As a conservative, you just have to love where the libtards are drawing their proverbial line in the sand. First, the libs wage a die hard suicide attack in formerly deep blue Wisconsin. Now the liberals all going all in to reclaim the Senate seat of the long time known drunk, the late Senator Oldsmobile. In Massachusetts, all a politician needed to win an election was a D suffixed to his name. Not the case any more, from my new most favorite co-bloggger, Anne Sorock, Legal Insurrection:
If you love Daily Kos, Van Jones and Keith Ellison, you’ll love Elizabeth Warren. If you love public employee unions running the state, you’ll love Elizabeth Warren. If you loved the Wisconsin Recall, you’ll love Elizabeth Warren.
The big union and Hollywood money and progressive media machine are going all in for Warren. It’s where they are making their stand (and so are we at LI for just that reason).
The liberals are fighting, and losing, their battles in traditionally blue states.
Don’t worry, I still love Darleen.
I’ll leave ET Williams to speak his piece:
Says Stacy:
To answer Mr. William’s question, Holder is sill the AGJ because he is both a Reliable Tool and, also, he Knows Too Much. My guess is that Holder has a signed presidential pardon in his safe. Would you exhibit the sort of cheek that Eric Holder offers before Congress without a Get Out Of Jail Free card in hot standby?
first off, what they shows very clearly is just what the left is willing to do to limit the constitution insofar as the second amendment. The illegality that they are willing to countenance in their efforts to further their totalitarian agenda.
Let’s be honest; the only reason that Eric Holder is still AG is because the Bamster needs someone to cover his backside, and in more than just “Fast and Furious”.
Holder, for his part, is being the wiseacre he is because in my estimation he figures that Obama is going to pardon anything that comes up between now and the election. Certainly, the ability to cover for the sins of the Obama administration does not end the moment all Bama is no longer president. Let’s remember there’s still a lot of political players within the department of justice in no-n leadership roles. That could make any prosecution of Holder, or for that matter, Obama himself, a bit of a problem.
Of course, we will be informed by the left that any prosecution of these two as a purely racist move.
But isn’t it interesting, the delta between how this situation is being handled, and how the Valerie Plame incident was handled. Where is the Democrat Party outrage over this one?
My guess is that holder wants Obama it has lost the election, will be roaming with Marc Rich.
A note from Glenn:
YOU DON’T NEED A WEATHERMAN TO SEE WHICH WAY THE WIND IS BLOWING: ‘Obama Girl’ Amber Lee Ettinger is ‘not as excited’ about 2012, won’t endorse Obama.
Indeed not. And little signs like this have been popping up all over.
Of course the usual cry of “Racism” keeps popping up from those trying in vain to defeat the meme that Obama is a failed president. Leaving aside the issue of why those racist republicans managed to fall so hard for Herman Cain, one wonders why it is that Amber Lee Ettinger hasn’t been labeled racist yet.
Dim Won, a/k/a Dumbo, b/k/a President Barack Obama on the nation’s economy:
President Obama: The truth of the matter is that, as I said, we created 4.3 million jobs over the last 27 months, over 800,000 just this year alone.
The private sector is doing fine. Where we’re seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government. Oftentimes cuts initiated by, you know, Governors or mayors who are not getting the kind of help that they have in the past from the federal government and who don’t have the same kind of flexibility as the federal government in dealing with fewer revenues coming in.
video:
Hat tip and reax: Sister Toldjah.
Not sure which is worse – his belief that the private sector is “doing fine” or his belief that the government is where we need to see the most growth! What’s really sad about this is – as I said on Twitter earlier – his private sector comments aren’t just White House spin: He really DOES believe the private sector is “doing fine.”
Sadly, Obama’s in a state of duhnial, much like many Democrats – including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who said in October 2011 that, “private sector jobs have been doing just fine”, and blamed Bush (of course) for the current unemployment/economic issues facing America.
I beg to quibble. It not so much that Dim Won is bone dumb ignorant. President Fifty-Seven States is simply not that smart. However Dim Won’s problem is not so much cognitive, but rather one of mind set. Obama is wedded ad the hips to class warfare. He see the world as either campaign contributors, that is public section union employees, with involuntary dues check-offs, and everybody else, to wit revenue sources.
Dumbo’s problem with the private sector is not one of job creation, the presence or lack of, but rather the private sector is not a reliable source for campaign contribution The Obama plan is simple. Funnel txx collars to untionized public employees. Have their dues docked from their pay. Then have the unions funnel the money back to the Obama campaign.
There was a de facto referendum on that model in Wisconsin on Tuesday. It lost. Expect another such referendum in five months. with similar results.
Either President Barack Obama made a sexist joke, or he is too naive to know the inference of the phrase “went down.” Given a choice between Door A or Curtain B, Salon tries to Rosemary Woods the tape, from Salon:
Let’s all agree to just not pretend the president made an “oral sex joke” at his gay fundraiser last night, because that’s stupid. It’s stupid, and most of the people with jobs as political reporters are at least literate, and understand that this thing did not happen. So don’t repeat it, or even write that “some say” they thought it maybe happened. This would’ve been fodder for one 200-word Wonkette post back in 2006, maybe. “Funny pool report says crowd tittered at unintentional double entendre” is not actually the sort of thing that the INSIDERS and political junkies who read Politico should concern themselves with. (And let’s also agree to stop just adding question marks to headlines when the headline without a question mark is not supported by the content of the story, maybe?)
Roll the tape, video:
Hat tip: Ann Althouse.
I’ll tend to go with Ms Banfield, and assume that President Fifty-Seven States did not intend to make a joke. On the other hand, the audience sure perceived the President’s quip to a joke.
However as the audience clearly laughed at the former editor of the Harvard Law Review, the idea that the Pres made an intentional funny is not without merit. What the President intended to do is open to debate, and I pass on that debate.
Garance Franke-Ruta is a senior editor at The Atlantic,, and where she oversees the Politics Channel and where Andrianna Sullivan holds court. Says Franke-Ruta:
Surveys show a shockingly high fraction think a quarter of the country is gay or lesbian, when the reality is that it’s probably less than 2 percent.
Now, you may well ask why knowing that discrepancy would be of any import. The answer is a simple and direct one:
Such a misunderstanding of the basic demographics of sexual behavior and identity in America has potentially profound implications for the acceptance of the gay-rights agenda. On the one hand, people who overestimate the percent of gay Americans by a factor of 12 seem likely to also wildly overestimate the cultural impact of same-sex marriage. On the other hand, the extraordinary confusion over the percentage of gay people may reflect a triumph of the gay and lesbian movement’s decades-long fight against invisibility and the closet.
So, in short, what we’re seeing here is a bandwagon argument, writ larger than life, as they always are… rather like the claim a few years ago of the number of homeless people that were supposedly dying every day. What was it, 24,000? If you’ll recall when we ran the numbers here on this web site, we figured out that if it was in fact 24,000 people dying every day, the problem with cease to exist after a period of less than one year through the stated attrition, alone. Then, as now, the reason for the overemphasis on numbers, false numbers, was obvious. They wanted sway on Society, that far outstripped their actual numbers. So, too, a few other groups, as Franke-Ruta points out:
Americans also “vastly overestimate the percentage of fellow residents who are foreign-born, by more than a factor of two, and the percentage who are in the country illegally, by a factor of six or seven,” according to a 2012 Wall Street Journal report on the social science of estimating minority groups. In 1993, a group of political scientists reported in Public Opinion Quarterly that “The extent to which minority populations are perceived as a kind of threat is … related to perceived proportions, though the direction of causality cannot be determined.” Correcting the misimpressions about the size of a minority group hasn’t been proved to have much impact on beliefs about them in the short-term, but that doesn’t mean that they might never.
I am reminded of Mark Twain’s comments, wherein he said that it’s easier to fool people than it is to convince them that they’ve been fooled.
In any event, as to the overly inflated perceptions of the size of various groupings, I’ve addressed the reasons behind that in the past. Briefly and particularly as regards homosexuals, the problem is of course is one of definitions… the legal definitions vs the Cultural. Consider this; A prohibition on homosexual unions wasn’t written into the constitution back when our nation was founded, because such things were assumed at a cultural level, and therefore never legally defined.
Proof of these assumptions is easy enough to find.
It is interesting for example, that Jefferson, (arguably the biggest social liberal of the lot) thought homosexual acts to be worthy of hanging… (I commend Fawn Brodie’s Jefferson to your reading list) and yet he never indicated anything of the sort in his … our… documents. Clearly, there was some assumptions made on the part of the founders in this area…. cultural assumptions. I have suggested repeatedly that the purpose of government, at least any government that wants to survive for long, in support the culture that gave that life. At the very least it should not run afoul of that culture, lest it become irrelevant to the people it’s supposed to be governing. Yet, while law and government is a more exact science, culture is less so. And so, codification of the culture is problematic at best.
Given this, Jefferson, and the rest of the founders apparently took the attitude that their best tack would be to write laws and a framework that would at least not run afoul of the existing culture, without specifying without attempting to codify the boundaries of that culture.
Leftists, and particularly homosexual leftists, correctly saw the source of the problem not as government but as society. Therefore, they seek to use government to change society. As an example, consider the attempted criminalization of anyone speaking out against homosexual marriages. This is a bedrock change in society that is being attempted by use of the force of government. Certainly, such a movement wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance if the real homosexual population numbers, say 1 or 2%, were commonly understood.
Frankly I’d be interested in being a fly on the wall when Sullivam inevitably lights in on Garance Franke-Ruta. The torrent of illogic from his mouth would be legendary, even within the context of his normal incoherency.
Now, as an aside, ponder this for just a moment; what is it that is driving this argument? Observe, if you will, the picture to the right. At issue here is, as usual, “free stuff”, and who gets it. At least some of this mess was opened up when government started picking winners and losers, and doling out money according to those whims. Once again we see were governmental power, and governmental money and the abuse thereof, distorts the social construct.
Ask yourself; Would this argument and the resulting societal damage, even be occurring absent government largess?
The democrats decision to attempt to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker may be the most bone headed move since July 3, 1863 when R.E. Lee’s ill-fated charge. from Karen, the Lonely Conservative:
The Democrats are touting exit polls that were woefully wrong to argue that Obama is still strong in Wisconsin. Hey, maybe they’ll start to believe their spin. Who knows what other blue states have a silent majority that’s had just about enough of hope and change. I wonder if the 38% of union household voters who went for Walker said they prefer Obama, but were lying because they didn’t want to be called raaaaacists. Perhaps people are waking up and seeing the need for sane fiscal policy, at both the state and the federal level
Public employee labor unions are the enemy of the taxpayer. It time for politician to either stand with the taxpayer, or stand down.
Some standards shouldn’t be broken up into singles. The Beatles Abbey Road LP is one such. So, here’s the whole thing.
The official unemployment numbers, once massaged into something more palatable than the reality of the situation, stands at around 8%… and has for some months, now. David Hogberg, in Investor’s Business Daily:
The unemployment rate rose slightly to 8.2% in May, holding above 8% for the 40th straight month, the Labor Department reported Friday. But actual employment rates of core working age Americans suggests the true jobs situation is even worse.
From mid-1987 until the Great Recession, the employment-to-population ratio of 25-54-year-olds usually ranged from 78.5% to 80%. It never fell below 78.2% even during the 1990-1991 and 2001 slumps.
But now, nearly three years after the recession ended in June 2009, that ratio stands at just 75.7%.
“Right now this is probably a better measure than the unemployment rate,” said James Sherk, senior policy analyst in labor economics at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “There are so many people dropping out of the job market and the unemployment rate, bad as it is, do
esn’t pick that up. The ratio gives a better idea of employment opportunities.”
It gives us a clear view also of the failure of the Obama administration to deal with such matters. The policy failures of this administration are the same failures that Jimmy Carter ran into. Socialism, you see, doesn’t work.
Obama’s people can use it’s shady bookkeeping, to keep the unemployment numbers artificially low in reports.They can continue to use the phrase “unexpectedly bad reports” while the economy continues to take a nose dive. After all, they’ve been doing it since assuming office in 2008. The fact is though, that the real people behind those numbers still vote. They know who is responsible for them being jobless. that the economy going in the tank, continually, is not “unexpected” to them. They know who is responsible for the policies caused them to give up looking for a job in a jobless “recovery”.
In my estimation they will vote accordingly come November. As such, Obama in the end will not escape the real numbers. That reckoning is coming.
Q: Why did the leftist cry himself to sleep?
A: He can’t recall.
That’s one of the many comments I’m hearing this morning, following a Scott Walker win in Wisconsin, that we predicted here.
WI Gov Scott Walker, following his victory speech last night
For all of the trying to make their own reality that the left has been involved with…. (“The Tea Party is dead”)….these last several months, the fact is the Tea Party handed the Democrats their collectivist heads. Make no mistake about what I’m saying, here. This is not a GOP victory, though they’ll cheer for it in a somewhat muted fashion. This was the Tea Party’s work, all the way. That’s a point that the GOP establishment shouldn’t lose sight of.
Says Jim Geraghty
He has liberated them from the soothing illusion that they are popular, and that the public agrees with them.
I’m not so sure, Jim. Think back and I’m sure you’ll have great problems coming up with any instance in memory where the Democrats allowed reality to alter their perceptions of themselves and their popularity. Even after Reagan’s landslide against Carter, the left was firmly convinced they were the more popular.
And today? Look at the comments from the folks who tried to out Walker:
“We aren’t going to go away,” said Marty Beil, executive director of the Wisconsin State Employees Union. “We’re not going to pull a blanket over our head and pee in our pajamas.”
You can’t get lower than that.
That’s why I’ve been telling the GOP for decades now, that they should never let down their guard. Too bad they’ve not been listening, and the Tea Party had to fight for the sane among us.
Oh, and speaking of Unpopular, CNN is saying that the Walker win was a narrow defeat for Democrats. Yeay, kinda like jobless rates have been taking “unexpected downturns” for 35-plus months, now. (OK, they changed it, now… apparently they could hear the laughter.)
Now…. you are going to doubtless hear that the reason Walker won is that the leftist cabal of the Unions, the Democrat party, and the socialists, were outspent. Funny how they only have problems with money in politics when they lose. Funny too, how they never mention that until the left gave up trying to buy the voters in WI, they were outspending the GOP nearly two to one. It’s easier fr them to suggest that they were outspent, than it is to say that their ideas were rejected….they went “all in” on this, even accusing Walker of fathering a “love child” and still lost. It’s over for the unions, people. And it’s about time.
Finally, let’s recall, please that Wisconsin went for Obama in the last election, in a big way. Does anyone outside the DNC’s inner sanctum not understand what a ground shift this is, and what it suggests for the election in November?
Oh… and PS to the GOP establishment: This event proves what I’ve ben saying for quite a bit, now… the Tea Party is more popular than you and your “centrism”. Isn’t it time you got on board?
F
ormer president, and permanent Arkansas trash, B.J. Clinton was on the campaign trail, but for whom was B.J campaigning, from Jeff Cox, CNBC:
Former President Bill Clinton told CNBC Tuesday that the US economy already is in a recession and urged Congress to extend all the tax cuts due to expire at the end of the year.
In a taped interview aired on “Closing Bell,” the still-popular 42nd president called the current economic conditions a “recession” and said overzealous Republican plans to cut the deficit threaten to plunge the country further into the debt abyss.
Is B.J. scheming to get Mrs. Clinton into the White House or just get Barack Obama out of it?
I posted about this track years ago:
Leslie West of Mountain, for his “Stormy Monday” as recorded at the Atlanta Pop festival. 19 minutes of as good a musical description of a thunderstorm as I’ve ever heard… powerful, musical, playful, and nearly jazz-like at times, yet never forgetting to rock and roll. One of my favorite all time recordings. It’s a bear to find, anymore.
William Tucker in The Spectator:
Since the incomparable William F. Buckley, Jr., has already dealt with this subject in 1958, I defer to his inimitable style in introducing the subject of today’s column:
Halfway through the second term of Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal braintrusters began to worry about mounting popular concern over the national debt…. Indeed, Franklin Roosevelt had talked himself into office, in 1932, in part by promising to hack away at a debt which, even under the frugal Mr. Hoover, the people tended to think of as grown to menacing size…. And then, suddenly, the academic community came to the rescue. Economists across the length and breadth of the land were electrified by a theory of debt introduced in England by John Maynard Keynes. The politicians wrung their hands in gratitude. Depicting the intoxicating political consequences of Lord Keynes’s discovery, the wry cartoonist of the Washington Times Herald drew a memorable picture. In the center, sitting on a throne in front of a maypole, was a jubilant FDR, cigarette tilted up almost vertically, a grin on his face that stretched from ear to ear. Dancing about him in a circle, hands clasped together, their faces glowing with ecstasy, the braintrusters, vested in academic robes, sang the magical incantation, the great discovery of Lord Keynes: “We owe it to ourselves.”
With five talismanic words, the planners had disposed of the problem of deficit spending…. Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect…
After being pinned to the wall in such eloquent fashion like a rare butterfly, you would think the conceit that “We owe the national debt to ourselves” would have been long retired to some museum of rhetorical antiquities. But no, we find that even today the doctrine is still vigorously alive, at least in the mind of Paul Krugman, the lunatic columnist of the New York Times who has just published another 300-page volume that can be digested into three words: “Spend, spend, spend” — the government, that is.
In other words, more of the same failed policies that got us here. Clearly, it’s all the left knows how to do. They have no answer for the reality that their policies have failed us… and always have…. and always will.
From a suppose institution of higher education, City University of New York, via Susan Edelman New York Post:
A steering committee led by Joyce Moy, director of CUNY’s Asian Research Institute, ran faculty focus groups based on “identity.” The groups included “African-American/black, Asian, White/Jewish, Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender, Hispanic/Latino, Individuals with disabilities, and Italian-American.”
Setting aside the merits, one of CUNY’s groups is not like the others. African-American, Asian, Jewish and Italian are all groups with some common ethnicity. Whereas, there is utterly no common ethnic components to a person’s sexual behavior. One is say a black or Italian from his moment of conception. Yet nobody has been conceived as a homosexual or bisexual.
So if CUNY has established de facto quotas for one behavior, what other behaviors should also be rewarded. How about set asides for chronic liars, like Elizabeth Warren, Brett Kimberlin and Barack Obama. What about a set aside for convicted felons ljke Kimberlin or O.J. Simpson?
