David Axelrod was in full B.J. Clinton mode, lying out his teeth, and every other conceivable body part. For their part, ABC News was intent on giving lip service to to Obama campaign and not reporting, from Mediaite:
On Thursday, David Axelrod, senior adviser to President Barack Obama, took aim at Mitt Romney’s offshore bank accounts. Romney’s gotten flak over the issue before, but Axelrod doubled down on the criticism, deeming Romney “most secretive candidate that we’ve seen, frankly, since Richard Nixon.”
The remarks came in an interview with ABC News. “The only reason to have these accounts is to shelter your taxes,” he said.
video:
Hat tip video and reax, Erika Johnson, Hot Air:
By David Axelrod’s “If you don’t have anything to hide, why not just release the information?”-logic, President Obama’s invocation of executive privilege in an attempt to shield AG Eric Holder from being held in contempt of Congress and having to turn over thousands of Fast & Furious-related documents, must mean that something nefarious is going on there, right? What, exactly, are President Obama and the Justice Department so keen to hide?
Oh my God, Mitt Romney uses tax shelters.
Mean while, question for the “most transparent administration in history”, when did President Fifty Seven States, a/k/a Dumbo, a/k/a Dim Won, b/k/a Barack Obama first learn of Operation Fast & Furious, and what, if anything, did he do to stop it.
The Speedway Bomber, a/k/a Brett Kimberlin, has been waging lawfare against the First Amendment. Yesterday, the First Amendment prevailed, from David Hogberg, Investor’s Business Daily:
Back on May 29, Judge C.J. Vaughey of District Court of Maryland for Montgomery County signed a peace order against attorney Aaron Walker, preventing him from writing anything about convicted Speedway Bomber Brett Kimberlin. For more on that incident, go here. For more on Kimberlin, go here.
Today both parties were back in court in front of Appellate Judge Nelson Rupp. This time, Walker was represented by attorney Reginald Bours.
Kimberlin made a number of statements, but his basic argument boiled down to Walker wanted to encourage people to blog about Kimberlin to incite others to harass him and send him death threats. As evidence, Kimberlin again had pages of Twitter feeds and blog posts.
This time, though, Judge Rupp did something extraordinary that Judge Vaughey did not. He actually looked at the evidence Kimberlin presented. After looking at them, Rupp declared, “I see nothing in here that threatens you personally.”
Imagine that. A judge actually reads the evidence. Who’d have thought!
Who would have thought that in the enlightened Twenty First Century, some persons small of mind, but some large of butt, would attempt to mix race, religion and politics, fromom Meagan Clark, Daily Caller:
A pastor has upset the townspeople of Winfield, Alabama by holding a conference for white Christians, complete with Confederate flags, Ku Klux Klan insignia and a cross-burning ceremony.
The group supporting the conference contends they have a right to religious freedom like every other American, and this right should have prevented the town mayor from ordering their flyers to the trash, WAFF 48 reported.
“When did they start religious censorship?” Rev. Mel Lewis, founder of Christian Identity Ministries and the conference’s keynote speaker, asked.And:
And:
(CNN) – First lady Michelle Obama made an impassioned pitch for black churchgoers to embrace political action on Thursday in a speech to the country’s oldest black religious denomination.
“To anyone who says that church is no place to talk about these issues, you tell them there is no place better,” Obama said at a conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Nashville, Tennessee.
“Because ultimately, these are not just political issues,” she said. “They are moral issues
I am outraged.
In the spring of 2012, we brought a new addition to The Conservative Reader’s Pages. Eric Florack at Bitsblog and I spent some time looking at the work we were both doing with our sites and have decided that it would be beneficial to the readers of both to bring BitsBlog into the TCR world. We have helped each other out by writing for each other from time to time for several years now. BitsBlog’s format will remain as it has, but you will notice more visibility regarding BitsBlog articles and vice-versa as we build on this relationship and make other changes to The Conservative Reader’s main page in coming months.
Eric did a good job of announcing this arrangement at the time it began, but I have been remiss in speaking to it as Publisher of The Conservative Reader. I am very happy and excited to have BitsBlog as a major part of The Conservative Reader. This is a really big deal, and I hope that you as faithful followers of BitsBlog enjoy the opportunity to grow with us!
To the writers and readers of BitsBlog, welcome to The Conservative Reader! We look forward to a long and prosperous relationship!
Art Smith is Publisher of The Conservative Reader and Editor of The Conservative Reader’s main site. You can reach Art by email at [email protected].
The notion of “having it all” is a crock of shit. Women can’t have it all any more than can men.
Nobody can have it all, if it involves enjoying what you have. If you try to have everything, and are miserable in your effort, you have failed.
From Sister Toldjah:
A beloved American actor has passed away.
[…]
Mayberry’s not the only town mourning the loss of “Sheriff Taylor” this morning.
A great actor, and former American icon.
Final transfer to the infantry approved.
[T]here is no positive right to health care, that no human has a “right” to medical care. Congress enacted a law saying otherwise, but that does not match up to a reality in which physicians cannot be conjured out of thin air, nor made to the do the bidding of Congress, at the wages Congress would like to pay, and under the time scale mandated by the law.
Roxeanne de Luca, Haemet
In a free society, there is no such thing a right to a commodity, any commodity. A commodity is product or service of value which is the product of human endeavor. Healh care, which only exists because if is a product of human endeavor, is a commodity There is no right to commodity, such as health care, because before you can give health care to one person, you must first take if from another.
If you can not lead, then hide, from Washington Post, via Jim Hoft, Gateway Pundit:
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. sharply criticized lawmakers Monday for voting to hold him in contempt of Congress last week, saying Republicans have made him a “proxy” to attack President Obama in an election year.
In his first interview since Thursday’s vote, Holder said lawmakers have used an investigation of a botched gun-tracking operation as a way to seek retribution against the Justice Department for its policies on a host of issues, including immigration, voting rights and gay marriage. He said the chairman of the committee leading the inquiry, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), is engaging in political theater as the Justice Department tries to focus on public safety.
“I’ve been doing all of these things all the time Darrell Issa and his band have been nipping at my heels,” a defiant Holder said. “They’ve been nipping, but I’ve been walking.”
The attorney general has long been a lightning rod for Republican lawmakers’ anger toward the Obama administration. But Holder said the debate over documents related to the gun operation, known as “Fast and Furious” — along with the National Rifle Association’s attempts to make it an electoral issue — have made matters worse.
“I’ve become a symbol of what they don’t like about the positions this Justice Department has taken,” he said. “I am also a proxy for the president in an election year. You have to be exceedingly naive to think that vote was about .?.?. documents.”
Now let me see, Eric Holder goes running to the President to hide behind a concocted claim of Executive Privilege, and now he is crying to people war using him to get the President. The fact is that Fast & Furious is a murder case, and should be investigated as one, and it was Holder who firmly tied the White House t to the murder of Agent Brian Terry. Elian Gonzalez could not be reached for comment.
I have trouble with the idea of running a criminal conver-up merely to protect a retired assistant football coach, from by Buzz Bissinger, Daily Beast:
[Joe] Paterno is lucky to have died last January at the age of 85.
Otherwise, based on new information from a CNN story by Susan Candiotti, he would be facing possible indictment for perjury. Along with former Penn State University president Graham Spanier. Along with two high-ranking former Penn State officials who have already been indicted by the Pennsylvania attorney general on charges of lying to a state grand jury in the case of predatory animal Jerry Sandusky.
It seems Paterno and Pervert State knew about Jerry Sandusky and tolerated, if not fostered, Sandusky’s perversion.
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
As cited by Michael J. Boskin, Wall Street Journal.
I do not endorse Dick Morris as a pundit. However he does present a charming, witty and sharp picture of the choice we face in November, from the Other Smitty, the Other McCain:
Visit Smitty to view his six other Dick Morris videos.
Note, the state declares Obama Tax to the all wonderful cure all for all that ails our nations health care system. Yet every single person who is attempting to impose Obama Tax on you, is exempt from the Obama. When Dirty Harry Reid gets wheeling into the emergency room, no death panel will be hovering over his doctors.
The Obama administration continues to invoke the B.J. Clinton defense, to wit outright lying. B.J. wished the nation to believe that getting a Lewinsky, that is oral sex, from Monica Lewinsky was not sex, because B.J. said it was not sex.
Like wise, Jack Lew, Chief of Staff for Dumbo b/k/a Barack Obama, wants you to believe that Obama Tax, a/k/a Obama Care, a/k/a Affordable Care Act, is not a tax because the Obami has said it not a tax, video:
Hat tip video: Karen, the Lonely Conservative.
If you step in dog poop, you can pretend is just a candy bar dropped on the sidewalk. Yet it still smells like poo. Likewise the Obami can pretend that Obama Tax is not a tax, but still means less money in your pocket, and more in the control of the state. The Obami say that the Obama Tax is not a tax. Yet it hires not one new doctor, the people who actually treat the six, but does hire several hundred new IRS agents, people who do not treat the sick but rather take the People’s money.
I’ve had a chance to read the majority and minority rulings.
I’ve been reading these things for a number of years now and anyone who has done so, even those not legally trained, have begun to recognize that the majority and minority opinions from the USSC have distinctly different tones in them, regardless of whether the ruling and its consequences tends to lean to the left or right. The minority opinion in this case written with a tone which is consistent with it being perceived by the authors, as the majority opinion. On that basis, it appears the switcheroo was done by Roberts.
But why? That point was apparently addressed by Rush Limbaugh on Friday:
RUSH: If you gotta go into all kinds of contortions, if you got to go outside the bounds of the law to save the act, and that’s what the New York Times quotes Justice Roberts saying. Justice Roberts suggested that even he didn’t find the tax argument especially plausible, but he quoted Justice Holmes to explain why it was good enough. “As between two possible interpretations of a statute, by one of which it would be unconstitutional and by the other valid,” Justice Holmes wrote, that would be Oliver Wendell, “our plain duty is to adopt that which will save the act.”
This is the New York Times reporting that Roberts, “Gosh, I got to save the act. I got to save the act.” So he went back and found Oliver Wendell Holmes: “As between two possible interpretations of a statute, by one of which it would be unconstitutional and by the other valid, our plain duty is to adopt that which will save the act.”
Well, excuse me, Mr. Justice Roberts, but how did that work in your Arizona finding?
Well, if he’s using Holmes as his model, we can see what happened.
Judge Robert Bork tells us, that there is a story of Justice Holmes and Judge Learned Hand, who had lunch together and afterward, as Holmes began to drive off in his carriage, Hand, in a sudden onset of enthusiasm, ran after him, crying, “Do justice, sir, do justice.” Holmes stopped the carriage and reproved Hand: “That is not my job. It is my job to apply the law.”
And therein lies the problem. Consider this from Unkategorized
Holmes is particularly associated with what Anthony D’Amato and Arthur Jacobson call the “‘Separation Thesis’—the thesis that law is entirely separate and distinct from any value-system such as justice or morality.” Famously, Holmes proclaimed: “I hate justice.” In a letter from Holmes to John Wu, the former wrote: “I have said to my brethren many times that I hate justice, which means that I know if a man begins to talk about that, for one reason or another he is shirking thinking in legal terms.”
Similarly, Hand characterizes his “job” in a letter to Harold J. Laski:
I have been in a minority of one as to the proper administration of the Sherman Act. I hope and believe that I am not influenced by my opinion that it is a foolish law. I have little doubt that the country likes it and I always say, as you know, that if my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them. It’s my job.
Justice was not the only thing Holmes hated. “I hate facts,” Holmes frequently remarked; “the chief end of man is to form general propositions.” He was always careful to add that no general proposition is worth a damn.
Kinda makes you wonder why Holmes is held so highly by conservative legal types. But it leaves no doubt in the mind what motivated Roberts.
But why wasn’t, as Rush asks, this standard applied to the Arizona Immigration case?
Now, it doesn’t appear to me, I know the two cases are different, but it doesn’t appear to me that the chief justice went out of his way to find Arizona’s immigration law constitutional. Now, I know that the Arizona law, that case was a case that was Arizona versus the regime and there was no congressional legislation per se that was being argued. But at the end of the day, it was. Federal immigration law was not being enforced. Arizona is falling apart because of it. They passed their own laws which mirrored the federal governments laws so they can enforce them. And the court said you can’t.
So it’s not consistent. We’re gonna do everything we can to make sure the act is upheld. No. Only certain acts.
…
“It’s not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.”
You see, in Arizona, you know what, political choices, we don’t agree with your political choices, we’re gonna reject your choices in Arizona.
It does seem to me that it’s going to be very difficult indeed to avoid the charge that there was political motivation involved with this. Limbaugh points that out as well as anyone, thus the rather extensive quote here.
I pointed out in my hasty response the other day, (which was obviously typed on a telephone keyboard thus errors and all)
I see no good coming from this ruling. And I mean for either side. Yes Obama and company will declare victory… and didn’t do you have already done so. then again obama and his apologist declare victory after last years disasterous midterm elections. So, I’m not convinced we should take their victory dance seriously at all.
Some of us, David among them, losing to feel that there is a bit of light showing here :
True, I’d rather see Obama Care dead, and it is still alive. However, thanks to Chief Justice Roberts, Obama Care is now closer to being dead, and easier to kill. The democrats have been using this it is a tax, it is not a tax shell game. Now a stake has been driven through the heart of the theory that Congress can create a class of commerce for the sole purpose or regulating it.
Democrats who defend Obama Care, do so by taking ownership fo the largest tax increase in our nation’s history. Barack Obama adamantly defended Obama Care as not a tax. He now defends the Roberts’ ruling declaring his pet cause a tax.
Sorry, but I have a great deal of difficulty accepting that there is any sunshine at the end of the tunnel. Rather I begin to think that it is the headlight of a train. and there wasn’t a person on earth, including the democrats is signed off on the thing, who didn’t realize that the thing was a tax. Even Clinonista George Stephanopoulos, hardly a bastion of right wing thought himself, drove this point home:
The bottom line here is we all knew it was a tax increase and it made no difference. It made no difference whatsoever. It got driven through anyway. So Roberts coming out and saying nothing but what we already knew two years ago, is not going to make a bit of difference in terms of killing this thing off, now. Sorry, it just won’t. Oh, I agree that we may yet be able to kill the thing off. There’s a small chance we may yet survive. But it isn’t going to be because of Roberts’ attempting to be clever in all of this.
Justice Roberts
The Roberts ruling was totally unexpected by the usual pundits. Nobody called this thing. Absolutely nobody. I suggest to you, respectfully, that the reason that that is is that they didn’t expect Roberts to go outside the scope of the law. I E., the Constitution, as regards and filtered through, the arguments that were brought in the case. The fact of the matter is, that as I read the transcripts of the oral arguments, that very little was said about this being the tax. The argument that was brought before the court by the Obama administration was that it was constitutional under the commerce clause. The Obama administration officials that argued before the court almost religiously ignored the concept that it was a tax. Yet, Roberts was hell-bent as Limbaugh suggests, on finding some way to uphold the act…. and so apparently decided to do the Constitutional groundwork of the Obama administration for them. This is an amusing situation at least insofar as Obama considers himself to be a constitutional scholar. He was dead wrong on the commerce clause argument. But Roberts had to find some way to make the act work. So he offered up the tax option.
Roberts in his cleaver mood, has been successful in dropping what he perceives to be rather hot potato in the lap of Obama and company. Certainly, Roberts has been successful in getting the Republicans a weapon, in that what he has said is Obamacare is the largest tax increase in the history of the world. But will the voters take the word of Roberts on this thing? Most voters aren’t paying that close attention anymore. They certainly will not be in six months time. All they see is “free stuff” and a dive in with both feet. I begin to think that the only way that Obama and his liberalism here is going to be removed from the political picture in this country is if someone manages to catch him with either alive Boy or a dead girl in the Lincoln bedroom. And maybe, not even then.
Now as to the future and the chances of our eliminating socialist Healthcare from the books, I still find myself skeptical in the extreme.
Mitt Romney now claims he is going to eliminate Obamacare on the first day of his administration. His own history comes back to bite him on this one. I find it difficult to believe, myself, that the author of the legislation that Obama used as the basis of his monster…is going to kill off his own handiwork. I will be pleased to see it if it happens, but I’m extremely skeptical that it will. I suspect that the best we will see is a watered down version of Obamacare with Romney’s name on it. Which, of course, is no good whatsoever.
I don’t think there’s any question about that, and have said so since the opening bell on this case. Doug Mataconis writes about this at OTB and basically confirms my initially voiced suspicions:
A new set of email messages among top level Penn State officials shows quite blatantly the extent to which they went out of their way to protect Jerry Sandusky when they first became aware of sexual abuse allegations against him:
(CNN) – With convicted serial child sex abuser Jerry Sanduskybehind bars, new questions are surfacing about what Penn State officials knew about a 2001 incident involving the former assistant football coach’s encounter with a boy in the shower — and whether they covered up the incident.
Sandusky sexually abused other boys in the years after the 2001 incident and before his arrest.
CNN does not have the purported e-mails. However, the alleged contents were read to CNN.
The messages indicate former Penn State President Graham Spanier and two other former university officials knew they had a problem with Sandusky after a 2001 shower incident, but apparently first decided to handle it using a “humane” approach before contacting outside authorities whose job it is to investigate suspected abuse.
“This is a more humane and upfront way to handle this,’ Gary Schultz, who was a university vice president at the time, allegedly wrote.
Paul Campos summarizes the email exchange in the immediate aftermath of McQuerry bringing the incident he witnessed in the Penn State football team’s showers to the attention of Head Coach Joe Paterno:
*On February 9, 2001, former PSU quarterback and current graduate assistant coach Mike McQueary meets with Paterno and tells him that on the previous evening he saw Sandusky sexually assaulting a young boy in the showers of the PSU football facility.
*At some point between February 9 and on or about February 19th, Paterno informs Curley of what McQueary has told him.
*On or about February 19th, Curley and Schultz contact McQueary about the incident.
*On February 26th, Schultz writes to Curley to confirm that Curley is aware/approves of a three-part plan to deal with the potential institutional difficulties raised by having Joe Paterno’s former defensive coordinator continue to rape little boys on campus. This plan consists of talking to Sandusky “regarding the future appropriate use of the University facility,” … “contacting the chair of the charitable organization” [this is Sandusky’s Second Mile foundation, which he used to procure victims] and “contacting the Department of Welfare.” [The latter step was the minimum legal obligation placed on Penn State officials by Pennsylvania law].
This, of course, is exactly what they should have done and, had they gone forward with this plan then there’s a good chance that Sandusky would have come under investigation far earlier than he did and that the boys he abused in the years that followed would have been spared being victimized by a monster. So what happened? Why wasn’t there a report made to the Department of Welfare as Schultz and Curley had planned?
I respond to Doug:
Fry him and those who protected him. I have no problems with this at all, in fact I’d have problems if they didn’t.
But I wonder; Does protecting one from the consequences of criminal actions, end up being viewed differently, because of the political implications?
And mind you, please, I’ve not thought this totally through…. but was Sandusky protected by PSU brass because they didn’t want to be seen as persecuting a a politically-protected sub-group? IE; a homosexual?
This is somewhat less visious on my part than it sounds.
It seems to me that when one is a Member of a politically protected group, the politically favored group if you will, that the burden of proof in so far and least as public opinion goes, is unequal to that apply to those who are not members of that group.
I’m wondering if the protection provided wasn’t because of a perception on the part of the PSU brass that public opinion (and the court thereof)would it be running strongly against them should charges be brought. PSU brass would have been seen as going after the member of the favored “minority” group.
Sandusky
As such, such a case would have been harder to get to the real court system intact, much less through it.
I wonder also, if this isn’t a direct result of our offer reliance on legal system for every situation that pops up. Just a few short years ago, somebody stumbling into the scene of Sandusky with a twelve year old in the shower, (Ala Mike McQueary) would have resulted in Sandusky having a baseball bat taken to him by the person observing the scene. These days, we rely on the government to take care of such matters, but we hold back, afraid we’ll be seen as the problem. This is particularly true of those who have what I will call “Star power”.
I wrote some months ago about that;
McQueary’s claim is initial reax was to call his father. Since I have no evidence he did not make such a call, it seems most logical to proceed with the assumption he did so call.
We have one of two possible reasons he would make such a call;
1: Like a good little liberal, he doesn’t have the stones to take the action most people would have taken…. kicking Sandusky’s ass, or at least being confrontational. A good little liberal would nbe non-judgemental and certainly never violent. Such a person would certainly make an appeal to an authority figure…. one not involved in government.
2: McQuery recognizes Sandusky as star power. Consider my comments as regards Michael Jackson, a few days ago:
Certainly, we can see by his whack-job behavior, that Jackson was well beyond reason for a lot of years, but that point alone does not absolve him of his irresponsibility toward his health and the consequences of it. That irresponsibility was essentially reinforced by his star power. Let’s be honest enough to say that after the string of hits in the 80’s and early 90’s, the guy could spend an entire CD making artificial fart noises and nothing else, and his fans would be buying the things, talking about how talented he was, and that he was breaking new artistic ground, rather than simply breaking wind… and that brings me to the second point; Jackson is being held as innocent by his fans, since he was the star and could do no wrong.
It seems a lock sure bet to me that Sandusky had gotten to that level of start power at PSU. So, people would have some serious difficulty trusting a report of child abuse from such a person. (And should I need to remind anyone, that Jackson himself had a thing for small boys?) McQueary looked at the situation and recognized his far smaller… and easily replaceable… role at PSU, and balked at throwing away what he’d achieved… because he doubted… and perhaps correctly… that anything would ever be done about what he saw. So, an appeal to a trusted authority figure… a desperate cry for help.
Of the two, the latter seems more likely, though I don’t rule out some combo of the two.
There seems something in human nature that causes us to ignore the wrongs of those we hold high, those who ahve what I’ve been calling “star power”. I’m sure we each can point to other similar situations…. Bill Clinton, certainly, had is (rather irrational) defenders…. many of whom when called on such defense today, dance around or outright deny it.
At the same time, I wonder if now that the dam has burst, and his star power is gone, the consequences on Sandusky won’t be heavier than they would be otherwise.
That, I think would be a logical result of if nothing else, an extra trust abused by Sandusky.
At the bottom line, did this go on as long as it did because of… liberalism?
