Democrats are attacking Mitt Romney for failing to praise our troops in Afghanistan in his convention speech. It’s no secret that Romney wants the election to be about the economy, while Barack Obama wants the election to be about whether Osama Bin Laden is still alive.
But attacking Romney for supposedly slighting the troops just strikes me as absurdist theater. Our military knows the score. They can see that the Democratic convention’s tribute video featured Russian ships and Turkish planes. No one at the DNC knew any better.
They remember how Obama said that our troops in Afghanistan were just air-raiding villages and killing civilians. They remember how, once president, he dithered for most of a year over whether to send more troops.
Our troops don’t like him. It’s no coincidence that when Obama gave a speech to troops at Fort Bliss at the end of last month, they sat impassively, waiting for him to finish.
But this isn’t really about the troops. He’s not trying to get their votes; he knows that most in the military will vote against him. In fact his party is suing to make it harder for troops to voting. (Obama’s mouthpieces claim their lawsuit is being misrepresented, but the legal documents make their position clear.)
No, this attack is aimed at persuading voters who support the military, but know little about it, and are gullible enough to buy it.
Morgan Wright, the Obama administration official who ran the program that funded Solyndra and other green boondoggles, refuses to testify before Congress, despite a subpoena.
Among other things, Darrell Issa (R-CA) wants to ask Wright about his use of a non-official email account to avoid scrutiny of the loan process.
We knew this already, but you don’t hear it admitted out loud very often:
A top official at a liberal super PAC with the goal of eradicating tea partiers from Congress is telling activists that it’s more effective to label Republicans as racists than criticize their policies.
According to an audio recording obtained by The Daily Caller, Matthew “Mudcat” Arnold, the national campaign manager of the liberal CREDO super PAC, told a gathering of supporters in Aurora, Colo., on Sept. 8 that they’ve realized “policy did not move voters.”
As bad as he is, I never thought Barack Obama would make a serious run at the title of worst American president, with Woodrow Wilson and James Buchanan having staked such strong claims. But then this happened:
That’s Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies bringing in for questioning Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the man who apparently made the film as the center of anti-American riots throughout the Middle East. A man who, to be clear, is guilty of no crime.
WHY BARACK OBAMA SHOULD RESIGN. Just for the record, this is what it looked like for a man who made a film that made the Obama Administration uncomfortable . . .
When taking office, the President does not swear to create jobs. He does not swear to “grow the economy.” He does not swear to institute “fairness.” The only oath the President takes is this one:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
By sending — literally — brownshirted enforcers to engage in — literally — a midnight knock at the door of a man for the non-crime of embarrassing the President of the United States and his administration, President Obama violated that oath. You can try to pretty this up (It’s just about possible probation violations! Sure.), or make excuses or draw distinctions, but that’s what’s happened. It is a betrayal of his duties as President, and a disgrace. . . By these actions he is, I repeat, unfit to hold office.
That’s right. The US government is doing the bidding of Islamist rioters.
The authorities say that Nakoula came in for a voluntary interview. Take another look at that picture. Does that look voluntary to you? Do you think the man really wanted to be perp-walked with a scarf on his head in the middle of the night? They could have interviewed him in his own home during the day, but they didn’t.
Finally, this is not about probation violations. (Nakoula is reportedly barred by his probation from using a computer.) You don’t send five deputies in the middle of the night to pick someone up for a technical probation violation. In fact, liberals generally don’t care about probation violations at all.
Moreover, we should never have even known about Nakoula’s probation in the first place! He has no involvement with the attacks on our embassies and never should have been investigated in the first place. We shouldn’t even know his name.
Is it now US government policy to investigate anyone whom the Arab street hates, to see if maybe he happens to have some outstanding warrants? This is absolutely appalling.
But wait, they didn’t stop there. Just hours after Obama pledged to “uphold the rights for individuals to speak their mind”, his administration asked YouTube to censor the video:
Obama administration officials said Thursday that they have asked YouTube to review the video and determine whether it violates the site’s terms of service, according to people close to the situation but not authorized to comment.
To their credit, Google refused to do so. (Although they are censoring it in India and several Muslim countries.)
We must be clear. This isn’t the usual self-censorship by mob veto. This is the sovereign power of the United States government being used to censor what the Islamists considered blasphemy.
Of course, all this is exactly what the Islamists want. It ought to be obvious, but apparently is not, that this sort of capitulation only promotes violence and additional demands.
We further call for criminalization of assaults on the sanctities of all heavenly religions. Otherwise, such acts will continue to cause devout Muslims across the world to suspect and even loathe the West, especially the USA, for allowing their citizens to violate the sanctity of what they hold dear and holy. Hence, we demand that all those involved in such crimes be urgently brought to trial.
In light of all this, it would be appropriate for the Obama administration categorically to rule out ever criminalizing blasphemy. Unfortunately, less than two months ago, the administration pointedly refused to do so. UPDATE: Given a second chance later in the session, he did seem to rule it out. That’s good. Still, it oughtn’t be hard to get this question right the first time.
UPDATE (9/28): Nakoula has now been arrested and is being held without bond.
The Office of Special Counsel has found that Kathleen Sebelius violated the law by using an official event to campaign for Barack Obama:
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius violated the Hatch Act in February when she called for re-electing President Obama during an official department appearance, the Office of Special Counsel said Wednesday. The finding could possibly cost Sebelius her job.
Cost Sebelius her job? Good one. The White House quickly announced that the administration holds itself “to the highest ethical standards” and therefore she will not be disciplined. (I might be making up the word “therefore”.)
The White House apparently thinks that retroactively reclassifying the event from official to political is plenty. That might make sense if they could also retroactively send the government employees who attended the event back to work.
President Obama says that Egypt is not an ally of the United States. (The White House has since “clarified” that he didn’t mean it.) It’s surely idiotic to say it publicly, but, to be fair, I think that’s true now.
The left’s favorite communist murderer is the centerpiece of the EPA’s memo on Hispanic Heritage Month. For the record, most of Che’s victims were Hispanic.
At first I was too outraged to comment on the 9/11/2012 attacks against our embassy in Cairo and consulate in Benghazi. Then it took time to write out how truly horrible the whole mess is. There are three different aspects of the story, each demanding a different sort of outrage at different people.
The terrorists
The first is the terrorists themselves. We now know that the attacks were planned in advance, and the street protests against an anti-Islam movie were merely a pretext. We also know that the diplomats in Libya were betrayed by Libyan security. (The story doesn’t make clear whether “Libyan security” refers to security forces of the Libyan government, or just Libyan nationals hired by the consulate.)
These people are evil, and they need to be destroyed. But there is little else to say on the matter. Despite all the promises of justice, we know that nothing will be done. The history of attacks against our embassies and consulates in such places as Tehran in 1979, Beirut in 1983, Tel Aviv in 1990, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998, and Beijing in 1999, among others, shows clearly that attacks against our embassies will always be forgotten when pursuing justice is inconvenient.
The diplomats
But since those people are evil, we don’t expect any better of them. The same is not true of the pusillanimous fools at the US embassy in Cairo, who condemned the anti-Islam movie that the attackers used as their pretext. They reiterated the statement multiple times, and it was later echoed by the Secretary of State and by the President.
The embassy originally issued the statement before the attacks, and the attacks took place anyway, which demolishes any pragmatic defense that might be offered for their attempted appeasement. And as a matter of principle, their statement is a disaster:
Our entire message regarding any criticism leveled against Islam or anything else should be this: The United States government is not in the business of approving or disapproving anyone’s speech. This should not be hard!
Not only did the embassy’s statement give short shrift to the value of free speech, it was simply untrue. They said “we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions”. Well, no, actually you don’t!
We don’t condemn offense to Mormons, Catholics, Evangelicals, or Orthodox Jews. Those people and their beliefs are insulted all the time. This is true every day, but especially during election season: Our president’s re-election campaign is running a whisper campaign targeting Mormons; attacking Catholicism gets you a prime-time slot at the Democratic convention; and our president famously denigrated Evangelicals and conservative Catholics as bitter clingers. No, it’s only Muslims whom it is forbidden to offend.
Moreover, there is nothing wrong with denigrating a religion (or all religions), at least as a general matter. We call that debating ideas! Religious ideas are important, and should be debated openly. To suggest that religious ideas, unlike others, are not worthy of open debate is simply demeaning.
On the film in question, I have no opinion. I have not seen it, nor have I seen the trailer. Many people who have seen the trailer say it doesn’t look very good. That does not matter one iota. Freedom of Speech is not limited to skilled craftsmen.
The press
Finally there’s the Obama campaign and the press (who are one and the same). On the day after terrorists attack our embassy and consulate, killing our ambassador and three others, with Obama’s foreign policy lying in smouldering wreckage, Romney holds a press conference and these tools don’t ask about foreign policy. No, they want to talk about whether Romney committed a gaffe by criticizing the Embassy’s aforementioned craven statement:
It’s disgraceful that the Obama Administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.
ASIDE: We actually get here a rare glimpse of how the press coordinates its anti-Republican message. On an open microphone we can hear reporters from NPR and CBS discussing how to phrase a question to make Romney look bad, and how to ensure that question gets asked no matter whom Romney calls on.
It’s true that Romney got one fact wrong: the Embassy first issued its apology before the embassy attack, not after. But since the Embassy reiterated its apology multiple times after the attack, that really makes no difference.
Beyond that, I honestly don’t understand what they see wrong with Romney’s statement. It can’t be that the Embassy’s statement was right. It was terrible for all the reasons I discussed above, but even if you don’t agree with a single word of that, the Obama administration itself also repudiated the Embassy’s statement:
The statement by Embassy Cairo was not cleared by Washington and does not reflect the views of the United States government.
It is suggested that he commented too soon; that by rushing to comment he missed the chance to adjust the tone for the murders that became public later. But that makes no sense. By that reasoning, you would never comment on anything, lest something else happen afterwards. Moreover, Romney’s statement wasn’t released from embargo until the Obama administration had already repudiated the Embassy’s statement.
It’s suggested that it was unfair for Romney to blame the Obama administration for the actions of the Cairo embassy. I find this maddening. These people refuse to hold President Obama accountable for any action of his administration. Our economic woes aren’t his fault. Trafficking guns to Mexican drug cartels isn’t his fault. He apparently doesn’t even control his own administration’s policy toward Jerusalem.
ASIDE: Mitt Romney, on the other hand, is answerable for every stupid comment made by any Republican anywhere. He’s even somehow responsible for the death of a woman who is six degrees of separation from even a flimsy connection to Romney.
No. The Embassy is part of his administration. That doesn’t mean that every action is his personal responsibility, but it’s perfectly fair to refer to it as part of the “Obama administration”.
Finally, there’s the notion that Romney shouldn’t have weighed in at all. “Politics should end at the water’s edge.” “Playing politics while people are dying.” This is such a load of crap it’s awfully hard to take.
Perhaps politics should end at the water’s edge. But if it ever did, which I doubt (is there even a single example of Democrats ever supporting a war or military action initiated by a Republican president?), that notion was killed during the Reagan administration, and its corpse was dismembered during the Bush 43 administration.
The centerpiece of John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign was opposition to the war in Iraq. And here’s Barack Obama attacking President Bush (and John McCain) for the conduct of the War on Terror, in which he explicitly cites a “brazen attack on a US base where nine servicemen were killed”:
Clearly, this suggestion that one should refrain from criticizing the administration while people are dying overseas is completely disingenuous. Or perhaps they think it should only apply to Republicans.
What you have here is a disgusting display of appeasement, set against the backdrop of the complete failure of Obama’s policy toward the Muslim world. Obama said his inauguration would end the hostility of the Muslim world toward America. Instead, his weakness has exacerbated it. The media, in their role as praetorian guard for Obama’s image, naturally need to distract from that.
Their vigor in doing so has led them to coordinate at attack against Mitt Romney that makes no sense. And it has also led them to tell outright lies. On Thursday morning, I heard NPR try to isolate Romney from other Republicans, saying that other Republicans had refused to join Romney’s criticism. (This isn’t the story I heard, but late in the piece it makes the same allegation.)
This is grossly misleading on its face; they failed to note that a lot more information had come out since Romney and the White House issued their statements. Of course Congressional Republicans were going to be more circumspect. But it’s also an outright lie. At the very least, Senator Kyl (R-AZ), the number two Republican in the Senate, and Senator Blunt (R-MO) both echoed Romney’s criticism. I’m sure others did as well.
In short, we have a ruthless enemy determined to hurt us, a feckless and pusillanimous foreign service incapable of dealing with the threat, and a dishonest media determined — for narrow partisan reasons — to do all it can to obscure those facts. What a horrible, horrible affair.
UPDATE: Some have been defending the embassy, saying that its statement was not an apology. That’s actually true; it’s worse. An apology would identify with the society that permitted the video (which is to say, us). They were expressing solidarity with the Islamists.
UPDATE: Patterico says that CBS’s Jan Crawford (the one coordinating the Romney questions) is getting a bum rap. If so, she should explain herself.
UPDATE: The White House has refused to respond to calls for them to condemn a notorious anti-Christian “art” display. Well, it’s not like Christians are likely to attack any embassies.
While Debbie Wasserman-Schultz prattles on about President Obama’s “stellar” record on Egypt, the Israelis’ far different perspective keeps being confirmed by events. In the latest snub, Obama just can’t find any time to meet with Benjamin Netanyahu during Netanyahu’s upcoming visit to the United States:
An Israeli official, who declined to be identified, said the White House had refused Netanyahu’s request to meet Obama when the Israeli leader visits the United States to attend the U.N. General Assembly, telling the Israelis, “The president’s schedule will not permit that.”
And this spin is just pathetic:
White House spokesman Tommy Vietor denied that Netanyahu’s request had been spurned, insisting instead that the two leaders were attending the General Assembly on different days and would not be in New York at the same time.
Obviously they don’t have to meet in New York. Netanyahu is travelling halfway around the world; he can take a half-hour flight to Washington. But don’t take my word for it:
One well-placed Jewish-American leader told Fox News that the White House has not yet fully ruled out moving things around on the schedule to accommodate Netanyahu. But as of now, Obama is scheduled to be on the campaign trail during the window of time when Netanyahu can make it to Washington.
The career staff of the Department of Justice Voting Section recommended that South Carolina’s voter ID law be cleared, but they were overruled by political appointees.
Furthermore, the DOJ has been stalling the ensuing litigation by filing absurd motions, like objecting to South Carolina submitting its brief in 12-point font instead of 13-point font. I am not making this up. This is presumably an effort to run out the clock until after the election, since the South Carolina law cannot go into effect without the approval of either the DOJ or a court.
There is a difference between the Romney-Ryan proposal and Obama policy though. Well, lots of them, but this one is key: In Romney-Ryan, the voucher program is voluntary; participants would choose whether to enter or not. The Obama program is opt-out, so (in some states) participants are in unless they take some action to stay out, which of course most won’t know to do.
I don’t know the program’s details, but it sounds like a good idea. (Indeed, it sounds a lot like Ryan’s plan.) It’s the hypocrisy that’s striking.
The “Democratic” Party, amending its platform to make it a little less extreme (by adding language on God and on Jerusalem that existed in previous platforms), skips the messy process of counting votes and simply decrees the motion carried. This despite the fact that it clearly did not get the required 2/3 majority:
Since this party is fine with falsifying floor votes in the US House of Representatives, I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that they would falsify a floor vote of their convention.
So the Democrats have belatedly changed their position on Jerusalem to match what the party says is Obama’s position, but that position is most emphatically not the position of the Obama administration. How is that exactly?
The Obama campaign explained that Obama’s position and administration policy are two different things.
Harry Truman famously said “the buck stops here.” But in the Obama administration, it seems the buck doesn’t stop anywhere at all. Administration policy is some faceless thing that even the president isn’t responsible for.
So, when Fox News’s Shepard Smith asked her about it, she denied ever saying it:
I didn’t say he said that. And, unfortunately, that comment was reported by a conservative newspaper. It’s not surprising that they would deliberately misquote me.
Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is a liar. Here’s the audio of her making the statement (cue to 0:25):
And here’s the video of her saying she never said it (cue to 0:45):
Not only is Debbie Wasserman-Schultz a liar, she’s that worst kind of liar: the kind who dishonestly says that someone else is lying. She says that the Washington Examiner deliberately misquoted her, when in fact their quote was verbatim.
Keep this mind if you’re ever inclined to make the mistake of believing something that Debbie Wasserman-Schultz says.
POSTSCRIPT: In fact, it’s President Obama’s policies that are damaging to Israel. In fact, he is not only damaging, but openly hostile. (Here’s just one example. Here’s twomore. Oh what the heck, here’s a litany.) Michael Oren obviously can’t come out and say this, but Israelis certainly get it. Only 4 percent of Israelis see Obama as friendly to Israel.
POST-POSTSCRIPT: It doesn’t have anything to do with this incident or with Israel, but if you still think you might be able to believe words that come out of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s mouth, watch this video in which Anderson Cooper eviscerates Wasserman-Schultz for lying about Romney’s position on abortion. I had no idea that Cooper had it in him.
POST-POST-POSTSCRIPT: If the so-called fact checkers wanted to do some actual fact-checking, this is the sort of situation where they could be useful: a factually false statement, rather than a rebuttable argument. (UPDATE: This one was tooobvious for the fact-checkers to skip.)
UPDATE: This woman’s lying goes beyond ordinary political mendacity. She is pathological. When questioned by CNN’s Don Lemon about her lies about her other lies, she just lies some more. I can’t embed the video, you can find it here. She said:
Don, if you look at what the Examiner — which is a conservative blog site, so it’s not surprising that they would deliberately misquote me — and I’ll reiterate that they did deliberately misquote me. First, they took only the first line of what I said, and then they cut it off. And so you haven’t played the rest of what I said. And what they did was, they reported that I said that Republican policies were dangerous for Israel, and actually that’s what Ambassador Oren commented on. I never said that Republican policies were dangerous for Israel.
This is a big soggy mess that’s hard to tease apart:
She maintains that Examiner misquoted her, even when presented with the recording that shows that the quote was verbatim.
Apparently she means that her quote was taken out-of-context (which is not the same thing as being misquoted), but she never uses that phrase. Lemon uses it on her behalf, though.
Her quote was not taken out of context. She says that she wasn’t talking about Republican policies, but about Republican criticisms of President Obama, which is in fact exactly what the Examiner said she said in their report’s very first sentence:
Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz claimed on Monday that Israel’s ambassador to the United States has accused Republicans of being “dangerous” to Israel by criticizing President Obama’s record.
She says that the Examiner cut off the rest of her remark, and CNN didn’t play the rest either. In fact, the Examiner’s recording went well past the quote and included all the context that Wasserman-Schultz alludes to. CNN played all that context as well.
She says that the Examiner reported falsely that she said that Republican policies were hurting Israel. It seems this is her key point, and it’s yet another lie. The Examiner never reported any such thing. Not only did the article correctly report her intent in the very first sentence, it never used the word “policy” at all.
Finally, returning to her original material, she reiterates her claims of unverifiable private discussions with Michael Oren. (Cue to 3:10 if you want to hear that part; I’m won’t bother to transcribe it.)
The Democrats want to make Todd Akin and his crazy ideas the face of the Republican party. They even reportedly plan to make him the theme for an entire night of the convention.
But Akin is just a congressman from Missouri. How much more significant is the misconduct of the Democrats who run the state of New York? The state assembly’s speaker (possibly the state’s most powerful politician) and the attorney general are implicated using taxpayer funds to pay hush money to silence a sexual harassment scandal.
“One thing about being president or running for president – if you’re easily offended, you should probably choose another profession,” Obama told USA Today.
That’s true; which is why his first reaction is so telling.
The so-called fact-checkers, which is the to say the opinion police, seem to have finally gone too far. Their recent performance has been so egregious, at a time when people are paying close attention, that everyone on the right and many in the center are realizing that the “fact-checkers” are worse than worthless.
The latest is moderate Democrat Mickey Kaus, who counters the bogus fact-checks of Romney’s ad attacking Obama for gutting welfare reform. In truth, the ad is neither fact nor falsehood, but opinion. Moreover, it is opinion firmly grounded in fact. The “fact-checkers” who grade it false based on the administration’s counter-argument are (at best) being misled.
The fact-checkers cite Sebelius’s pledge to issue waivers only to states that get at least 20% more people off welfare. Kaus points out that (1) that pledge was issued only after Republicans starting attacking the new policy, and (2) the easiest way for states to attain that 20% “improvement” is to increase the number of people on welfare by about 20%, at which point simple math will provide the 20% increase in people getting back off welfare. So Sebelius’s pledge doesn’t improve the new policy — it may make it even worse.
If he wins a second term, Mr. Obama plans to remain in campaign mode. . . He has told some aides that a sizable mistake at the start of his administration was his naiveté in thinking he could work with Republicans on weighty issues.
So, America, if you want this campaign to end, you need to elect Romney.
POSTSCRIPT: Of course, Obama was never interested in striking any compromises with Republicans. By “work with Republicans”, Obama means “persuade Republicans to do his bidding.” And yes, he was naive if he thought they would agree to blow over a trillion dollars on useless stimulus and nationalize health care.
Okay, first the chuckle. Obama was caught misspelling OHIO:
Then comes the media failure: The Washington Post quickly reported that the photo was a fake. (Down the memory hole now, but you can see a Washington Post tweet to that effect halfway down the page here.) That reporting was based on, apparently, nothing whatsoever. The Post later retracted.
What happened, it seems, is that the Obama campaign sent out a second photograph of him spelling the word correctly, and the Post reporter jumped to the conclusion that the first photograph must therefore have been fake. (Since no one ever respells a word correctly after making a mistake.) You can only make this kind of mistake when you’re in the tank.
Even after retracting, the reporters still held out the possibility that it might have been fake, writing “I don’t know if the first one is photoshopped.”
Since Obama’s stimulus money was allocated primarily according to political affiliation (with the money going primarily to Democratic districts, and with more strongly Democratic districts getting more money than marginal ones), I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that a sizeable chunk went to MSNBC.
J Christian Adams says that Republicans are finally learning to use Alinsky tactics against Democrats. I suppose that’s a good thing. The future of our country is too important to leave those tactics — which are undeniably effective — to the other side. Having taken the high road will be cold comfort when the statists are taking control of every facet of our lives.
But I think it’s lamentable. We’re seeing a coarsening of our politics that is probably irreversible. I hate to see the good guys lower themselves to the bad guys’ level.
In the end, as is so often the case, this comes down to media malfeasance. If conservatives and libertarians had gotten credit for taking the high road, there would have been some benefit to it, and conversely there would have been some cost to playing by Alinsky’s rule book. But with the media in the tank for the left, the left faced no consequences for their actions, and the right was branded dirty tricksters no matter what they did.
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.
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
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.
Oh good grief; the Politifact spin artists are saying that Paul Ryan’s story about the Janesville GM plant (Obama said he’d keep it open for 100 years, but it lasted less than one year) is false because: (1) it closed under Bush, and (2) Obama never promised he would keep it open anyway.
And I believe that if our government is there to support you, and give you the assistance you need to re-tool and make this transition, that this plant will be here for another hundred years.
Okay, according to a very narrow reading, he never promised to keep it open, he only said that he believed that his policies would keep it open. That’s a pretty thin reed on which to call Ryan’s comment false.
Except it’s even worse than that. In fact, Ryan quoted him accurately:
Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said, “I believe that if our government is there to support you, this plant will be here for another 100 years.”
Put in an ellipsis, and that’s a verbatim quote. Ryan did not misrepresent Obama at all, even in the utterly insubstantial way that Politifact suggests.
Moreover, Politifact’s shtick is various different grades of truth or falsehood. But they didn’t grade Ryan’s 100% accurate claim as “mostly true” or even “half true”; they go all the way to an unmodified “false”. Even if there were some wiggle room here for Politifact to work with, which I don’t see, there’s no way to get all the way to “false”. They’re lying; plain and simple.
UPDATE: Further, David Freddoso points out that Ryan never said the plant closed under Obama. That’s true, but since the plant actually did close under Obama, it’s not a critical point.
Also, the Obama campaign claims that the plant was “slated” to close during the Bush administration. If true, that wouldn’t change anything: Obama knew the plant was in trouble when he delivered his not-quite-a-promise, but a planned closure can be reversed if times improve and that was the hope he held out for Janesville. (Indeed, a idled plant can be re-opened.) But, moreover, depending on how you define “slated” (their whole argument is one of semantics), the claim isn’t even true. Although the plant had been on the chopping block for some time, its final closure was announced February 18, 2009.
What I really like is how the Leftist media is pretending it knows more about a GM plant in Paul Ryan’s HOMETOWN than Paul Ryan does.
UPDATE: MSNBC’s “fact-checker” Ezra Klein (who used to run a discussion group for journalists to coordinate the liberal spin in their reporting) offers this:
Ryan says it had not yet shut down Obama was elected, that Janesville was “about to” lose the factory at the time of the election. This is false, as Ryan knew in 2008 when he issued a statement bemoaning the plant’s closing.
Either Klein never read the page he linked to, or he hopes that no one clicks through. Anyone who did click through found that Ryan’s statement said this:
Following the announcement by General Motors that it planned to close its Janesville plant by 2010, U.S. Senators Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl and Representative Paul Ryan sent a letter to General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner asking him to reconsider the decision. . .
(Emphasis mine.) Exactly as Ryan said — and Klein contradicts — the plant was going to close but hadn’t yet. Bogus “fact-checking” is a plague on our body politic, but Klein has invented a new genre: the self-refuting bogus fact-check. Bravo! (UPDATE: Ezra Klein demonstrates how not to correct your mistakes.)
UPDATE: I’ve been focusing on the outright lies, but it’s also worth taking a note of the misdirection. Obama and his media allies are complaining than Ryan is unfairly blaming Obama for the plant’s closure. That would be unfair, if Ryan had said that, but he didn’t. Everyone knows that GM has been in trouble for years, and no one blames Obama for GM’s woes in 2008-2009. (Post-bailout is another matter!)
Ryan’s point, with Obama and his allies are trying to obscure, is simply this: The Janesville plant was in trouble. Obama told the worried people of Janesville that his policies would fix the problem. They didn’t.
This is just one example — a personal example from Ryan’s home town — of how Obama promised a bright tomorrow (“hope and change”) but failed to deliver.
It’s valuable to get the particulars right, since the left is lying about the particulars, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the key point.
UPDATE: Dear ABC: when you correct the factual errors in your article, it’s good form to correct the headline too.
Since this is apparently not just Politifact’s hackery, but the entire left’s main attack on Ryan’s speech, I’ve changed the title.
UPDATE: It turns out that GM considered re-opening the plant, but did not, at a time when the government was running the show, so you actually can blame Obama for the plant remaining closed if you want to. Fine, but that’s not really the point. The point is that Obama said he could turn around the auto manufacturing industry so that Janesville and plants like it would stay open, and he failed.
Also, in case there’s still any confusion about when the plant closed, there’s this video from April 2009:
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.
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.
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.
It’s always fascinating to observe through practice the hierarchy of liberal causes. For example: when it’s convenient to them, liberals would have you believe that safety is the top priority for society (“think of the children!”). But while liberals favor safety over nearly any individual liberty, it’s at nearly the bottom when measured against other liberal priorities.
For instance, in a story headlined “Bacteria May Grow In Reusable Grocery Bags, But Don’t Fret”, NPR argued that:
Dr. Susan Fernyak, director of San Francisco’s Communicable Disease and Control Prevention division, tells Shots, “Your average healthy person is not going to get sick from the bacteria that were listed.” . . .
San Francisco banned disposable plastic shopping bags three years ago. San Francisco’s bag ban hasn’t affected the rates of E. coli infection in town, Fernyak says.
That was a strange position to take, from people who usually think that the slightest possibility of danger justifies a ban. Moreover, according to the latest research it simply isn’t true. A study at the University of Pennsylvania found that food-borne illness did spike after San Francisco enacted its ban, and that people died as a result.
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.
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.
China’s communist government is preparing to file treason charges against a former official who sought political asylum at the U.S. consulate in Chengdu but was turned away to avoid upsetting U.S.-China relations. . .
U.S. officials said Wang provided information and documents on the case of British national Neil Heywood, who was found dead in a Chongqing hotel the previous November.
The Free Beacon reported May 1 that the office of Vice President Joe Biden was behind the administration’s decision to turn Wang away from the consulate, in particular Biden national security aide Antony Blinken.
Blinken, according to administration officials, overruled State and Justice Department officials who favored granting Wang political asylum and working to get him out of China.
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:
Romney left Bain in 1999, two years before GST Steel was shut down in 2001.
When GST was shut down, Bain was run by Jonathan Lavine, a major Obama bundler.
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. . .)
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.
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.”
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.
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?
“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.
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.
Citing a “series of emails” between Obama political appointees and career Justice lawyers, Walton writes:
The documents reveal that political appointees within DOJ were conferring about the status and resolution of the New Black Panther Party case in the days preceding the DOJ’s dismissal of claims in that case, which would appear to contradict Assistant Attorney General Perez’s testimony that political leadership was not involved in that decision.
President Barack Obama has signed a secret order authorizing U.S. support for rebels seeking to depose Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his government, U.S. sources familiar with the matter said.
Sounds good. Just one problem: Why do I know about this?! Isn’t it supposed to be a “secret” order?
This administration is completely unable to keep a secret when it comes to national security. We know that the leaks are coming from top administration officials, probably from the White House, and the administration’s leak investigation is just theater. The administration no longer even denies that the leaks came from the White House, and just says that the president didn’t authorize them. (You hardly need the president to officially “authorize” leaking to establish a sense at the White House that leaking is tolerated or even encouraged.)
I’m afraid Donald Rumsfeld was right when he said this week that Israel would be unwise to notify the United States about any planned action against Iran’s nuclear program:
“If I were in the Israeli government, I don’t think I would notify the United States government of any intent to do anything about Iran,” Rumsfeld stated. “I think that their [Israel’s] relationship with the United States is such that it conceivably could leak out of the United States government that he called and that he plans to do something on Iran.”
“So my guess is, given the pattern of leaks out of the White House, that any prime minister of Israel would not call the United States and give clear intentions as to what they plan to do.”
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 I have frequently remarked here, the biggest mystery in the Gunwalker scandal is exactly what the operation was intended to accomplish. It’s the fact that ATF never tried to track any of the guns they were trafficking into Mexico (which rules out any obvious legitimate purpose) that turns Gunwalker from merely a horrible screw-up and cover-up into something more sinister.
Thus, it’s worthwhile to note that the ATF actually did try to track some of the guns. Out of thousands of guns illegally trafficked to Mexican drug cartels, the ATF tracked two of them.
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.
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.
I was surprised to learn that your city may have a policy barring persons with certain religious views from engaging in commerce in your city. Naturally, I have no wish to invest in your community and only then find that I am excluded from doing business there because of my religion.
Therefore, I ask that you supply me with a list of all current religious tests that must be satisfied to do business in your city. Please also explain what sorts of business are covered by your policy: is the religious test only for restaurants, or does it apply to other businesses as well? Furthermore, please clarify what percentage of a business must be owned by members of prohibited religions for the exclusion from commerce to apply.
I would also like to know how to go about obtaining an exemption from your city’s religious test, as is apparently possible in Boston.
Finally, can you refer me to any attorneys who specialize in navigating your city’s religious restrictions?
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.
“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.
This story must be awfully confusing to people who believe that Saddam Hussein had no chemical weapons:
Britain will help the Iraqi government dispose of what’s left of deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons, still stored in two bunkers in north of Baghdad, the British embassy in Baghdad announced Monday.
The British Defense Ministry will start training Iraqi technical and medical workers this year, an embassy statement said. The teams will work to safely destroy remnants of munitions and chemical warfare agents left over from Saddam’s regime. He was overthrown in 2003 following an American-led invasion.
Saddam stored the chemical weapons near population centers so that he could access them quickly, despite the danger to his civilian population. . .
The head of the Iraqi National Authority, Mohammed Al Sharaa, said the remnants “represent a great challenge to the Iraqi experts to safely dispose.” He called the agreement with British authorities “a good opportunity for Iraqi experts to benefit from the well-known expertise of U.K. experts.”
The Obama campaign is calling for Mitt Romney to release more tax returns. (He has already released several years.) Joel Pollak counters with a list of the top ten things that Obama has refused to release.
Pollak’s list is not really parallel, though. Some of the stuff on his list, like the Gunwalker documents, actually matters.
Barack Obama and Mitt Romney hold fundraisers in Newport Beach, California. The city bills the campaigns for the costs of security. Romney pays, Obama doesn’t.
Interestingly, the Secret Service position is that the city should provide the security for free, or if not, then someone else (such as the county or state) should provide it for free. Seriously.
What makes GM’s heavy investment in the Volt, a flawed car that no one wants, look even worse? GM makes no profit on the car:
According to multiple GM executives there is little or no profit being made on each Volt built at a present cost of around $40,000. Furthermore, the $700 million of development that went into the car has to be recouped.
GM says they have a long-term plan to make the Volt profitable. Given GM’s recent history, one has to guess that the plan is to receive a bailout. This isn’t snark: My guess is GM’s plan for the Volt is to profit from government incentives.
I’m not just talking about subsidies, which I’m sure that President Obama would dearly like to institute, but CAFE standards. With CAFE standards due to increase to an insane 54.5 mpg, every Volt sold at a loss will give GM more breathing room for regular cars.
It’s no big deal, but I thought this was interesting:
The White House has reversed its previous stance of not using the official presidential seal at campaign events. The practice, which is not illegal, is a reversal from statements made by former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs that they would not be using the official seal at campaign stops. . .
But President Obama used it last Friday at a campaign rally in Pittsburgh, and Vice President Biden used the vice presidential seal Thursday in Houston when addressing the NAACP convention.
When asked at Thursday’s White House briefing about it, current Press Secretary Jay Carney said he was not aware of that specific Gibbs comment and was quick to point out that Obama’s predecessors had used it.
Of course, the president has every right to use the presidential seal. What’s interesting about this is it exemplifies a pattern by this president. He made great promises of higher standards time and time again when it was cheap to make them, without any intention of fulfilling them.
It was easy to say that he would hold himself to a higher standard on the campaign when he wasn’t actually campaigning. Once campaigning started, the promise was forgotten.
Let’s just remember what President Obama’s fine promises are worth when not contemporaneously matched with action: nothing at all.
The White House is indignant about Charles Krauthammer’s assertion that President Obama, in his first days in office, sent back a bust of Winston Churchill lent by the British government.
Lately, there’s been a rumor swirling around about the current location of the bust of Winston Churchill. Some have claimed that President Obama removed the bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office and sent it back to the British Embassy.
Now, normally we wouldn’t address a rumor that’s so patently false, but just this morning the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer repeated this ridiculous claim in his column. He said President Obama “started his Presidency by returning to the British Embassy the bust of Winston Churchill that had graced the Oval Office.”
This is 100% false. The bust still in the White House. In the Residence. Outside the Treaty Room.
News outlets have debunked this claim time and again. First, back in 2010 the National Journal reported that “the Churchill bust was relocated to a prominent spot in the residence to make room for Abraham Lincoln, a figure from whom the first African-American occupant of the Oval Office might well draw inspiration in difficult times.” And just in case anyone forgot, just last year the AP reported that President Obama “replaced the Oval Office fixture with a bust of one of his American heroes, President Abraham Lincoln, and moved the Churchill bust to the White House residence.”
In case these news reports are not enough for Mr. Krauthammer and others, here’s a picture of the President showing off the Churchill bust to Prime Minister Cameron when he visited the White House residence in 2010.
[photo]
Hopefully this clears things up a bit and prevents folks from making this ridiculous claim again.
(Emphasis mine.)
This denial struck Jake Tapper as strange, since the “rumors” that Obama had returned the bust were well-founded. A spokesman for the British Embassy said in 2009:
The bust of Sir Winston Churchill by Sir Jacob Epstein was uniquely lent to a foreign head of state, President George W Bush, from the Government Art Collection in the wake of 9/11 as a signal of the strong transatlantic relationship.
It was lent for the first term of office of President Bush. When the President was elected for his second and final term, the loan was extended until January 2009.
The new President has decided not to continue this loan and the bust has now been returned. It is on display at the Ambassador’s Residence.
So what gives? Tapper learned that there were actually two busts of Churchill. One was given to the White House during the Johnson administration; the other was lent during the Bush administration. The former has been in the residence all along (it was not moved there); the second was in the Oval Office and has been returned.
So the “ridiculous”, “ridiculous”, “100% false”, “patently false”, “debunked” “rumor” that Obama returned the bust is entirely true. It’s the White House’s statement that the bust was moved to the residence that is patently false.
ASIDE: An AP “Fact Check” column from last year reporting that Mike Huckabee “failed to note” the Obama moved the bust to the resident was also false. Nice fact checking. The National Journal story the White House cites is behind a paywall, so I can’t check what it actually says.
The nuance to catch here isn’t just that the White House was wrong, but the level of disdain and mockery they employed in their false debunking.
The White House later issued an update (presumably after Tapper’s reporting):
Since my post on the fact that the bust of Winston Churchill has remained on display in the White House, despite assertions to the contrary, I have received a bunch of questions — so let me provide some additional info.
[He confirms every particular reported by Tapper.]
On January 20, 2009 — Inauguration Day — all of the art lent specifically for President Bush’s Oval Office was removed by the curator’s office, as is common practice at the end of every presidency. The original Churchill bust remained on display in the residence. The idea put forward by Charles Krauthammer and others that President Obama returned the Churchill bust or refused to display the bust because of antipathy towards the British is completely false and an urban legend that continues to circulate to this day.
Note here the complete lack of any embarrassment for the false statements in the original post. Nor has the White House corrected any of those false statements other than by adding a contradictory update to the end. Nor is the existence of an update even noted at the top of the post.
Worse still, they maintain that Krauhammer was somehow wrong (“completely false”, circulating an “urban legend”), despite the niggling detail that he was right.
The only disputable fact is the reason that the bust was returned. The White House claims that the return of the art is standard practice. Perhaps, but one has to suspect that the British government would have been happy to let Obama keep the bust as a symbol of the transatlantic relationship, had Obama been willing to do so.
In fact, we needn’t speculate. Recall the British statement:
The new President has decided not to continue this loan and the bust has now been returned.
To sum up: The White House statement, which accused Krauthammer of being wrong at least eight times, is false in every particular, while Krauthammer is right.
POSTSCRIPT: The Krauthammer column is well-worth reading, by the way. It recounts several instances of this administration’s disdain for our allies, most of which are much more substantial than the bust issue.
UPDATE: The British embassy re-confirms, and Krauthammer fires back. The White House has yet to apologize.
UPDATE: Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, apologizes. They still haven’t corrected their erroneous post, though. And they still maintain that it wasn’t their choice to return the bust.
There’s still something left to remark on though. Pfeiffer says:
A better understanding of the facts on my part and a couple of deep breaths at the outset would have prevented this situation.
Well, okay. Alternatively, one might employ a general rule of thumb that when the British government makes an official statement, one oughtn’t call it “ridiculous” without checking first. Failing to do so might give people the impression that you don’t respect our most important ally.
President Obama, after first claiming — falsely — that he was misquoted, now says his “You Didn’t Build That” remarks was taken out of context. They weren’t. Cue the video below to 32:26. That will start you with Obama suggesting that our schools are failing because students don’t want to learn, about a minute before his notorious remarks on success.
Obama talks about his “balanced way” to cut the deficit: cutting the budget by a “trillion or trillion-two” (ASIDE: Obama has added over $1.5 trillion in annual spending, before Obamacare kicks in) and asking “for the wealthy to pay a little bit more”. He then explains why they should be happy to do it: First, it worked great when Bill Clinton did it. (I suppose he would see it that way.) Second, they should “want to give something back” because:
They know they didn’t —
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!
There’s nothing in the context that is remotely exculpatory. Obama was explaining that successful people should be happy to pay higher taxes, because they didn’t succeed on their own; others were responsible for their success.
Obama can’t say specifically how he is being distorted, because he isn’t being distorted at all. He just wishes he hadn’t said it. He can’t just walk it back either, because this is a man who is temperamentally unable to admit being wrong. Instead, he has to lash out at everyone else for failing to appreciate his unspoken intent.
While searching for a good clip of President Obama’s “You Didn’t Build That” speech in Roanoke, Virginia, I found this amusing bit (cue to 1:28), in a speech Obama gave in Roanoke in 2008:
I say: “Sir, I understand you are a die-hard Republican.” He said “Yes I am.”
I said, “How’s business?”
He said: Not so good, my customers can’t afford to eat out right now.
I said: Well, I’m just curious, who’s been running the economy for the last eight years?
He said: I guess the Republicans have.
I said: If you just keep hitting your head against the wall, over and over again, and it starts to hurt, at some point do you stop hitting it against the wall?
He said: I guess that would make sense.
I said: You might want to try the Democrats for a change. We can’t do any worse!
After four years, Obama has indeed made it worse, but now Obama wants us to keep hitting our head against the wall. It will surely stop hurting eventually!
(Fun fact: banging your head against the wall does eventually stop hurting. Eventually it kills you.)
The left can’t seem to settle on a straight story explaining exactly what is deceptive about attacks on Obama’s “You didn’t build that” speech. Here’s ABC’s effort:
Republicans have seized on the line “you didn’t build that” to falsely claim that Obama was speaking directly to business owners about their businesses.
They’re deceptive because Obama wasn’t directly addressing business owners?! Lame. I thought ABC was capable of better spin than this.
The Democrats’ DISCLOSE bill is ostensibly intended to force the disclosure of the funding sources of political speech. In fact, the law already requires disclosure of the funding of political speech (read Justice Thomas’s blistering concurrence in the Citizens United decision for why that’s a bad idea). The real effect, if not indeed the real purpose, of the bill is to create a huge chilling effect against individuals speaking out in politics.
I believe there ought to be limits because the First Amendment is not absolute. No amendment is absolute. You can’t scream ‘fire’ falsely in a crowded theater. We have libel laws. We have anti-pornography laws. All of those are limits on the First Amendment. Well, what could be more important than the wellspring of our democracy? And certain limits on First Amendment rights that if left unfettered, destroy the equality — any semblance of equality in our democracy — of course would be allowed by the Constitution. And the new theorists on the Supreme Court who don’t believe that, I am not sure where their motivation comes from, but they are just so wrong. They are just so wrong.
Notice what is absent from Schumer’s argument: anything at all to limit its application. He observes that there are some limits on the freedom of speech, and argues therefore that the government can impose other limits on the freedom of speech. He does not identify anything special about his desired anti-speech rule that would be parallel to fire-in-a-crowded-theater, libel, or pornography.
Let’s please not have any more nonsense about how the Democrats are the party of civil liberties.
California Democrats were faced with a dilemma: protecting children from pedophile teachers meant standing up against the teachers’ union. They made the wrong choice.
The owner of several Connecticut nursing homes is calling for a criminal probe after union workers staged a mass walkout earlier this month, allegedly vandalizing and sabotaging the health care facilities in the process. Among the allegations is that the workers, supposedly disgruntled over protracted labor talks, switched around the IDs of Alzheimer’s patients.
The alleged sabotage, which also purportedly included tampering with medication records and removing patient identification bands, occurred in three of the company’s five Connecticut facilities in the overnight hours before the July 3 strike. . .
Those employees are represented by a chapter of the Service Employees International Union.
Can the president unilaterally amend US law, simply by refusing to enforce it? The Constitution gives him no such power. The Constitution (in article 1, section 7) gives the president the power to veto a bill before it becomes law, but once a bill becomes law, the Constitution (in article 2, section 3) gives the president the duty to see it “faithfully executed”.
President Obama knows that his decision not to enforce immigration law is contrary to the law. He explained in March 2011 that:
There are enough laws on the books by Congress that are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system that for me to simply through executive order ignore those congressional mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as president.
THE PRESIDENT: Now, I swore an oath to uphold the laws on the books, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know very well the real pain and heartbreak that deportations cause. . .
Now, I know some people want me to bypass Congress and change the laws on my own. (Applause.) And believe me, right now dealing with Congress —
AUDIENCE: Yes, you can! Yes, you can! Yes, you can! Yes, you can! Yes, you can!
THE PRESIDENT: Believe me — believe me, the idea of doing things on my own is very tempting. (Laughter.) I promise you. Not just on immigration reform. (Laughter.) But that’s not how — that’s not how our system works.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Change it!
THE PRESIDENT: That’s not how our democracy functions. That’s not how our Constitution is written.
But political considerations have since intervened and he has now decided to do it anyway. Obama’s decision to gut President Clinton’s welfare reform law is similar, excepting only that in this case we lack sound bites of him admitting that his action is improper.
As my readers know, immigration is not an issue about which I am passionate. As a matter of policy, I’m not sure that I disagree with Obama’s action. But I’m truly concerned about the precedent this sets. If this policy stands — and I think it probably will — we will have fundamentally altered the American system of government, giving the president what amounts to a retroactive veto over any law that must be implemented by the executive branch.
Democrats, if they could look past the considerations of the next election cycle, ought to be just as concerned about this. As John Yoo points out in his devastating critique of Obama’s move:
President Romney could lower tax rates simply by saying he will not use enforcement resources to prosecute anyone who refuses to pay capital gains tax. He could repeal Obamacare simply by refusing to fine or prosecute anyone who violates it.
In fact, in the long-run this precedent will probably favor Republicans more than Democrats, since the president is much more often a Republican than a Democrat. But it means a terrible blow against the rule of law.
An Obama campaign ad is accusing Mitt Romney of “launching a false attack” by quoting him:
NARRATOR: Mitt Romney is launching a false attack.
ROMNEY: President Obama exposes what he really thinks about free people and the American vision. . . He said this: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
NARRATOR: The only problem? That’s not what he said.
[Obama says a bunch of other stuff, interleaved with stuff from Romney, then:]
OBAMA: If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.
This is truly bizarre. Not only are they lying, saying that Obama didn’t say what he said, but the ad even includes video of him saying exactly what they’re denying he said. It’s the self-refuting ad!
I’m reminded of this by President Obama — a man who has, in his entire life, never created anything but two autobiographies (maybe) — pronouncing that entrepreneurs and inventors are not responsible for what they created:
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. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges.
If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.
This is a revealing statement. It’s consistent with Obama’s personal experience. He has always gotten ahead because of his ability to ingratiate himself with the machine and thereby to feed off the efforts of others. And it explains his policies: if no one is responsible for their own success, why not confiscate the fruits of their labor and “spread the wealth around”.
But it’s stunningly ignorant. He could just as well have said that a farmer who works from dawn to dusk every day to raise a patch of potatoes isn’t responsible for his crop because somebody else made his hoe. Of course no one person can prosper in isolation, this is very well understood. The economy succeeds when each person individually adds value, and is compensated for his or her effort. The guy who made the hoe is responsible for the hoe, and got paid for it, he is not responsible for the potatoes. Likewise, Obama’s teachers, road-builders and bridge-builders got paid for their efforts. This is just basic economics; it’s a pity our president doesn’t understand it.
POSTSCRIPT: But doesn’t the government pay for some of that added value? No, the taxpayer does. And the taxes are paid disproportionately by the very innovators that Obama is minimizing. Moreover, while some of our tax money does go to people who are creating value (public goods and services that would otherwise be under-provided, like roads, defense, law enforcement, and basic research) far more of it goes to transfer payments, to boondoggles, to parasites, or — worst of all — to regulators who occasionally may mitigate an externality but whose primary function is actually to hamper the creation of value.
An Obama campaign commercial blames Mitt Romney for layoffs at GST Steel. Setting aside whether Bain Capital is to blame for that, Romney wasn’t at Bain when it happened. And, the guy who was running Bain when it happened is now a top bundler for Barack Obama.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi was emphatic. Mitt Romney’s refusal to release more than two years of his personal tax returns, she said, makes him unfit to win confirmation as a member of the president’s Cabinet, let alone to hold the high office himself.
Sen. Harry Reid went further: Romney’s refusal to make public more of his tax records makes him unfit to be a dogcatcher.
They do not, however, think that standard of transparency should apply to them. The two Democratic leaders of the Senate and the House of Representatives are among hundreds of senators and representatives from both parties who refused to release their tax records.
Lawmakers agreed Thursday to a goal of scanning all cargo-containing ships before they leave foreign ports as Congress neared a deal on a major security bill to carry out the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations. In House-Senate negotiations on the bill, House and Senate Democrats pushed through a provision allowing a five-year window for radiation scanning technology to be put in place and giving the Homeland Security secretary authority to make exceptions. . .
The measure was part of the House bill that passed in January, but it was not included in the Senate version and is strongly opposed by the Bush administration, which said it was technically and economically unfeasible.
It was a worthy goal, but unfortunately an infeasible one. Still, that didn’t dissuade the Democrats; liberals are always reluctant to acknowledge the limitations of reality. Plus, it was great demagoguery.
Execution of the mandate fell to the Obama administration and the five-year deadline is about to expire. What happened? Well, well, well:
The Obama administration has failed to meet a legal deadline for scanning all shipping containers for radioactive material before they reach the United States, a requirement aimed at strengthening maritime security and preventing terrorists from smuggling a nuclear device into any of the nation’s 300 sea and river ports. . . The department’s secretary, Janet Napolitano, informed Congress in May that she was extending a two-year blanket exemption to foreign ports because the screening is proving too costly and cumbersome.
Too costly and cumbersome? Sounds a lot like “technically and economically unfeasible” to me.
I think the drone campaign against Al Qaeda is necessary and effective, and I’m not even particularly squeamish about killing Americans who happen to be present at a legitimate military target. But I’m very uncomfortable about deliberately targeting Americans, particularly children:
He was an American boy, born in America. Though he’d lived in Yemen since he was about seven, he was still an American citizen, which should have made it harder for the United States to kill him.
It didn’t.
It should at the very least have made it necessary for the United States to say why it killed him.
It didn’t.
(Previous post.) (Via Instapundit, who adds some well-deserved mockery for the hypocritical left.)
Obama responded thus: “Yesterday, his advisers tried to clear this up by telling us that there was a difference between ‘outsourcing’ and ‘offshoring.’ Seriously. You can’t make that up.”
And indeed you wouldn’t have to make it up, because it is a real thing: different words with different meanings. . . “Outsourcing” happens when a firm contracts out its non-core functions to other vendors, e.g., a hotel decides to hire a cleaning service rather than keep maids on the hotel payroll.
By the way, here’s Merriam-Webster’s definition (note the complete absence of any international connotation):
outsource : to procure (as some goods or services needed by a business or organization) under contract with an outside supplier
What’s most striking here is the aggressive nature of Obama’s ignorance. Not only is he apparently unaware that outsourcing need not be foreign, he actually mocks the notion.
Grassley and Issa said that in early 2011, right around the time Grassley first made public the whistleblowers’ allegations about Fast and Furious, Scot Thomasson – then the chief of the ATF’s Public Affairs Division – said, according to an eyewitness account: “We need to get whatever dirt we can on these guys [the whistleblowers] and take them down.”
Thomasson also allegedly said that: “All these whistleblowers have axes to grind. ATF needs to f—k these guys.”
According to Grassley and Issa, when Thomasson was asked about whistleblowers’ allegations that guns were allowed to walk, Thomasson said he “didn’t know and didn’t care.”
Grassley and Issa have given Horowitz until July 6 to answer whether Thomasson was “admonished” for those threats against whistleblowers, how he got his job in the first place and how the DOJ and ATF are going to make sure he doesn’t retaliate against whistleblowers moving forward.
A lot of effort has been devoted to establishing when the Justice Department became aware of Gunwalker. I suppose that’s appropriate since the DOJ has repeatedly lied about that, but it’s also largely beside the point. The DOJ has approved the operation after-the-fact by covering it up, promoting the perpetrators, and punishing whistleblowers.
One of Eric Holder’s specious defenses is that his predecessor was also aware of gunwalking too. One rebuttal is that Wide Receiver was nothing at all like Fast and Furious (as Holder himself has admitted). Another rebuttal is that it isn’t true:
During last week’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Holder had alleged that former Attorney General Michael Mukasey knew of gunwalking during the George W. Bush administration.
“An attorney general who I suppose you would hold in higher regard was briefed on these kinds of tactics in an operation called Wide Receiver and did nothing to stop them — nothing,” Holder told Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn during that hearing. “Three hundred guns, at least, walked in that instance.”
After the hearing, Grassley wrote to Holder asking him to provide evidence to back up his blaming Mukasey.
Instead of being able to facilitate evidence, though, according to Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley’s office, Holder and the DOJ have now retracted that statement.
A single internal Department of Justice email could be the smoking-gun document in the Operation Fast and Furious scandal — if it turns out to contain what congressional investigators have said it does.
The document would establish that wiretap application documents show senior DOJ officials knew about and approved the gunwalking tactic in Fast and Furious. This is the opposite of what Attorney General Eric Holder and House oversight committee ranking Democratic member Rep. Elijah Cummings have claimed.
It appears that email would also prove senior DOJ officials, likely including Holder himself, knew in March 2011 that a Feb. 4, 2011 letter from the DOJ to Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley falsely denied guns were permitted to “walk” into Mexico. The DOJ allowed that false letter to stand for nine more months, only withdrawing it in December 2011.
Also, Holder admitted in Congressional testimony that the document could not be shielded by executive privilege.
Border enforcement has gone completely off the rails:
It’s one thing to tell civilian employees to cower under a desk if a gunman starts spraying fire in a confined area, say members of Tucson Local 2544/National Border Patrol Council, but to give armed law enforcement professionals the same advice is downright insulting. The instructions from DHS come in the form of pamphlets and a mandatory computer tutorial.
“We are now taught in an ‘Active Shooter’ course that if we encounter a shooter in a public place we are to ‘run away’ and ‘hide’” union leader Brandon Judd wrote on the website of 3,300-member union local. “If we are cornered by such a shooter we are to (only as a last resort) become ‘aggressive’ and ‘throw things’ at him or her. We are then advised to ‘call law enforcement’ and wait for their arrival (presumably, while more innocent victims are slaughtered).”
Remember the left’s sanctimonious prattle during the Bush administration against its prosecution of the war on terror? Every bit of it was just naked political opportunism. Now that Democrats are in charge, they are doing everything either the same, or with fewer safeguards. For instance:
In a city full of them, Harold Koh is Washington’s biggest hypocrite. As the dean of Yale Law School, Koh was the most prominent critic of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies, deriding them as “executive muscle-flexing.” The former President, Koh said, was the “torturer-in-chief.” In a 2002 interview with The New York Times, he referred to the war on terror as “legally undeclared” and questioned the administration’s right to kill terrorists on the battlefield. “What factual showing will demonstrate that they had warlike intentions against us and who sees that evidence before any action is taken?” he asked.
In 2009, after the election of Barack Obama, Koh was awarded the job of State Department legal adviser. Since that time, he has defended a war waged in Libya without explicit congressional authorization, drone strikes targeting suspected terrorists and the extrajudicial assassination of an American citizen who had become a leading Al Qaeda ideologist.
During the Bush administration, Koh made the preposterous demand of a “factual showing” “before any action is taken.” Now:
As The New York Times described the administration’s rationale for drone strikes, “people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good.”
Also, the Obama administration, for political reasons, doesn’t want to send any new detainees to the professional, humanely-run prison at Guantanamo Bay. So instead they’re sending them to a secret prison in Somalia. Hypocrites.
Someday (hopefully soon) Republicans will be running the war or terror again. When that happens, these hypocrites will suddenly find their voice again. Pay no attention to them.
City officials decided not to renew a contract with American Traffic Systems Inc. for the city’s seven red-light cameras, citing a lack of enforcement from Los Angeles County courts, time wasted by Pasadena police officers and questions about the cameras’ effectiveness in improving traffic safety.
Unfortunately, Pennsylvania is going the opposite direction. James Walker of the National Motorists Association reviews many of the reasons why red-light cameras are a bad idea here, but it really comes down to this: Red-light cameras aren’t for safety, they are for revenue. In fact, they create a conflict of interest in which officials trade-off safety for revenue: the cameras only make money with short yellow lights, which make intersections more dangerous. Municipalities that keep longer yellows have found, like Pasadena, that the cameras lose money.
Remember when the Democrats were talking about the need for civility, and the danger of using violent metaphors in politics?
“Unless things change and Obama can run on accomplishments, he will have to kill Romney,” said a prominent Democratic strategist aligned with the White House.
The White House, having persuaded the Supreme Court to approve their health care takeover as a tax, are shamelessly pretending that they never called it a tax:
That’s the Obama campaign press secretary saying:
Review the court transcripts, Ryan. At no point did Verrilli or any of the government lawyers say that it was a tax.
Which, of course, is an out-and-out lie. It wasn’t just Verrilli in oral arguments; it was also in the briefs, not to mention countless Democratic statements.
Argentina is moving on to the next step in its financial collapse: commandeering bank assets. Specifically, the government is ordering banks to make loans at rates well below the market rate, or even the interest rate.
It’s amazing to watch these socialist fools imagine that they are immune to the laws of economics.
The Constitution, though it dates from the founding of the Republic, has powerful meaning and vital relevance to our own times. The constitutional protections that this case involves are protections of structure. Structural protections—notably, the restraints imposed by federalism and separation of powers—are less romantic and have less obvious a connection to personal freedom than the provisions of the Bill of Rights or the Civil War Amendments. Hence they tend to be undervalued or even forgotten by our citizens. It should be the responsibility of the Court to teach otherwise, to remind our people that the Framers considered structural protections of freedom the most important ones, for which reason they alone were embodied in the original Constitution and not left to later amendment. The fragmentation of power produced by the structure of our Government is central to liberty, and when we destroy it, we place liberty at peril. Today’s decision should have vindicated, should have taught, this truth; instead, our judgment today has disregarded it.
The short version of today’s ruling: Obamacare is unconstitutional as written, but as a courtesy, the Chief Justice has rewritten it into a different law that does the same thing and passes muster.
As part of the Obama administration’s furious spin of the president’s decision to withhold the documents regarding the Fast and Furious cover-up, Jay Carney dusted off the bogus claim that Gunwalker began during the Bush administration. Pressed on it, he admitted that the operations didn’t, but maintained that the “tactic” did:
As I’ve pointed out here several times before, there is no comparison between Operation Wide Receiver (which Carney is alluding to) and Fast and Furious. There are lots of important differences, but the only one you need to remember is this: The aim of Wide Receiver was to track gun trafficking, in order to stop it. The aim of Fast and Furious was to supply guns to Mexican drug cartels, for reasons the administration has never seen fit to reveal.
But don’t take my word for it, here’s Eric Holder admitting there’s no comparison between the two:
The Obama administration is getting serious about the leak investigation:
Officials at the CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies will be given expanded polygraph tests under a new Obama administration directive aimed at stamping out national-security leaks.
Except it’s not, if this story is complete. There’s no indication here that White House officials will be getting the polygraph tests. Since we already know that the leaks are coming from the White House, this whole thing is a charade.
Posted by K. Crary 
Internet Scofflaw 
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