#3
The lying is not unique to the OBAMA White House. The Bush White House did it. Congress is doing it. Banks and brokers are lying. The list of truth-tellers is shorter.
#4
Obama, lying? So? He's been doing that for years, only nobody has ever had need to call him on it since he was never anything other than an unimportant Chicago machine pol, a rather unintelligent hack at that. Were it not for racial guilt and press complicity, this buffoon would never have become president.
#5
The lying is not unique to the OBAMA White House. The Bush White House did it.
And you and me. The difference is the degree. Is not the same thing getting a one tenth deep stab in the chest (Bush) than a ten inch depth one (Obama).
Well, as a wintry election day dawns in Massachusetts, I'll believe it when I see it. If all but one of those polls are right, Scott Brown now has a lead well beyond the margin of error.
But, as that Boston Globe "Dead Heat!" headline suggests, it's not necessarily beyond the margin of Acorn, the margin of lawyer, and the margin of Franken-style recounts. On the other hand, if you're minded to (as MSNBC's electokleptomaniac Ed Schultz recommends) steal the vote, you don't really want to have to steal it big, on a Mugabe-esque scale.
However things turn out, the Dems have got a fright. I would be surprised if many candidates in November are quite the same spectacular combination of gaffe-prone stupidity and arrogance as Martha Coakley. But, granted that, I was surprised at how incompetent the Democrat machine was.
On Sunday, the president veered between dull and really, really lousy. He did what he did with his Olympics pitch in Copenhagen he took the extraordinary step of flying in to save the day, and then when he got there thought he could wing it. He, or at any rate his minders, should know by now that his rhetoric is seriously underperforming "incoherent without his teleprompter and a bore with it."
Yet his staff allow him to stagger around as the last believer in his own magic. What sort of functioning pol would be so careless as to say "Everybody can own a truck"? He should talk to any New England dealership about that. As it happens, I bought a new truck* last month and I've never seen the place so empty.
At the start of this campaign, the issues were health care and the economy. After "Ted Kennedy's seat" and "Curt Schilling the Yankees fan" and "only the little people campaign at Fenway," the genius Dems succeeded in making their own assumptions about one-party rule a very potent secondary issue.
Very foolishly, Obama both underlined the regal hauteur of the Massachusetts machine and simultaneously nationalized the election by portraying it as a referendum on the Hopeychange. If Martha now loses, he can't plead it's nothing to do with him.
(*purely for the purposes of running against John Kerry. I'm putting it on water skis and I'm going to ride alongside him when he's windsurfing off Nantucket scoffing, "Oh, everybody can buy buttock-hugging yellow spandex.")
Whether or not Republican Scott Brown wins today in Massachusetts, the special Senate election has already shaken up American politics. The close race to replace Ted Kennedy, liberalism's patron saint, shows that voters are rebelling even in the bluest of states against the last year's unbridled pursuit of partisan liberal governance.
Tomorrow marks the anniversary of President Obama's Inaugural, and it's worth recalling the extraordinary political opportunity he had a year ago. An anxious country was looking for leadership amid a recession, and Democrats had huge majorities and faced a dispirited, unpopular GOP. With monetary policy stimulus already flowing, Democrats were poised to get the political credit for the inevitable economic recovery.
Twelve months later, Mr. Obama's approval rating has fallen further and faster than any recent President's, Congress is despised, the public mood has shifted sharply to the right on the role of government, and a Republican could pick up a Senate seat in a state with no GOP Members of Congress and that Mr. Obama carried by 26 points.
What explains this precipitous political fall? Democrats and their media allies attribute it to GOP obstructionism, though Republicans lack the votes to stop anything by themselves. Or they blame their own Blue Dogs, who haven't stopped or even significantly modified any legislation of consequence.
Or they blame an economic agenda that wasn't populist or liberal enough because it didn't nationalize banks and spend even more on "stimulus." It takes a special kind of delusion to believe, amid a popular revolt against too much government spending and debt, that another $1 trillion would have made all the difference. But that's the latest left-wing theme.
The real message of Massachusetts is that Democrats have committed the classic political mistake of ideological overreach. Mr. Obama won the White House in part on his personal style and cool confidence amid a recession and an unpopular war. Yet liberals in Congress interpreted their victory as a mandate to repeal more or less the entire post-1980 policy era and to fulfill, at last, their dream of turning the U.S. into a cradle-to-grave entitlement state.
We had been encouraged a year ago by Mr. Obama's selection of Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff because we thought he would have learned from the Clinton failure of 1993-1994 and knew enough to stand up to the Congressional left. How wrong we were. Mr. Emanuel and his boss have instead deferred to Congress's liberal barons on every major domestic policy.
These committee chairmen are all creatures of the Great Society and what was called the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s. They have spent their lives in government and know almost nothing about the private sector or how to grow an economy. They view the Reagan era as an historical aberration, and they have stayed in Washington for decades precisely in wait of this moment to realize 40-years of pent-up policy ambition. They believe this is their 1965, or 1933.
Tight Massachusetts race alarms California Dems by Carla Marinucci & Joe Garofoli, Chronicle Political Writers Emphasis added.
...For Boxer, a favorite Republican target, a GOP win in Massachusetts would be a particularly dark sign representing "not just the canary in the coal mine," said Wade Randlett, a leading Silicon Valley fundraiser for Obama. "It's the flock of dead ravens landing on the lawn."...
Posted by: Mike ||
01/19/2010 11:19 ||
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#2
My lovely wife tells me that this isn't an issue of brave Google against the evil Chinese.
It's about Google wanting to be treated differently then all other foreign IT companies when it comes to online pr0n, just a step or two below where angels tread.
Apparently the Chinese government has made it plain to Google: Do something about online pr0n.
Google's reply: If you make us do this, we will leave.
Chinese Government: Don't let the door hit ya on the way out.
President Obama is a slow learner. For all his brainpower, he's saddled himself with three ideas about the economy and job creation that aren't working, either substantively or politically. And he appears to be too ideologically rigid or stubborn to consider the evidence and jettison the failed ideas.
Instead, he puts himself in embarrassing situations. On the day the Labor Department announced the unemployment rate was stuck at 10 percent and 85,000 jobs had been lost in December, Obama insisted he continues to explore every avenue to accelerate the return to hiring.' So what did he propose? Tax credits totaling $2.3 billion to create green jobs' and a second stimulus package of $150 billion (the first one, enacted 11 months ago, cost $787 billion). This is more of the same.
Cristina Romer, the chairman of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, managed to out-embarrass the president. Last week, she sandwiched her highly improbable claim that the administration's stimulus had created or saved' 1.5 million to 2 million jobs between an Associated Press finding that $20 billion in stimulus funds for roads and bridges had failed to reduce the unemployment rate anywhere and a Labor Department announcement of a rise in new claims for jobless benefits.
Posted by: lord garth ||
01/19/2010 05:48 ||
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#1
Has Obama and his CommiCzars considered liquidating the kulaks? Lots of jobs created/saved in that one.
Posted by: ed ||
01/19/2010 8:00 Comments ||
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#2
If his underlying goal is to "cut the US down to size", he would not see them as failed ideas.
Sorry, I have seen his achievements in exploiting whiteman's guilt but can anyone tell me of any palpable achievement of Obama's brainpower? Maths? Rocket Science? Chess?
#4
...running a con [aka confidence game] grand enough to put himself in one of the most critical positions on the planet without the skills or experience to actually do the job without creating chaos and ruin.
#5
Procopius2k, unless chaos and ruin is in his non-pulic job description. He is decent at it, you have to admit, not the best of the best, but trying.
#8
Having just read the Harry Potter series of books (preparing for middle-school subbing) I think that they do one very important thing. They introduce children to the horrors of out of control bureaucracy.
Trying to apportion the roles:
Obama = Cornelius Fudge
Pelosi or Napalitano = Umbrage
Emanuel = ?Petigrew?
#13
Sorry, I have seen his achievements in exploiting whiteman's guilt but can anyone tell me of any palpable achievement of Obama's brainpower? Maths? Rocket Science? Chess?
Let's review:
1. He gained his most famous post, as editor of Harvard Law Review, by a vote of fellow left-lib students-- not due to superior grades and legal writing skills. As editor, he stood out for failing to write a single article.
2. As a practicing junior associate with a private law firm, he screwed around and billed about 1,300 hours per hour-- about 30% fewer than the minimum deemed acceptable by most law firms. His biggest client over the course of his crap legal career? ACORN.
3. After leaving the practice of law, he used his lefty connections in Chicago to land a part-time adjunct lecturer post at a local law school. No evidence of any trials won or major cases he ever consulted on.
4. As a legislator, his ONLY legislative achievement was securing the videotaping of police confessions while a small time state legislator in Illinois.
5. Zero executive experience.
6. Zero expertise in any field. As a lawyer, he was a washout. Has not produced any legal scholarship at all.
What accounts for the man's intellectual reputation? Not one but TWO autobiographies. When he hasn't even done enough to merit one slim autobiography.
What's that Elvis C. song? Oh yeah: "Clowntime Is O-o-o-over...."
Pope Benedict's recent decree advancing the sainthood of Pope Pius XII is another serious blow to reconciliation between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people. The record of Pius XII during the Holocaust is still a subject of legitimate historical question and a longtime point of emotional disagreement between some in the Vatican and Jewish leaders.
Consideration of Pius's sainthood should be reserved for a time when the complete Vatican archives of the Holocaust period are released and historians can objectively evaluate Pius's efforts to save Europe's Jews from extermination. Any rush to judgment before the record is clarified will only give a larger forum to Pius's critics, undermine Vatican credibility in the eyes of the world and cause deep hurt to Jews whose families and loved ones were murdered during the Shoah.
While the Vatican has its own reasons for accelerating Pius's canonization now, it is the fourth recent troubling development in Catholic-Jewish relations, coming afterthe Vatican 's July 2007 authorization of wider use of the Tridentine Mass with its Good Friday prayer for the conversion of the Jews; its January 2009 lifting of the excommunication of four bishops of the anti-Semitic Society of Pope Pius X, including the Holocaust-denying Richard Williamson; and the June 2009 (but later retracted) United States Conference of Catholic Bishops statement that Catholics in interfaith dialogue are obligated to evangelize to Jews and extend to them an implicit invitation to the Church.
These developments have left many Jews and Catholics alike to worry about the future of Catholic-Jewish relations. Indeed, some professionals now question whether the salutary achievements of the Second Vatican Council toward reconciliation are still operative Catholic teaching.
FOR 50 years after Vatican II, Catholics and Jews well informed about Nostra Aetate and official Catholic post-conciliar documents regarding Catholic-Jewish relations were enormously impressed by the Church's spiritual strength to revise its theology regarding its elder brothers and permanently rid itself of replacement theology and its concomitant Adversus Judeaos teachings. Buoyed by the leadership of Popes John XXIII, Paul VI and John Paul II, they were convinced of the sincerity of the Church's determination to reconcile with theJewish people.
If this is now being questioned, the uncertainty can - and should - be laid easily to rest. It is time for the Church to reassert loudly and clearly that Nostra Aetate andthe Catholic post-conciliar documents are still the guiding principles for the Vatican, and that the warm friendship extended to the Jewish people by the saintly Pope John Paul II still characterizes the current policies of Pope Benedict XVI and the Vatican.
This can be achieved powerfully in deed. Catholic and Jewish distress regarding the future of Catholic-Jewish relations would be significantly alleviated by positive Vatican steps, such as authorizing the mandatory teaching of Nostra Aetate to Catholic worshipers and seminarians, promoting the study of Pope John Paul II's teachings about theJewish people and Judaism and instituting a prayer for Jewish people and Israel on the Feast of St. James, the patron saint of Jerusalem.
The reconciliation of the Church with the Jewish people is one of God's great blessings, one that inspires all people around the world. If the Church and the Jewish people can make peace with each other after nearly 2,000 of enmity, then peace is possible between any two peoples anywhere. Recognizing that Catholics and Jews are brothers and sisters deeply bound by their fervent belief in the one creator of heaven and earth who revealed Himself to the people Israel is one of the miracles of the last century - and it is too important for Jews, for Catholics and for the world to allow to lapse.
Jews and Catholics share a common spiritual patrimony and all people of good will should pray that both the Church and the Jewish people continue to work for this historic reconciliation grounded in mutual understanding, respect and equality.
Rabbi Dr. Eugene Korn is the North American Director of the Center for Jewish-Christian Understanding and Cooperation, Rabbi Dr. Shlomo Riskin is the Chancellor.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
