Loose Thoughts

A few loose thoughts:

1.  Be sure to check out my continuing Monday posts on DaTechGuy blog each week.  They go up a little after noon each Monday.  This week my post reflects on the upcoming administration of John Bel Edwards.  Color me skeptical.

2.  Why is Donald Trump still leading in the polls?  Seriously.  I'm not being derogatory about Trump supporters, but I swear I spoke to one guy a week ago who said he likes Trump "because you just never know what he will say!"  It's like reality tv!  SMDH.

Okay, so Rubio and Cruz are trending up and that's good.  Steve will never be on board with Rubio but I can be.  My history with Rubio is very well documented, all the way back to May 2009 on this and multiple other blogs. I'm predicting the nominee will be Rubio (yes, I KNOW conservatives hate his immigration stance; trust me.  The Legal Insurrection readers have flayed me over this).

And by the way, The New Yorker has an interesting profile of Rubio, here.

3.  I think Ben Carson is a very kind, gentle man; he won't be president.

4.  I really, really miss the sane, rational, intelligent voice of Bride of Rove.  Perhaps she will come back in 2016?  *Hoping*

5.  There are some great local activities going on this week:  the annual Candlelight Christmas Service will be this Friday, December 4, at the Brown Chapel on the Centenary campus.  We went last year and it's just beautiful.  I've been looking forward to it all year.  Saturday, December 5 will be the Pioneer Christmas Parade and Trade Days in Grand Cane.  It begins early but is always a good time.

6.  Gertrude Stein once said “It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.”  The revisions to my Cammie book are sitting here, ready to go, but I haven't done them.  In part, I hate to get back in there and mess up what I've done, but I know that in the end it will be better.  In another part, my deadline is August 1.  That's a long way away and I work better under pressure.  So, I'm setting myself a February 1 deadline.  There's a reason behind that date that I don't want to get into right now, but suffice to say that my goal is to have the manuscript ready to go by February 1.  

While I do have a contract with LSU Press, the manuscript still has to get by their panel of expert readers, so I have to get my act together.  Right now I am doing some additional research and reading to round out a couple of thin spots in my manuscript.  I had no idea what a long process this is; but, it will be a better book for it all!

7.  What a screwed-up-dirty dog-cluster-monkey-mess this LSU story has been this week.  The only person that needs to go ANYWHERE is Joe Alleva.  What an inept ass.  Both Miles and the players deserve better than what they got from Alleva this past week.

8.  Have you tried this?  It is heaven.  I can only find it at Sam's Club -- during the holidays.  Stock up.

9.  I am SO ready for baseball season at Centenary to begin.  This is the fastest three months of the year for me.

Have a good week.  I'm back to work this week after Thanksgiving break and we are heading into EOC testing.  We are ready.  Then we get to kill Macbeth.  Awesome!  Then Christmas break!

Leave a comment.  I miss your voices.

The White House Spin Is Making Me Dizzy

This is why so many people hate politics and/or politicians.

The spin.  The doublespeak.  The lies.

Case in point.  Consider White House chief of staff Jack Lew this morning talking with George Stephanopoulos on the contraceptive issue that has been raging; it's really the same thing that grated during the Obamacare debate.  This morning Jack Lew said (emphasis mine),

You know, George, from the very beginning, the president had two important goals here. One is to guarantee that every woman has a right to all forms of preventive health care, including contraception, secondly, that we do it in a way that respects the legitimate religious differences and the religious liberties that are so important in our country. 

On Meet the Press this morning, Lew said:

We are now in a place where we can say with certainty that women are going to have the right to health care and we can say that religious institutions, including Catholic hospitals and universities, won't have to pay for or do the administrative work to provide benefits that they find objectionable.

First of all, when exactly did health care become a "right," and two, when did contraception become a "right"?  And when did I, as a woman, not have access to health care?  Sure, women at one time were denied the right to vote, but health care?  I don't remember that one.

And on the issue of contraceptives, women have managed their contraception choices for ages without the government guaranteeing their right to it.

It's all about the doublespeak.

Now all of a sudden Republicans are apparently denying women access to contraceptives because they don't want the government dictating every aspect of our daily lives.  Bullspit.

And now, the government is attempting to force insurance companies to provide it whether they want to or not.  As Rick Santorum pointed out on Meet the Press this morning:

No one's denying them access to birth control. This is, this is outrageous. I mean, the, the bottom line is that you have the federal government now saying we're going to give you a right and then saying, by the way, we're going to tell you how to exercise that right. We're going to control you, a religious, a church-affiliated group as to, you know, what you provide to your employee. And if you don't like it, tough, because our rights, our right to tell you what to do trumps your deeply held convictions about what your dollars should be spent for. And the idea that you can have the insurance company, and by the way, many and--of--a large number of Catholic social service providers are self-insured, and so the self-insured is the insurance company, they're going to be forced to still provide.

So all that compromise business about how the Catholics won't be forced to provide contraception is baloney.

It's all smoke and mirrors.

Lew went on with his spin cycle when he said on the subject of a Senate budget:

So it, it is a challenge in the United States Senate to pass legislation when there's not that willingness to work together. Congress didn't do a great job last year. It, it, it drove right to the edge of a cliff on occasion after occasion. I actually think it's unfair to blame the United States Senate for that. A lot of that was because of the extreme, you know, conservative approach taken by House Republicans.

Hunh?  It's the fault of conservatives that Harry Reid hasn't passed a budget in the Senate in over 1000 days?   When David Gregory pointed out that the Democrats control the Senate, Lew then blamed the tea party:

Yeah, but it--the positions that ended up tying the Congress in knots came out of the House. It came out of the tea party wing in the House.

Ridiculous. 

So.  According to Jack Lew (on two different programs) today,  contraceptives are a natural born right and the conservative tea party wing is to blame because Harry Reid can't pass a budget.

I'm getting dizzy. 

No wonder people hate politicians.

Desperate Democrats

In response to my post yesterday about former La. Governor Buddy Roemer's imminent presidential bid announcement, Sarah commented, "Who's not running for president?"  Well, Paul Ryan isn't....

But she raises a good point.  While the main stream media has already picked the Republican candidate, (we can just bypass that primary nonsense!)  in reality, the field is still settling.  I don't think Roemer is going to be a serious contender, but that's beside the point.  The field isn't set.  Stacy McCain still contends that Palin is getting in which will definitely shake things up.

Yesterday, Legal Insurrection pointed out that the democrats must already be sensing trouble:

Democrats must be in trouble if The Daily Beast is running a headline White Supremacist Stampede, with this opening line:

Add to the growing list of candidates considering a bid for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012 America’s most famous white-power advocate: David Duke.

Ah yes, the David Duke card gets played.

And Professor Glenn Reynolds agrees:

Like the release of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve oil, the fact that they’re playing these cards so very early in the election cycle does smack of desperation.

Obama's vulnerability is obvious to everyone except possibly the Narcissist in Chief himself.

Look for more of these political moves to come; I'm taking over/under wagers on how far out from the election the permitorium in the Gulf is lifted.  I'm guessing early next year you'll see a wave of new permits being issued and rigs springing up like dandelions in the Gulf of Mexico.

Hit the Road

It's a gorgeous day so Steve and I are hitting the road again today and heading back over to Minden to see Milly Rose.  She called this week and told me she's "unpacked a LOT of new stuff" and so we're off to check it out.

What else am I going to do, anyway, but sit here and seethe over the hypocrisy that emanates from our campaigner-in-chief or fret about the uninspiring line of  Republican candidates lining up to unseat him?

I'll be back this afternoon with the FMJRA and some Milly pictures.  Get outside today. 

Oh August, Please Go

Man...it's August; I'm distracted and unfocused.

Well, I'm really focused on work right now and getting the school year off to a good start.  There are a lot of little details, procedures, and paperwork that need to be handled.  That's consuming a lot of my energy right now.  It'll level off, soon.

I just can't write about this mosque anymore.  It's such a cut and dry issue to me, I just can't continue writing about how morally wrong it is for this mosque to happen.  Bride of Rove nailed it for me today on this issue:

Ground Zero Victory Mosque? I’m against it. Had they named it anything but the Cordoba Project and insisted on dedicating it on 9-11 and if they had more than $17k in the bank with the funding coming from mystery money and had Atlas Shrugs not uncovered the truth about the Imam in charge – meh – maybe. But given all that? Who the hell out there can support it other than on the lame-assed “It’s legal” defense? It’s offensive and aweful and should be shut down before the first brick is touched

Read what she wrote and know my response is "what she said!"

I'm also really interested in this post by Chris Harnisch regarding Yemen, but alas, I'm unfocused.  I can't force my grey matter to delve deeply enough into it to matter right now.

You know, I had an email conversation with a friend this weekend about blogging; how do you keep going when it all just gets silly and redundant and you get to the point where you can't even make it relevant anymore.  I finally decided, it's just August.  It'll come back around.

Right now what I'm really focused on is my Stieg Larsson series.  I read the first book, as you know.  Then I read the second one and when I finished it Sunday night I was all, "What the HELL!  How can he leave me like this!"  Thank goodness I'm reading them so far behind everyone else because now I have all three.  If I'd had to wait several months before getting my hands on book number three, I'd be furious!  He SOOOOOOO left me hanging.  Tsk, tsk.

So I'm just beginning book three, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, and...well, I'm focused on THAT.  I can't wait to find out what happens to Lisbeth Salander.  (Please don't tell me!).  As I finish them I pass them off to my brother; he's equally enthralled.

But, you know, if I was focused enough to blog about something it might be this post from Hot Air about Charlie Crist's sinking fortunes.  Heh!

Or I'd especially like to cover this one about the moratorium.  Via The Wall Street Journal,:

Senior Obama administration officials concluded the federal moratorium on deepwater oil drilling would cost roughly 23,000 jobs, but went ahead with the ban because they didn't trust the industry's safety equipment and the government's own inspection process, according to previously undisclosed documents.

Oh man.  That one's gonna hurt...; Michelle Malkin weighed in on this one, here.

And consider this, although at this point, it's just rumor because I haven't confirmed it in great detail, but according to a source, he told me his firm has been "rehiring" workers that were "laid off" some sixty days ago because for each "new hire" there is a $5000 tax credit under Obama's jobs program.

WTF?  Can you do that?  PolitiFact says:

With his first year in office under his belt and unemployment still high, President Barack Obama called for additional help for the economy through a tax credit for businesses that add jobs...The tax credit would be $5,000 for every new worker employed in 2010. It would be capped at $500,000 per firm.

Hmph.  No potential for fraud there, no?  

I don't think I WANT to focus on the possibilities there...

Meanwhile, Obama's index is -14 today as he chips away on the greens on Martha's Vineyard and the rest of us squabble over jobs and mosques and the country goes to hell in a handbasket. 

Ah, August.

Please go away.

Am I On Strike?

I think every blogger, at some point, becomes demoralized, dejected, disgusted.  No, this is not an "I'm retiring  from blogging" thing at all, but I admit to having backed off a bit in the past few weeks as real life has taken over my world.  I can't string two coherent thoughts together anymore, much less a blog post.  I know things will settle down and return to normal at some point, but man, oh man.  Life has been crazy.  Implosion.

So I'm checking the sites tonight to see what I've missed this week and here's Ed Morrissey's post entitled "Did the Government Cause the Gulf Oil Spill?"  Well, hell. 

As it turns out, maybe, indirectly, yeah...

The generally accepted view of the Deepwater Horizon disaster has focused on the blowout preventer and the non-standard procedures BP conducted just before the explosion and fire.  However, most of the damage and the main source of the spill came from the collapse and sinking of the DH platform rather than the initial explosion.  A new report by the Center for Public Integrity, based on testimony from people on scene and Coast Guard logs, contains evidence that the platform sunk because of a botched response from the Coast Guard, which failed to coordinate firefighting efforts and to get the proper resources to fight the fire...

Well, no wonder Obama shook BP down to foot the bill on this one.

Read the rest of Ed's post for the whole story, as well as this one by Rob Bluey at the Washington Examiner for the full story on that. 

I'm so sick of this administration - from their pushback on Arizona to their own failure to secure the border; to Obama's party, party, party White House while the nation rots, the complete and total destruction of our country and the Constitution...; the way this administration has fought my own Governor at every turn on the oil spill management....I don't have to itemize all of it.  You know, because if you're reading this blog you're sick of it too. 

We try to blog about it, we try to write and tell people, but hell.  Is anybody listening?    According to Rasmussen today, 26% of the nation's voters "strongly approve" of the way Obama is doing his job.  WTF is up with that?  What's wrong with these people?  Did they just end up in the wrong country?  Hell! 

Maybe my subconscious is resting for the fall elections.  Because I am fairly certain that come November, the Democrats, no matter how they've ranted, raved, smeared and played demagogue, they'll know the power of the conservative voter.  Epic.

I'll round-up the week tomorrow.  Maybe next week I'll kick it back into gear.  Right now, I'm just pissed.

Bleh.

Sheryl Crow Just Wants to Have Some Fun, but Not With the Tea Party

Because Sheryl Crow is so superior to everyone else she is now qualified to pass judgment on patriotic Americans expressing, as Crow is, their right to free speech and engagement in political discourse.

Via Newsbusters, Katie Couric asked Crow in a Glamour magazine interview (Glamour?!) what she thought about the activism of the Tea Party movement.  Crow's response:

"I appreciate the fact that those people are out there and that they are fired up," responded Crow, before adding that Tea Partiers "haven't educated themselves...they're just pissed off."

When will celebrities learn to just shut up and do what they are paid to do? Why do so many of them continue to alienate fans and potential customers?  It runs both ways, to be sure.  I'm sure liberals get irritated at Chuck Norris or Ted Nugent when they express their opinions, too.  The difference, it seems to me, however, is that in this case Sheryl Crow sinks to judgmental name calling.

I could be wrong, but I don't recall Nuget, Norris or Janine Turner insulting the other side.  Can't you just express an opinion, if you must, without being insulting?  

When you have nothing else to back up your position, rely on the insult.

Not only are Tea Partiers "angry" but also potentially dangerous; a little too much Janet Napolitano in your reading stack, Sheryl?:

"My main concern is that [the Tea Party is] really fear-based," said Crow, a cancer survivor and environmental activist. "What's coming out of the Tea Party most often, especially if you go onto YouTube, and you see some of the interviews with these people who really don't even know what the issues are, they're just swept up in the fear of it and the anger of it."

"They're not sure what they're angry at," Crow continued. "[T]hey don't understand what's happening on Wall Street."

The singer also worried that the "uneducated" and "angry" Tea Partiers could even become dangerous. "[K]nowledge is power, and anything less than that when it comes to anger can be dangerous," said Crow.

Let me clear it up for you, Sheryl.  I'm educated. I'm angry - you've got that part right.  I'm angry at the big government takeover by the Obama administration.  I'm angry at the generational debt this administration is dragging us in to.  I'm angry at the explosion of social programs and the expansion of the welfare state along with the seemingly endless continuation of unemployment benefits.  99 weeks?  Really?  You can't find some kind of job in two years?!  I'm angry at the refusal of this administration to secure our borders and the sanctuary cities that allow illegals to violate our laws.  I'm angry at the socialization of the health care industry while doing nothing, really, to reign in health care costs.  That's not reform.  I'm angry at the very idea of cap and trade and the refusal to drill in ANWR and other much safer reservoirs than deepwater Gulf drilling;  for that matter, I'm angry at the very mismanagement of the Gulf disaster which YOU, as a self-avowed environmentalist ought to be outraged about.

There's more, but I'm sure you're busy, Miss Crow.

How's that toilet paper rationing thing working out for you?

Here is the entire interview, if you are interested.

(H/T:  Kim Ebey)

Can You Hear Us, Now?

The New Yorker has a feature on the Tea Party movement and characterizes it this way:

As spring passed into summer, the scores at local Tea Party gatherings turned to hundreds, and then thousands, collecting along the way footloose Ron Paul supporters, goldbugs, evangelicals, Atlas Shruggers, militiamen, strict Constitutionalists, swine-flu skeptics, scattered 9/11 “truthers,” neo-“Birchers,” and, of course, “birthers”—those who remained convinced that the President was a Muslim double agent born in Kenya.

Which one of those stereotypes means "hard-working, middle class American conservative"?

Ben McGrath is the author of the piece and after chronicling the oddities of the past decade, to include the collapse of Detroit and Wall Street, the election of an African American Democratic President, and the "erosion of public trust in élite institutions," as well as possibly the strangest of all, "an obscure state senator who once posed naked for Cosmopolitan emerges, after driving a pickup truck around Massachusetts, as a leading contender to unseat the aforementioned President."

What's shocking? The part that Scott Brown posed naked for Cosmopolitan when he was 22 years old or the part that he drove a pickup truck?

McGrath contends that "American history is dotted with moments like this, when, as the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz says, “panic and vitriol come to the fore,” occasioning a temporary realignment of political interests."

You can read the rest of McGrath's summation of the Tea Party movement, including his opinion of Dick Armey whom he characterizes as "an absent-minded professor in cowboy boots," here.

Hanson on Obama

Don't miss Victor Davis Hanson this morning on Obama's "meltdown." As always, Hanson just nails it:

The once celebrity Obama has lost that luster, point-by-point over a year, bleeding by a thousand small cuts until he nears 40-percent approval. In themselves, the bad jokes like the flippant remark about the Special Olympics, the lunatic appointments like Anita Dunn and Van Jones, the serial untruths about airing health care on C-SPAN or shunning lobbyists, the phony deadlines on Gitmo and the Iranians, the bribing of senators with hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayers' funds, the bowing, the snubbing of the British, the use of the race card against tea-party critics, the Skip Gates mess, the Orwellian NEA business, constant fluff photos ops, but rare real press conferences — all that in the aggregate brought Obama to his present state.

It's not just Obama that carries the burden here - the entire Democratic party is circling the drain right now. Martha Coakley is tanking in MA (and there's that nasty incident with John McCormack last night) which is, I think, evidence of things to come. Campaigning Democrats are feeling the heat and getting frustrated.

Republicans don't seem to have their act pulled together just yet to capitalize on this meltdown, but there is still time. Marco Rubio in Florida is certainly a bright spot. It seems he's about done with Charlie Crist right about now.

Read Hanson's entire post here.

The Politics in Popular Fiction

I can see I'm going to have to run over to my local Barnes & Noble this week and pick up a copy of Game Change. The book by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin describing the 2008 presidential campaign is the hot topic right now.

And it sounds darned interesting! Marc Ambinder has some gossipy details here, including Harry Reid's "no Negro dialect" which had everyone in an uproar yesterday.

I read a lot of non-fiction, but every once in a while I throw some popular fiction in there just for a break. I just finished Sara Paretsky's Hardball yesterday. She's not as prolific as some authors and it's been a long time since I read one of her V. I. Warshawski novels, but I've always enjoyed them and Paretsky spins a decent mystery tale, as a rule.

I had some issues with this book though. By the time I reached page 44 there had been at least three references to Barack Obama, some veiled, some obvious: one in the introduction as Paretsky recalls her own early political activism: ('We thought change for good was not only possible, but near at hand. Lately, my long-dormant sense of hope has come back to life.")

Page 26, Paretsky's detective, Vic Warshaski, visits a client where "Martin Luther King, Jr.'s and Barack Obama's portraits hung on either side of the wall-mounted television...". And on page 44, Vic says of a Chicago politician that he was "as photogenic as John-John or Barack."

So by this point, I'm thinking, okay, maybe I'm overly sensitive to this - let it go. One of the characters is a young, handsome, rising Chicago politician, so maybe these references are part of the story. It's understandable. This character is possibly being groomed "for a post-Barack Obama presidential run" (p. 167).

But after a while I felt beat over the head with them. There are lots of anti-government references as well. By the end of the novel, Vic is being watched by Homeland Security to the point that she has to go on the run. There is much editorializing about the Patriot Act ("We think we're so safe here, and yet my own government is spying on me" (p. 260).

And there are plenty of shots at the torture debate as one of the characters is revealed to have confessed to a crime he didn't commit after being tortured by corrupt police officers: "Given the climate of torture cultivated by the U.S. Department of Justice in recent years, some cops apparently felt they had no reason to hold back on their own forays into 'extreme rendition,'" (p. 433).

In the end, it seemed to me a lot of needless politicizing in a popular fiction novel. It felt preachy.

As soon as I finished the book I picked up Robert Stacy McCain's book with Lynn Stewart, Donkey Cons. I figured, if I'm going to read about politics, it might as well be non-fiction.

What Does it All Mean?

I'll leave it to the highly paid pundits and experts like Michelle Malkin to tell us "what it all means," but the elections last night were crazy-exciting to watch.

I will say that I'm thrilled with the Christie win, not shocked by the McDonnell win, and encouraged by the NY-23 race. I really thought Hoffman could pull that one out, but so it goes. As Britt Hume said last night, "That's why you have primaries." Part of the issue in that election was a time issue; it was a late-breaking campaign from the very beginning. Hoffman fought a great fight and there's a lot to be encouraged about there.

Stacy McCain reports from the Hoffman headquarters:

The liberal Republican Scozzafava suspended her campaign four days before Election Day, but still got about 7,000 votes -- a number greater than the margin of victory for the Democrat she endorsed, Bill Owens. Her defeat was victory enough for some conservatives, on a night when the GOP swept the off-off-year gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey. And the candidate who drove Scozzafava out of the race struck a defiant tone in conceding his narrow loss to Owens.

"This one was worth the fight.…. And this is only one fight in the battle," said Hoffman, an accountant who began his campaign as an utter unknown but finished as the hero of what John Gizzi of Human Events called a nationwide "crusade" by conservatives.

So, yes, there's much to be encouraged about.

And no time to lick wounds or savor victories! The 2010 elections are just around the corner and there's always Florida!

(More at Memeorandum)

Election Night

Update: And Corzine has just given his concession speech! Hooray for Christie's victory! The NY-23 is still really close right now and it's nerve wracking. Stacy McCain is reporting problems with voting machines in two counties - about 11 machines. Overall though, either way, it's been a good night for conservatives.

Election night - I'm settled in with the slower-than-Christmas-I-hate-Vista laptop watching the returns. McDonnell has already been declared in Virginia. No shocker there but good news nontheless.

There's talk all over the internet, blogosphere and television as to whether these elections are a referendum on Obama or not. I don't know about that; that's really not my area of expertise, but I do believe that it is telling that the New Jersey race, for example, is expected to be as close as it is. By all previous expectations and performance, the Democrat should have had no problem there. That Christie has made it such a contest may not be a referendum on Obama but certainly shows how voters are beginning to view the shenanigans coming out of Washington.

So much for the right wing fringe!

Simply put, anyone who spins this election story as having nothing to do with a referendum on Democrats or the massive spending coming out of Congress right now is just silly.

Ah well. Updates to come as results come in. Hang tight.

On a More Optimistic Note...

To counter my "end of the world" post earlier, I'll make note here of Michael Berry's guest host spot yesterday for Mark Levin.

I didn't hear the whole show; I was driving and caught a few minutes on the radio, but it was encouraging. Berry was making the case that this is a great time in America - the greatest time, in fact. We are more politically active and aware right now than we've been in years!

He hooked me from the beginning of the spot because he was describing exactly what I've done over the past year. Berry asked, and I'm paraphrasing, "How many of you have pushed away from the television, quit watching commercial network sitcoms, and started watching conservative news programs?" I've been watching conservative news programs for years, but in the past year find that I watch less and less television because I'm reading, researching, or writing.

He went on to point out that more an more people are becoming engaged and active in the legislative process. "How many of you went online in the past year and read a piece of congressional legislation? How many of you have ever done that before?"

Over the past year, people have read bills, written and called congressmen, attended Tea Parties or town halls, have gone online to express their feelings in blogs or emails to friends, have registered to vote or even voted for the first time. People have taken to the internet and to the streets to be heard.

Berry is right. People are more involved now than they've been in years.

So what does that mean? Does that mean that 2010 will bring good things to Washington? That people are fed up? People are tired of the status quo in Washington? Obama promised "change" but I don't think he's the change most of us wanted.

So, I'll take a leaf of optimism from Michael Berry and be grateful that so many people are now paying attention to what is happening around us and in Washington. Maybe good things are coming; maybe all the negative now is for a reason.

Go back to the adage - You have to go through a Carter to get a Reagan. Where are you, son?!

Sleeping Giant

Why Read the Bill?

At least John Conyers is honest. Via CNS News and Memeorandum, we have this clip of Conyers wondering what good it does to "read the bill."



Is he frustrated that he "only has two days" to read the bill, or frustrated that you need "two lawyers" to understand it? There is a solution to both of those problems; slow down!

We know that nobody read the Porkulus bill. That will hurt some of them in 2010. We also know that most did not read the Cap and Trade bill. That will definitely hurt in 2010. My suggestion to any Congressman who hopes for re-election? Slow down, read the bill, be sure you know what you're about to inflict upon your constituents and on the future of America.

Slow down!

America is a Center-Right Nation - Has Obama Forgotten That?

There is much in the news this morning about the faltering Obama agenda. There is this Washington post story about Obama's falling approval ratings, this AP story regarding Obama's stall tactic in releasing his budget update, news that the nation's governors have concerns over the health care legislation, reports of the stimulus money being squandered, and now more news on the IG investigations. It can't be a happy Monday in the White House.

Fred Barnes points to the errors of the stimulus legislation as part of Obama's problems. It was passed too quickly. Nobody read it. It was crafted behind closed doors. Barnes calls it a "rookie mistake" for Obama to have let the congressional Democrats run that show.

And now the 2010 elections are beginning to loom.

Robert Stacy McCain has a piece at American Spectator on the progress of the Inspectors General Investigaton; he says:

"Timing is very important in politics, and both Republicans and Democrats are beginning to look ahead to the 2010 mid-term elections. Projections of double-digit unemployment and mushrooming deficits are already causing some Democratic jitters. The questions being asked about the IG investigations and Obama's promises of 'transparency' now dangle like a sword of Damocles above the heads of Democrats on the Hill."

Obama's rush to ram through as much of his liberal social agenda as fast as he can has always seemed suspect to me. Presidents usually take advantage of that "honeymoon" period to enact their policies, but Obama's policies have been such a radical departure from what we know to be American values, that people are beginning to get skittish.

Sure, he still has plenty of support and his numbers are not in the cellar. He's still relatively popular. But 22% of the moderate and conservative Democrats now see him as an old-fashioned "tax and spend Democrat," up from 4% in March, according to the Washington Post-ABC News poll.

John Meacham, writing for Newsweek in October 2008, said that America is still a center- right nation, a fact that Obama should not forget. It may have come to that. People may be beginning to get the jumps at the idea of socialized health care, bailouts, frigtening deficit projections, radical cap and trade legislation proposals, and the practice of transparency only when it suits the White House; why are we spending $18 million to revamp the Recovery.gov website?

Obama is pushing back on health care reform now by going on what Fox is calling a "blitz" to get health care reform passed before the August recess. What's the rush? Shouldn't something that important and something that affects so many Americans move more cautiously? Must we pass yet another critical piece of legislation in a rapid-fire way? Or is it that in Washington only the investigations move slowly while the legislation is quick?

The polls show that Americans are beginning to develop concerns about the Obama agenda. As more and more people lose jobs ("the stimulus has done its job!") and unemployment rises, as people continue to lose their homes, as the deficit grows and spending in Washington continues, people will notice and Obama's numbers will continue to fall. He'll retain some popularity of course, but the scope is changing. There is a shift underway.

As Obama heads off to Martha's Vineyard on vacation next month, he might revisit his agenda and consider those words of Meacham who said that "America a nation that is more instinctively conservative than it is liberal—a perennial reality that past Democratic presidents have ignored at their peril."

On Obama's Speech on National Security

Fred Barnes wrote an assessment of yesterday's Obama speech which, of the many posts about the speech that I've seen, was the one that was closest to what I was feeling as I was listening. I listened to the speech and then printed off the text because there were some moments there that I was just stunned to hear coming from an American president.

This is what Barnes said (emphasis mine):

"While insisting 'we need to focus on the future,' President Obama devoted much of his speech on terrorist detainees today to denouncing the policies of President Bush's administration. He faulted everyone in Washington for 'pointing fingers at one another,' yet pointed his own finger frequently, and critically, at the Bush administration. Obama said America's problems won't be solved 'unless we solve them together'--in a divisive and partisan speech certain to alienate Republicans and conservatives.

"If any president has gone to such lengths to attack his White House predecessor as Obama did today, I don't recall it. True, presidents have blamed the prior administration for problems they inherit, but I can't think of a president who did so as aggressively and with such moral preening as Obama."

Barnes nails exactly what I had been thinking as I listened. I have NEVER heard commentary of a previous president as petulant and as arrogant as Obama's yesterday. To me, it totally demeans the office. I can't in my wildest dreams imagine anyone with the class of say...Reagan, for example, doing such a thing.

As Barnes goes on to say, of course Obama is going to have differing policy than his predecessor. That's politics and is to be expected. Nobody faults Obama for that. Conservatives knew from the beginning that there were going to be differences. We all did. But he's been in office some four months now; it's time to quit campaigning against Bush. And it's time to quick looking back and pointing the finger which he is so quick to advise everyone else to stop doing as well.

Barnes points out that in his speech Obama said the Bush war on terrorism "likely created more terrorists around that world than it ever detained" but he offers no proof of this. I find this completely irresponsible and a dangerous thing to say. "Likely"? Not "certainly"? Not "We have evidence that..."? "Likely" indicates a huge assumption of unsubstantiated fact that is dangerous to assert as we fight two wars.

This was the paragraph of Obama's speech that got me:

"I knew when I ordered Guantanamo closed that it would be difficult and complex. There are 240 people there who have now spent years in legal limbo. In dealing with this situation, we don't have the luxury of starting from scratch. We're cleaning up something that is, quite simply, a mess -- a misguided experiment that has left in its wake a flood of legal challenges that my administration is forced to deal with on a constant, almost daily basis, and it consumes the time of government officials whose time should be spent on better protecting our country."

First of all, how can he call Gitmo a "misguided experiment"? The poor-pitiful-me-we-have-to-clean-up-after-the-Republicans tone is so wholly unpresidential and so lacking in leadership quality that it stuns me. He campaigned hard for this job. He knew that Guantanamo was an issue that he would be dealing with because he said during the campaign that he would close it. To whine about it being a part of his job now is simply incredible.

If closing Gitmo is such a huge problem for him on "an almost daily basis" then keep it open. The Attorney General has called it a model prison. The people that work there are trained to deal with terrorist prisoners. Their special dietary needs are already tended to, their religious needs, and their medical care. Obama can continue with his revamped military commissions, try the ones he can, and detain the ones he can't. The ONLY reason to close it is for a campaign promise and to presumably improve our moral standing. If Obama is such a great orator then he should be able to make the case worldwide for its continuance.

And this statement: "For reasons that I will explain, the decisions that were made over the last eight years established an ad hoc legal approach for fighting terrorism that was neither effective nor sustainable...". I've got to disagree with that. How can he say that the Bush decisions for fighting terrorism were not effective? We have not been attacked since 9/11. That sounds pretty effective to me.

At any rate, I'll leave further parsing to others. My whole objection to the speech was that it was petulant, angry, false, self-serving, and in many cases, not true. An American president should lift his country up and should be proud of its successes. I know that Guantanamo is not a success in the eyes of everyone, but it's hard to argue with the fact that we had to detain terrorists somewhere and that, through a combination of decisions, we have been kept safe ever since.

For Obama to continue four months into his term to stand before the American people and continue to criticize President Bush is not leadership. It's whining. Leave it to the pundits and critics to bash away at whomever they wish. He needs to move on.

Mitt Romney at the NRA Convention

Mitt Romney's speech at the NRA convention yesterday was great! I'm waiting for a YouTube video of it to show up. Here's the text, and here are some highlights:

"Listening to our liberal friends sometimes, I'm reminded a little bit of the monarchists. Not because they want a king instead of a president, but because they place their faith in government. As they see it, government knows best. Government needs to protect us from ourselves. The supreme voice in the land is not the people, but the government."

On the Stimulus:

"Because the Democrats fundamentally believe that government knows best, they decided to give more money to government. And so Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and others put together a wish list of new ways to spend taxpayer dollars by the hundreds of billions. Will the economy come back? Of course it will, but not as quickly and as strongly as it could have. Why? Because the heavy hand of government is never as effective as the dreams and vision and hard work of 300 million Americans."

On Obama's apology tour:

"I'm glad that he backed away from his campaign promise to pull the troops immediately out of Iraq. I'm glad he is going to get tough on the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. I'm glad he's continuing to hold military tribunals for terrorists...President Obama, however, is wrong to back away on missile defense. He was wrong to go on Arab TV and claim that America has dictated to other nations. America has sacrificed more than any other nation to free people from dictators."

On national security:

"The jihadists are still at war with America, and we shouldn't be worried about whether someone reads them their rights. They are still determined to do our country great harm. Our government has no greater duty than a vigilant defense, and no greater purpose than victory for America and for the cause of freedom."

Rove, Jacobson and Nancy

Karl Rove and Professor Jacobson appear to be on the same wavelength.

Rove writes, "It is clear that after the 9/11 attacks Mrs. Pelosi was briefed on enhanced interrogation techniques and the valuable information they produced. She not only agreed with what was being done, she apparently pressed the CIA to do more.

"But when political winds shifted, Mrs. Pelosi seems to have decided to use enhanced interrogation as an issue to attack Republicans. It is disgraceful that Democrats who discovered their outrage years after the fact are now braying for disbarment of the government lawyers who justified EITs and the prosecution of Bush administration officials who authorized them. Mrs. Pelosi is hip-deep in dangerous waters, and they are rapidly rising."

and Jacobson: "What will Democrats do if they find that other Democrats were morally if not legally culpable in waterboarding? Do the Democrats have an exit strategy?

"Here's my prediction of what will happen if Democrats push the investigation to the bitter end causing damage to national security, a political death match with the CIA, and Democrat-on-Democrat finger pointing:

Stenny Hoyer, Speaker; Jane Harman, Majority Leader; Nancy Pelosi, Chair of the House sub-committee on fresh water fisheries; Republicans, unexpected gains in 2010 mid-term elections.

"The Democrats wished hard for an investigation into waterboarding and other interrogation methods. They may have wished too hard, because they are about to get what they wished for, with no way out."

It seems Nancy Pelosi is in a mess! Be sure to read Jacobson's entire post - he's brilliant.

The Incredible Arrogance of Obama - Asks French Government to Deny Tourists at Normandy When He Visits

John Romano (via Memeorandum) has a brilliant piece on Big Hollywood. And I'd like to write about it but I'm trying to clean my brains off the wall where I beat my head until it exploded. I'll try to get myself together and encourage you to read his article.

That beating my head against the wall thing? It's because I just can't understand, I just can't GET why people adore Barack Obama.

I have commenters on this blog and I know people that fawn over every move he makes. I hear comments along the lines of "Thank GOD we have an intelligent president now! He's awesome! I love him! I *heart* him! He's going to restore America's popularity in the world! Everyone will like us again! He's going to provide health care to EVERY American! He's going to give you a TAX CUT! " Oh, it goes on and on. I don't begrudge them their feelings and opinions, really. That's what makes politics, but I just don't GET it. I guess I'm a knuckle dragging neanderthal. Not intelligent enough to keep up with the masses.

Back to Romano. He's writing about Obama's upcoming visit to Normandy and he compares what is to come with George W. Bush's visit in 2004. For Obama's visit - he has asked that no tourists be allowed to tour Normandy that day because HE will be there. It's the 65th anniversary of D-Day and he doesn't want to let anybody else in. What arrogance!

Don't tell me it's about security either. They managed security when Bush went.

"The 65th Anniversary of D-Day is fast approaching. Barack Obama will attend the events on June 6th as George Bush did in 2004 for the sixtieth memorial service. Here is the rub, as of now Obama’s State Department has asked (read demanded) the French government not allow tour guide services to operate that day. It is a big day for Normandy tourism. Yet, the king will not allow those not connected with government to enjoy the day. Obama is very important you know. This is an unprecedented request. I hope the French come to their senses and deny it.

Compare that with 2004. Security was tight as President Bush and other world leaders were in attendance, but the event was still open to all. A friend relayed the story of waiting in line to use a port-a-potty (a French port-a-potty no doubt, yuck, believe me.) She looks to her left and who he is in the next line waiting patiently? President Bush. Sure he had Secret Service nearby, but he waited like everyone else."

Obama's arrogance is simply beyond belief. I suppose to many people, the people who voted for him, this is not a character flaw. To me, it is. I don't think you can argue a case that he is not arrogant, although I am sure someone will try. Romano has Obama on video (I'm not going to steal his entire post - you'll have to go watch it for yourself!) saying "a light will shine down from somewhere...You will experience an epiphany. And you will say to yourself, 'I have to vote for Barack.'"

Was he "just joking"? Is that "out of context"? Hell, no. He believes this drivel.

Arrogance is a serious character flaw because it leads you to believe that you are always right and you are unable to listen to those who may be able to guide you. You believe your way is the only way and that you can make no mistakes. Like Caesar. Or Oediupus.

You have Wanda Sykes at the Nerd Prom last night telling people that Rush Limbaugh ought to be tried for treason because he said he hopes Obama fails. Okay, she's a comedienne and can say crap like that. But when a President of the United States releases documents that endanger troops and national security, when he releases terrorists onto United States soil, when he alienates longtime allies in favor of leaders who have expressed hate and disdain for us, instituting nationalized health care, nationalizing automakers and banks, well, maybe Wanda Sykes wasn't looking in the right direction when she decided to call someone out for treason.

Romano enourages us to remember the 2010 elections are coming and that there is still time to slow down this train wreck. I honestly do not, at this point, believe that the Obamabots will turn against their leader; they love him. They love Michelle. They love Michelle's arms. They love the dog. But the elections will give the rest of us a chance to slow down the havoc that he is imposing on our country. If he gets all four years unchecked then the damage will be practically unreparable.

As Romano says, NOT what those boys in Normandy died for.

I've got to go finish cleaning brain matter off my walls.