“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.”
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
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.
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?
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.
VDH has a good humored, entertaining, and perceptive comparison of the two current GOP front-runners. (Who knows what twists and turns and front-runners lie ahead?) Mr. Hanson did not stress enough one important point, however. Many in the GOP base want a candidate and a president who will wage a tireless war against the sources of disinformation in the country from its cultural institutions, and particularly from the media.
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!!!
Nile Gardiner in the Telegraph responds to Paul Krugman’s advice to the eurozone to increase government spending even further than it already has done:
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.
VDH describes some of the strangeness of 2011-12, compared with the expectations encouraged in 2008-9. Then he tells us we probably ain’t seen nothin’ yet:
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.
