Internet Scofflaw

Sigh.

(Via the Corner.)

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.

(Via the Corner.)

UPDATE: What a clown show.

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.

I am not making this up.

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.

(Via the Corner.)

We all belong to the government:

Statists.

(Via the Corner.)

UPDATE: Fred Thompson comments, “I’m sure it sounded better in the original Chinese.” Heh.

At a session for Jews at the Democratic convention, DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz said this:

We know, and I’ve heard no less than Ambassador Michael Oren say this, that what the Republicans are doing is dangerous for Israel.

In fact, Michael Oren never said it. At least, there’s no public record of him saying it, and Ambassador Oren “categorically” denies saying it.

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 two more. 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 too obvious 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:

1. She maintains that Examiner misquoted her, even when presented with the recording that shows that the quote was verbatim.
2. 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.
3. 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.

4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.)

Amazing. This woman is a pathological liar.

(Via Commentary.)

Barack Obama is trying to replay his 2008 campaign:

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.

Obama says he wasn’t offended by Clint Eastwood’s speech. I guess he realized how bad it looks for the president of the United States to punch back at an entertainer, but it’s a little late for that now.

Obama gets this part right, though:

“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.

(Via Jim Treacher.)

Obama says his main mistake of his first term was not spending enough time attacking Republicans:

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.

(Via Instapundit.)

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.

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.

(Via Instapundit.)

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

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

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

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

The administration originally denied that the documents exist:

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

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

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

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

(Via Instapundit.)

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

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

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

This was my favorite part:

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

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

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

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

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

Full transcript here.

Idiots:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is very good.

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

(Via Brit Hume.)

More here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This too is a complete lie:

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

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

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

POSTSCRIPT: The Onion treatment.

UPDATE: Now this is just sad:

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

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

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

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

Wasserman-Schultz later had to concede:

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

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

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

Even the liberal fact-checkers are noticing:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A similar report appeared in the Sunday Telegraph.

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

(Previous post.) (Via Nile Gardiner.)

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

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

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

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

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

(Via Patterico.)

(Via James Pethokoukis.)

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

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

and then:

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

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

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

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

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

(Previous post.) (Via Instapundit.)

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.

(Via Instapundit.)

UPDATE: That’s not the only city Obama has stiffed. (Via Instapundit.)

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.

(Via Instapundit.)

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.

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!

[And so on.]

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.

(Previous post.)

UPDATE: Here’s the official transcript.

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 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.

Chuck Schumer (D-NY) admits this. In a speech supporting the DISCLOSE bill, he calls for limits on free speech:

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.

(Via Instapundit.)

UPDATE: And also New York Democrats. (Via Instapundit.)

. . . truly are a loathsome bunch:

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.

(Emphasis mine.)

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!

(Previous post.)

UPDATE: Someone prepared this shortened version of Obama’s self-refuting ad:

Dilbert’s boss’s fallacy:

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.

Another must-read from Frank J Fleming.

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.

Typical:

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.

(Via Instapundit.)

President Obama doesn’t know what “outsourcing” means:

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.

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.

Lie in haste, retract at leisure.

(Previous post.)

What? Price caps cause shortages? Who knew?