making sure insurance companies aren’t discriminating against those who are already sick, or making sure that unscrupulous lenders aren’t taking advantage of the most vulnerable among us, I do so because I genuinely believe it will make the economy stronger for everybody. But I also do it because I know that far too many neighbors in our country have been hurt and treated unfairly over the last few years, and I believe in God’s command to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” I know the version of that Golden Rule is found in every major religion and every set of beliefs — from Hinduism to Islam to Judaism to the writings of Plato.

Words are like the tides. They come and go, nice to watch, with no lasting impact. Who cares if the Golden Rule is something else than represented above? Who cares if Plato said something other than claimed above? No one will check; no one will care. (We’ve seen it all before, over and over again.) Bonus points if you can figure out why Plato was included on the list.

Spengler:

The rush out of the Egyptian pound is so rapid that Egyptian investors refuse to hold debt in their own national currency, even at a 16% yield. After Islamist parties won more three-quarters of the seats in recent parliamentary elections – 47% for the Muslim Brotherhood and 25% for the even more extreme al-Nour Party – the business elite that prospered under military rule is counting the days before exile. The first reports of actual hunger in provincial Egyptian towns, meanwhile, are starting to trickle in…

It seems unlikely that Egypt’s central bank will be able to prevent a banana-republic devaluation of the Egyptian pound, and a sharp rise in prices for a population of whom half barely consumes enough to prevent starvation. The difference between Egypt and a banana republic, though, is the bananas: unlike the bankrupt Latin Americans, who exported food, Egypt imports half its caloric consumption. Meat imports have already fallen by 60% over the past year…

Nearly half of Egyptians are functionally illiterate. Nine-tenths of adult women have suffered genital mutilation. Almost a third of Egyptians marry first or second cousins, the fail-safe indicator of a clan-based society. Half of Egyptians live on less than $2 a day, and must spend half of that on food…It should have been no surprise that the Islamists swept the parliamentary elections, given the desperation of the people and the cupidity of the political system. The Wafd Party, Egypt’s oldest secular political entity, polled just 9% of the vote.

Delusional as it was to expect Egyptians to support secular liberal parties that never existed and offered no solution to their desperation, it is all the more delusional to expect the Islamists to stabilize Egypt. The Islamist victory in the first round of voting last year almost certainly prompted the jump in capital flight in December, and the consolidation of Islamist power. Egypt’s middle class will leave and tourism, down by a third over the past year, will virtually disappear

We saw this sort of thing coming a year ago. But the wise ones said, “to be in Tahrir Square tonight, to feel the energy and pride of a people taking back the keys to their country and their future from a tired old dictator, was a privilege.”

The guy is up for parole. No kidding.

The latest vessel is Newt Gingrich, obviously flawed in many ways. But take a moment to read what he’s saying. It’s less the messenger than the message that has the power. We think that GOP primary voters believe that a minimally acceptable candidate articulating that message clearly and unapologetically is electable by a sizeable majority of voters. After all, in the wake of the ridiculous Keystone decision, even staunch liberals are shaking their heads about the disastrous course the administration has set for the country. We don’t recall a recent analogy to this bubbling up of opinion from the grass roots. (Eugene McCarthy’s strong losing performance in the 1968 New Hampshire primary comes to mind.) If the insiders don’t quite get what is going on, it wouldn’t be the first time.

So many people who are so concerned about jobs, about medical costs, about the everyday parts of life, and who feel that the elites in Washington and New York have no understanding, no care, no concern, no reliability, and in fact do not represent them at all.

In the last two debates we had…where people reacted so strongly to the news media, I think it was something very fundamental that I wish that the powers that be in the news media would take seriously. The American people feel that they have elites who have been trying for a half century to force us to quit being American and to become some kind of other system, and the reaction…People completely misunderstand what’s going on. It’s not that I am a good debater, it’s that I articulate the deepest held views of the American people…

If Barack Obama can get reelected after this disaster, just think how radical he would be in a second term…there are a number of key issues we have to talk about with the President. I believe this campaign comes down to economics, including jobs, economic growth, balancing the budget, the value of money, comes down to national security, what threatens us and what to do about it, but the centerpiece of this campaign is about American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky…

What we are going to argue is that American exceptionalism, the Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution, the American Federalist Papers, the Founding Fathers of America are the source from which we draw our understanding of America. He draws his from the Saul Alinsky, the radical left-wingers, and people who don’t like the classical America…

One of the keys issues, and I’m prepared to take this straight to the President and frankly, straight to the elite media…is the growing anti-religious bigotry of the elites…The second big theme that every South Carolinian understands is jobs, economic growth…I want to go into every neighborhood of every ethnic background in the country and say to the people very simply, if you want your children to have a life of dependency and food stamps, you have a candidate and that’s Barack Obama. If you want your children to have a life of indepedency and paychecks, you have a candidate and that’s Newt Gingrich…

Part of our long-term security interests is having an American energy policy. I want America to become so energy independent that no American President ever again bows to a Saudi King. Let me give you an example of a common sense conservatism that solves problems. You have well over $29 billion of natural gas offshore. As President I will authorize on the very first day the development of it. That natural gas will create jobs that, in Louisiana, average $80,000 apiece. In addition, it generates royalties. Part of the royalties should be used to modernize the port of Charleston, which affects 1 out of every 5 jobs in South Carolina.

But it’s not enough just to find the money. The Corps of Engineers bureaucracy is so long and so stupid that they currently take 8 years to study, not to do the project but to study the project. We fought the entire Second World War in 3 years and 8 months. Now if you can beat Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and Imperial Japan in 3 years and 8 months, it is almost unimaginable that it now takes 8 years to study the project…

The President’s decision to veto the Keystone pipeline…you have to wonder how out-of-touch with reality this administration is…The President says, no, we don’t want you to build a pipeline from central Canada straight down, with no mountains intervening, to the largest petrochemical center in the world, Houston, so that we would make money on the pipeline, we would make money on managing the pipeline, we would make money on refining the oil, and we would make money in the ports of Galveston and Houston shipping the oil.

Oh no, we don’t want to do that because Barack Obama is taking care of his extremist left-wing friends in San Francisco. They think that will really stop the oil from getting out. No. Prime Minister Harper…is going to cut a deal with the Chinese, and they will build a pipeline straight across the Rockies to Vancouver. We will get none of the jobs, none of the energy, none of the opportunity. An American President who can create a Chinese-Canadian partnership is truly a danger to this country.

Gingrich certainly owes a great deal to the much-reviled media, and possibly to Romney’s mishandling of his tax issue. More surprises ahead no doubt, but even Romney partisans know that important changes are needed, and quick.

the dreadful infection of journalism got into my system. Turning aside from the honorable occupation of teaching, I started writing articles about the wrongs of the Egyptian people, how they were clamoring, and rightly so, for a democratic setup, and how they would never be satisfied with less than one man one vote and all that went therewith…That at least was what I wrote in my articles, and they went flying over to England, and, like homing pigeons, in through the windows of the Guardian office in Manchester, at that time a high citadel of liberalism. That was where the truth was being expounded, that was where enlightenment reigned.

Of course that was in the 1920′s, but you can find the same sort of thing today.

IBD:

According to the BLS, the “labor force participation rate” — the ratio of the number of people either working or looking for work compared with the entire working-age population — is now 64%, down from 65.7% when the recession ended in June 2009. That’s the lowest level since women began entering the workforce in far greater numbers several decades ago. If you adjust for this drop, the unemployment rate would be close to 11%, instead of the official 8.5%.

Of course this has been the case for a long time now. Imagine how the media would be reporting unemployment, and indeed, will be reporting unemployment, if the White House changes hands this year.

Obama made several recess appointments — a tactic that as a senator he once criticized — even though Congress was not in recess. In December, the president signed a $1 billion omnibus spending bill, but notified Congress that he might not abide by some of the very provisions he had just signed into law. During the Libya war, Obama felt that bombing Qaddafi’s forces did not really constitute military operations, and therefore he had no need to notify Congress under the War Powers Act. It is clear that Arizona is not trying to circumvent federal immigration law, but rather is desperately trying to find some way to enforce it, given that the Obama administration has selectively chosen not to do so. In response, the federal government is suing the state of Arizona, even as it assures illegal aliens that they will not be arrested if they have not committed a crime — as if Obama can by himself decide that illegally entering and residing in the United States is not a federal crime in the first place. President Obama argued that it was constitutional to force citizens to purchase federalized health care, and that all Americans would be subject to his new health-care law — except some 2,000 businesses and organizations that were given politically driven waivers. Obama decided to reverse the legal order of creditors in the bailout of a bankrupt Chrysler Corporation in favor of more politically suitable constituencies. The administration does not like the Defense of Marriage Act, and therefore announced that it won’t enforce it. When a federal judge struck down an Obama- administration ban on new leases for gas and oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, Obama for a time ignored the injunction. When a BP oil leak in the Gulf outraged America, the president met with company executives and announced that they had agreed to set up a $20 billion “fund” to pay for imminent damage claims — as if our chief executive now meets with culpable private businesses to assess what he thinks they should pony up to avoid federal retaliation…

on any given challenge Obama assesses the politics of favoring his constituency of the “poor” and “middle class,” and then uses the necessary legal gymnastics post facto to offer the veneer of lawfulness. If someone is breaking a federal “law” by entering Arizona illegally from Mexico, there must be a way to make the enforcer of that “law” the real suspect — given that a Sheriff Joe Arpaio is by allegiance of the privileged 1 percent and those whom he arrests most surely are not. Consumers are deemed to need federal help more than do lenders; accordingly, Congress “really” is now in recess. In other words, we are witnessing with this administration the ancient idea of the supposedly exalted ends justifying the somewhat ambiguous means — albeit dressed up in trendy Ivy League legalese and progressive moralizing. Our postmodern president is not content with just picking and choosing which laws he will follow in advancing his social agenda. The war against the myth of disinterested Western jurisprudence extends also to free-market economics, as we see with the monotonous demonization of the so-called 1 percent and those who make over $200,000 per year. Sometime after January 2009, we learned that the “wealthy” did not gain their riches by a wide variety of what we once thought were legitimate means — luck, inheritance, work, health, intelligence, expertise, experience, education, or an overriding desire for money and status, coupled with an avoidance of classical sins like sloth, crime, and drunkenness. Rather, we were taught that there was something else going on, something innately unfair in the manner in which we are arbitrarily compensated. In some sense, we are back to the old notion of a labor theory of value (e.g., an hour of working at Starbucks is inherently no less valuable to our society in terms of how much the worker should be paid than an hour crafting a deal at Goldman Sachs). The role, then, of government is not to ensure an equality of opportunity — which is impossible, given inherent and unending race, class, and gender exploitations — but to strive for an equality of result. That utopian task demands that the best and the brightest in government redistribute capital, or rather use the state to make right what the private sector has distorted.

And this from the head of one of our political parties: “The discourse in America, the discourse in Congress in particular…has really changed, I’ll tell you. I hesitate to place blame, but I have noticed it take a very precipitous turn towards edginess and lack of civility with the growth of the Tea Party movement.” Already, “the Department of Homeland has been operating a ‘Social Networking/Media Capability’ program to monitor the top blogs, forums and social networks online for at least the past 18 months.” Hard to imagine what 2013-2017 America is going to look like if these folks aren’t shown the door.

The WSJ discusses Bain Capital’s investments:

22% either filed for bankruptcy reorganization or closed their doors by the end of the eighth year after Bain first invested, sometimes with substantial job losses. An additional 8% ran into so much trouble that all of the money Bain invested was lost…Bain produced about $2.5 billion in gains for its investors in the 77 deals, on about $1.1 billion invested. Overall, Bain recorded roughly 50% to 80% annual gains in this period, which experts said was among the best track records for buyout firms

Here are a few thoughts on the non-VC PE industry. KKR was started in 1976. and initally capitalized on low stock market valuations to take companies private at very low EBITDA multiples. Excellent idea. Around the same time the mainstreaming of hostile takeovers by Morgan Stanley’s Bob Greenhill and attorney Joe Flom meant that a going-private transaction did not have to be voluntary. (We once attended a meeting with a public company director who pleaded that we find someone to do a hostile takeover of his company because the CEO was so awful.)

The emergence of Mike Milken’s junk bonds in the 1980′s accelerated going-private transactions. In addition, acquirors had the ability to allocate basis among subsidiaries of the acquiree (“mirrors“) so that they paid no taxes on the operations they sold off to pay down debt. An attorney famous for defending targets of the takeovers called them junk-bond, bust-up, bootstrap deals. These developments arguably contributed to CEO’s being better stewards of public company assets. Bain Capital was founded in 1984, towards the end of the first phase of large PE deals. It looks as though the firm did start-up and growth capital deals at first and migrated into troubled situations sometimes referred to as vulture capital.

We’ve never done business with Bain Capital, though we’ve been involved as an agent and principal in the PE business for several decades. It has been our general observation that bankers and finance guys generally don’t know too much about business operations, but business operations get translated into numbers, and they know the numbers. It has surprised us that PE has been portrayed as both the Second Coming and the Devil’s Spawn by elements within the GOP. It’s neither of course.

We agree that the young-rich know-nothing banker with his 2+20 cap-gains-on-the-carry compensation scheme creates an image issue. But there’s this on the other side after all. As MoDo wrote, “a prospective race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney is being caricatured here as ‘Saul Alinsky versus Gordon Gekko’.” We agree with roughly 50% of that.

Depp & Burton Attend Whitehouse Halloween Party ~- President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama on Saturday handed out treats to more than 2,000 trick-or-treaters, marking their Halloween at a White House event partly aimed at honoring military families. Johnny Depp & Tim Burton were amoung the attendess at the Whitehouse Halloween Party and apparently Johnny was very popular with the children because of his Jack Sparrow character from Pirates Of The Caribbean. It is not known yet if Depp & Burton dressed up for the Party but we do know there was some characters from The Night Before Christmas and apparently a tea party with the Mad Hatter….could this have been Johnny Depp?

(Since this report came from a dedicated fansite, it missed or overlooked Chewbacca’s attendance at the fancy party.) This tiny story serves to illustrate that the media are even more pathetic, unprofessional and subservient than we thought.

the president’s biggest failures have been his own ideas….Obama arrived in office afire with the ambition to create a Palestinian state within two years. But his diplomacy was based on a twofold misunderstanding: that the key to successful negotiations was forcing Israel to stop all settlement construction — and that the United States had the leverage to make that happen.

Veterans of the Middle East “peace process” shook their heads in wonderment as what at first appeared to be a rookie error evolved into a two-year standoff between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. There was only one possible explanation for this persistence in futility: The president himself was fixed on it.

Obama’s next big project was global nuclear arms control — an initiative so impressive to Norwegians that it won him the Nobel Peace Prize before he could act on it. Yet the results to date hardly seem prizeworthy. The New Start nuclear arms agreement with Russia merely ratifies warhead reductions already underway in Russia, while imposing a modest cut on the U.S. arsenal. More ambitious multilateral initiatives by Obama — to control nuclear materials, for example — have made little progress, despite an elaborate summit the president hosted in 2010.

Here again there appears to be a disconnect between Obama’s 1970s-vintage ideas and the real world of the early 21st century. There’s nothing wrong, and modest good, in extending Cold War nuclear conventions with Russia, or extracting highly enriched uranium from Ukraine and Chile. But the most dangerous proliferation threats emanate from countries that don’t attend summits or sign international treaties, such as North Korea and Iran. In terms of nuclear capability, both are ahead of where they were in 2009.

This brings us to Obama’s most distinctive — and most ill-fated — idea, and the one most identified with his 2008 campaign: the determination to “engage” with U.S. adversaries such as Iran, North Korea, Syria and Venezuela. Obama promised “direct diplomacy” — even one-to-one meetings — with the likes of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Kim Jong Il. More broadly he made the case that the United States could benefit by reaching out to autocratic regimes…

In his first year Obama dispatched two letters to Khamenei while keeping his distance from the revolutionary Green movement. He shook hands with Hugo Chavez. He launched a “reset” of relations with Russia’s Vladi­mir Putin and dispatched envoys to reason with Bashar al-Assad in Damascus. He delivered a sweeping address to the Muslim world from Cairo.

The results have been meager. Khamenei spurned the U.S. outreach. Relations with Putin warmed for a time but now have grown cold again. In Egypt and across the Middle East, the president’s popularity is lower today than when he gave the Cairo address.

The Post offers no explanation for the litany of failures it cites. Remarkable enough that a Democrat wrote the piece. We’ll leave it to VDH to provide a rationale: “American foreign policy is now becoming an extension not of classically liberal values, but of progressive suspicions of constitutional government, capitalism, and the historical role of the United States in particular and the West in general. The bowing to foreign potentates, the sad historical fabrications in the Cairo speech, the self-serving nonsense that arose in the first Al-Arabiya interview, and the so-called ‘apology tour’ were simply superficial manifestations of a deeper ambiguity about America.” He’s being charitable.

it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man. For war consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting…as the nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto…

In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Egypt is a country with no democratic tradition, over 40% illiteracy and grinding poverty. Terrible unemployment and underemployment. And a 65% vote in favor of more of the same. So who is closer to understanding Egypt, the Tom above or the NYT’s Tom?

the Islamist parties — the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafist Al Nour Party — just crushed the secular liberals, who actually sparked the rebellion here, in the free Egyptian parliamentary elections, winning some 65 percent of the seats. To not be worried about the theocratic, antipluralistic, anti-women’s-rights, xenophobic strands in these Islamist parties is to be recklessly naïve. But to assume that the Islamists will not be impacted, or moderated, by the responsibilities of power, by the contending new power centers here and by the priority of the public for jobs and clean government is to miss the dynamism of Egyptian politics today.

Flashback: “to be in Tahrir Square tonight, to feel the energy and pride of a people taking back the keys to their country and their future from a tired old dictator, was a privilege.”

“The Obamas,” by New York Times correspondent Jodi Kantor, tells of the first Halloween party the first couple feted at the White House in 2009…George Lucas sent the original Chewbacca to mingle with invited guests…“White House officials were so nervous about how a splashy, Hollywood-esque party would look to jobless Americans — or their representatives in Congress, who would soon vote on health care — that the event was not discussed publicly…

the White House made certain that more humble Halloween festivities earlier that day — for thousands of Washington-area schoolkids — were well reported by the press corps. Then the Obamas went inside, where an invitation-only affair for children of military personnel and White House administrators unfolded in the East Room…

the State Dining Room had also been transformed into a secretive White House Wonderland. Tim Burton decorated it “in his signature creepy-comic style. His film version was about to be released, and he had turned the room into the Mad Hatter’s tea party, with a long table set with antique-looking linens, enormous stuffed animals in chairs, and tiered serving plates with treats like bone-shaped meringue cookies,” reports the book…“Fruit punch was served in blood vials at the bar. Burton’s own Mad Hatter, the actor Johnny Depp, presided over the scene in full costume, standing up on a table to welcome everyone in character.”

Comments: (a) did reporters really not know about this — hard to believe; (b) no wonder the administration kept it secret; (c) also from that time period, compare and contrast; and (d) added bonus, Shrinkwrapped’s take from election night 2008.

The Guardian’s front-page headline this morning was ‘NHS cuts have affected patient care say four out of five doctors’. So just how severe are these ‘cuts’? Ten per cent of the budget? Five? Here are the official figures from the Department of Health. At a time when other ministries are indeed under pressure, spending on the NHS will continue to grow year on year throughout the parliament – as it has almost uninterruptedly since 1948. Expenditure will rise from £103.8 billion to £114.4 billion in 2015. It’s true that, once inflation is factored in, the increase is slight – around 0.4 per cent. It’s true, too, that there is a reallocation of funds within that budget from administration to the actual provision of healthcare. Still, in no system of mathematics does this represent a ‘cut’. What, then, is the Guardian talking about? Read far enough and you’ll see that the whole story is based an online survey of, er, 664 self-selected respondents

Middle East Forum:

Consider the New York Times’ coverage, as reported by Adam Nossiter, in an article titled “Nigerian Group Escalates Violence With Church Attacks”: The sect, known as Boko Haram, until now mostly targeted the police, government and military in its insurgency effort, but the bombings on Sunday represented a new, religion-tinged front, a tactic that threatens to exploit the already frayed relations between Nigeria’s nearly evenly split populations of Christians and Muslims…

This sentence is fraught with problems. For starters, Boko Haram has been terrorizing Nigerian Christians for years, killing thousands of them, and destroying hundreds of their churches. Considering that just last Christmas Eve, 2010, Boko Haram bombed several churches, killing nearly 40 Christian worshippers, the New York Times’ characterization of these latest attacks as “represent[ing] a new, religion-tinged front” is not only unconscionable, but unprofessional.

Boko Haram — whose full name in Arabic is “People of Sunna for Da’wa [Islamization] and Jihad [Holy War]” — has, for a decade, been representing a very “religion-tinged front,” that is, an Islamic front, one that is hostile to all things non-Muslim, with Christians at the very top. In just the last couple of months, Boko Haram has carried out attacks on dozens of other churches, bombing some, torching others. In one instance, they opened fire on a congregation of mostly women and children, killing dozens; they executed two children of an ex-terrorist because he converted to Christianity

A cut is properly defined as an inadequate increase. A clear religious-political strategy of violence is properly defined an unfortunate religion-tinged tactic that might result in some random man-caused disasters. What about clear writing don’t these whiners understand?

You need a photo ID to get on an airplane or an Amtrak train; to open a bank account, withdraw money from it, or cash a check; to pick up movie and concert tickets; to go into a federal building; to buy alcohol and to apply for food stamps. Most Americans don’t think it’s a hardship to ask voters to produce one. A Rasmussen poll in June indicated 75 percent of respondents support photo ID requirements…

Republicans “want to literally drag us back to Jim Crow laws,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, D-Fla, chair of the Democratic National Committee. The NAACP has asked the United Nations to intervene to block state voter ID laws. It may have an ulterior motive for opposing ballot security measures. An NAACP official was convicted on 10 counts of absentee voter fraud in Tunica County, Miss., in July…

This year there have been investigations, indictments or convictions for vote fraud in California, Texas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina and Maryland. In all but one case, the alleged fraudsters were Democrats…

At least 55 employees or associates of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now have been convicted of registration fraud in 11 states, says Matthew Vadum of the Capital Research Center, who’s written a book about ACORN. Of 1.3 million new registrations ACORN turned in in 2008, election officials rejected 400,000.

What a waste of four years. The cling to power re-election strategy is to suppress attempts to enforce laws, and accuse the law enforcers of vile motivations. Hint: implicitly calling 75% of Americans names is not a sound strategy, even with the media on your side.

What a waste of four years. Economically, the administration has pursued a relentlessly disciplined agenda that is economically destructive. But in many ways, that’s not the worst of it. The country has a bad case of moral rot, and while there’s not much a president can do about that directly, he can certainly use the bully pulpit to advantage. Or not.

A man was given a great opportunity and squandered it. Oddly enough, it was the opportunity he campaigned on four years ago, but all that was just words. The largest irony is that the facts on the ground offered any number of opportunities for distinction if not greatness, but we’d bet that the administration’s senior team is so blinkered by ideology that they only saw their distorted version of the American reality.

One reason Iowa Democrats have been better prognosticators than Iowa Republicans is that more people participate in their caucuses. About twice as many people showed up for the Democratic precinct caucuses as for their Republican counterparts in 2008. In a state of three million people, a bare 119,000 Republicans showed up for the caucuses. Some 60% of them identified as evangelical or born-again Christians — a far higher percentage than in any presidential contest in any large non-Southern state that year.

With a week to go, there’s a three way tie among the candidates. That’s about 24,000 supporters apiece. What an absurd, idiosyncratic, unrepresentative way to cull the herd.

When the Journal/NBC News poll last month asked Americans who they think is most to blame for current economic problems, both former President Bush and Wall Street bankers were fingered more often than was President Obama. That attitude gives some resonance to Mr. Obama’s argument — already oft-stated and sure to be repeated a lot in the campaign to come — that the Republican administration of George W. Bush allowed the country to fall into a deep economic ditch, and that it isn’t Mr. Obama’s fault it’s taking a long time to climb out. Second, whatever unhappiness exists with Mr. Obama’s economic record, there is ample reason to think Republicans are even less popular. Just over 40% of Americans have an unfavorable view of the president, but 48% hold an unfavorable view of Republicans.

We don’t claim to know what the electoral future holds, but basing opinions on GIGO polling data is ludicrous. The poll is 1000 adults, almost 20% of whom aren’t even registered to vote. The 2008 results of those who voted in the presidential election were 4/3 D/R , which is way out of line with the actual tally.

Finally, the D-to-R self-identification in the poll is 46-36 (including leaners), way out of line with the 35-35 actual results from exit polling. Weighting leaners so heavily D is clearly misleading since I’s flipped 33 points D-to-R in the most recent elecrtion. Are the people who write this nonsense lazy or complicit?

From 1960 to 2010, the share of federal spending going for “payments to individuals” (Social Security, food stamps, Medicare and the like) climbed from 26 percent to 66 percent…

falling military spending — from 52 percent of federal outlays in 1960 to 20 percent today…

In 1960, federal taxes were 17.8 percent of national income (gross domestic product). In 2007, they were 18.5 percent of GDP…

the Forbes 400 richest Americans have a collective wealth of $1.5 trillion. If the government simply confiscated everything they own, and turned them into paupers, it would barely cover the one-time 2011 deficit of $1.3 trillion…

Obama has provided no leadership. Aside from Rep. Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, few Republicans have.

It looks like Mr. Samuelson is writing a contemporary history of America’s financial Armageddon. He has already done the chapter comparing US debt levels to those of the PIIGS. He’s already done the chapter on the ruinous healthcare law, though he was careful to put his criticism in the third person. His criticism of politicians is bi-partisan, but it seems clear enough that he has stronger feelings than he is willing to share in print.

Last Saturday, violent groups of Islamic-Salafi radicals burned the famous scientific institute established by Napoleon in Egypt after its first encounter with the West. Some historians consider it the start of modern times in the Middle East. The site, L’Institut d’Egypte, held some 200,000 original and rare books, exhibits, maps, archeological findings and studies from Egypt and the entire Middle East, based on the work of generations of western researchers. Most of the artifacts were lost forever, burned or looted…

In 1258, the Mongols burned the immense library in Baghdad known as the “House of Wisdom.” It held rare writings that have disappeared forever, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, and the other cornerstones of Western civilization. All we know today is that these books existed, yet following the terrible fire in Baghdad they were burned forever. The Mongols sought to secure the same objective as Egypt’s Salafis: Erasing the past and keeping only their present.

Earlier this year: “to be in Tahrir Square tonight, to feel the energy and pride of a people taking back the keys to their country and their future from a tired old dictator, was a privilege.” Yeah, right.

The Justice Department on Friday rejected South Carolina’s law requiring voters to show photo identification at the polls, saying it makes it harder for minorities to cast ballots. It was the first voter ID law to be refused by the federal agency in nearly 20 years…”Minority registered voters were nearly 20 percent more likely to lack DMV-issued ID than white registered voters, and thus to be effectively disenfranchised,” Perez wrote, noting that the numbers could be even higher since the data submitted by the state doesn’t include inactive voters.

CNN:

A federal judge in Charleston, South Carolina blocked Thursday parts of the state’s anti-illegal immigration law approved by the legislature last summer…The first section blocked makes it a felony to transport or conceal a person “with intent to further that person’s unlawful entry into the United States” or to help that person avoid apprehension.

Campaign 2012. Attacking the rule of law on transparently flimsy grounds, and with such brass too. Pretty much what we predicted a year ago. In a way it’s not surprising, but in a way it’s shocking to see how far this country has fallen and so fast. (Imagine the kind of hope and change in store for the country 2013-2017 if these low lifes get away with this next November.)

Final points: (a) the opposition party is MIA on these outrages; and (b) the media, the media — the lead stories of the day are about a $20 a week tax cut for 8 weeks, and morons fighting over who gets to buy a pair of sneakers. A million Americans died in the nation’s wars for this?

Just about the only thing more ridiculous than this track record is the media’s track record of ignoring and covering up these appalling performances.

North Korea’s young and inexperienced next leader will lean on a seasoned inner circle headed by his aunt and uncle to guide him through the transition to supreme ruler. Kim Jong Un, who vaulted into the leadership role with the death of his father, Kim Jong Il, made his public debut as anointed successor only 15 months ago. Since then, the whirlwind political campaign has barreled ahead…

The late Kim Jong Il had 20 years of preparation at the side of his father, North Korean founder Kim Il Sung, who died in 1994. Experts say that because Kim Jong Un doesn’t have that kind of experience, the youngest member of the political dynasty will need the brains and political brawn of his father’s closest confidants before formally taking power…

two close, trusted family members and political power brokers have emerged as Kim Jong Un’s main protectors: paternal aunt Kim Kyong Hui and her husband, Jang Song Thaek, who have risen to the top of North Korea’s political and military elite since the succession campaign began two years ago. Both 65, they also have the weight of seniority so important in a society that places a premium on age and alliances.

The AP joins Ted Turner and Eason Jordan in the big suck-up to just about the most vile place on earth. Probably better to quit than to write neutral-to-positive prose about a country that routinely starves its own people.

Take away all the”‘no more red state/no more blue state,” “this is our moment” mish-mash and what is left to us? “Reaching across the aisle” sounded bipartisan, but it came from the most consistently partisan member of the U.S. Senate. Most of the 2008 campaign was a frantic effort on the part of the media to explain away Bill Ayers, ACORN, the SEIU, Rev. Wright, Father Pfleger, the clingers speech, “get in their face,” and the revealing put downs of Hillary Clinton. But those were windows into a soul that soon opened even wider — with everything from limb-lopping doctors and polluting Republicans to stupidly acting police and “punish our enemies” nativists. The Special Olympics “joke,” the pig reference to Sarah Palin, the middle finger nose rub to Hillary — all that was a scratch of the thin shiny veneer into the hard plywood beneath. The binding up our wounds myth had no basis in reality, but was constructed on the notion (to channel the racially condescending Harry Reid and Joe Biden) that a charismatic and young postracial rhetorician seemed so non-threatening. The logic was that Obama took a train from Springfield to DC; so did Lincoln; presto, both were like healers. The truth? The Obamites — Jarrett, Axelrod, Emanuel, etc. — were hard-core partisan dividers, who had a history of demonizing enemies, suing to eliminate opponents, and leaking divorce records, in addition to the usual Chicago campaign protocols. If one were to collate the Obama record on race (from Eric Holder’s “my people” and “cowards” to Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” and Van Jones’s racist rants), it is the most polarizing in a generation. The Obama way is and always was to create horrific straw men: opponents of health care reform are greedy doctors who want to rip out your tonsils; opponents of tax increases jet off to Vegas to blow their children’s tuition money; skeptics of Solyndra-like disasters want to dirty the air; those against open borders wish to put alligators and moats in the Rio Grande as they round up children at ice cream parlors.

If we survive, pretty much a whole generation of media people are going to look, not merely biased, which is no sin, but corrupt like Walter Duranty.

To recap a bit, on the Thursday before election day in 2000, the Bush DUI’s were leaked to Fox and hit the airwaves, an excellent piece of political theater that the Bush campaign should have anticipated. But that was child’s play. On election day, we seem to recall that some early predictions suppressed turnout in the Florida panhandle. In 2004, CBS and the NYT collaborated on a scandal story a couple of weeks before the election about a vast number of weapons that had dissappeared in Iraq.

This was the same CBS that used obvious forgeries of documents from a dubious source in an attempt to sink the Bush re-election campaign against an opponent with some more fact-based problems. And Bush wasn’t very much of a conservative. In 2008 the 12-to-1 opposition media fell all over themselves to praise their candidate, and couldn’t be bothered with his scandals and strange, outlandish rhetoric.

Flash forward. For the most part, neither Solyndra nor Fast and Furious are important scandals. The media collectively yawn over America’s highly secret military technology showing up in mint condition in enemy hands. The media happily participate in staged propaganda events, apparently no longer concerned about objectivity and professionalism, as long as the chosen narrative is advanced.

One GOP candidate says this: “the people who decide elections, the people in the middle — by the way, people who last time voted for Barack Obama — do not want to have a president elected based on red meat.” The other one might respond that telling the truth is not red meat. The candidates, by the way, agree on most issues. So things seem to have come down to this, at least for a nanosecond: (a) stylistically to an issue of temperament, and (b) substantively to different views about the urgency to challenge the narrative of media employees who swallowed whole the received wisdom of their university days and editorial board meetings.

I know the suggestion right now is, is that somehow, well, this Keystone issue will create jobs. That’s being determined by the State Department right now, and there is a process…But here’s what I know: However many jobs might be generated by a Keystone pipeline, they’re going to be a lot fewer than the jobs that are created by extending the payroll tax cut and extending unemployment insurance

Yes, it’s that same fellow who said some other things that make just as much sense. Rubbish here. Rubbish there. Rubbish everywhere. We marvel at how someone can be so disciplined that he can say utter nonsense with a straight face, and keep doing it, time after time after time. But even more than that, we marvel that most of the legacy media are either so corrupt or so stupid and ill-informed that they go along with these risible performances. History should be a cruel judge of this.

Steel mills that needed 100 or 1,000 employees are now able to do the same work with 100 employees, so layoffs too often became permanent, not just a temporary part of the business cycle. And these changes didn’t just affect blue-collar workers. If you were a bank teller or a phone operator or a travel agent, you saw many in your profession replaced by ATMs and the internet…

there is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let’s respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. “The market will take care of everything,” they tell us. If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes – especially for the wealthy – our economy will grow stronger. Sure, they say, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well…

it’s a simple theory. And we have to admit, it’s one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government. That’s in America’s DNA. And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. But here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It has never worked.

It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It’s not what led to the incredible postwar booms of the 50s and 60s. And it didn’t work when we tried it during the last decade. I mean, understand, it’s not as if we haven’t tried this theory. Remember in those years, in 2001 and 2003, Congress passed two of the most expensive tax cuts for the wealthy in history. And what did it get us? The slowest job growth in half a century. Massive deficits

Poor guy has no clue about the economic miracle of the last 150 years. Poor country has to put up with this drivel. How insulting all that nonsense about bank tellers, ATM’s, silent robotic factories, travel agents and so forth. Not surprising, since he knows so little about important events in relatively recent US history, events like D-Day and the Berlin Airlift. Help!!!

the major European economies that are now in trouble have two things in common: membership of the eurozone and staggering public debts. According to IMF figures, Greece’s gross government debt as a percentage of GDP (2011 forecast) stands at 165.6 percent, up from 105.4 percent in 2007. Italy’s government debt now stands at 121.1 percent of GDP, up from 103.6 percent in 2007. Portugal’s debt has risen from 68.3 percent of GDP in 2007 to 106 percent in 2011. Even the EU’s second biggest economy, France, is not immune from the debt crisis. France’s government debt is now at 86.9 percent of GDP, up from 64.2 percent four years ago.

And the United States is in an even worse situation — with gross government debt as a percentage of GDP standing at a towering 100 percent, a dramatic increase from the 2007 level of 62.3 percent.

The long-term impact of this debt, both for America and for Europe, will be devastating unless spending is dramatically slashed, entitlement programs are reformed, and public sector work forces are significantly trimmed. The cradle-to-grave welfare states that dominate the social landscape of most European Union countries will ultimately have to be dismantled. The huge public debts will make economic growth increasingly difficult, have an unsettling effect on the markets, and drive down the confidence of the credit rating agencies. As The Telegraph reports today, all 17 eurozone members now face losing their Standard and Poor’s AAA credit status.

The current EU debt crisis should be a dramatic wake-up call for political elites on both sides of the Atlantic to reverse the tide of big government

Meanwhile, back at the NYT: “Although Europe’s leaders continue to insist that the problem is too much spending in debtor nations, the real problem is too little spending.”

It’s funny. On issue after issue, the conventional wisdom of those at the NYT makes no sense at all — and its adherents are so smug. Take the Paul Gregory response to the Bill Keller article of the other day. Change “economic policy” to “global warming” or “cap and trade” and it’s the same dismissive tone to those who disagree with the Grey Lady.

The EPA heaved its weight against another industry this month, issuing a regulation to sharply increase fuel economy. Under this new rule, America’s fleet of passenger cars and light trucks will have to meet an average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, a doubling of today’s average of about 27 mpg. By the EPA’s estimate the rule will cost $157 billion, meaning the real number is vastly greater…The only way Detroit can hit these averages will be by turning at least 25% of its fleet into hybrids. But hybrid sales peaked in the U.S. two years ago at 3% of the market and are declining…

Until this Administration, fuel standards were the remit of Congress, via its Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) program. In 2007, the legislative branch raised those standards with a bill requiring the U.S. fleet to hit 35 miles per gallon by 2020, a 40% increase. The industry is struggling to keep pace with those steep requirements. President Jackson is now casting aside 35 years of Congressional prerogative. Because the Obama EPA has declared carbon dioxide a “pollutant,” and because cars emit CO2, Ms. Jackson is citing the Clean Air Act in her bid to commandeer Detroit.

We discussed the absurd, but politically very useful, idea that CO2 is a pollutant, several years ago. We lived in an Age of Foolishness then, and it’s only gotten worse.

This silent command and control agenda, so damaging to the economy and so unremarked — indeed, probably quietly cheered — by most of the media, is one reason for the serial popularity of the anti-Romneys. A substantial portion of the GOP base believes that their candidate will be running against one man next year, but will be running against the media for the following four years. They want clarity over obfuscation, pugnaciousness over acceptance of media biases. There does indeed need to be an arguer-in-chief but it’s not clear that that role and the role of president are really compatible.

One lesson, however, has not fully sunk in and awaits final elucidation in the 2012 election: that of the Chicago style of Barack Obama’s politicking. In 2008 few of the true believers accepted that, in his first political race, in 1996, Barack Obama sued successfully to remove his opponents from the ballot. Or that in his race for the U.S. Senate eight years later, sealed divorced records for both his primary- and general-election opponents were mysteriously leaked by unnamed Chicagoans, leading to the implosions of both candidates’ campaigns. Or that Obama was the first presidential candidate in the history of public campaign financing to reject it, or that he was also the largest recipient of cash from Wall Street in general, and from BP and Goldman Sachs in particular. Or that Obama was the first presidential candidate in recent memory not to disclose either undergraduate records or even partial medical. Or that remarks like “typical white person,” the clingers speech, and the spread-the-wealth quip would soon prove to be characteristic rather than anomalous. Few American presidents have dashed so many popular, deeply embedded illusions

We expect to be surprised in 2012, and we’re not looking forward to it. In 2011 we learned aome unpleasant things: (a) how corrupt and brazen the two-card monte government has been on both sides of the aisle, with things like perfectly legal insider trading; and (b) however far left you think the administration is, the 12-to-1 legacy media are the same or more so, as evidenced by their continuing to largely serve as stenographers for the administration in defense of its horrible track record.

The above is a “path to renewal” that “inspires” Americans to a new beginning? Really? (We’ve explained in some detail that, romantic illusions of the media notwithstanding, OWS is unlike the pragmatic anti-draft protests of the sixties that covered themselves in fancy talk if only to hide the naked self interest of many of the protesters.) Still, OWS does have its creative moments, and the Meow Chant seems to be one of them.

Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen. As with religion, it is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate. As with religion, it comes with an elaborate list of virtues, vices and indulgences. As with religion, its claims are often non-falsifiable, hence the convenience of the term “climate change” when thermometers don’t oblige the expected trend lines. As with religion, it is harsh toward skeptics, heretics and other “deniers.” And as with religion, it is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit.

You know where we are on the issue. Our question is this: in 5 years and in 10 years, will AGW still be the conventional wisdom in the media and the academy?

It is odd that there remain those on the right who think that the last three years have been some sort of failure or series of mistakes. It’s too bad the economy isn’t doing better, but that’s not the priority of these folks. The priority is making things fairer, according to their enlightened vision.

The most remarkable thing about this administration is not incompetence; it is discipline. (As the man said: “We are five days from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”) They stay relentlessly on their message of the moment, positioning themselves as the reasonable ones in the center, amidst those on the left and right who take irresponsible positions — and all the while they are quietly executing their agenda, moistly through the federal agencies and cabinet departments. Clever, profoundly anti-democratic.

But the playbook is badly out of date. OWS isn’t random; it’s straight from the playbook. No doubt it will metastasize over the next year and show up at Tea Party events and so forth to cause no end of trouble. The most peculiar thing about this exercise is that it is happening at almost precisely the wrong historical moment. The USSR fell almost a generation ago, and the welfare states of Europe are crumbling under the weight of their entitlement burdens. What a bizarre moment to emulate them.

The second most peculiar thing, at least to us, is our discovery of the extent of the corruption. Many years ago we wrote about the temptation to corruption in declining industries such as the legacy media. We had no idea how bad it really is. Congressmen can legally trade on insider information; major media outlets ignore huge scandals when they are politically inconvenient. And on and on.

We don’t think this is going to end well for the left. We think that they total about a third of the electorate. though the media megaphone makes them seem much more populous. It’s not really a 50/50 country when very basic issues are in play. As evidence we point to Independents flipping by 33 points last November after they figured out they had been sold a bill of goods in 2008. However, we do not underestimate the lengths to which those in power will go to remain in power. Frankly, we’re not looking forward to what the next political year is likely to bring.

As the Occupy Wall Street movement has continued and spread, its esteem in American voters’ eyes has slipped. Last month, when PPP first asked about the movement nationally, voters were split, with 35% supporting the movement’s goals and 36% opposing them. Now, that is 33-45, 11 points worse. Still 52% of Democrats support their goals, but opposition has risen from 16% to 24%. Meanwhile, both Republicans (from 13-59 to 11-71) and independents (from 39-34 to 34-42) have moved 13 or 14 points against O.W.S. That now makes the movement less popular than its right-wing counterpart, the Tea Party

It’s hard to gauge how accurate this poll is, since the D/R/I breakdown is not specified. However, the generic R congressional candidate was ahead 39/36 among I’s, which seems less that what you’d expect, given other surveys. The change in OWS polling numbers is of course a principal reason that the mayors all over the country coordinated their shutting down the nasty camps. Why run an ad for the GOP every night on the local news?

World headed for irreversible climate change in five years…If the world is to stay below 2C of warming, which scientists regard as the limit of safety, then emissions must be held to no more than 450 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; the level is currently around 390ppm. But the world’s existing infrastructure is already producing 80% of that “carbon budget”, according to the IEA’s analysis, published on Wednesday. This gives an ever-narrowing gap in which to reform the global economy on to a low-carbon footing. If current trends continue, and we go on building high-carbon energy generation, then by 2015 at least 90% of the available “carbon budget” will be swallowed up by our energy and industrial infrastructure. By 2017, there will be no room for manoeuvre at all – the whole of the carbon budget will be spoken for, according to the IEA’s calculations.

Think of this: the difference between Have a Nice Day! and We’re Doomed! depends on 60 parts per million of the gas that plants breathe. That’s less than 1 out of 10,000 bits of air, as we tirelessly point out. If you think the earth is that fragile, well, good luck. Or maybe we’re just among the Gomers and Goobers of the world, as the WaPo reported: “It is not surprising that support for federal funding for clean energy drops among Republicans when their major source of information is a ‘news’ network that is pushing an anti-environment, anti-science, anti-government agenda 24/7.”

The conversation then drifted to Netanyahu, at which time Sarkozy declared: “I cannot stand him. He is a liar.” According to the report, Obama replied: “You’re fed up with him, but I have to deal with him every day!” The remark was naturally meant to be said in confidence, but the two leaders’ microphones were accidently left on…reporters “did not have a chance to take advantage of this fluke.”

The surprising lack of coverage may be explained by a report alleging that journalists present at the event were requested to sign an agreement to keep mum on the embarrassing comments. A Reuters reporter was among the journalists present and can confirm the veracity of the comments. A member of the media confirmed Monday that “there were discussions between journalists and they agreed not to publish the comments due to the sensitivity of the issue.”

And on a more serious note, there’s this: “The Seals’ own accounts differ from the White House version…shocked that President Barack Obama announced bin Laden’s death on television the same evening, rendering useless much of the intelligence they had seized.” Did the press follow up on this? Not a chance. They don’t bark, let alone bite.

The truth is that even if the allegations are true, the presidential candidate is not guilty of sexual harassment. He is accused of having made a gross, dumb and reckless pass at a low point in her life. She pushed him away, she said, and it never happened again. In other words, he took ‘no’ for an answer…we have a responsibility to make it okay for politicians to tell the truth — providing that they are respectful of ‘no means no; yes means yes’ — and still be able to enter high office, including the presidency. Until then, we will disqualify energy and talent the country needs

We heard that Ms. Steinem disparaged the accuser’s lawyer, Gloria Allred, because Allred had called Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice “Uncle Tom types.” Could that be true as well? If so, we’re finally making real progress in this country.

the media and Cain’s detractors have over-played their hand. By Friday night, Politico, which broke the original story, had published 94 articles on the allegations in under six days. Every other major publication had followed suit. Every time he stepped out of a room, Cain was mobbed by reporters. Yet despite the maelstrom, Cain’s accusers remain anonymous and the details of the allegations oddly vague. With many conservatives believing that sexual harassment lawsuits are an industry and that frivolous cases are often settled to avoid more expensive litigation, there was a growing sense that Cain was being treated unfairly. Cain’s very amateurishness became almost endearing. Rather than mouthing slick talking points, Cain got angry with the journalists (a profession loathed by most Republican activists) and claimed that he was the victim of a “high-tech lynching”…Those who leaked the details of the 1990s sexual harassment cases might have thought that they’d destroy Herman Cain and leave his campaign dangling from a tree. But, as befits this strange and unpredictable election campaign, a funny thing happened on the way to the lynching.

We haven’t commented on this pig-pile, because we’ve had nothing useful to say. However, it seems clear enough that a substantial portion of the electorate has revolted against — what exactly?

On the Thursday before election day in 2000, the Bush DUI’s were leaked to Fox and hit the airwaves. On election day, we seem to recall that some early predictions suppressed turnout in the Florida panhandle. In 2004, CBS and the NYT collaborated on a scandal story a couple of weeks before the election about a vast number of weapons that had dissappeared in Iraq. This was the same CBS that used obvious forgeries of documents from a troubled guy in an attempt to sink the Bush re-election campaign against a guy with some more fact-based problems. And Bush wasn’t very much of a conservative. In 2008 the 12-to-1 media fell all over themselves to praise their candidate, and couldn’t be bothered with his scandals and strange, outlandish rhetoric. The legacy media now seem to be paying the price for this behavior.

It would appear that a substantial portion of the electorate has adopted as a default position that a partisan narrative chosen by the establishment media is a lie until proven otherwise. That’s quite a big change in a short span of years.

HT: PW

Jean Quan, mayor of Oakland, and the Oakland city council have made “preserving disorder” the official municipal policy. On Wednesday, the “Occupy Oakland” occupiers rampaged through the city, shutting down the nation’s fifth-busiest port, forcing stores to close, terrorizing those residents foolish enough to commit the reactionary crime of “shopping,” destroying ATMs, spraying the Christ the Light Cathedral with the insightful observation “F**k,” etc. And how did the Oakland city council react? The following day they considered a resolution to express their support for “Occupy Oakland” and to call on the city administration to “collaborate with protesters.”

That’s “collaborate” in the Nazi-occupied-France sense: The city’s feckless political class are collaborating with anarchists against the taxpayers who maintain them in their sinecures. They’re not the only ones. When the rumor spread that the Whole Foods store, of all unlikely corporate villains, had threatened to fire employees who participated in the protest, the regional president, David Lannon, took to Facebook: “We totally support our Team Members participating in the General Strike today — rumors are false!” But, despite his “total support,” they trashed his store anyway, breaking windows and spraypainting walls.

As the Oakland Tribune reported: “A man who witnessed the Whole Foods attack, but asked not to be identified, said he was in the store buying an organic orange when the crowd arrived.” There’s an epitaph for the republic if ever I heard one. The experience was surreal, the man said. “They were wearing masks. There was this whole mess of people, and no police here. That was weird.” No, it wasn’t. It was municipal policy…

At first glance, an alliance of anarchists and government might appear to be somewhat paradoxical. But the formal convergence in Oakland makes explicit the movement’s aims: They’re anarchists for statism, wild free-spirited youth demanding more and more total government control of every aspect of life — just so long as it respects the fundamental human right to sloth. What’s happening in Oakland is a logical exercise in class solidarity: The government class enthusiastically backing the breakdown of civil order is making common cause with the leisured varsity class, the thuggish union class, and the criminal class in order to stick it to what’s left of the beleaguered productive class.

It’s a grand alliance of all those societal interests that wish to enjoy in perpetuity a lifestyle they are not willing to earn. Only the criminal class is reasonably upfront about this. The rest — the lifetime legislators, the unions defending lavish and unsustainable benefits, the “scholars” whiling away a somnolent half decade at Complacency U — are obliged to dress it up a little with some hooey about “social justice” and whatnot…that’s all it takes to get the media and modish if insecure corporate entities to string along…

Oakland’s occupiers and worthless political class want more of the same fix that has made America the Brokest Nation in History: They expect to live as beneficiaries of a prosperous Western society without making any contribution to the productivity necessary to sustain it. This is the “idealism” that the media are happy to sentimentalize, and that enough poseurs among the corporate executives are happy to indulge — at least until the window-smashing starts.

Okay, we get all that. But as an electoral strategy this course seems to head straight in the direction of unprecedented landslide defeat. (And a generational discrediting of the movement’s media accomplices to boot — sweet!) So what part of the clever plan are we missing?

So we’re a center-right country, moving more right, and even committed liberals like Joe Klein can see that OWS are losers and worse. So what’s the administration’s strategy here? There may be some allies of the administration who envision that OWS protests may lead to increasing levels of violence one way or the other and that this will inure to the benefit of the D’s as the proletariat rises up. But the country described in the paragraph above is neither Venezuela nor Cuba. In a bid to restore order, it’s hard to see a majority choosing left-wing authoritarianism. A greater probability is the opposite outcome. Again, what’s the strategy here?

Do they include the greedy doctors, who, the president once asserted, recklessly lop off limbs and yank tonsils for profits? Is my urologist a dreaded one-percenter? He found out what was causing my kidney stones but probably makes good money. Was a nearby farmer one, too? I bet he makes over $200,000 but, like many other growers in this area, has found a way to produce beef and cotton more cheaply…

was the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs a suspect billionaire? Should I be mad or grateful that he made billions by permanently replacing my old scissors, paste, and bottle of Liquid Paper of the 1970s?

Did Johnny Depp really have to earn $50 million last year alone — or Leonardo DiCaprio $77 million? Couldn’t they have settled for $2 million in salary in 2010, and thereby passed on a little bit of the savings to their ticket-buying fans? What kind of system would allow Oprah Winfrey or the late Michael Jackson each to accumulate nearly $1 billion? Is left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore — reportedly worth $50 million — a one-percenter? Why does such an enemy of capitalism need so much capitalist largesse?

Do this administration and its supporters really wish to separate millions of diverse Americans by a moral divide of the “few at the top”? Are liberals like Sens. John Kerry and Dianne Feinstein — among the richest in the U.S. Senate — in that elite group?

How about Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, together worth over $100 billion? They are certainly philanthropists. But their charities are predicated on two assumptions: They both apparently trust the private sector more than government to administer their vast estates, and neither sees much of a problem in avoiding billions in inheritance taxes that would one day be due to a now-broke federal treasury.

Is George Soros a “corporate-jet owner”? He nearly broke the Bank of England by shorting the British pound and was convicted in France of insider training. Rather than comply with new federal financial-disclosure regulations, he told some of his outside investors just to keep their money. Is Obama’s former director of the budget, Peter Orszag, a “fat-cat banker”? He left the administration to enter the “revolving door” of Wall Street, where he is now a rich banker for Citigroup.

There’s more than a little desperation in this pathetic approach to governance. The Hill: “The numbers say that voters don’t think he deserves reelection, he has no meaningful accomplishments, and the nation is headed off in the wrong direction under his watch. He is simply not viable by any measure.” Foolishness begets foolishness.

Several decades ago, back when Ugly George roamed Manhattan, there was a homeless fellow whom we’d often see in the vicinity of Broadway and 57th Street. He had a shopping cart with a drum in it. He’d play the drum occasionally and ask for handouts. For some reason, he wore what appeared to be shoe polish on his head outlining the part of the scalp normally covered by hair. We hadn’t thought of him in a long time, but he seems to now have successors galore.