Internet Scofflaw

According to Amazon’s data, conservative/libertarian books outsell liberal books by a 57-43 margin. In Pennsylvania the margin is 52-48. I don’t know exactly what to make of that, but it’s interesting. With the intelligentsia being so liberal, I would have expected it the other way.

One thing is for certain: publishers that drop writers who come out as conservative or libertarian (like Sarah Hoyt) are making a big mistake.

(Via Instapundit.)

Why is the Department of Justice facilitating protests at the Republican convention?

The Democratic convention will force a cancer treatment center to close for four days.

Despite earlier denials, newly exposed documents show that the producers of the upcoming movie about the Bin Laden raid were given unprecedented access, and that that access was granted by the White House:

Judicial Watch announced today that it has obtained records from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Department of Defense (DOD) regarding meetings and communications between government agencies and Kathryn Bigelow, the Academy Award-winning director of The Hurt Locker, and screenwriter Mark Boal in preparation for their film Zero Dark Thirty, which details the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden.  According to the records, the Obama administration granted Boal and Bigelow unusual access to agency information in preparation for their film, which was reportedly scheduled for an October 2012 release, just before the presidential election, but the trailers are running now until the rescheduled release in December.

The administration originally denied that the documents exist:

The records – which should have been produced months ago pursuant to a court order in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed on January 21, 2012 – include records from a “stack” of “overlooked” documents discovered by the CIA in July 2012

The latest in the annals of government-run health care:

Family doctors are being told to try to talk women out of having Caesareans and very strong painkillers during birth to save the NHS money. New guidelines drawn up for GPs urge them to encourage women to have natural labours with as little medical help as possible.

But don’t worry, I’m sure that it could never happen here.

(Via Instapundit.)

Wow, Clint Eastwood got under Obama’s skin. Funny how taking the high road never occurs to this guy.

If enough Americans saw his speech tonight, he wins the election.

According to MSNBC, mentioning that Obama came from Chicago is racist.

This was my favorite part:

None of us have to settle for the best this administration offers, a dull, adventureless journey from one entitlement to the next, a government-planned life, a country where everything is free but us.

Listen to the way we’re already spoken to — listen to the way we are spoken to already, as if everyone is stuck in some class or station in life, victims of circumstances beyond our control, with government there to help us cope with our fate. It’s the exact opposite of everything I learned growing up in Wisconsin, or at college in Ohio.

UPDATE: Well, I have to take the quote a little further:

Now when I was waiting tables, washing dishes, or mowing lawns for money, I never thought of myself as stuck in some station in life. I was on my own path, my own journey, an American journey, where I could think for myself, decide for myself, define happen as for myself. That is what we do in this country. That is the American dream.

That’s freedom and I will take it any day over the supervision and sanctimony of the central planners.

Full transcript here.

Idiots:

In a move blasted by rights groups, a 3-year-old-deaf boy has been told by his Nebraska school district to change the way he signs his name because the gesture resembles shooting a gun. Hunter Spanjer uses the standard S.E.E., Signing Exact English. He crosses his index and middle fingers and waves them slightly to signify his name. And, Grand Island Public Schools’ policy forbids any “instrument” that “looks like a weapon,” reported NCN.

President Obama pays tribute to Neil Armstrong’s passing with a stock photo of himself gazing at the moon.

It’s not quite as good as the Christian FAQ, but this is also very good.

I tried a package of two of the high-efficiency incandescent light bulbs that the government wants us to use instead of regular light bulbs. Both of them, one at a time, have now burned out while a regular bulb in the neighboring socket has kept going, and it wasn’t even fresh when I put the first eco-bulb in.

Also one notices immediately that the eco-bulbs are poorly made — I had trouble screwing them into the socket. But at least they cost six times as much as the regular bulbs used to cost.

Jim Treacher tweets this article in the American Prospect, which he re-titles “Stop denying you’re a racist, racist!” It’s mostly as dreadful as you would expect, but it did have this laugh-out-loud line:

It’s almost forbidden to discuss the role racism has played in shaping opposition to Obama.

The author lives in a very different world than we do, if he thinks that it’s “almost forbidden” to call Obama’s opponents racists. I wish I lived in that world.

The question, “why is there no liberal Atlas Shrugged” never would have occurred to me, since the phrase seems to make little sense: what traits are there of Atlas Shrugged that are remotely compatible with liberalism? But Robert Tracinski gives the question serious consideration anyway, in a surprisingly interesting essay that ties together Marx, Victor Hugo, and “naturalism” in literature.

This is very good.

The lead plaintiff in the pro-fraud lawsuit against Pennsylvania’s voter ID went to the DMV to demonstrate how it was impossible for her to get a photo ID. . . and got her ID.

(Via Brit Hume.)

More here.

The Obama campaign says it’s drawing smaller, less enthusiastic crowds on purpose.

Joe Soptic is a former steelworker who was laid off when the plant at which he worked closed in 2001. The Obama super-PAC says that Mitt Romney killed Soptic’s wife, Ilyona Soptic.

If you haven’t heard this story already, I’m afraid this is no joke. The story goes like this: Romney laid off Soptic, causing his wife to lose her health insurance, so she couldn’t get treatment for her cancer, so she died.

The ad contains two actual facts: Soptic lost his job, and his wife tragically died of cancer. Everything else is a lie. Let’s see if we can list them all:

1. Romney left Bain in 1999, two years before GST Steel was shut down in 2001.
2. When GST was shut down, Bain was run by Jonathan Lavine, a major Obama bundler.
3. GST offered Joe Soptic a buyout.
4. After GST shut down, Joe Soptic got another job and could have added Ilyona to his health insurance, but chose not to.
5. Ilyona had her own health insurance through 2003, when she lost her job at a different company.
6. Ilyona wasn’t diagnosed with cancer until 2006. She died 22 days later.

It’s sad that Ilyona died. But her death had nothing whatsoever to do with Mitt Romney. If such a tenuous connection really meant anything, think of how many deaths we can blame on Barack Obama, whose policies have and will cost millions of people their health insurance!

The ad is so radioactive that the Obama campaign wants to distance itself from it. But, at the same time, they won’t condemn the ad either. Instead, they tried to split the difference:

Asked about the Priorities spot on MSNBC Wednesday morning, Robert Gibbs said he doesn’t “know the specifics” while Stephanie Cutter said on CNN: “I don’t know the facts about when Mr. Soptic’s wife got sick or the facts about his health insurance.” And Jen Psaki told reporters on Air Force One that “we don’t have any knowledge of the story of the family,” according to Yahoo! News.

By claiming not to know the facts, they want to insinuate that it might be true while keeping their hands clean. (Now, in a situation such as this, that doesn’t cut it. If you don’t know the facts, you need to learn them. But never mind, because. . .)

This too is a complete lie:

Yet in May of this year, Cutter herself hosted a conference call in which Soptic detailed his case to reporters. During the call, as he did in the ad, Soptic explained how his wife fell ill after he lost his job, and how he lost his health insurance. The call took place as Soptic began appearing in Obama campaign ads, and was featured in a profile on the Obama campaign website.

Not only does Soptic appear in two Obama campaign ads, the Obama campaign still has Soptic on its official website even now. (Screenshot here.)

Let’s review: Barack Obama’s endorsed super-PAC releases the most vicious attack ad ever. The ad is a complete lie. The central figure in the ad has a long and ongoing history with the official Obama campaign. And, the Obama campaign lied about that history.

POSTSCRIPT: The Onion treatment.

UPDATE: Now this is just sad:

Democratic Party Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said Sunday she has “no idea” about the political affiliation of Priorities USA, the Super PAC behind a recent ad suggesting Mitt Romney is responsible for a woman’s death — though the group was co-founded by two former Obama staffers.

Wasserman-Schultz also defended the ad’s content (!) saying “What I think of the ad is that there’s no question that the ad raises facts.”

In fact, Priorities USA is not only run by former Obama staffers; it received President Obama’s official blessing:

Fearing a tide of spending by outside conservative groups, President Obama is giving his blessing to a pro-Democratic Party “super PAC” that will work to help his reelection, his campaign said late Monday. . . Messina said Obama will throw his support to Priorities USA Action, a super PAC founded by two former White House aides that until now has been unable to match its conservative competitors in fundraising.

Wasserman-Schultz later had to concede:

The Florida Democrat later backtracked on that remark on Twitter: “Clearly Priorities USA is a Democratic SuperPAC. Was trying to state the obvious: we have no control over their activities.”

That is clearly not what she was trying to state (she had even gone so far as to question whether Priorities USA was even run by Democrats), but even that doesn’t mean a whole lot. Although they can’t legally “coordinate” with the PAC, it’s easy for them to signal what they want. For instance, they might have Joe Soptic tell his (bogus) story on a conference call.

Moreover, how certain are we that the Obama campaign really doesn’t coordinate with his PAC? They say it’s illegal, as if that were somehow proof that they’re not doing it. But the law rarely seems to be a conclusive factor with this bunch. Why would they suddenly start following the law in the single area — getting re-elected — that matters to them most?

Even the liberal fact-checkers are noticing:

“There’s so much deceit here we hardly know where to start,” explains Brooks Jackson at FactCheck.org, which is run by Annenberg Public Policy Center. He’s commenting on a new [Obama campaign] ad that strongly suggests Romney committed tax fraud. “It wasn’t Romney who was avoiding taxes, it was Marriott Corp. And there’s no evidence to support the ad’s speculation that Romney himself paid no income tax, or that he did something illegal,” Jackson had already noted.

Jackson also noted that the central claims of the ad are attributed to CNN, with only the fine print acknowledging that it was an opinion piece.

The White House can’t maintain its distance from the Occupy movement in light of this revelation:

The Obama administration told law enforcement authorities to go easy on Occupy Wall Street protesters, even though they were violating local laws, according to documents obtained by watchdog group Judicial Watch.

Emails from the General Services Administration show that the federal agency, acting on orders from the White House, told federal law enforcement authorities in Portland, Ore., not to enforce curfews on protesters camped out on federal property. . .

Occupy Portland saw some of the more violent protests of the national movement. A week before the email exchange, 25 demonstrators were arrested after they refused to leave Jamison Square in the Pearl District after the park was closed at midnight.

When Charles Krauthammer wrote a column criticizing President Obama for his disrespect for our allies, the White House took issue with one sentence out of Krauthammer’s litany of Obama snubs and worse:

Obama started his presidency by returning to the British Embassy the bust of Winston Churchill that had graced the Oval Office.

The White House first denied that the bust had even been returned, calling it a “rumor” that was “patently false”. Except it was true, and the denial was patently false. The White House later retracted their “fact check” (although they left all the incorrect material up and buried the correction at the end) and eventually apologized.

However, they continued to maintain that Krauthammer’s allegation was a “completely false” “urban legend”, claiming that the bust was returned only because the loan had expired at the end of President Bush’s term in office. The White House deputy press secretary took up the new line of defense and attack:

There is myth floating in some of the darker corners of the internet that suggest that upon taking office the President went out of his way to snub the British people by prematurely returning the bust of Winston Churchill that had occupied a prominent place in the Oval Office under the previous president. That’s not true. . .

The bust was loaned to President Bush by the British government. As is customary, at the conclusion of President Bush’s term, and before President Obama entered the Oval Office, the bust was returned to the British embassy.

The White House’s new story isn’t true either. The British government has made it clear that they offered to extend the loan and the Obama administration refused. The Times reported:

Britain wants President Obama to put a bronze bust of Sir Winston Churchill back in the Oval Office, where it stood for the past eight years as a symbol of an enduring special relationship with America. The White House is not so sure. . .

A spokesman for the British Embassy in Washington said yesterday: “We have made it clear that we would be pleased to extend the loan should Mr Obama so wish.” He added that no response had been received; yesterday the White House declined to comment.

A similar report appeared in the Sunday Telegraph.

We will be charitable, and assume that the White House’s original attack was not a deliberate falsehood, and that they simply failed to ascertain the facts before lashing out. But we cannot be so charitable now that they have had every opportunity to establish the facts. Not only is their latest defense/attack false, but they sneer that the allegation comes from the “darker corners of the internet”. Darker corners? The Times is one of the world’s oldest and most respected newspapers, dating from 1785. The Telegraph and the Washington Post (for which Krauthammer writes) are relative upstarts, dating from just 1855 and 1877.

(Previous post.) (Via Nile Gardiner.)

If you catch a cold, the British NHS will give you good treatment for free. If you have a serious health problem, you don’t want the NHS. A frightening look at our future under Obamacare.

As the federal government takes control over everyone’s health care, and as it consequently scales everyone’s health care back, it will rarely if ever admit “we are going to let you get sick or die to save money.” No, the government bureaucrats in charge of your health care will tell you that it’s for your own good.

That is, you’re going to see a lot more of this:

On Monday an expert government panel, the United States Preventive Services Task Force, joined the call by recommending against routine testing with electrocardiograms, or EKGs, in people who have no known risk factors or symptoms of heart disease, like shortness of breath or chest pains.

The recommendations, published online in Annals of Internal Medicine, made the test the latest addition to an expanding list of once routine screening tools that have fallen out of favor. Earlier this year, the task force advised against regular screening with the prostate specific antigen, or P.S.A., blood test, long considered the gold standard for early detection of prostate cancer. The panel has also come out against measures like annual Pap smears for many women and regular mammograms for women in their 40s.

(Via Patterico.)

(Via James Pethokoukis.)

In President Obama’s infamous remarks on successful people’s lack of responsibility for their success, he said:

Look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.  You didn’t get there on your own.  I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart.  There are a lot of smart people out there.

and then:

Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive.

Economic historian Deirdre McCloskey argues that the people who created the system that allowed us all to thrive are exactly the people who stopped thinking about success they way that Obama does:

“In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” she writes, “a great shift occurred in what Alexis de Tocqueville called ‘habits of the mind’ — or more exactly, habits of the lip. People stopped sneering at market innovativeness and other bourgeois virtues.” As attitudes changed, so did behavior, leading to more than two centuries of constant innovation and rising living standards. . .

What was different, she maintains, is how people thought about new ideas. Creative destruction became not only accepted but also encouraged, as did individual enterprise. “What made us rich,” she writes, “was a new rhetoric that was favorable to unbounded innovation, imagination, alertness, persuasion, originality, with individual rewards often paid in a coin of honor or thankfulness. . .”

Obama thinks that 21st-century living standards are compatible with 18th-century attitudes toward entrepreneurism.

(Previous post.) (Via Instapundit.)