Let me be precise here: Fox News peddles a fair amount of hateful crap. Some of it borders on sedition. Much of it is flat out untrue.
You know there must be Democrat in office when the media is writing seriously about sedition. Just a year ago it was the press’s job to hold the government accountable.
Of course, Klein isn’t able to cite any example of Fox’s reporting that is “hateful crap” or “flat out untrue”. The one example he does mention, Fox News’s exposure of the radicalism of Van Jones, was neither.
And that’s revealing. What are upsetting Klein (and the White House) aren’t false stories, but true ones. They don’t want media scrutiny on this administration, because the public is seeing how different it is from what they were promised.
The New York Times explains why the White House decided to declare war on Fox News:
By the following weekend, officials at the White House had decided that if anything, it was time to take the relationship to an even more confrontational level. The spur: Executives at other news organizations, including The New York Times, had publicly said that their newsrooms had not been fast enough in following stories that Fox News, to the administration’s chagrin, had been heavily covering through the summer and early fall — namely, past statements and affiliations of the White House adviser Van Jones that ultimately led to his resignation and questions surrounding the community activist group Acorn. . .
“It was an amalgam of stories covered, and our assessment of how others were dealing with those stories, that caused us to comment,” Mr. Axelrod said in describing the administration’s thinking.
(Emphasis mine.)
Axelrod says explicitly what Brit Hume conjectured a few days ago: the White House’s problem is that Fox is breaking stories and the rest of the press is taking them up.
So, as noted at the Corner, their problem is not that Fox isn’t a real news organization. On the contrary, their problem is that it is.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez told citizens Wednesday to limit their showers to three minutes because the country is having problems supplying water and electricity.
“If you are going to lie back, in the bath, with the soap and you turn on the what’s it called, the Jacuzzi … imagine that, what kind of communism is that? We’re not in times of Jacuzzi,” Chavez said.
It’s revealing of the depth of economic mismanagement in Venezuela that the country with the greatest natural wealth in South America could be unable to supply such basic necessities as food, water, and electricity.
Maureen Dowd used her column last week to attack Mary Cheney, Dick Cheney’s daughter. Mary is starting a consulting firm and rumor has it that her father approves of the enterprise, which apparently is enough for the alleged sins of the father to visit on the child.
Dowd also gratuitously reminds us that Mary is a lesbian, which has no bearing at all on the column, and even titles her column after a bizarre sexual practice supposedly practiced by lesbians. So let’s not forget which side it is that has no problem appealing to prejudices when it serves their purposes.
Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, may be hot on the heels of a Holy Grail of cancer therapy: They have found a way to not only protect healthy tissue from the toxic effects of radiation treatment, but also increase tumor death.
Today the White House announced that pay czar Ken Feinberg would be available for interviews with every member of the White House pool (that is, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and Fox) except Fox News. This was an overreach even for the Obama-friendly networks, who showed some integrity and refused to participate unless Fox was invited as well. The White House relented, but in a final show of pettiness, cut back the length of the interviews from 5 minutes to only 2 minutes.
UPDATE: An anonymous Treasury Department spokeperson is denying that this happened. Well, if you won’t take Fox’s word for it, how about CBS (cue to 1:00):
JEFF GREENFIELD: And on Thursday the Treasury Department tried to exclude Fox News from pool coverage of interviews with one of its key officials. It backed down after strong protests from the press.
CHIP REID: All the networks said, that’s it. You’ve crossed the line.
UPDATE: You can read the story in text here. (Via Newsbusters.)
UPDATE: Some are suggesting that this wasn’t a show of integrity after all. Well, even if they did the right thing for the wrong reason, it’s good enough for me.
Newt really needs to re-think his support for Dede Scozzafava. This isn’t RINO but DIABLO – Democrat In All But Label Only. It’s not one of those “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” bi-swinger deals — not when you’re pro-“stimulus”, pro-cash-for-clunkers. And the reductive argument that her sole redeeming value – a willingness to vote for John Boehner as Speaker — is reason enough to support her is silly in a special election. If he’s ever Speaker, Boehner won’t be till January 2011, and it’s 12 months premature for Newt to be telling voters they need to suck it up and accept that a handful of Jim-Jeffords-in-embryo-form are necessary for the Republican tide.
But beyond all that there’s now a competence issue: Since the cop-calling and its aftermath, the candidate has demonstrated that there is no case for her whatsoever. At this stage in the nation’s affairs, Washington doesn’t need another incoherent buffoon insulated by a phalanx of thin-skinned twerps already guarding her like a 30-year incumbent for whom routine questions are an outrageous form of lèse-majesté. By any reasonable measure, this candidate is unworthy of a seat in the national legislature.
The tea parties and town halls were a response not just to Obama but to the 2006/2008 GOP.
Hear, hear. The Scozzafava nomination is worrying sign that the GOP has not yet learned its lesson. With so little at stake, the special election is a perfect opportunity to educate them.
White House pay czar Kenneth Feinberg was the driving force behind the move to order steep pay cuts from bailed-out executives, and did not even seek the president’s approval before making his decision.
The Treasury Department is expected to formally announce in the next few days a plan to slash annual salaries by about 90 percent from last year for the 25 highest-paid executives at the seven companies that received the most from the Wall Street bailout. Total compensation for the top executives at the firms would decline, on average, by about 50 percent.
The sweeping decision, though, came from Feinberg and not from President Obama.
One official told Fox News that Feinberg from the start had the independent authority to work with companies and make such a call. Obama was never required to sign off before final decisions were made.
I’m not one to get exercised over President Obama’s umpteen czars. If the president wants to hire someone to help coordinate policy in a certain area, that’s his business.
But that’s assuming that the czar is merely coordinating policy. It’s another matter entirely if the czar has independent executive authority (particularly for something as outrageous as dictating salaries). In that case, he needs to face Senate confirmation, and the “pay czar” does not. That is unacceptable, and I would have thought it unconstitutional as well.
Recently, President Obama’s advisors have decided that it’s easier to blame the Bush Administration than support our troops. This weekend they leveled a charge that cannot go unanswered. The President’s chief of staff claimed that the Bush Administration hadn’t asked any tough questions about Afghanistan, and he complained that the Obama Administration had to start from scratch to put together a strategy.
In the fall of 2008, fully aware of the need to meet new challenges being posed by the Taliban, we dug into every aspect of Afghanistan policy, assembling a team that repeatedly went into the country, reviewing options and recommendations, and briefing President-elect Obama’s team. They asked us not to announce our findings publicly, and we agreed, giving them the benefit of our work and the benefit of the doubt. The new strategy they embraced in March, with a focus on counterinsurgency and an increase in the numbers of troops, bears a striking resemblance to the strategy we passed to them. They made a decision – a good one, I think – and sent a commander into the field to implement it.
Now they seem to be pulling back and blaming others for their failure to implement the strategy they embraced. It’s time for President Obama to do what it takes to win a war he has repeatedly and rightly called a war of necessity.
(Emphasis mine.)
The bad faith exhibited by the Obama administration is breathtaking. They asked the outgoing administration to keep its conclusions private, which it did, and then exploited their silence to pretend that they hadn’t done anything. (And yes, Cheney did relate Emanuel’s remarks accurately. Nearly verbatim, in fact.)
According to Gallup, the slide in President Obama’s approval rating (-9 points) between the second and third quarter of his administration is one of the largest first-year slides since polling began, and the largest ever between the second and third quarters. In absolute terms, Obama’s third-quarter approval rating of 53% is the second-lowest in history (only Clinton’s was lower, at 48%).
Ron Bloom, White House manufacturing czar and car czar:
Generally speaking we get the joke: We know that the free market is nonsense. We know that the whole point is to game the system; to beat the market, or at least find someone to pay a lot of money because they’re convinced that there is a free lunch. We know this is largely about power, that it’s an adults-only, no-limit game. We kind of agree with Mao that political power comes largely from the barrel of a gun. And we get it, that if you want a friend you should get a dog.
(Transcript and emphasis mine.)
The context for these remarks are not clear from the clip, but unless the whole piece is a quote of someone else, it’s hard to see how the context could make these remarks any less damnable.
The Obama administration reached a new agreement Wednesday with top Polish government officials to place a new generation of missile interceptors on Polish soil, a surprising turnabout from just a few weeks earlier when it appeared the United States was ready to abandon its missile defense program in Eastern Europe.
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk emerged from a lengthy private discussion to announce that Poland’s participation in the missile defense system was, essentially, back on — though in a new format that involves delivering a smaller number of defensive weapons in 2018. . .
The hastily arranged vice presidential trip, which also will include stops in Romania and the Czech Republic this week, was intended to soothe relations and reassure the fledgling NATO members that the missile program was not being scrapped, and that the evolving policy should not be viewed as a snub or a weakening of U.S. security commitments to states in the region.
Obviously I’m glad if this actually happens, but what the heck are these jokers doing?
I can think of two explanations: (1) cancelling missile defense was part of a quid pro quo that Russia has now reneged on, or (2) these guys haven’t the foggiest idea what they’re doing. Theory 1 doesn’t make me happy (one should know better than to make quid pro quos with the Russians), but it’s still better than theory 2, which I fear is much more likely.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto published last week, Andrew Breitbart said that he was sitting on additional ACORN videos, figuring that diminishing returns would set in after five. Now he’s released the sixth video, and it proves ACORN’s efforts to rehabilitate themselves are built on lies.
Video #6 comes from ACORN’s Philadelphia office, another one of the five offices that ACORN says O’Keefe and Giles were thrown out of. (ASIDE: Breitbart has already released videos from two other offices — New York and San Diego — that ACORN falsely claimed O’Keefe and Giles were thrown out of.) ACORN has invested a lot in their account of what happened at the Philadelphia office. In addition to claiming they threw out O’Keefe and Giles (the video shows they were not), ACORN made a lots of other statements about the interview that are now proven false. Those claims were taken up by a variety of credulous news outlets and the ever-hacktastic Media Matters, all of which now have egg on their faces.
It’s the behavior of the media that is most fascinating. Despite ACORN having been repeatedly shown as liars (and worse) throughout the affair, the media has persisted in accepting their version of events with nothing but ACORN’s word to go on.
Charles Krauthammer comments on the ridiculous notion that we can’t decide Afghanistan troop levels until after their election:
After all, look, there are three things that we can say with confidence about what the government of Afghanistan will look like after this election. It’s going to be weak, it is going to be pro-American, and it’s going to be corrupt. That’s how it was yesterday, and that’s how it will be tomorrow.
More or less corrupt and more or less weak, but that’s how it will be, and that’s how it was a year ago. So it’s not going to depend on the outcome of the election. That’s the card that we’re dealt in Afghanistan, and that’s going to be.
Now, the best outcome would be if you had a coalition so you wouldn’t have to have a runoff with all of the complications that are talked about. But even so…why would you hold off and delay a critical decision on the strength of our troops? Because you don’t know the exact composition of the cabinet?
It’s nonsense, and I think Gates shot it down pretty strongly today.
I’ve aware that the blog is displaying with the wrong theme on the iPhone. I’m working on the problem.
UPDATE: It’s a new “feature”. I’ve disabled it now.
UPDATE: The real problem is that too many web developers don’t seem to get the point to the iPhone. The idea is it’s supposed to be just like browsing on a computer. We don’t want you to give us a special theme for the iPhone, it defeats the purpose! They are tolerable when you can still get to the real page, but far too many web sites don’t even make that possible.
Since too many web developers don’t get the iPhone, I wish Apple would deal with the problem. They could do it easily by including an option in the iPhone’s browser to withhold the browser identity.
Senate Finance ranking member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is raising concerns that a Department of Health and Human Services Web site that urges visitors to send an e-mail to President Barack Obama praising his health care reform plan may violate rules against government-funded propaganda.
The Web page is accessed through a “state your support” button featured prominently on the HHS Web site and carries a disclaimer that the Web site is maintained by HHS.
In a letter sent to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius Tuesday, Grassley warned that “any possible misuse of appropriated funds by the executive branch to engage in publicity or propaganda in support of an Administration priority is a matter that must be investigated and taken seriously,” noting that in 2005 Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) argued that “the use of official funds for similar activities were ‘underhanded tactics’ and that these tactics ‘are not worthy of our great democracy.’”
Watching so many serious journalists and leftist political figures fall for the fake Rush Limbaugh quotes tells us something very frightening about what leftists believe true about non-leftist America. I say, “frightening,” because we evaluate the level of threat that others pose based on our understanding of the amorality of their beliefs. Then we rationalize the harshness of the methods we are willing to employ against them based on our threat assessment. . .
Given this, what does it portend for American non-leftists that a wide and powerful swath of the American left apparently believes it quite credible that a major media figure with an audience in the tens of millions looks back fondly on slavery and approves of political assassination? What draconian methods could those leftists rationalize using if they really believe they are fighting people with such values?
Indeed, but we needn’t merely speculate. For example, I know leftists personally that admit Michael Moore is a fabulist, but support him anyway because he attacks the right people. Mind you, I’m not talking about those who make a business of lying, like politicians and journalists, but ordinary people.
You floss regularly, yield to oncoming traffic and use your credit cards judiciously, dutifully paying off your balance every month. You may believe that your exemplary behavior shields you from unexpected credit card fees. Sadly, that is no longer the case.
[Various credit cards are raising feeson those who use credit responsibly.]
These fees are the credit card industry’s response to credit card legislation that will, among other things, restrict credit card issuers’ ability to raise interest rates on existing balances. Credit card issuers are looking for ways to raise income before the new rules take effect in February. During the first quarter, 27% of credit card offers included annual fees, up from 18% a year earlier, according to Synovate Mail Monitor, a credit card direct-mail tracking service.
This is exactly what any economist would have predicted would happen in response to the credit card bill. But some people are actually surprised:
Curtis Arnold, founder of CardRatings.com, says he expected credit card issuers to raise annual fees after the legislation was enacted. What he didn’t expect, he says, “was that good customers were going to be hit.”
Didn’t expect it? Why on earth not? The credit card bill limited the ability of card issuers to assign greater costs to greater credit risks. Where did he think the costs were going to go?
Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) locked Republicans out of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee room to keep them from meeting when Democrats aren’t present.
Towns’ action came after repeated public ridicule from the leading Republican on the committee, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), over Towns’s failure to launch an investigation into Countrywide Mortgage’s reported sweetheart deals to VIPs.
For months Towns has refused Republican requests to subpoena records in the case. Last Thursday Committee Republicans, led by Issa, were poised to force an open vote on the subpoenas at a Committee mark-up meeting. The mark-up was abruptly canceled. Only Republicans showed up while Democrats chairs remained empty.
Republicans charged that Towns cancelled the meeting to avoid the subpoena vote. Democrats first claimed the mark-up was canceled due to a conflict with the Financial Services Committee. Later they said it was abandoned after a disagreement among Democratic members on whether to subpoena records on the mortgage industry’s political contributions to Republicans.
A GOP committee staffer captured video of Democrats leaving their separate meeting in private chambers after the mark-up was supposed to have begun. He spliced the video to other footage of the Democrats’ empty chairs at the hearing room, set it to the tune of “Hit the Road, Jack” and posted it on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s minority webpage, where it remained as of press time.
Towns’s staffers told Republicans they were not happy about the presence of the video camera in the hearing room when they were not present. Issa’s spokesman said the Democrats readily acknowledged to Republicans that they changed the locks in retaliation to the videotape of the Democrats’ absence from the business meeting even though committee rules allow meetings to be taped.
To summarize: Towns locked the room after Republicans used the room’s cameras to embarrass Democrats for abruptly cancelling a meeting and lying about the reason why. The underlying controversy was the Democrats’ refusal to investigate the Countrywide scandal, in which key Democrats are implicated.
Power Line has Issa’s video. (It’s actually not all that good.)
If you thought that the United States would never support blasphemy laws, you would be disappointed:
While attracting surprisingly little attention, the Obama administration supported the effort of largely Muslim nations in the U.N. Human Rights Council to recognize exceptions to free speech for any “negative racial and religious stereotyping.” The exception was made as part of a resolution supporting free speech that passed this month, but it is the exception, not the rule that worries civil libertarians. Though the resolution was passed unanimously, European and developing countries made it clear that they remain at odds on the issue of protecting religions from criticism. It is viewed as a transparent bid to appeal to the “Muslim street” and our Arab allies, with the administration seeking greater coexistence through the curtailment of objectionable speech. . . In the resolution, the administration aligned itself with Egypt, which has long been criticized for prosecuting artists, activists and journalists for insulting Islam.
A free-speech resolution with a blasphemy exception is worse than no resolution at all. This doesn’t advance free speech; it sets it back.
What the administration seems not to be recognizing is that resolutions like this are meaningless except as rhetoric. If UN Human Rights resolutions were somehow enforceable, there might be some wisdom in compromising to pass one. But they aren’t. They are nothing more than position statements, and we are officially taking the position that blasphemy laws are okay. Americans may not be paying much attention, but I guarantee that repressive nations like Egypt will make the most of it.
I like my Kindle, but I’m still happy about Barnes & Noble’s new Nook e-reader. I hope it will push Amazon to make some improvements, particularly something like the Nook’s book-lending feature.
Clearly, Fox is really enjoying its label as the one network the White House doesn’t want you to watch. I wonder if they’ll be splashing it on the screen soon.
There are a lot of versions of the wrestle-with-a-pig adage, but my favorite is this one: Never wrestle with a pig; it gets you dirty, and the pig likes it.
First, attack Fox News as being not a real news station, primarily (according to Robert Gibbs) because of its opinion programs starring Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity. Then, invite Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow to an off-the-record briefing with the president.
UPDATE: Also at the briefing: Eugene Robinson and Maureen Dowd.
On June 3, MSNBC Rachel Maddow stated on-the-air that Rush Limbaugh said that Martin Luther King’s assassin should get the Medal of Honor. It took her 138 days (that’s four-and-a-half months) to retract the lie, and grudgingly at that.
Moe Lane notes the latest Rasmussen polling on the issues. When asked which party people trust more, the GOP now leads on every issue. In the last month, the GOP extended their lead or erased the Democrats’ lead in nine out of ten categories: health care (+6), education (+10), social security (+10), abortion (+5), economy (+6), taxes (+7), Iraq (+9), national security (+11), and government ethics (+3). The GOP only lost ground on immigration (-5), where it now leads by only seven points.
Wow. The GOP also leads on the generic ballot, despite trailing (as they always do) in partisan identification.
The numbers don’t say whether this is an endorsement of the GOP or a repudiation of the Democrats, but I think it’s much more the latter than the former.
Anita Dunn, the White House communication director, in her CNN interview declaring war against Fox News:
DUNN: Howie, I think if we went back a year go to the fall of 2008, to the campaign, that it was a time when this country was in two wars, that we had a financial collapse probably more significant than any financial collapse since the Great Depression.
If you were a FOX News viewer in the fall election, what you would have seen would have been that the biggest stories and biggest threats facing America were a guy named Bill Ayers and something called ACORN.
What is Dunn saying here? Is she claiming that Fox never covered the financial collapse? That’s obviously ridiculous. No, it seems that she is complaining about the news that Fox did cover. She would rather than Fox had ignored Ayers and ACORN as most everyone else did.
KURTZ: Is that the reason the president did not go on FOX News Sunday when he did all the other Sunday shows, and will President Obama appear again on FOX this year?
DUNN: Well, you know, Howie, President Obama, he did “The Factor.” He did “O’Reilly.”
KURTZ: Yes. That was during the campaign.
DUNN: That was last year. As president earlier this year when he met with news anchors, met with Chris Wallace…
KURTZ: My question is will he appear on FOX in the next couple of months?
DUNN: You had a two-part question. The first was, is this why he did not appear? And the answer is yes, obviously he’ll go on Fox because he engages with ideological opponents. And he has done that before. He will do it again. I can’t give you a date because, frankly, I can’t give you dates for anybody else right now.
(Emphasis mine.)
Let’s be charitable and assume that Dunn is answering a different question (“will he go on Fox ever?”) than she was asked. Because if she was answering the question she was asked, her answer was a lie:
But last week, Fox News was informed by the White House that Obama would grant no interviews to the channel until at least 2010. The edict was relayed to Fox News by a White House official after Dunn discussed the channel at a meeting with presidential spokesman Robert Gibbs and other Obama advisers.
Going on:
DUNN: For instance, Howie, “The New York Times” had a front page story about Nevada Senator John Ensign and the fact that he had gotten his former chief of staff a job as a lobbyist and his former chief of staff’s wife was someone Ensign had had an affair with.
KURTZ: We reported the story.
DUNN: Did you see coverage of that on FOX News? I’m not talking Glenn Beck, and I’m not talking Sean or “The Factor.” I’m talking about FOX News.
KURTZ: I will have to check on that. I assume you know the answer.
She never comes out and says it, but she is clearly implying that Fox didn’t cover the story. That’s a lie:
Dunn also strongly implied that Fox had failed to follow up on a New York Times story about a scandal swirling around GOP Sen. John Ensign of Nevada, although Fox News broadcast the stories on numerous shows, including Special Report with Bret Baier.
If you don’t want to take Fox News’s word for it, here’s just one of many stories Fox ran on the Ensign scandal.
Thirty-eight forged or fraudulent ballots have been thrown out — enough votes, an election official admits, to likely have tipped the city council and county elections in November to the Democrats. . .
A special prosecutor is investigating the case and criminal charges are possible. New York State Supreme Court Judge Michael Lynch ruled that there were “significant election law violations that have compromised the rights of numerous voters and the integrity of the election process.”
Note that the Working Families Party, the organization responsible for the fraud, is linked to ACORN.
John Hinderaker notes a dismaying but unsurprising development in our dealings with Iran:
Iran has refined at least 1.4 tons of enriched uranium, enough — if further enriched to weapons grade — to build a nuclear bomb. Of course, Iran claims that the uranium is for peaceful energy purposes, so the US suggested an arrangement whereby Iran would ship their enriched uranium to France. France would then process the uranium into fuel rods for a nuclear reactor and ship them back. The fuel rods would be useless for weapons purposes, neatly dealing with the Iranian nuclear problem for a while.
It seems like a very good plan, if we make one important assumption. It only works if Iran is actually sincere about using its uranium for peaceful energy purposes. If Iran was not sincere, the scheme was destined to get derailed at some point before Iran actually hands over its uranium.
Iran’s negotiators have toughened their stance on the nuclear programme, signalling that Tehran will refuse to go ahead with an agreement to hand over 75 per cent of its enriched uranium. . .
Iran has amassed at least 1.4 tons of low-enriched uranium inside its underground plant in Natanz. If this was further enriched to weapons-grade level – a lengthy process – it would be enough for one nuclear weapon.
But Iran agreed to export 75 per cent of this stockpile to Russia and then France, where it would have been converted into fuel rods for use in a civilian research reactor in Tehran. This would have been a significant step towards containing Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Before talks, however, Iranian officials signalled they would renege. “Iran wants to directly buy highly-enriched uranium without sending its own low-level uranium out of the country,” reported a state television channel.
Obviously, allowing Iran to buy fuel rods but keep its own stockpile achieves nothing at all. In fact, we’re worse off than before, because Iran is now using the previous arrangement to say that the US has accepted Iran’s uranium enrichment plan. Iran’s official news agency says:
Informed sources close to the talks in Vienna said that the US has in a series of secret meetings informed its European partners of Washington’s decision on acceptance of uranium enrichment in Iran.
I hope this teaches the administration the folly of pursuing a line of diplomacy that depends on the good intentions of our adversary.
That the message that the left-wing magazine The Nation wants to send to the White House:
The Obama administration really needs to get over itself.
First, the president and his aides go to war with Fox News because the network maintains a generally anti-Obama slant.
Then, an anonymous administration aide attacks bloggers for failing to maintain a sufficiently pro-Obama slant.
These are not disconnected developments.
An administration that won the White House with an almost always on-message campaign and generally friendly coverage from old and new media is now frustrated by its inability to control the debate and get the coverage it wants.
The New York Times and even Helen Thomas are also piling on over the folly of the White House’s war on Fox News. There’s no way this ends well for the administration, so why are they doing it?
I think they can’t help themselves. Throughout his short political career, Barack Obama has never faced much adversity, and the little he has faced he certainly never learned to take with grace. (Remember when he became the Democratic front-runner and started getting a few tough questions in debates? That was the end of the debates.) He was inaugurated to near-universal adulation and it seems that he really believed his hope and change mythology.
Now he is facing real adversity. A majority disapproves of his job performance, and 40% strongly disapprove. His signature domestic initiative is unpopular and faces an uncertain future in Congress. Afghanistan requires strong and politically risky action. Iran is laughing at him. The IOC snubbed him. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. So they are lashing out.
When the going gets tough, the tough get going. The weak blame Fox News.
Voters in this small city decided overwhelmingly last year to do away with the party affiliation of candidates in local elections, but the Obama administration recently overruled the electorate and decided that equal rights for black voters cannot be achieved without the Democratic Party.
The Justice Department’s ruling, which affects races for City Council and mayor, went so far as to say partisan elections are needed so that black voters can elect their “candidates of choice” – identified by the department as those who are Democrats and almost exclusively black.
The department ruled that white voters in Kinston will vote for blacks only if they are Democrats and that therefore the city cannot get rid of party affiliations for local elections because that would violate black voters’ right to elect the candidates they want.
Take a close look at this. The Justice Department rejected a change to elections because it might change the candidates for whom white voters vote. I thought that the Voting Rights Act was about ensuring, you know, the right to vote, but it seems that I was wrong. In the eyes of our current Justice Department, voting rights are about making sure the right candidate is elected.
Kinston is two-thirds black, but the decision was necessary to compensate for low turnout among blacks:
Ms. King’s letter in the Kinston case states that because of the low turnout black voters must be “viewed as a minority for analytical purposes,” and that “minority turnout is relevant” to determining whether the Justice Department should be allowed a change to election protocol.
Black voters account for 9,702 of the city’s 15,402 registered voters but typically don’t vote at the rates whites do.
As a result of the low turnout, Ms. King wrote, “black voters have had limited success in electing candidates of choice during recent municipal elections.”
“It is the partisan makeup of the general electorate that results in enough white cross-over to allow the black community to elect a candidate of choice,” she wrote.
So now the Voting Rights Act isn’t about the right to vote, but about ensuring a particular outcome even when people choose not to vote!
If there’s any question about how political this decision was, note two things: First, the Justice Department is rejecting a neutral change specifically and explicitly because it lessens the importance of the Democratic Party. Second, look who made the decision:
The decision [was] made by the same Justice official who ordered the dismissal of a voting rights case against members of the New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia.
One final observation: Kinston is two-thirds black, and the measure passed in seven of nine black precincts. So, in order supposedly to ensure the voting rights of blacks, the Justice Department is rejecting a decision made by the black voters of Kinston.
I wonder if this decision will usher in the end of Section 5 of the Voting Right Act. Section 5 was always dubious, but now that it is being used in such an indefensible manner, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the courts show it the door.
Anita Dunn, a senior White House aide, has boasted of how Barack Obama’s presidential campaign managed to “absolutely control” the press during the 2008 election.
The top campaign strategist who has shot to attention recently as President Obama’s main attack dog against Fox News, the conservative-leaning cable network, was speaking at a conference in the Dominican Republic in January.
“Very rarely did we communicate through the press anything that we didn’t absolutely control,” she said.
I’ll be interested to see how the press responds to this. What is their purported journalistic integrity worth to them?
Anyway, this gives us a new perspective on Anita Dunn’s attacks on Fox News. She says Fox News isn’t a real news agency, which probably means they weren’t able to control it.
UPDATE: Fox News says that the White House opened its war against them because they (Fox) had the temerity to fact-check their guest from the White House:
The video drew attention after Dunn kicked off a war of words with Fox News last Sunday, calling the network “opinion journalism masquerading as news.” The White House stopped providing guests to “Fox News Sunday” in August after host Chris Wallace fact-checked controversial assertions made by Tammy Duckworth, assistant secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Chris Wallace’s interview with Duckworth is here, and she certainly did get raked over the coals. Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen when you don’t have your facts straight?
To sum up: The real press is controlled. Reporting facts the White House doesn’t want people to hear is “opinion journalism masquerading as news”.
UPDATE: It’s not just Fox News’s allegation. Anita Dunn did specifically tie its boycott of Fox News to Wallace’s fact-check of Duckworth:
DUNN: . . . Major [Garrett] came to me when we didn’t include Chris.
KURTZ: Chris Wallace DUNN: In the round of Sunday shows, Chris Wallace from the Sunday shows. And I told Major quite honestly that we had told Chris Wallace that having fact-checked an administration guest on his show, something I’ve never seen a Sunday show do, and Howie, you can show me examples of where Sunday shows have fact-checked previous weeks’ guests.
Additionally, I wouldn’t really call what Wallace did “fact-checking”. A typical fact-check is done afterward, and doesn’t give the subject a chance to respond. What Wallace did would better be described as “asking questions”.
In a dramatic shift, the Chamber of Commerce announced Monday that it is throwing its support behind climate change legislation making its way through the U.S. Senate.
Only it didn’t.
An email press release announcing the change is a hoax, say Chamber officials.
Several media organizations fell for it.
A CNBC anchor interrupted herself mid-sentence Monday morning to announce that the network had “breaking news,” then cut away to reporter Hampton Pearson, who read from the fake press release. . .
In a story posted Monday morning, Reuters declared: “The Chamber of Commerce said on Monday it will no longer opposes climate change legislation, but wants the bill to include a carbon tax.”
Reuters updated the story to acknowledge the hoax, but it was too late: The Washington Post and the New York Times had already posted the fake story on their Web sites.
Despite the story being completely implausible, Reuters, CNBC, the Washington Post, and the New York Times all ran this story, and not one thought to fact-check it. I guess they really wanted to believe.
After moderating for a couple of weeks, public disapproval to Democratic health care reform is again near its high. A double-digit majority (54-42) oppose the plan that just passed the Senate Finance Committee.
A long-secret cost of Detroit elections — paying for endorsements — is generating controversy in the City Council election, even though most candidates defend the expense. . . Candidates who want three or four endorsements from prominent groups in the Nov. 3 election may have to shell out about $5,000.
It’s a system virtually unheard of in U.S. politics — where groups traditionally give money to candidates they like, not vice versa . . .
“There is a certain way things get done in Detroit,” said Dearing, a businessman making his third run for the council. “And this is part of that political process. It is part of our culture.”
How did such a system evolve?
Political consultant Eric Foster said the process thrives in Detroit because it’s a one-party city.
The last Republican mayor was Louis Miriani in 1957, so Foster said candidates are desperate to distinguish themselves by aligning themselves with powerful groups. Foster said he knows of no other city with the practice.
“In other places, you’d have a candidate trying to appeal to a certain group or certain agenda, but here everyone is a Democrat,” said Foster, of Urban Consulting of Detroit, which manages political campaigns.
What? One-party rule leads to corruption? Who knew?
I keep hearing that Glenn Beck is just a blowhard opinionist, contributing nothing but hot air. If that is true, why do we keep learning news from him? About Van Jones, about ACORN, about Anita Dunn . . . I mean, isn’t that the New York Times’s job? No? What a strange era we’re living in.
Guys like Glenn Beck are trying to break stories, while the NYT and its ilk are trying to conceal them. I’ve never watched Beck, but maybe I should start.
Hillary Clinton has been caught out “mis-speaking” again in a manner that suggests that she hasn’t learnt from past experiences of her globe-trotting, “lily-gilding” speeches. . .
According to the Sunday Life newspaper, during a speech she made to the Stormont parliament she said that Belfast’s landmark Europa Hotel was devastated by an explosion when she first stayed there in 1995. . .
However, the last Provisional IRA bomb to damage the Europa was detonated in 1993, two years before President Clinton and his wife checked in for the night.
The last time the Europa underwent renovations because of bomb blast damage was in January 1994, 22 months before the presidential entourage booked 110 rooms at the hotel.
Mrs Clinton told assembled politicians at Stormont: “When Bill and I first came to Belfast we stayed at the Europa Hotel … even though then there were sections boarded up because of damage from bombs.”
I was away back when this happened and forgot to blog it when I got back. A revealing incident with the Guardian:
The Guardian was forced to amend an article on past Nobel Peace Prize winners on its Web site on Friday after it omitted the names of Israel’s prize winners.
Following the announcement of US President Barack Obama’s winning the 2009 prize, an article written by the newspaper’s news editor Simon Rogers listed the names of all Nobel Peace prize winners since the award’s inception in 1909. However, all of Israel’s prize winners – Menachem Begin, Yizhak Rabin and Shimon Peres – were omitted.
In the 1978 entry, Menachem Begin’s name was missing, with only Egyptian president Anwar Sadat listed. The same error occurred in the 1994 entry with Yasser Arafat the only entry and Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres missing. . .
In a statement on Friday, the newspaper blamed the mistake on a “technical issue,” saying the names was accidently omitted.
A technical issue deleted all three Israeli winners, and only the three Israeli winners? Not buying it.
The mayor of Alabama’s largest city is facing a federal bribery trial that could drive him from office and send him to prison if he’s convicted.
Prosecutors say Birmingham Mayor Larry Langford took clothing, a Rolex watch and other bribes totaling some $235,000 while serving on the Jefferson County Commission. In exchange, they say Langford steered $7.1 million in county bond business to a political crony’s investment firm. . .
Langford says everything that changed hands were gifts between friends. He also claims his prosecution is part of a Republican scheme to target Democrats in Alabama.
The administration doesn’t want to do what’s necessary to win in Afghanistan because it sees it as a net political negative. Their efforts to try to come up with a national security justification for their craven inaction is growing increasingly pathetic:
It would be irresponsible to send more troops to Afghanistan until a legitimate and credible government is in place, the White House and top Democrats said Sunday.
White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said the most critical issue facing U.S. strategy is whether the Afghans can be an effective partner in destroying Al Qaeda safe havens and bringing stability to the region.
“It would be reckless to make a decision on U.S. troop levels if in fact you haven’t done a thorough analysis of whether in fact there’s an Afghan partner ready to fill that space that U.S. troops would create and become a true partner in governing,” Emanuel said in an interview Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
We can’t carry out the mission because Afghanistan’s recent election is disputed? What does one have to do with the other? Plus: we’ve now told the enemy that all they have to do to keep us out is to keep disputing the election!
Lamest. Excuse. Ever.
UPDATE: Defense Secretary Gates says the election dispute is no reason to wait:
Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Tuesday that the Obama administration cannot wait for the Afghan election to be resolved before making a decision on troop levels, appearing to be at odds with White House officials who have tied a decision on U.S. strategy to the resolution of the election and political stability.
Gates suggested the election would not have an immediate impact on the overall situation in the country.
He told reporters aboard his plane to Tokyo that the administration cannot “sit on our hands.”
So Keith Olbermann says that tea partiers are engaging in “political terrorism” and asks why they should be viewed any differently from Hezbollah or Hamas. Oh, I can see a few differences, such as the minor detail that Hamas and Hezbollah exist to kill innocent people and the tea parties are a peaceful protest group.
President Obama’s Nobel prize illustrates the folly of one of the president’s proposed tax “reforms”. It seems Obama wants to limit charitable deductions so that they apply only at the 28% tax rate even if you’re in the 35% tax rate. If Obama’s policy were already in effect, he would stand to lose 7% in taxes by giving the prize money to charity. That’s $98,000.
Why does the president want to discourage charitable giving anyway? What public policy justification could possibly be cited? Is it because private charities lessen the need for government largesse?
In the NYT’s article yesterday about the White House’s new war on Fox News, it mentioned that the White House cites favorably the St. Petersburg Times’s Truth-o-meter. Specifically, the White House mentions a Truth-o-meter purported debunking of a statement Glenn Beck made about “a White House staffer”. The White House was not specific as to which staffer, but the Truth-o-meter conveniently collects all its Glenn Beck evaluations on one page. Let’s take a look.
ASIDE: I have never watched Glenn Beck, other than a few clips that have gone around the internet, so I have no opinion about his general truthfulness. In fact, I never even heard of Glenn Beck before a few weeks ago. However, I do have an opinion of the general truthfulness of the White House, so I did have some idea what I might find.
I’ll assume that the St. Petersburg Times can be trusted to quote Beck accurately and in context, which might or might not be justified. I’ll set two statements aside because I’m not familiar with the facts. The others are:
Beck says that 45% of doctors say they will quit if health care reform passes. This is not quite true. In fact, 45% of doctors say they will consider quitting, which is an important distinction. The Truth-o-meter calls the statement false, which of course it is. They would seem to be right in this case, until you note that the Truth-o-meter uses a whole spectrum for its evaluations, not simple binary. In light of that, they should have said something to the effect of “not quite true”. (They also raise issues with the IBD/TIPP poll’s methodology. Those issues seem far-fetched — TIPP is a well-established scientific poller — but in any case, it’s hardly fair to park such issues at Glenn Beck’s door.)
Beck says that Van Jones, the former White House green jobs czar, is a self-avowed communist. He certainly used to be. But the Truth-o-meter calls the statement “barely true“. Why? Because he didn’t prove that Van Jones is still a communist, and has spoken favorably about exploiting the business world. Here, the Truth-o-meter has ventured into the realm of opinion. In my book, if you publicly call yourself a communist, a nazi, or an Islamist, we are justified in assuming you still are unless and until you publicly disavow those views. The Truth-o-meter makes no suggestion that he has.
Beck says that Van Jones signed a truther petition. This is entirely true. The Truth-o-meter calls it half true, because the petition’s most incendiary claims were made by insinuation rather than outright, and one sentence taken from Beck’s discussion suggests that its claims were made definitively.
Beck claims that John Holdren, the White House science czar, proposed forced abortions and sterilization to control population. I guess it depends on what you mean by “proposed”. In his book he discusses those schemes, among others (such as an armed world government to enforce population limits). Some schemes get his nod of approval and some do not. According to the Truth-o-meter, the abortion and sterilization schemes did not get the nod of approval, and on that basis, they call Beck’s statement not only false, but “pants on fire“. Apparently, the Truth-o-meter is so confident that “propose” means “advocate” and not merely “consider” that they move this statement from true all the way past technically false to outright lie. The New Oxford American Dictionary disagrees; it defines “propose” to mean “put forward (an idea or plan) for consideration or discussion by others”, which is exactly what Holdren did.
To summarize, of the four Glenn Beck statements, one is slightly wrong and the other three are true. The Truth-o-meter rates them “false”, “barely true”, “half true”, and “pants on fire”. Clearly, the Truth-o-meter is useless. No wonder the White House likes it.
President Barack Obama is naming George D. Mulligan, Jr. as Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of the White House Military Office (WHMO).
Mulligan replaces his former boss, White House Military Office director Louis Caldera, who resigned on May 8 after the so-called “Scare Force One” incident of April 27, which had an Air Force One aircraft flying very low over Manhattan for the purposes of new photographs of the plane, with little notice given to thousands of understandably concerned if not scared citizens, visions of 9/11 in their heads.
From 1994 until 2004, Mulligan – a Navy officer from 1986 until 1994 — served in various positions within the White House Military Office.
This doesn’t seem to correct the root problem that led to the Scare Force One incident, which is the Obama administration’s decision to change the position from a career military officer to a political appointment.
Anita Dunn — White House Communication Director, wife of President Obama’s lawyer, and front person in the White House’s new war on Fox News — says that Mao Tse-Tung is one of her favorite political philosophers. For the record, Mao is history’s worst monster.
In an e-mail message, Ms. Dunn said, “My source for the Mao quote was actually the late Lee Atwater, either in an article or bio I read after the 1988 election. Now that I’ve revealed this I hope I don’t get Keith Olbermann angry with me. Let it be noted that I also quoted Mother Teresa, but no one is accusing me of being a saint!”
The speech she gave was a high school commencement address. Ms. Dunn says that the line about Mao and Mother Teresa was intended to be ironic – neither was a political philosopher – and that she used it simply to illustrate a larger point about the importance of challenging the conventional wisdom.
Fine. But neither of these explain why Dunn called Mao one of her favorite political philosophers. (Did Lee Atwater call Mao one of his favorite political philosophers? I doubt it.) Explain that away, if you can. Until then you’ve rebutted nothing.
Shepard Fairey, artist of the famous Obama Hope poster, admits he lied to the court in the copyright infringement lawsuit resulting from the poster:
In a strange twist to an already complicated legal situation, artist Shepard Fairey admitted today to legal wrongdoing in his ongoing battle with the Associated Press.
Fairey said in a statement issued late Friday that he knowingly submitted false images and deleted others in the legal proceedings, in an attempt to conceal the fact that the AP had correctly identified the photo that Fairey had used as a reference for his “Hope” poster of then-Sen. Barack Obama. . .
In February, the AP claimed that Fairey violated copyright laws when he used one of their images as the basis for the poster. In response, the artist filed a lawsuit against the AP, claiming that he was protected under fair use. Fairey also claimed that he used a different photo as the inspiration for his poster.
After Fairey’s admission, a spokesman for the Associated Press issued a statement saying that Fairey “sued the AP under false pretenses by lying about which AP photograph he used.”
Fairey said that his lawyers have taken the steps to amend his court pleadings to reflect the fact that “the AP is correct about which photo I used as a reference and that I was mistaken.”
Fairey’s counsel has now admitted that Fairey tried to destroy documents that would have revealed which image he actually used. Fairey’s counsel has also admitted that he created fake documents as part of his effort to conceal which photo was the source image, including hard copy printouts of an altered version of the Clooney Photo and fake stencil patterns of the Hope and Progress posters.
Incidentally, it seems that to those who have been paying attention to the case, it was obvious all along that Fairey was lying.
UPDATE: This guy is a real piece of work. Not being into the underground art scene, I didn’t know that before the Hope poster, Fairey was best known for, shall we say, unsanctioned public art. But he doesn’t want graffiti on his own property.
A new Fox News poll finds that 62% trust General McChrystal more than President Obama to decide the next step in Afghanistan; only 22% trust Obama more. Even Democrats trust McChrystal more than Obama, by a 45-36 margin.
The public is evenly divided on the job Obama is doing in regard to the economy (49-48 disapproval), Afghanistan (43-41 disapproval), and Iran (44-43 approval). A majority disapprove of the job he is doing in regard to health care (50-42).
According to an article in Popular Science, scientists have succeeded in creating magnetic monopoles (that is, magnets with only one end). Monopoles have been the province of science fiction for so long, it’s staggering to think that they’re real now.
When MSNBC is caught promulgating fabricated quotes, this is all the retraction you can expect:
Limbaugh denies he said quote, ‘slavery has its merits,’ it was a quote that appeared on MSNBC this past Monday and Tuesday. MSNBC attributed that quote to a football player who was opposed to Limbaugh’s NFL bid. However, we have been unable to verify that quote independently. So, just to clarify.
In order to deal with the problem of aggressive dogs, Denmark considers killing all mongrels. Any dog not registered in the national stud book would be put to death.
Hugo Chavez’s totalitarian revolution marches on. His latest is education reform, which places the entire education system under his control. In addition to ensuring that all education is rooted in “Bolivarian doctrine”, it also helps Chavez stamp out the embers of Venezuela’s free press:
The new education law also lets the government suspend media outlets that affect the public’s “mental health” or cause “terror” among children.
Rush Limbaugh’s quest to own the St. Louis Rams have dredged up a variety of supposedly racist things that Limbaugh supposedly said. All the worst ones have been shown to fabrications, but there’s one thing that he really did say. In 2003, Limbaugh said that Donovan McNabb was overrated, and that was because “the media has been very desirous that a black quarterback can do well.”
Is that statement racist? It’s not racist to say that McNabb was overrated. It’s hardly even arguable but that McNabb was mediocre back in 2003. So why was he overrated? The Eagles were not a top team nor were they a New York team, the usual reason for players to be overrated. Limbaugh’s theory seems possible but unlikely.
I say it’s unlikely because people don’t all do things for the same reason. No doubt a non-zero number of people wanted McNabb to succeed because he is black. But I also have no doubt that the number was nowhere near 100%. How many was it? Without a poll, it’s impossible to say. Anyway, who cares?
Why was this theory called racist? Apparently, people are offended by Limbaugh’s implication that people might adopt a view for racial reasons. But in 2009, we have a large group of people who claim that the only reason anyone opposes President Obama is because he is black.
Other than a change in players, the Limbaugh theory and the Carter-Garofalo-Krugman-Dowd-Murtha-etc-etc theory are pretty similar. So why do so many people claim to find the former theory offensive but the latter theory self-evident?
Jay Nordlinger writes: “A Marxist is someone who loves humanity in groups of 1 million or more.”
I get his meaning, but historically speaking, Marxists are those who kill humanity in groups of 4 million or more. In some cases much more. (Okay, Pol Pot killed only about 2 million, but give him a break; he only had access to about 10 million.)
Senators diverted $2.6 billion in funds in a defense spending bill to pet projects largely at the expense of accounts that pay for fuel, ammunition and training for U.S. troops, including those fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to an analysis.
Among the 778 such projects, known as earmarks, packed into the bill: $25 million for a new World War II museum at the University of New Orleans and $20 million to launch an educational institute named after the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat.
Remember a few years ago when the left was crying crocodile tears about how the military was being denied the body armor and up-armored Humvees they needed? Those voices are strangely silent now. One might get the impression that their concern for the military was all just a show.
Michael Wilbon, Washington Post sports columnist, writes:
I don’t listen to [Rush Limbaugh’s] show because his comments about people of color anger and offend me, and I’m not easily offended. I’m not going to try and give specific examples of things he has said over the years; I screwed up already doing that, repeating a quote attributed to Limbaugh (about slavery) that he has told me he simply did not say and does not reflect his feelings. I take him at his word.
But Limbaugh has long history of the same insults and race baiting, to the point of declaring he hoped the president of the United States, a black man, fails.
Limbaugh’s long history of racist comments offend him, but he can’t produce a single example of one, nor will he even try. Just trust him.
Oh wait, maybe he will try and given one example. Limbaugh wanted the president to fail. Obviously only a racist could want an extreme leftist president to fail in his efforts to remake the country. If that’s racism, then I’m sure Limbaugh does indeed have quite a long history of it.
First thought: I guess no one reads George Orwell any more. Or watches Babylon 5 for that matter.
Second thought: Suppose we did create a government agency dedicated to Goodism. How long would it be before it was perverted from mere foolishness into some ACORN-like enterprise? I’ll bet it would happen on day one.
BONUS SNARK: This apparently is the brainchild of Dennis Kucinich, so I’m sure it would take a firm stand against chemtrails and space-based mind-control weapons.
The Democrats have decided to counter criticism of their health care ambitions by calling their critics liars. Now, one might think that when you call someone a liar, you have an obligation to say what they are lying about. But sometimes that can be a problem, because (1) they aren’t actually lying, and/or (2) you don’t want people to listen to them, so discussing their actual criticisms is counterproductive. In that case, you keep your allegations of lying non-specific. At least, that’s what you do if you have no decency.
Case in point: The Democratic National Committee is anticipating an ad campaign from health insurers opposing the Democratic health care schemes, and they don’t want anyone to listen to them. So they send out a mailer calling the insurers liars. Randy Barnett posts the letter and notes that its allegations are entirely nonspecific. They accuse the health insurance industry of lying, but don’t identify a single lie specifically, much less give a refutation of that lie.
Then mailer also links to a DNC video:
Let’s take this apart. Most of the video features one guy, Wendell Potter, from the Center for Media and Democracy (that’s a left-wing group, in case you couldn’t guess) telling CNN and MSNBC that the health insurance industry is a bunch of liars.
Unlike the mailer, the video does identify one specific claim: “Congress is proposing over one hundred billion in cuts to Medicare Advantage.” This is a peculiar kind of lie, in that it is absolutely true. (In fact, they could have said over $120 billion in cuts.) The rebuttal is no rebuttal at all: “THE TRUTH: The insurance lobby opposes reforming Medicare Advantage because they enjoy huge profits from the program. They’re just scaring seniors.”
They also take on the PriceWaterhouseCoopers report, sort of. Which is to say that they splash a “BOGUS” stamp on it, and rebut it with “THE TRUTH: The report is totally ‘bogus’.” Well then, if you can write “bogus” on it, I guess it must be bogus.
For the last fifteen seconds of the one-and-a-half minute video, they include vague sentence fragments from the AARP and an MSNBC talking head, and a single word (“deceptive”) from a Washington Post article. Obviously, the Post article is the one that we’re supposed to find credible, but a little bit of digging shows that the Post article is not an article at all, but a post on Ezra Klein’s blog. The substance of Klein’s criticism is that PriceWaterhouseCoopers once did a study for the tobacco industry, and its current study assumes that reform will not realize any savings.
So that’s it: one guy nonspecifically attacking the health insurance industry to credulous hosts on CNN and MSNBC, two non-rebuttal rebuttals, a couple of sentence fragments, and a single word from a Washington Post article that isn’t actually a Washington Post article and that hinges on the supposed dishonesty of assuming that the Democratic plan will not cut costs (an assumption with which 79% of the public agrees). It is on this basis that the Democratic National Committee accuses the health insurance industry of lying.
Lying is bad. Dishonestly accusing others of lying is despicable. Dishonestly accusing others of lying without even saying what they supposedly lied about; I’m not sure I even have a word for that.
New from the Onion: “Obama to Enter Diplomatic Talks With Raging Wildfire”. I thought the best line was: “President pulling firefighters away from the scene as a sign of goodwill”.
When the CBO scored the Baucus plan, it found that it did not widen the deficit, under the assumption (among others) of drastic cuts in Medicare reimbursements. The CBO report was skeptical that the cuts would actually happen:
These projections assume that the proposals are enacted and remain unchanged throughout the next two decades, which is often not the case for major legislation. For example, the sustainable growth rate (SGR) mechanism governing Medicare’s payments to physicians has frequently been modified (either through legislation or administrative action) to avoid reductions in those payments. . . The long-term budgetary impact could be quite different if those provisions were ultimately changed or not fully implemented.
The CBO’s skepticism was with good reason. Democrats have alreadyintroduced the bill that would boost Medicare reimbursements. So the plan that the committee asked the CBO to score was a lie. There’s no other word for it.
Anyway, with the new legislation, we’re looking at hundreds of billions in new spending and new deficits.
POSTSCRIPT: It will be entertaining to watch the Democrats waive “PAYGO” for this thing; proving that PAYGO is a complete sham.
The superintendent of the Burlington Township School District is standing by its Obama praise song:
The superintendent of a New Jersey school system where elementary school students were videotaped singing the praises of President Obama stood behind his employees Wednesday evening, saying the principal and teacher did nothing wrong — despite growing anger from parents.
“There was nothing systematic or indoctrinating about this innocent classroom activity,” Burlington Township Superintendent of Schools Christopher Manno said during a school board meeting. “There was no intention on the part of the teacher to make any political statement or promote a political agenda.”
Manno specifically defended the school’s principal and the teacher who led the activity.
To do something this raw, Manno must feel very secure in his job. However, the state of New Jersey also says it is investigating.
In the latest ratings for cable news stations, CNN and MSNBC not only fell well behind Fox, but also behind Headline News in the 25-54 demographic. (I haven’t been paying attention; when did Headline News stop being a joke? Or did it?) Maybe stuff like this is why.
The Obama administration’s effort to “reset” relations with Russia and its decision to renege on missile defense in Europe are finally starting to pay dividends, with Russia beginning to cooperate with the west on the Iran problem.
Just kidding!
Secretary of State Clinton visited Moscow, but Putin wouldn’t see her. (He was coincidentally out of town.) But he did warn against western powers trying to “frighten the Iranians” and said that talk of sanctions are premature.
Chris Matthews fantasizes on-the-air about Rush Limbaugh’s murder. Isn’t there supposed to be a part of your brain that keeps you from expressing every evil thought that pops into your head? I guess Matthews doesn’t have that part.
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the CBO, takes a look at the horrific taxes in the Baucus bill:
Most astounding of all is what this Congress is willing to do to struggling middle-class families. The bill would impose nearly $400 billion in new taxes and fees. Nearly 90% of that burden will be shouldered by those making $200,000 or less.
It might not appear that way at first, because the dollars are collected via a 40% tax on sales by insurers of “Cadillac” policies, fees on health insurers, drug companies and device manufacturers, and an assortment of odds and ends.
But the economics are clear. These costs will be passed on to consumers by either directly raising insurance premiums, or by fueling higher health-care costs that inevitably lead to higher premiums. Consumers will pay the excise tax on high-cost plans. The Joint Committee on Taxation indicates that 87% of the burden would fall on Americans making less than $200,000, and more than half on those earning under $100,000.
Industry fees are even worse because Democrats chose to make these fees nondeductible. This means that insurance companies will have to raise premiums significantly just to break even. American families will bear a burden even greater than the $130 billion in fees that the bill intends to collect. According to my analysis, premiums will rise by as much as $200 billion over the next 10 years—and 90% will again fall on the middle class.
Senate Democrats are also erecting new barriers to middle-class ascent. A family of four making $54,000 would pay $4,800 for health insurance, with the remainder coming from subsidies. If they work harder and raise their income to $66,000, their cost of insurance rises by $2,800. In other words, earning another $12,000 raises their bill by $2,800—a marginal tax rate of 23%.
87% of the burden will fall on those earning less than $200k, the people on whom President Obama promised not to increase taxes “a single dime”. I don’t think a president has broken a central campaign promise so thoroughly since Woodrow Wilson “kept us out of war”. (And just wait, cap and trade is still on the back burner.)
Let’s suppose that a union owned two major auto companies and also controlled the labor for a third company that competes with the two it owns. What would you predict that the union would do?
If you guessed the union would stick it to the third company, you’re right. The UAW is now favoring GM and Chrysler over Ford.
In upstate New York, an Eagle Scout has been suspended from high school for three weeks because he had a pocket knife in a camping kit he kept in his car.
UPDATE: The superintendent will not bend. Also, it seems that the school district’s purported zero-tolerance policy doesn’t actually appear in its rule book.
Only 31 percent of Pennsylvania voters believe Democratic Sen. Arlen Specter should be re-elected, and 59 percent believe it’s time to give someone else a chance, a state poll released today shows.
Specter’s numbers are “staggering,” said pollster Jim Lee, president of Susquehanna Polling and Research. An incumbent typically is vulnerable if fewer than 40 percent approve of his or her re-election, Lee said. . . “When I see a re-elect in the low 30s, that’s … near fatal,” Lee said.
A Susquehanna Poll in February found 38 percent of Pennsylvanians believed Specter deserved to be re-elected.
UPDATE: In the latest Rasmussen poll, Specter continues to trail Toomey, 40-45.
Various media outlets, including CNN and MSNBC, are attributing bogus racist quotes to Rush Limbaugh. This story is all over the place, but Gateway Pundit seems to have the best synopsis.
Some times it’s said that a story must have been “too good to check”, but I don’t think this fits into that category. This one must have been “too good to think critically about for even a moment”. If anyone had done so, they would have realized that if Limbaugh had really said these things, his career would have been over back when he said them.
BONUS: Ed Driscoll thinks the quotes came off Wikiquote (a cousin to Wikipedia). ‘Nuff said. (Via Instapundit.)
POSTSCRIPT: If you want to see a sleazy sorta-retraction-but-not-really, check out CNN’s Rick Sanchez here. Sanchez tells his audience that Limbaugh denies the particular quote, but adds that Limbaugh has also said a lot of other similar stuff. He doesn’t elaborate on what that might be.
UPDATE: Here’s CNN’s Rick Sanchez making stuff up (cue to 1:00):
Also, Mark Steyn summarizes the new script for race carding:
Step One: You can’t say that. It’s racist.
So you don’t. Next:
Step Two: You’re using “code language”.
As I always say, “code language” is code language for “I’m inventing what you really meant to say because the actual quote doesn’t quite do the job for me.” Still, you steer clear of “code language.” So then:
Step Three: We’ll just concoct it out of whole cloth, and, after running for a week with “Slavery Advocate Wants Medal of Honor for MLK Killer”, our fact-checkers will confirm the accuracy of that statement by citing something you said about Donovan McNabb or Obama’s economic policy. Close enough.
If they said, “Rush is a bit bombastic and we think it would be a distraction from football,” then there would be no cause to complain. But they didn’t say that. They said the man was a racist and an advocate for slavery, which is a lie. They created a division, and then complained that Limbaugh is divisive. And in the process they have reinforced the stereotype of conservatives as racists.
It is sad when lies succeed and the truth does not. It is outrageous that these race-baiting bigots in the sports media managed to successfully slander a man.
As President Obama mulls the military’s request for a big troop build-up in Afghanistan, Americans have swung in favor of such a move, according to a new IBD/TIPP Poll.
The survey of 927 adults found that a plurality of 48% favors sending more troops and resources to Afghanistan. That’s a sharp reversal from September, when Americans opposed the idea, 55%-35%.
Robert Reich is a former cabinet secretary under Bill Clinton, a professor of public policy at Berkeley, a political commentator, and an adviser to President Obama. In a talk in 2007, he explained what an honest candidate should say about health care:
Young, healthy people need to pay more.
If you’re very old, it’s too expensive to keep you alive a few more months, “so we’re going to let you die.”
There will be less medical innovation.
Therefore, “you are probably not going to live that much longer than your parents.”
The remarks seem to be fully in context. See for yourself:
I guess we should appreciate Reich for his honesty. Certainly we should appreciate him for nothing else.
UPDATE: A commenter points out something I forgot to mention. The worst thing about this clip isn’t even Reich; it’s his audience. Where you should hear horrified gasps, you hear cheers instead. What is wrong with these people?
UPDATE: Reich claims that his remarks are being taken out of context. But when he explains the context, it’s exactly the context that is clear in the video: what a politician would say if he told the truth (as Reich sees it) rather than what people want to hear. In fact he affirms that the things he said in the video are “what everyone knows to be the truth”.
Apparently, Reich cannot believe that people could be offended by what he really said, so they must be misinformed as to the context. Well, Mr. Reich, believe it.
The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.
Today’s published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.
The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.
The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.
The good news, such as it is, is that the injunction was lifted today. (ASIDE: The affair had to do with a scandal involving dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast.) So, should we be mollified that the British press can be prevented from reporting the proceedings of a public session of the House of Commons for only one day?
When browsing the federal budget this morning (I know, I know), I discovered a line-item I’ve heard nothing about: “Repeal LIFO method of accounting for inventories”. This is a tax increase on business (estimated to collect billions each year) brought about by a change in how business are required to account for the inventory. It’s technical, but not too difficult to understand.
LIFO stands for “last-in, first-out”. In computer science terms, it means that you may treat your inventory as a stack, rather than a queue. Consequently, the cost-basis for figuring the value of an item of inventory sold is the current replacement cost of that item. For example, let’s suppose you buy a widget for $10 and you turn around and sell it for $12. Under LIFO, you pay taxes on your $2 profit. It doesn’t matter if you happen to have a another widget in inventory that you bought when the price was $8.
In contrast, under FIFO (“first-in, first-out”), you are deemed to be selling the old $8 widget first. That means that you pay tax on $4, and you now have a $10 widget in inventory. When inflation is high (as it seems likely soon to be), the difference between LIFO and FIFO can be substantial.
The LIFO scheme makes sense. Let’s suppose you buy a widget for $10 and you turn around and sell it for $10. Your business has accomplished nothing; you’re back in exactly the same state as you were before. LIFO accounting respects that reality, you pay taxes on zero. Under FIFO, however, you need to look at what you have in inventory. If you had an $8 widget in inventory, you pay taxes on a $2 profit that doesn’t exist.
Unfair tax increases are no big surprise. Here’s the surprising thing: I’ve never heard anything about this. And it’s not just me. Having discovered this, I googled it and found a lot of stories in trade journals but not a single one from the general press. The closest thing I could find in the general press is a Fox News article from 2006 about a LIFO-repeal proposal that ultimately was defeated.
PriceWaterhouseCoopers has done an audit of the Baucus health care plan. The results aren’t pretty. Neither are they surprising:
Key Findings
Health reform could have a significant impact on the cost of private health insurance coverage.
There are four provisions included in the Senate Finance Committee proposal that could increase private health insurance premiums above the levels projected under current law:
Insurance market reforms coupled with a weak coverage requirement,
A new tax on high-cost health care plans,
Cost-shifting as a result of cuts to Medicare, and
New taxes on several health care sectors.
The overall impact of these provisions will be to increase the cost of private insurance coverage for individuals, families, and businesses above what these costs would be in the absence of reform.
On average, the cost of private health insurance coverage will increase:
26 percent between 2009 and 2013 under the current system and by 40 percent during this same period if these four provisions are implemented.
50 percent between 2009 and 2016 under the current system and by 73 percent during this same period if these four provisions are implemented.
79 percent between 2009 and 2019 under the current system and by 111 percent during this same period if these four provisions are implemented.
In short, the Baucus plan makes a bad problem worse. The audit also observed that by 2019 most health plans (even the most basic ones) would face cost increases sufficient to subject them to the “Cadillac plan” tax.
UPDATE: PriceWaterhouseCoopers is the largest and most respected of the auditing firms. But now they’ve been marked as enemies of the people:
Democrats and their allies scrambled on Monday to knock down a new industry-funded study forecasting that Senate legislation, over time, will add thousands of dollars to the cost of a typical policy. “Distorted and flawed,” said White House spokeswoman Linda Douglass. “Fundamentally dishonest,” said AARP’s senior policy strategist, John Rother. “A hatchet job,” said a spokesman for Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont.
The stimulus package is a failure, and Democrats are worried that “Blame Bush” won’t cut it for much longer:
Alarmed by the rising jobless rate, Democrats are scrambling to “do something” to create jobs. You may have thought that was supposed to be the point of February’s $780 billion stimulus plan, and indeed it was. White House economists Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein estimated at the time that the spending blowout would keep the jobless rate below 8%.
The nearby chart compares the job estimates the two economists used to help sell the stimulus to the American public to the actual jobless rate so far this year. The current rate is 9.8% and is expected to rise or stay high well into the election year of 2010. Rarely in politics do we get such a clear and rapid illustration of a policy failure.
This explains why political panic is beginning to set in, and various panicky ideas to create more jobs are suddenly in play.
Just to help you remember which side it is that repeatedly questions the other’s patriotism; here’s the Democratic National Committee:
The Republican Party has thrown in its lot with the terrorists – the Taliban and Hamas this morning – in criticizing the President for receiving the Nobel Peace prize.
The Library of Congress has concluded that Honduras’s removal of Manuel Zelaya was constitutional, not a coup. To justify its continued efforts to punish Honduras, the State Department cites a legal memo from Harold Koh, its top lawyer. But the thing is, Koh’s memo is secret. Even members of Congress can’t see it.
The desire to move beyond the Zelaya era was almost universal in our meetings. Almost.
In a day packed with meetings, we met only one person in Honduras who opposed Mr. Zelaya’s ouster, who wishes his return, and who mystifyingly rejects the legitimacy of the November elections: U.S. Ambassador Hugo Llorens.
In order to cut the astounding costs of health care in Massachusetts (the model for the Democratic plan, if you recall), the state will limit patients’ choices of hospitals and specialists. You can’t have everyone picking the best hospitals, you see.
But don’t worry, it’s being done by a commission, not a panel.
Nancy Pelosi proposes a VAT. But this can’t happen; the president promised as much. Does Pelosi think the president will break his promise? Where would she get such an idea?
Of the U.S. presidents who were alive after the peace prize was first awarded in 1901, the worst two were Woodrow Wilson (also the worst overall) and Jimmy Carter. Both were awarded the peace prize. Barack Obama is making a strong run for third (or even second), so perhaps the award is appropriate in a sense.
Brad Woodhouse, the DNC’s communications director says:
The Republican Party has thrown in its lot with the terrorists – the Taliban and Hamas this morning – in criticizing the President for receiving the Nobel Peace prize.
Point one: I guess Mr. Woodhouse didn’t get the memo. The Taliban are no threat now.
Point two: The idea that mocking the Nobel selection (or celebrating Chicago’s evasion of the Olympics) is tantamount to supporting terrorism is too ridiculous to bother rebutting. But, I will remark that — as with their allegations of racism — every time they make this sort of argument it diminishes their effect.
Point three: Once again, we see which side is comfortable impugning the other side’s patriotism.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) has blacklisted WTAD radio in Quincy, Illinois. Their offense? Reporting the news. In particular, they revealed his plans to come to town:
A spokesman for U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) says the senator’s office will no longer send media information to Quincy’s oldest radio station because the station decided to let the public know he was coming to town. . .
Durbin, the assistant majority leader of the Senate, has been an outspoken critic of health care town hall meetings, said he didn’t want to get a “sucker-punch” from constituents and opted to have a session in a conference room before an invited few and a handful of reporters.
Posted by K. Crary 
The nearby chart compares the job estimates the two economists used to help sell the stimulus to the American public to the actual jobless rate so far this year. The current rate is 9.8% and is expected to rise or stay high well into the election year of 2010. Rarely in politics do we get such a clear and rapid illustration of a policy failure.
Internet Scofflaw 
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