The Hillary Show Begins

SNL perfectly captures the spirit of the Hill and Bill show going forward as they imagine the "low key" announcement of her candidacy that did in fact happen Sunday:



(H/T Legal Insurrection)

Yes, there is the sense of entitlement, the reference to the e-mail scandals, the utter lack of sincerity, and much more. Hats off to SNL for a pitch perfect skit. And the moment at 1:12 when Hillary tries to "look natural" is quite good.

Of course, the Onion's take on the announcement was equally as good:

After several seconds spent sitting motionless and glaring directly into the camera, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reportedly began Sunday’s video announcing her 2016 presidential bid by warning the nation not to fuck this up for her. “Listen up, assholes, ’cause I’m only saying this once: I’ve worked way too goddamn hard to let you morons blow this thing for me,” said Clinton, repeatedly jabbing her index finger toward the viewers at home while adding that if they thought she was going to simply sit back and watch them dick her over like they did in 2008, they were out of their fucking minds. “Seriously, don’t you dare even think about it. If you shitheads can just get in line, we can breeze through this whole campaign in 19 months and be done with it. Or, if you really want, we can do this the hard way. Because make no mistake, I’m not fucking around. Got it?” Clinton then ended her announcement by vowing to fight for a better future for all working-class families like the one she grew up in.

Comedy, but not far off the mark, I think. Hillary, as I pointed out below, intends to stay as far away from real press as possible, preferably until the coronation. We can expect a campaign of buzz words - empowerment, families, middle class - and no substance.

This from Roger Simon's post, No Questions, Please: Hillary Announces on Twitter:

America rejoice! A multi-millionairess serial liar married to a multi-millionaire serial adulterer has just announced for the presidency of our country to save the middle class from impoverishment! (Or was it “income inequality”?) (Or was it “Chelsea Clinton in a Gucci dress, Mateo New York bracelet, Cartier bracelet, Garland Collection ring, Halleh ring,” as appears in this month’s Elle?)

Better tell Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky, not to mention Gil Scott-Heron. His song got it wrong. The Revolution is going to be televised (until we’re blue in the face) and it will start in tony Chappaqua on a posh gated estate with pool and tennis court, guarded by the Secret Service with its own (exceptionally) private email system, infinite closed-circuit video surveillance and who knows what else?

Is everyone throwing up yet? Not even Maureen Dowd is buying. Oh, well, American “liberalism” has been screwing the lower classes for the last fifty years. Why stop now?

But maybe we are reaching a new low. It couldn’t be more obvious why Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy on Twitter and a disingenuous video. She’ll do anything not to take questions. Her last encounter with the press, over her vanishing emails, made Richard Nixon seem like Diogenes. In fact, Nixon is Diogenes compared to Hillary. Imagine how the press would have reacted if Nixon had lied about being under fire in Bosnia… or anywhere. Or had claimed that “the great leftwing conspiracy” was the cause of “Pat’s affairs.” (Well, scratch that.)

Hillary is also probably the most immoral person to run for president. Anyone who could tell the father of Tyrone Woods, the Navy SEAL murdered in Benghazi, that they would “get the man who made that video” at his son’s own funeral is capable of just about anything. . . .

And from Maureen Dowd:

Her paranoia, secrecy, scandals and disappearing act with emails from her time as secretary of state have inspired a cascade of comparisons with Nixon. . . .

She wants to avoid the coronation vibe this time, a member of her orbit told Politico’s Glenn Thrush, even though Martin O’Malley, a potential rival, objected that “the presidency of the United States is not some crown to be passed between two families” and The Onion reported her campaign slogan is “I deserve this.”

Hillary’s team plans to schedule low-key events where she can mingle with actual voters. “I think it’s important, and Hillary does, too, that she go out there as if she’s never run for anything before and establish her connection with the voters,” Bill Clinton told Town & Country for a cover story.

The Big Dog, who got off his leash last time in South Carolina, said he will start small as well, noting: “My role should primarily be as a backstage adviser to her until we get much, much closer to the election.”

Democratic strategists and advisers told The Washington Post’s Anne Gearan and Dan Balz that “the go-slow, go-small strategy” plays to her strengths, “allowing her to meet voters in intimate settings where her humor, humility and policy expertise can show through.”

As the old maxim goes, if you can fake humility, you’ve got it made. . . .

Instead of a chilly, scripted, entitled policy wonk, as in 2008, Hillary plans to be a warm, spontaneous, scrappy fighter for average Americans. Instead of a woman campaigning like a man, as in 2008, she will try to stir crowds with the idea of being the first woman president. Instead of haughtily blowing off the press, as in 2008, she will make an effort to play nice.

It’s a do-or-die remodeling, like when you put a new stainless steel kitchen in a house that doesn’t sell. . . .

Now, after 25 years on the national stage, Hillary is still hitting the reset button on her image, this time projecting herself as a warm, loving grandmother.

Politico, for its part, has already started posting Hillary campaign releases as if they are actual article. From their latest, we learn that Hillary is on a "1,000 mile road trip" to Iowa, making "unplanned" stops along the way (read "no press waiting") and in Iowa, to participate in a "series of small, private events," (read "no press invited.") The campaign is careful to point out that this road trip "was her own idea." What a woman of the people.

Lastly, this from Instapundit: "My question for Hillary, shamelessly stolen from a tweet I can’t find now: Do the underage girls held as sex slaves on Jeffrey Epstein’s private island that Bill visited feel “empowered” by Hillary’s candidacy?"

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Hillary's 2016 Campaign - Silence Is Golden

For decades, Hillary Clinton has had her entire life scripted. She has existed in a world insulated by handlers and managers and “her people,” all of whom are employed for the overarching purpose of mediating her engagement with the calamitous world “out there.” Yet every time the bubble is pricked, and we no longer have to see Hillary Clinton through limousine glass darkly, we rediscover her vices — her obsessive secretiveness, her arrogance, her shrewish treatment even of those closest to her — and the unmistakable fact that she is simply not equipped to deal with the world unmediated.

Hillary Clinton wants to run a Truman Show campaign. But what the last six years have made incontrovertibly clear is that you can’t run a Truman Show presidency.

Ian Tuttle, National Review, 10 April 2015

The Hillary 2016 campaign will begin tomorrow, not with a grand celebration, a speech and a press briefing, but a tweet, a Facebook posting, and a video. Not invited will be the press. This woman is treating the press like pure kryptonite at the moment, and if early indications are accurate, she will be doing that throughout the campaign. This from Hot Air, quoting the NYDN:

But Hillary Rodham Clinton is going small — real small. When the presumed Democratic front-runner announces her 2016 bid in the coming days, expect a Facebook post, a video, maybe some tweets. Then it’s off on the trail to meet one-on-one and in small groups with voters in the early states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada.

The approach — described by Democratic strategists and advisers familiar with her plans — is intended to address some of the key shortcomings of Clinton’s 2008 run for the White House, when she often came off as flat and overly scripted before large crowds. The go-slow, go-small strategy, these advisers say, plays to her strengths, allowing her to meet voters in intimate settings where her humor, humility and policy expertise can show through.

What her message to those voters will be is an open question. Many supporters agree she needs a ready answer for why she wants to be president, other than that she thinks she would be good at it.

A Facebook post, a video, and maybe a few tweets? That’s certainly a social-media strategy for a campaign, but not a campaign as a whole. Even the plans for the actual campaigning look excessively modest for a modern presidential campaign — a few one-on-ones, a few small groups. The woman who made a fortune off of giving big speeches at $300,000 a pop suddenly wants the smallest venues possible.

Why? It’s not so much that Hillary comes off “flat and overly scripted before large crowds.” She’s made millions speaking before large crowds. It’s that she can’t keep the press out of large crowds once she starts making those kinds of appearances as a candidate. Her speaking tours forbid press coverage and any videotaping; even the transcripts have to be given to her at the end of the speech. Team Hillary is so afraid of media questioning that they’re scaling down the announcement to duck it.

I can well imagine Hillary, whose e-mail scandal is potentially criminal and far far from over, will attempt to control the press to a degree far beyond which even Obama managed in 2007 -- and, that said, to Obama's credit, he did take a few tough interviews during that time. Even her UN presser on the e-mail scandal was as tightly controlled as could be managed -- a foreign press corps with at least one seemingly planted question. She is going to try and coast through the primaries while keeping any unfriendly press excluded.

Will it work? Given that the Democrats seem to have no other options, probably. One thing is for sure. The MSM will not be giving her the Rand Paul treatment. Indeed, I expect that the MSM will treat Hillary as they treat Obama today, with their anger fully muted by shared goals and deference.

Ann Althouse wonders if this is not a return to the 2007 "Let's start a conversation with America" campaign. And as she notes, rather tongue in cheek, "We've been talking with Hillary now for such a long, long time...." Well, expect the "talking with Hillary" to be all one way for the foreseeable

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Gender, Abortion & Rand Paul's Handling of the MSM

Rand Paul is now officially in the race for President. The attacks from the left have commenced. One, Paul is mean to women. Two, let's try to get Paul in a corner on the abortion issue.

The left seems to have their knickers in a bunch over the latest salvo in the war on women. The headline from Salon: “No no no no no no no no: Listen!” He-man Rand Paul lectures a lady — again. From Washington Post, it's Rand Paul's problem with female interviewers just cropped up again. Really? The left's going to play the victim card now when a Republican gets testy with a reporter in an interview if the reporter happens to be female? This would be the same left that spends their days and nights bemoaning a supposed lack of gender equality and looks upon the slightest hint of chivalry as yet another example of white male patriarchy?

Here's the video clip:



The interviewer, Savannah Guthrie, is, in fact, editorializing as part of a question, and the editorial is not favorable to Rand Paul. Paul's not having it, so he stops her in mid-question. In all fairness to both parties, Guthrie is doing what reporters should be doing, and Paul is perfectly within his rights to contest it. Frankly, Paul should be the example for how everyone on the right should be treating the MSM these days.

But apparently the left wants now to complain because Rand was mean to a lady. The hypocrisy is mindnumbing. If a woman is going into professions such as the law, politics, or journalism, their arguments are owed no deference because of their gender. This is the left trying to create a mountain out of a molehill, and I suspect this complaining has less to do with Rand Paul's lack of deference to a female member of the MSM than it does with battlespace prep for Hillary Clinton's candidacy.

Update: This from Ann Althouse's post, The Rand Paul Has Problems With Women Meme:

But even for those of us who don't want special sensitivity to women and who think it will hurt women's opportunities — in journalism, in politics, and elsewhere — we observe how well women are treated with an understanding of what has gone on in the past when women were subordinated and diminished and dissuaded from entering the fray. . . . With that background understanding, what is objectively equal treatment may feel unequal.

Of course, it's also true that Rand Paul has his opponents who will use whatever works, and I fully expect them to accuse him of sexism whenever they can now. Once it's a meme, that's how it goes. If he remains "short tempered and testy," whatever hits women will be highlighted as Rand Paul's problem with women. If he manages to take the edge off, because he's trying "to get better," what niceness is aimed at women will be characterized as patronizing and even exclusionary. His opponents will want to box him in. Whatever he does will be wrong.

Update: Fox News ladie Dana Perino think this will play poorly for Rand Paul, while Megyn Kelly feels otherwise and indeed, takes offense at this effort from the left to "protect" the ladies, finding that in and of itself sexist.

But that is not all Rand Paul is in the news for today. A reporter in the interview below (at the 8:00 mark) asked Rand Paul to state his specific position on exemptions for abortion. Paul's response is probably the perfect one:



Allahpundit at Hot Air notes:

And this is no idle tu quoque. The great majority of Americans oppose late-term abortion; the vast majority, maybe a unanimous majority at this point, of Democratic leaders support it without restriction. They are, without exaggeration, absolute fanatics on this subject. And proudly so. . . .

Obama feels no differently. Neither does Nancy Pelosi, who’s gone as far as to use the word “sacred” when discussing her feelings on this topic. Paul’s response should be a stock answer for any GOP candidate who gets a question on a third-rail social issue going forward: We’ll weigh in just as soon as Hillary Clinton does. Want to know what Marco Rubio thinks about abortion exceptions? No problem — just as soon as Hillary tells us when life begins. Want to hear Ted Cruz’s take on gay marriage? He’d be happy to provide it — just as soon as Hillary answers a simple question about how many genders she thinks there are. The wedge question should cut both ways this campaign, whether the media likes it or not.

Well done, Rand Paul.

For the record, abortion is not and should not be a Constitutional issue. The decision to adopt it as such in Roe v. Wade was pure judicial activism and, by imposing their own personal morality under the guise of a "penumbra" of a Constitutional right, the Courts created a horrendous political divide in this country. It was an issue of social policy falling outside the text of the Constitution, and by the 10th Amendment, was a decision to be left to the individual state's to decide. Personally, if asked to weigh in on the issue at state level, I would allow abortion through the first two trimesters. That is a moral, ethical and pragmatic question for the mother. It becomes a societal issue, however, once the baby would be viable outside of the womb. Late term abortions are nothing more than murder.

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Wolf Bytes

Hillary Clinton should be facing jail time over this e-mail scandal (via HotAir):



It is appearing more likely by the day that Ted Cruz is a serious candidate: Cruz campaign raises $31 million in a week

Tells us something we don't know, please: Dick Cheney calls Obama the worst President we have ever had on foreign policy

I believe the answers you seek are Obama & the left: Why is the Middle Class is Doing Worse Than You Think

How about a wall between Science and Politics: Dr. J. Curry Savages APS For Their Statements On Climate Change

Left wing arrogance and subpar intelligence caught out at Instapundit:

THE INSTAWIFE: If “Facts Are Conservative,” Then Are Lies Liberal?

Well, that seems to be the gist of this Elizabeth Bruenig piece at TNR. Excerpt:

The right, on the other hand, tends to understand politics on the individual level, which fits in neatly with a general obsession with the capital-i Individual. Thus, the right tends to pore over the specific details of high-profile cases like those of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, concluding that if those particular situations were embattled by complications or mitigating factors, then the phenomena they’re meant to represent must not be real either. And if a few highly publicized rapes turn out to be murkier than first represented, then rape itself is not a crisis, just a regrettable and rare anomaly. The positive version of this approach is the elevation of people like Joe the Plumber, individual cases that purportedly show the value and effectiveness of conservative politics. It isn’t great reasoning, but it is very appealing on a sub-intellectual level.

So to Breunig, it works like this: Left: Here’s a really, really important fact that totally proves my general point! Right: Your “fact” is a lie, and thus doesn’t support your argument at all. Left: That isn’t great reasoning, but it is very appealing on a sub-intellectual level.

Well, someone’s sub-intellectual here. And TNR seems to be doing a lot of hiring along those lines lately.

Hell hath no fury like a leftie scorned: Lawrence Tribe savaged in the Obama administration for advocating on behalf of a coal company against the EPA

He really is one scotch away from becoming Ron Burgundy: Chris Matthews Goes On A Tirade Against MSNBC For Airing "Goddamn Rightwing Ads"

Perhaps Klingons will be found on Uranus: NASA's Chief Scientist Predicts That We Will Find Signs Of Alien Life By 2025

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Cruz Missiles

Ted Cruz entered the GOP primary race on Monday, and the race in the media to define him has officially commenced. Here's a bit of a roll up from the past few days, some pro, some ridiculously con from the left and from potential competitors on the right:

NY Daily News: The Right Roars As Ted Cruz Rises

National Review: Of Course Ted Cruz Could Win

Breitbart: On Global Warming, Cruz Says He's Galileo, Not A Flat Earther [What a perfect analogy]

WaPo: Ted Cruz's Phenomenally Bad Idea [To get rid of the IRS and impose a flat tax]

Campus Reform: Ted Cruz and the Republicans are Resurrecting Discrimination [the story manages to work in every prog buzz word possible - ultra right wing, extremist, etc.]

WaPo: What's Wrong With Ted Cruz [Concern trolling at its finest]

The Week: Cruz Haters Gotta Hate

Via Hot Air: NYT - What Ted Cruz Would Need To Do To Win

Via Hot Air: Politico - Ted Cruz's Strategy: Destroy The 'Mushy Middle'

Via Hot Air: Wapo - In The Senate Where Cruz Played Rough, Scarce Praise For His Presidential Run [Given the performance of Senate Republicans in rolling over to fund Obama's unconstitutional immigration plan through DHS, I consider that a big plus]

Via Hot Air: Mediaite - Rep. Peter King Threatens To Jump Off A Bridge If Cruz Gets The GOP Nomination [Would that he stay true to his word]

Via Hot Air: Bloomberg - Ted Cruz Is No Captain Courageous [Ridiculous essay. Cruz stood against all who aren't conservatives. That's called the courage of one's convictions.]

Via Instapundit: New Yorker - The New Yorker’s John Cassidy Calls Latino Ted Cruz “Uppity.”

Via Instapundit: National Review - Would the Media Allow ‘Cruz Crushing’ if He Were a Hispanic Democrat?

Via Instapundit: Washington Examiner - Think Progress claims Ted Cruz is anti-woman because he supports a flat tax.

Via Instapundit: Ann Althouse On Ted Cruz's Speech At Liberty Univ. - “This is a truly powerful speech. Just brilliant.”

Via Instapundit: - Popehat On NPR's Ted Cruz Racism: “First time I ever heard NPR use the term ‘White Hispanic’ was George Zimmerman. Second time today. Never for Castro, who’s white as snow.”

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The Future of Obamacare & "Liberalism"

We are sitting at the tip of the Obamacare nightmare. Virtually all of the horrible consequences forecast for this obscenity will come to pass.

According to Krauthammer, the Obamacare debacle could be the death knell for "liberalism."



And if the U.S. voters were rational, that would be true. But as 2012 taught us, they aren't. I hate to disagree with Krauthammer's assessment, but don't count on Obamacare or any big government program being killed off until our nation itself is in extremis.

One - no leftie will ever admit that their grand government programs have failed, regardless of the results. They will only go so far as to say that there are a few problems - often blamed on the opposition - and that just some slight tweeking of the laws may be needed to obtain perfection. This is a script replayed in a loop ad inifinitum.

Two - the left is utterly shameless and without a shred of intellectual integrity. What matters for them is only "socialist truth" - those claims, whether or not with any basis in reality, that advance their cause. They will never take any responsibility. They will shamelessly lie. In the vast majority of cases, they will do so with the complicity of the MSM. And the reality is that many, many people will believe them.

Three, the pathological alturism that sits at the heart of the leftwing movement is a siren's song. It paints a picture of rainbows and unicorns - a picture people want to believe.

And lastly, the left has made so many systemic changes over the past century to our form of government that act as safe harbors for them that it is doubtful they can be killed off. The left has found endless ways to funnel tax payer money to interest groups - unions, community organizing groups, Planned Parenthood, etc. - who cycle it back to the party in an endless loop. We are now governed by regulators whose "laws" bypass our elected representatives. And our courts have been used by the left to vastly change our nation for decades, with their decisions becoming effectively unchangable but by Constitutional amendment.

There will be a death knell in the end, but I think it more likely for our nation than the liberalism that will destroy it.

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Is Charlie Manson The Model For Our MSM?

Bookworm Room has posted on her belief that "Mainstream media is the spiritual descendant of Charlie Manson." It is a very creative and well made argument. Says Book:

Manson had a goal: he envisioned a new world order, with himself and his followers as the leaders. To bring about this new world order, he first had to destroy the existing one. He came up with an idea that he called “Helter-Skelter“: he was going to incite race warfare because he was pretty sure that would bring America down, leaving room for him and his followers to take over. He figured that the best way to start an apocalyptic race war was through violent murder. He wasn’t going to do the murder himself, of course, but he did incite his dumb, sexually-opiated, often drugged followers to commit the deeds on his behalf.

Now, let’s think about the mainstream media. The MSM has a goal: a completely Democrat-dominated political machine, with the MSM and the politicians it’s created in total control. Because this will be a statist new world, the MSM must first destroy completely America’s current, still vaguely capitalist market and individualist ideology. To that end, the media has decided that it will incite race warfare, because it’s pretty sure that race warfare will destroy existing institutions and allow it and its political class to take over. Media members figure that the best way to start this societal breakdown is to sow so much division between blacks and whites in America that the country becomes dysfunctional and, if necessary, bloodied. The media elite are not going to sully their own hands, of course, but they will work hard to incite their followers to commit the deeds on their behalf. (And sadly, to the extent they have followers in black inner cities, these are young people who are minimally educated, inundated with unhealthy sexual messages from movies and rap songs, and too often on drugs. Just think of Trayvon….)

I can’t prove the MSM’s goal, but I can prove its tactics. . . .

Do read her whole post. Her reasoning is solid. I have to take issue on only one point - Charlie Manson was merely a cog in the great socialist wheel. I would name the spiritual progenitors of our MSM as Marx, Lenin and Stalin.

Here are the comments she and I made to her post:

Me:

A fascinating piece, but in the pantheon of mass murders with dreams of grandeur and world change, I think you aim a bit too low. I would have picked Stalin as the MSM’s ideological progenitor. He in fact worked to change an entire country, and indeed, under him, there came to be the division between objective truth and socialist truth. There was control of the media to communicate only approved messages. Etc., etc. And some of the old Soviet movies – particularly the post WWII biopic on Ivan The Terrible – are probably pretty analogous to The Butler in that both teach a version of history not grounded in fact, but rather in message.

On a final note, if you are going to point out things about Oprah, I think that you are missing the most outrageous – her assertion that Trayvon Martin is the “Emmett Till of our time.” Oprah rather surprised me, actually. She built her career by being careful to appear as a normal American rather than an “African American.” She was accepted on those terms. Yet now it turns out that she too is a closet race hustler. May her career be effected accordingly.

Book:

I agree with you about the media’s general leftism, along with its global domination plans. What struck me, though, was how tightly their script regarding racism follows Charles Manson’s plans. It’s as if, when it comes to destroying the U.S. specifically through racial divisions, the media poured over Manson’s evil plans for sowing racial disharmony, and made those plans their own.

Me:

Book, as to racism generally, the only reason blacks weren’t targeted as part of the leftist ideology in Stalin’s Russia was because there were none in that country. But that said, the very foundation of socialism and the left has always been the disparity between the “oppressed and the oppressor.” It is their entire schtick. Blacks were being heavily recruited into the communist party of the USA in the lead up to the 60′s. Even Thomas Sowell was recruited into communism as a young man. The treatment of blacks as a victim class fits hand in glove with the opening lines of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. Manson’s view of a race war was nothing new. It was in fact Marx’s view of all human history.

While Stalin and Lenin didn’t have blacks, what they had was class warfare. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to Obama and thought that his words could have come from the mouth of Lenin demonizing the Kulaks. Indeed, I looked up some of Lenin’s old speeches old speeches on the Kulaks just to verify my thought – and I was 100% correct. Class war and race war are virtually one in the same – both rely on the oppressed and the oppressor paradigm, both involve demonization of the other, and both are political tools used in precisely the same manner. It is just Marx’s paradigm pointed in two slightly different directions.

I am not saying that your choice of Charlie Manson was in any way wrong. Indeed, I would say that it causes much more of an emotional response to think of it that way then the pedantic argument that I am making. I admit to a bit of shock when I was your post heading in a way that I wouldn’t have been if it referenced Stalin instead of Manson. Thus I will bow to your choice on this one.

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Kirsten Powers On Abortion, Wendy Davis & Crazy Nancy

Kirsten Powers is that rare left of center journalist with intellectual honesty. Her latest topic, the ignorance of Democratic women generally in their defense of abortion laws. And in particular, Ms. Powers focuses on two of the most ignorant, Wendy Davis and Crazy Nancy. This from Ms. Powers in the Daily Beast:

The Democratic star du jour was asked this week to explain the difference between the late-term abortions she fought to keep legal in Texas and the illegal killings by Philadelphia abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell. “I don’t know what happened in the Gosnell case,” she told the Weekly Standard’s John McCormack, who cornered her after her National Press Club speech on Monday.

This is incredible. After all, Davis is the state senator who held an 11-hour filibuster to fight legislation drafted in response to the abuses at Gosnell’s clinic. A passing knowledge of the case seems like basic due diligence.

She went on: “But I do know that [Gosnell] happened in an ambulatory surgical center. And in Texas changing our clinics to that standard obviously isn’t going to make a difference.” It takes real skill to pack so many falsehoods into so few words. . . .

At one point in his interview, McCormack asked Davis what she made of the fact a majority of women support late-term abortion bans. Davis told him, “I…think that a lot of people don’t really understand the landscape of what’s happening in that arena today and what an incredibly small percentage of procedures take place there.”

Actually, the people who “don’t really understand” the issue are the Democratic ladies crusading against laws the majority of the country supports.

Despite frequently mocking anti-abortion activists as anti-science know-nothings, abortion rights absolutists are the ones who play fast and loose with the facts of abortion. Because they are so rarely asked to defend their positions, Davis and her ilk apparently don’t feel the need to be informed. Follow-up questions to their strange and often empirically false statements are almost nonexistent, while offensive or misinformed comments from GOP back benchers are greeted with full-scale media hysteria.

John McCormack has been the dogged fly in the ointment here. On a noble quest to get a response to an eminently reasonable question, he has yet to get a straight answer. In June, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi convened a press conference to condemn a bill banning abortions after 20 weeks. McCormack asked her essentially the same question he asked Davis: “What is the moral difference between what Dr. Gosnell did to a baby born alive at 23 weeks and aborting her moments before birth? Pelosi answered, “You’re probably enjoying that question a lot, I can see you savoring it.” This insulting nonsense inexplicably elicited laughter from some of the assembled reporters.

Pelosi then told an outright lie: “[The 20-week ban] would make it a federal law that there would be no abortion in our country.” No reporter questioned this absurdity, even though they’ve heard pro-abortion rights leaders assert a thousand times that “only” 1.5 percent of abortions occur after 20 weeks. (For those who care, that’s “only” 18,000 late-term abortions each year.)

Pelosi then expressed outrage at the line of questioning, raised the fact she had five children in six years, and snapped, “As a practicing and respectful Catholic, this is sacred ground to me when we talk about this.” When you are pulling the Catholic card to defend your support of unrestricted late-term abortion, you’ve officially gone off the rails. . . .

Well, in all fairness, Pelosi has been certifiably insane for years. She is, I am convinced, incapable of intellectual honesty. There are many on the far left who seem likewise, with Debbie Wasserman Schultz being the most odious.

At any rate, my hats off to Ms. Powers for her intellectual honesty and holding both Democrats and the media to account on the abortion issue.

For the record, here are my positions on abortion.

Abortion is immoral at any point. However, if asked to vote on the issue, I would vote to allow that women still have safe access to abortions during the time frame when there is no question that a fetus is not viable outside the womb.

Making abortion a Constitutional right was one of the biggest mistakes the Supreme Court has ever made. It has utterly poisoned our national politics for decades. There was no basis whatsoever in the Constitution for the decision. I fully agree with the conservatives on the Supreme Court and its most liberal justice, Justice Ginsburg, that abortion is a question outside the Constitution and, thus, should have been left to states and localities.

Lastly, there is no question that once a fetus has any chance at being viable outside the womb, killing that fetus inside the womb or out is murder. It is murder both by the mother and physician involved, and should be treated as such at law.

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More On Trayvon Martin, Profiling & The Canard Of The "White" Menace To Blacks (Updated)

This from Bill Whittle, making the point that George Zimmerman is being lynched by the race grievance industry while painting a fact based picture of Trayvon Martin the likes of which we have never gotten from the MSM.



In my post below, responding to the race grievance industry's (and Obama's) generalized complaints about racial profiling, I wrote:

In 2011, blacks made up 13% of the population. Yet according to FBI Crime Statistics, in not a single category of crime - with the exception of DUI - was the number of total criminal incidents committed by blacks equal to or below their proportionate representation in society. In 2011, blacks in the U.S. were responsible for 49.7% of all murders, 55.6% of all robberies, 32.9% of all forcible rapes, and 33.9% of all aggravated assaults. The FBI does not publish - or at least I could not find - like statistics for victims, but looking at the numbers, blacks were just as likely to be the victims of crime out of all proportion to their representation in society. In 2011, 49.9% of all murder victims were black.

According to the left, this "disproportionate problem," as Obama called it, of criminality in the black community is the problem of . . . [wait for it] . . . a racist criminal justice system. They never quite indicate whether they think all of the black men in jail are actually innocent or whether the police just spend too much time catching actual black criminals. Either way, this from Heather McDonald:

The criminal law regularly announces that black Americans are “worth less than other Americans,” Cardozo Law School professor Ekow Yankah wrote on the New York Times opinion page this week. It wasn’t activists who “injected” race into the discussion, scoffed The American Prospect’s Jamelle Bouie on Monday, the “criminal-justice system” is “already” racial. An e-mail alert on Wednesday from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School proclaimed: “An ugly truth rears its head again: Racial disparities are alive and well in our criminal-justice system.”

The idea that the criminal-justice system discriminates against blacks — and that this bias explains blacks’ disproportionate presence in custody — is a staple of civil-rights activism and of the academic Left. Every effort to prove it empirically, however, has come up short [See Is The Criminal Justice System Racist]. A 1994 Justice Department survey of felony cases from the country’s 75 largest urban areas discovered that blacks actually had a lower chance of prosecution following a felony than whites did and that they were less likely to be found guilty at trial. Alfred Blumstein has found that blacks are underrepresented in prison for homicide compared with their arrest rates. A meta-analysis of charging and sentencing studies showed that “large racial differences in criminal offending,” not racism, explained why more blacks were in prison proportionately than whites and for longer terms, according to criminologists Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen.

This is not merely something the left and the race grievance industry want to studiously ignore. They want to use the Martin trial to push the utter canard that what blacks have most to worry about are racist whites out to stalk and kill them. In the dark fantasy that the race hustlers push, our nation is 1950's Mississippi writ large. That is why they are so deeply committed to painting George Zimmerman as not merely Bull Conner reborn, but as a metaphor for all "whites." But, as Ms. McDonald notes:

In fact, if a black parent wants to radically reduce his son’s chance of getting shot, he should live in a white neighborhood. New York’s crime profile is typical of urban-crime disparities across the country. The per capita shooting rate in predominantly black Brownsville, Brooklyn, is 81 times higher than that of predominantly white and Asian Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, according to the New York Police Department. Blacks in 2012 committed about 75 percent of all shootings in New York, and whites a little over 2 percent, though blacks are 23 percent of the city’s population and whites 35 percent. Blacks are 60 percent of the city’s homicide victims. Their killers? They aren’t white.

The picture is the same nationally. . . .

Update: The Faculty Lounge blog has an exceptional post up on Zimmerman's calls to police over a period years, with the vast majority being in his capacity of neighborhood watch. Evaluating whether Trayvon Martin was subject, in any degree, to "racial profiling" is made easier in respect to the entire log of Zimmerman's calls. The picture the log paints of Zimmerman is of someone who was racially neutral - which would fit with his life story - and who in fact keyed on aspects of suspicious behavior by people of any and all races.

- Zimmerman called police on three occasions to report people identified as black acting suspiciously, one of whom was Trayvon.

- Zimmerman called police twice when he noticed a man who fit the description of a person wanted for burglary. The man happened to be black - and indeed, the burgler in question.

- Zimmerman called police out of "concern for the safety" of a seven year old black child wandering unsupervised in the road.

- Zimmerman called police five times to report suspicious activity by whites and hispanics.

Do read the whole post for much more detail, particularly into what actions Zimmerman reasonably deemed suspicious. This provides another piece of the puzzle of which I was unaware. Many blacks describe the Zimmerman case as a replay of the brutal lynching of Emmett Till. They are right, though it seems that the more facts come to light, the more it appears that Zimmerman is the one being brutally lynched.

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Kirsten Powers & The Left's War On Truth

For the past six years, the right has been railing against the mainstream media for wholly ignoring all stories that would be problematic for Obama and the left. The worm has finally turned with Benghazi, the IRS scandals (targeting conservative 501(c)4's and targeted auditing), and the DOJ's investigations into Fox News and the AP over national security leaks.

And yet, the efforts of the most vile on the left is not to seek the truth, but to try and spin this all either as mere Republican partisan spin, Republican hatred of Obama, or Republican overreaching - or indeed, in the innocuous case of wording difference in some of the Benghazi e-mails, as pure right wing fabrication. It is so far beyond the pale as to cross a real boundary line where any thought of fair and open debate with these people is simply no longer an option. That said, certainly not all on the left fit this mold - Kirsten Powers being perhaps the most shining example of an intellectually honest left of center reporter. And today, she took the Obama administration and her fellow journalists on the left to task for their scurrilous acts in an exceptional column:

It’s instructive to go back to the dawn of Hope and Change. It was 2009, and the new administration decided it was appropriate to use the prestige of the White House to viciously attack a news organization—Fox News—and the journalists who work there. Remember, President Obama had barely been in office and had enjoyed the most laudatory press of any new president in modern history. Yet even one outlet that allowed dissent or criticism of the president was one too many. This should have been a red flag to everyone, regardless of what they thought of Fox News. The math was simple: if the administration would abuse its power to try and intimidate one media outlet, what made anyone think they weren’t next?

These series of “warnings” to the Fourth Estate were what you might expect to hear from some third-rate dictator, not from the senior staff of Hope and Change, Inc.

"What I think is fair to say about Fox … is that it really is more a wing of the Republican Party," said Anita Dunn, White House communications director, on CNN. “[L]et's not pretend they're a news network the way CNN is." On ABC’s “This Week” White House senior adviser David Axelrod said Fox is "not really a news station." It wasn’t just that Fox News was “not a news organization,” White House chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel told CNN’s John King, but, “more [important], is [to] not have the CNNs and the others in the world basically be led in following Fox, as if what they’re trying to do is a legitimate news organization …”

These series of “warnings” to the Fourth Estate were what you might expect to hear from some third-rate dictator, not from the senior staff of Hope and Change, Inc.

Yet only one mainstream media reporter—Jake Tapper, then of ABC News—ever raised a serious objection to the White House’s egregious and chilling behavior. Tapper asked future MSNBC commentator and then White House press secretary Robert Gibbs: “[W]hy is [it] appropriate for the White House to say” that “thousands of individuals who work for a media organization, do not work for a ‘news organization’?” The spokesman for the president of the United States was unrepentant, saying: “That's our opinion.”

Trashing reporters comes easy in Obama-land. Behind the scenes, Obama-centric Democratic operatives brand any reporter who questions the administration as a closet conservative, because what other explanation could there be for a reporter critically reporting on the government?

Now, the Democratic advocacy group Media Matters—which is always mysteriously in sync with the administration despite ostensibly operating independently—has launched a smear campaign against ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl for his reporting on Benghazi. It’s the kind of character assassination that would make Joseph McCarthy blush. The main page of the Media Matters website has six stories attacking Karl for a single mistake in an otherwise correct report about the State Department's myriad changes to talking points they previously claimed to have barely touched. See, the problem isn’t the repeated obfuscating from the administration about the Benghazi attack; the problem is Jonathan Karl. Hence, the now-familiar campaign of de-legitimization. This gross media intimidation is courtesy of tax-deductable donations from the Democratic Party’s liberal donor base, which provides a whopping $20 million a year for Media Matters to harass reporters who won’t fall in line.

In what is surely just a huge coincidence, the liberal media monitoring organization Fairness and Accuracy in the Media (FAIR) is also on a quest to delegitimize Karl. It dug through his past and discovered that in college he allegedly—horrors!—associated with conservatives. Because of this, FAIR declared Karl “a right wing mole at ABC News.” Setting aside the veracity of FAIR’s crazy claim, isn’t the fact that it was made in the first place vindication for those who assert a liberal media bias in the mainstream media? If the existence of a person who allegedly associates with conservatives is a “mole,” then what does that tell us about the rest of the media?

What all of us in the media need to remember—whatever our politics—is that we need to hold government actions to the same standard, whether they’re aimed at friends or foes. If not, there’s no one but ourselves to blame when the administration takes aim at us.

In the video below, Ms. Powers points out not only the outrageousness of the DOJ's investigation of Fox News' James Rosen, but also the Obama administration practice of punishing and prosecuting whistleblowers while letting pass all leaks of national security information which paintw the Obama administration in a favorable light.



My respect for Ms. Powers has long been full and complete. Meanwhile, three of the most vile left wing journalists, Jonathan Capehart, Josh Marshall, and Ezra Klein, were yesterday seen filing into the West Wing, no doubt for a journolist meeting with Carney, if not Obama.

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Setting The Record Straight Four Years Later

It has long been leftist dogma that "the failed policies of the Bush administration" caused our economic meltdown.  That statement was usually followed by vague references to "deregulation" and Wall St. greed. It has been the single most destructive lie of my lifetime. And because of it, we now have another four years of Obama

I pointed out over four years ago that the left's social engineering with the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) caused both the housing bubble and the destruction of credit standards - all leading directly to our economic meltdown. Recently, the IBD published a concurence:

Democrats and the media insist the Community Reinvestment Act, the anti-redlining law beefed up by President Clinton, had nothing to do with the subprime mortgage crisis and recession.

But a new study by the respected National Bureau of Economic Research finds, "Yes, it did. We find that adherence to that act led to riskier lending by banks."

Added NBER: "There is a clear pattern of increased defaults for loans made by these banks in quarters around the (CRA) exam. Moreover, the effects are larger for loans made within CRA tracts," or predominantly low-income and minority areas.

To satisfy CRA examiners, "flexible" lending by large banks rose an average 5% and those loans defaulted about 15% more often, the 43-page study found.

The strongest link between CRA lending and defaults took place in the runup to the crisis — 2004 to 2006 — when banks rapidly sold CRA mortgages for securitization by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and Wall Street.

CRA regulations are at the core of Fannie's and Freddie's so-called affordable housing mission. In the early 1990s, a Democrat Congress gave HUD the authority to set and enforce (through fines) CRA-grade loan quotas at Fannie and Freddie.

It passed a law requiring the government-backed agencies to "assist insured depository institutions to meet their obligations under the (CRA)." The goal was to help banks meet lending quotas by buying their CRA loans.

But they had to loosen underwriting standards to do it. And that's what they did. . . .

Read the entire article here. Expect this to get zero play outside of the IBD.

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The Most Ridiculous Headline Of The Day

This one, from ABC, should take an award:

Obama: More Moderate Republican Than Socialist

Now, in fairness to ABC, this is based on a quote from Obama during an interview:

President Barack Obama believes that if he were president 25 years ago, his economic policies would make him a moderate Republican.

During an interview with Noticias Univision 23, the network's Miami affiliate newscast, Obama pushed back against the accusation made in some corners of south Florida's Cuban-American and Venezuelan communities that he wants to instill a socialist economic system in the U.S. The president said he believes few actually believe that.

"I don't know that there are a lot of Cubans or Venezuelans, Americans who believe that," Obama said. "The truth of the matter is that my policies are so mainstream that if I had set the same policies that I had back in the 1980s, I would be considered a moderate Republican."

But in condemnation of ABC, they make their report simply taking Obama's quote at face value, without putting it in any historic context. And there is a lot of context.

The 1980's were the time of Ronald Reagan, massive tax cuts, a bull market, the reinvigoration of America, all coupled with serious attempts to reign in regulations and decrease the size of government. I don't know of a single "moderate Republican" in the 1980's who would have supported a single policy of Obama's.

In other words, Obama's statement is about as counterfactual as one could get, though no one reading the report without the benefit of having lived through the 1980's would understand that.  And it does give ABC a headline they like.  What horseshit.

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Benghazi: Who Put The 3 A.M. Phone Call On Hold?

Benghazi was the administration's 3 A.M. phone call. Someone in the administration, perhaps Obama himself or with his knowledge, put that phone call on hold, abandoning our people in Benghazi to their death. Their inaction, no doubt borne of political calculations, is criminal. No need to take my word for it.

Admiral James Lyons, U.S.N., Ret., former commander of the Pacific Fleet, doesn't hold back on the Obama administrations failures in Benghazi or the degree of deception he sees being practiced. Adm. Lyons writes in the Washington Times today, calling for immediate and "full disclosure of what has become the “Benghazi Betrayal and Cover-up:"

Once the attack commenced at 10:00 p.m. Libyan time (4:00 p.m. EST), we know the mission security staff immediately contacted Washington and our embassy in Tripoli. It now appears the White House, Pentagon, State Department, CIA, NDI, JCS and various other military commands monitored the entire battle in real time via frantic phone calls from our compound and video from an overhead drone. The cries for help and support went unanswered.

Panetta's claim that there was insufficient intelligence to launch our military assets in support of the Benghazi mission is just pure, unadulterated bullshit. He had better real time intel than any commander could hope to have going into a combat situation. As to Panetta's claim that Gen. Ham and Gen. Dempsey concurred - I want to hear that with my own ears. That is simply unbelievable. More on Gen. Ham at the bottom of this post.

To continue from Adm. Lyons:

The Obama national security team, including CIA, DNI, State Department and the Pentagon, watched and listened to the assault but did nothing to answer repeated calls for assistance. It has been reported that President Obama met with Vice President Joseph R. Biden and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta in the Oval Office, presumably to see what support could be provided. After all, we had very credible military resources within striking distance. At our military base in Sigonella, Sicily, which is slightly over 400 miles from Benghazi, we had a fully equipped Special Forces unit with both transport and jet strike aircraft prepositioned. Certainly this was a force much more capable than the 22-man force from our embassy in Tripoli.

I know those Special Forces personnel were ready to leap at the opportunity. There is no doubt in my mind they would have wiped out the terrorists attackers. Also I have no doubt that Admiral William McRaven, Commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, would have had his local commander at Sigonella ready to launch; however, apparently he was countermanded—by whom? We need to know.

I also understand we had a C-130 gunship available, which would have quickly disposed of the terrorist attackers. This attack went on for seven hours. Our fighter jets could have been at our Benghazi mission within an hour. Our Special Forces out of Sigonella could have been there within a few hours. There is not any doubt that action on our part could have saved the lives of our two former Navy SEALs and possibly the ambassador.

Having been in a number of similar situations, I know you have to have the courage to do what’s right and take immediate action. Obviously, that courage was lacking for Benghazi. The safety of your personnel always remains paramount. With all the technology and military capability we had in theater, for our leadership to have deliberately ignored the pleas for assistance is not only in incomprehensible, it is un-American.

To anyone without any military experience, Panetta's claim that there was not sufficient intelligence and that, as a matter of doctrine, we don't put soldier's in harms way without a complete intel picture probably sounds reasonable. I can virtually assure you that to every current and former military officer - on the facts of Benghazi - Panetta's explanation is ludicrous. It is meant to gloss over deliberate inaction that was criminal. As Adm. Lyons concludes:

Somebody high up in the administration made the decision that no assistance (outside our Tripoli embassy) would be provided, and let our people be killed. The person who made that callous decision needs to be brought to light and held accountable. According to a CIA spokesperson, “No one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need.” We also need to know whether the director of CIA and the director of National Intelligence were facilitators in the fabricated video lie and the overall cover-up. Their credibility is on the line. A congressional committee should be immediately formed to get the facts out to the American people. Nothing less is acceptable.

Obama was asked directly, at the Town Hall debate, who denied the requests for additional security in Benghazi in the run up to 9-11 and why they denied those requests. Obama did not answer the questions. Obama was asked directly by a reporter last week whether the administration denied requests for help during the Benghazi attack. Obama did not answer the question. Obama is trying to string this out until after the election. This is a scandal far worse than Watergate, and yet Obama is being aided at every turn by a MSM totally vested in his reelection. This really is surreal.

Update: This from Michael Ramirez at IBD captures the situation perfectly:

The first person we need to hear from is Gen. Ham, the AFRICOM commander during the Benghazi attack. Panetta claims that Gen. Ham agreed with him, that there was insufficient intel to send military support to Benghazi. There is a rumor that Gen. Ham was relieved of his command on that night because he was preparing to disobey an order to stand down. We know that Gen. Ham is still listed as the AFRICOM Cdr, but that Panetta announced his replacement two weeks ago after Gen Ham had only been in command for 18 months. Further, we now learn that Gen Ham is no longer even at his post, he has returned to the U.S. and is being processed out of the Army into retirement. It would be very unusual indeed for a Commanding officer to physically leave his post at any time before a change of command ceremony in which both he and the incoming commander would participate. Someone needs to interview Gen. Ham.

(H/T Hot Air)

Update: The White House has just released photos of Obama in the WH Situation Room, looking at a large screen video link and getting an update on Sandy. Instapundit links to various twitter responses, asking where the pic is of Obama in the Situation Room during the Benghazi attack. Where indeed?

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The Wages Of Straying Off The Liberal Plantation

Buzz Bissinger, the lifelong Democrat and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who recently came out for Romney, discovers that the left is surprisingly intolerant. Heh.



The most interesting part of the interview above was when the CNN's Howard Kurtz takes offense at Bissinger's quite accurate claim that left wing ideology pervades mainstream journalism and reporting. Kurtz defended CNN's stable of reporters. That would be the same CNN that gave rise to the "tea-bagger" joke and led the sliming of the Tea Party movement? That would be the same CNN whose last "town hall" debate had more plants than a florist shop. Kurtz is living in a bubble. CNN hasn't yet gone full frontal MSNBC or NYT, but they are not all that far away.

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AP Gone Wild

This outrageous photo was published by the AP on Monday.

I'll do my best Big Bird imitation here: Hey kids, can you say M-e-d-i-a B-i-a-s?

If I were the parent of that girl, I would be demanding an apology from AP and readying a lawsuit.

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The Left Goes To Their Last Refuge Defense, Axelrod Calls Out To The MSM For Support

The left, in the immediate aftermath of the debate, was in shock - and at MSNBC, in meltdown. But the memos have apparently gone out, and the left's MSM response has coalesced. Yes, Romney won on theatrics and style points, but all of his facts were LIES - all lies, I tell you, LIES. We've seen this exact same thing play out a few weeks ago in the coordinated MSM response to Paul Ryan's speech at the Republican convention. There are some lies being told it - but that's projection on the part of the left.

Let's take a tour through the gutter of the MSM today and see what piles of excreta we can find. Former Enron advisor Paul Krugman is always a good place to start:

OK, so Obama did a terrible job in the debate, and Romney did well. But in the end, this isn’t or shouldn’t be about theater criticism, it should be about substance. And the fact is that everything Obama said was basically true, while much of what Romney said was either outright false or so misleading as to be the moral equivalent of a lie.

After that sweeping assertion, Krugman points to but a single example where he thinks Romney was less than honest. Others at least made a more concerted effort to justify their claim that Romney's speech was not but "lies."

Jonathan Chait at NY Magazine actually titled his commentary Romney's Successful Debate Plan: Lying. Chait's chief complaint relies on the original Tax Policy Center analysis of Romney's tax plan - an analysis done in part by one of Obama's former economic advisors. The upshot is that Obama claims that would add $500 billion a year for ten years to the deficit. But that presumption is based on simply dropping tax rates without closing loopholes - a patently ridiculous assumption.

More importantly. Chait, as do all the left relying on that TPC analysis, neglects to point to an update the TPC has done. TPC now finds that Romney's tax plan would come within $41 billion of tax distribution neutrality. I know that the left has trouble with math, so let me point out that $41 billion times ten is $4 trillion 5590 billion less than the $5 trillion dollar figure that Chait, the President and others are claiming would be added to the deficit by Romney's tax plan. And even that number is based on a static analysis of Romney's tax plan, neglecting any consideration of a growing economy bringing in more tax revenue. To call Romney's claims regarding his tax policy a lie based on the original TPC analysis - and assigning it a claim of raising the deficit $5 trillion over ten years - really is a lie.

Then there is Jonathan Cohn at TNR who writes about The Four Most Misleading Moments in Romney's Debate Performance:

The pundits are unanimous. Mitt Romney had more energy, offered more specifics, and may even have come across as more empathetic. I agree and polls suggest voters saw it the same way.

The debate may not change the dynamics of the election. But if I knew nothing about the candidates and this was my first exposure to the campaign, I’d think this Romney fellow has a detailed tax plan, wants to defend the middle class and poor, and will take care of people who can’t find health insurance.

Problem is, this isn’t my first exposure to the campaign. I happen to know a lot about the candidates. And I know that those three things aren’t true. . .

Cohn too relies on the original Tax Policy Center analysis for much of his argument.

A special mention needs to be made of Igor Volsky of Talking Points Memo who claims to have found: At Last Night’s Debate: Romney Told 27 Myths In 38 Minutes. I won't go down all of them, but just to give you a flavor, my favorite was:

17) “Well, I would repeal and replace it. We’re not going to get rid of all regulation. You have to have regulation. And there are some parts of Dodd-Frank that make all the sense in the world.”

Romney has previously called for full repeal of Dodd-Frank, a law whose specific purpose is to regulate banks. MF Global’s use of customer funds to pay for its own trading losses is just one bit of proof that the financial industry isn’t responsible enough to protect consumers without regulation.

Talk about your non-sequiturs. Repealing Dodd Frank now means no regulation - despite Romney's calls for sane regulation? And talk about the insanity and hypocrisy of pointing to MF Global, led by one of Obama's top bundlers, Jon Corzine, who, incidently, Obama's DOJ has refused to indict for the second largest theft in history. MF Global is one example the left should avoid like the plague. One wonders if Igor is off his meds.

At any rate, the left is still reeling today. So what did the President's chief advisor, David Axelrod, do to stop the bleeding? He has called on his most loyal and stalwart allies to rally to Obama's defense:

Mr Axelrod, speaking on a campaign conference call, made an appeal to reporters to make the points that Obama himself had failed to make in the debate,

What does it say of the state of our MSM when Axelrod can call on them publicly to put out administration spin. The worst part is that you can bet the MSM is already pulling out the long knives to do precisely that between now and Nov. 7.

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Ryan Appears On Face The Lib Media

Paul Ryan, on CBS's Face The Nation yesterday, patiently explained to Norah O’Donnell that Obama's claim to holding out a bi-partisan fig leaf and that the budget impasse has been caused by Republicans does not comport with reality. Ryan really does hold back - were I him, I would have reminded O'Donnell how Obama demagogued the Ryan budget proposal in front of the cameras some months ago. But as Ryan did note, Obama says one thing, but then does another. I think that pretty much sums up Obama in toto.



Nice Deb has much more on this interview, including O'Donnell parroting the latest talking points from the DNC, that Ryan is being hypocritical for opposing defense cuts as part of sequestration when he voted in favor of the bill. Ms. O'Donnell, who clearly understands what Ryan is saying, nonetheless focuses on the talking points like a good little Obama stooge. Do visit Nice Deb for the entire discussion.

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Depression & Leftie Political Correspondents

"Presidential campaigns," opines Politico, "are supposed to be the greatest show in American politics — infused with big ideas and historical import." And yet, political reporters this year are depressed. They "want," Politico tells us, "the whole thing over with."

Yet another high-profile veteran campaign correspondent had his Howard Beale moment this week — mad as hell (or rather, sad as hell) and not willing to take it anymore — when Mark Leibovich lamented the devastating “joylessness” of the 2012 grind and wondered what the hell he was doing with his life.

“How am I ever going to get through it?” the chief national correspondent of The New York Times Magazine asked.

But his cri de coeur is just the latest primal scream in a campaign that is sending a whole generation of journalists to the confessional.

“This is worse than normal, a lot less fun, and it feels impossible for us to change the conversation, . . .”

Talk about self delusion. It's not that it is "impossible" to change the conversation, it is that doing so would mean addressing all of the elephants in the room. Perhaps the most revealing line of the article comes a little later when the author bemoans the absence of a campaign with "lofty notions of hope and change." Really? All of the problems we face, and the left-wing press corps is depressed because this isn't a campaign playing out on utterly meaningless soaring rhetoric?

As to the "historical import" of this election, the Politico seems oddly mystified by their inability to put their finger on it. I think I can help with that.

I don't think it an overstatement to say that America is in its most dire straits since 1860. We are at a tipping point. Another four years along this trajectory - including the systemic changes to our national fabric via the anachronistic "progressive" agenda of Obama, will deeply and irrevocably harm our nation. Objective reality is staring us all in the face. That reality includes:

- Unsustainable debt at over 100% of GDP that could destroy our nation, while Obama has put forth no plan to rein in spending. The budget proposals Obama has submitted, including most recently the 2013 budget, show ever increasing spending and debt accumulation. (And as an aside, the leftie press ought to note that, in a show of true bipartisan harmony, the budget was unanimously voted down in the House and Senate)

- Unsustainable welfare programs that are on a clear and unarguable trajectory to destroy our entire economy within one to two decades. And while Obama has seen fit to demagogue Paul Ryan's plans to reform entitlements, Obama has yet to put forth any plan of reform of his own.

- real unemployment, when you add back in those who are of working age but who are discounted in U-3 numbers as having left the workfore, that is well into double digits,

- that the majority of new jobs created in the Obama economy - 58% - have been low wage jobs.

- that the median income of Americans on Obama's watch has declined by 7.3%,

- rising energy prices,

- massive food inflation

- looming tax increases, including taxmageddon and all the new taxes associated with Obamacare,

- policies that are doing serious damage to the elderly and our children, and

- a war on religion in an effort to make the left the sole arbiter of morality in our nation.

Or perhaps the journolisters could use a handy chart to clue them in on the changes to our nation from the start of Obama's presidency to today;

In any event, there have been countless periods in living memory when the press focused on each and every one of these issues like a laser, thumping their chests with righteous indignation, but now they find themselves having to avoid them like the plague. Thus, for example, when Paul Ryan gave his speech at the RNC touching on many of the issues, what we got across the entire leftwing press was not an adult discussion of the issues, but rather "Lyin' Ryan" from Politico and a bevy of articles similarly demonizing Ryan from the NYT.

It doesn't take a psychiatrist to analyze this onset of depression in leftie political reporters. They are trying to carry the water for a President - and indeed, the entire "progressive" movement - that has completely and utterly failed. I am surprised that the cognitive dissonance they have to be experiencing hasn't caused their heads to explode.

And yet they can't quite put their finger on what's depressing them. That is denial so severe that they need to collectively see a shrink for some serious meds and padded room time. I, meanwhile, am going to a quiet place and enjoy my schadenfreude with a good beer.


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