Romney:  Referring to large assortument of qualified women as “binders”.

Obama:  Misery for women.

Discuss.

“The biggest surprise of the night was when Meatloaf bailed the President out on his Libya answer”

— Gary Miller, from Facebook

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

The President knew nothing about ATF gun-running, Solyndra’s solar panels or Secret Service prostitutes. Now we learn he knew nothing about terror threats in Libya.

It seems the President has been completely shut out of the government he’s supposed to be running. It’s almost as if his own employees see him as nothing more than an Affirmative Action token hire. They apparently believe he really is just an articulate, clean, bright, nice-looking Black man, someone to be paraded for the cameras occasionally but kept away from all the real decision-making. “Have another round of golf” they tell him, “Don’t worry about us, we’ll take care of everything.” Except they don’t; and he gets blamed for it.

That must suck. I wonder if he’s lonely.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

He’s showing some of the signs of having spent four years as a figurehead for others.

The smirking?  The 82 interruptions?  The incoherent girly giggling?

No big deal.  I expected that from Biden.

Biden’s approach to the debate was, in a conventional social sense, “rude” – but this is politics.  Conventional rules, at least under the surface, are more or less irrelevant.

For starters, Biden is well aware that virtually nobody changes their mind over the Veep debates.  The Veepstakes are all about getting bases jazzed for the final sprint.  And what you saw was the comparison of the tactics the campaigns believed with reach their various bases.

Ryan was thoughful, on point, intellectually cogent, and stayed on the message – “we’re going to start making the tough choices, and get people back to work” – the sort of things the conservative base is concerned with.

Biden was arrogant, blustery, giggly, interrupting constantly – he was, in fact, the very model of the modern Liberal.  The model of the lefty base is, in fact, Fast Eddie Schultz and Chris Matthews.

I don’t think it was just boorishness, though.  Biden is a bobblehead, but he’s not stupid.  I think he knows that if the whole country was talking about what a jabbering, smirking, inappropriately-giggling jag he was, they would spend less time talking about the past four years, Benghazi, four years of 8% unemployment (not to mention the most important issues of the past year, last Wednesday’s debate and Big Bird).

So far, it’s working.

But the part that I wanted to yell from the mountaintops?  Bident’s closing statement.  He stated his purpose, and the administration’s as making sure the “playing field is leveled, they, in fact, have a clear shot, and they have peace of mind”

Government-leveled playing fields are level.  They are as clear as an IRS form.  And government doesn’t give peace of mind (barring the bits and pieces of safety net that actually serve as safety nets, which we already paid for, thank you very much), it only takes it away.

Red meat tofu for a not-so-bright base?  Absoluteley.

Deserving re-election?

Pfft.

Lara Logan shreds the Administration’s lies on Afghanistan:

Remember all those years Democrats looked their knowing looks and said “but Bush hasn’t gotten Bin Laden!”, concluding with a smug grin like a toddler who’d just filled a diaper. We’d reply “if they killed Bin Laden tomorrow, the war wouldn’t end” – but they were too busy showing the diaper, apparently, to pay attention.

Sometimes it sucks to be right.

Yesterday we published the now-infamous (albeit still ignored-by-the-MSM) video of Barack Obama’s Kanye-West-like speech to a group of African-American activists about the racism tied to the aid to Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina.

As Paul Mirengoff notes, not only was it racist, it was completely false:

Obama’s claim was false. A few weeks before Obama gave his Hampton speech, Congress had waived the Stafford Act in connection with $6.9 billion in federal aid for New Orleans.

But it gets worse for Obama. Neo-neocon points out that Obama was one of 14 Senators who voted against the waiver of the Stafford Act. So not only was Obama’s complaint false, it was one he would have lacked standing to raise, given his vote on the issue.

Now, Obama voted against the Stafford Act waiver because it was part of a bill providing funds for the war effort in Iraq. Apparently, Obama’s desire to make sure the surge failed and we lost to al Qaeda in Iraq trumped his concern for the good people of New Orleans. Or maybe it was all posturing, Obama’s specialty, since he knew the money would go to Iraq and the Stafford Act would be waived regardless of how he voted.

Perhaps Obama should have voted “present.”

I suggest all of the above, plus the fact that being a Democrat in Chicago means never being accountable to anyone.

Of course, the mainstream media does their best to keep that going nationally.  It’s just gotten a lot harder to do that.

They said if I voted for Barack Obama, racism would prevail.

And they were right:

“Down in New Orleans, where they still have not rebuilt twenty months later,” he begins, “there’s a law, federal law — when you get reconstruction money from the federal government — called the Stafford Act. And basically it says, when you get federal money, you gotta give a ten percent match. The local government’s gotta come up with ten percent. Every ten dollars the federal government comes up with, local government’s gotta give a dollar.”

“Now here’s the thing,” Obama continues, “when 9-11 happened in New York City, they waived the Stafford Act — said, ‘This is too serious a problem. We can’t expect New York City to rebuild on its own. Forget that dollar you gotta put in. Well, here’s ten dollars.’ And that was the right thing to do. When Hurricane Andrew struck in Florida, people said, ‘Look at this devastation. We don’t expect you to come up with y’own money, here. Here’s the money to rebuild. We’re not gonna wait for you to scratch it together — because you’re part of the American family.’”

That’s not, Obama says, what is happening in majority-black New Orleans. “What’s happening down in New Orleans? Where’s your dollar? Where’s your Stafford Act money?” Obama shouts, angry now. “Makes no sense! Tells me that somehow, the people down in New Orleans they don’t care about as much!”

It’s a remarkable moment, and not just for its resemblance to Kayne West’s famous claim that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” but also because of its basic dishonesty. By January of 2007, six months before Obama’s Hampton speech, the federal government had sent at least $110 billion to areas damaged by Katrina. Compare this to the mere $20 billion that the Bush administration pledged to New York City after Sept. 11.

Even if you are a low information voter, this has got to be sinking in, doesn’t it?

David Harsanyi at Human Events has ht a retrospective on the “highlights” of the Obama Personality Cult. 

Of course, it’s his socialist and anti-market philosophy that I really dislike about the guy.  But the personality cult he and his handlers built around himself always seemed vaguely…

…North Korean?

That’s one word for it.

I’ll say this – even if I were still a liberal, this would have made me extremely uncomfortable.  And yes, that is a bipartisan thing;  a lot of Ron Paul supporters are a little less messianic, but not much less personality-focused.

Read Harsanyi’s whole piece.

He’s a busy, busy man.

It was in observance of “Talk Like A Pirate Day”, yesterday.

Perhaps we should respond with “Talk With An Israeli Prime Minister” day…

UPDATE:  As commenter Jeff Rosenberg (Hey, Jeff!) points out, Media Matters has leapt to the President’s defense, noting that the photo above is three years old.

The MM4A piece is silent on what the President was doing.   Playing golf with Jay-Z?  Meeting with (and bowing to) Somali pirates?   Playing video games with his daughters?  At an Eva Longoria fundraiser?  We don’t know.  All we do know is, it wasn’t “meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu at this crucial moment in both nations’ history”.

The media – in carrying out their role as Obama’s Praetorian Guard – has been doing its damnedest to try to paint Romney’s “47%” remark as a huge gaffe.

But Mitt was right; 47% of the people don’t pay taxes.  And in some cases – the poor – there may be a reason for this.

The lefty and media (ptr) came out with all sorts of rationalizations and tu quoques –

• “Republican states pay less than average!” was one I saw on TV yesterday (Channel 9 was duly parroting the Media Matters chanting points), which is hilarious, given that the states they point out invariably have lower per-capita incomes and costs of living than the Blue states; you’ve got liberals bitching about progressive taxation!
• “Many rich people pay no taxes!” – Leaving aside the obvious answer – it’s a red herring, the middle class and wealthy as a whole do pay the vast majority of this nation’s tax burdeen – well, gosh, d’ya suppose we should simplify the tax system to remove some of the byzantine loopholes?   A flat tax would sure fix that…
• “Part of that is the Bush Tax cuts!” – This is a dumb evasion.  The Bush tax cuts were across-the-board.  But it’s hordes of “targeted tax cuts” that have so imbalanced the system – because the tax system has long been an instrument of redistribution.

But whatever the qualifications and rationalizations, whatever the reasons for some and the outrages of others, the fact remains that this society can not survive with, soon, less than half of its people paying in.

Romney should not back off of this statement.  His campaign has been far too timid lately; while for about a week or two after the Ryan selection he was cooking with gas, rife with promise that this nation could finally have The Big Conversation it’s needed for at least a generation (the one that Tip O’Neill blocked thirty years ago), he’s been running a campaign only a weasel consultant could love since then.

We need to reform entitlements.  We need an America where everyone has some skin in the game.  Above all, we need a nation that doesn’t believe government is something we “belong to”, but rather something we hire to do some distasteful jobs.

It’s been one gaffe after another for The One this past week.

But you’d never know it from the media.

…is counting on all those German electoral votes he worked so hard to get four years ago, he might face an uphill fight…

Obama apparently thought he’d get three warning letters.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

Last week, the drone was Obama’s weapon of choice and his war strategy was working.

This week, CBS News reports:

“. . . there had been threats that Islamic militants might try to take revenge for the death of al Qaeda’s No. 2 commander Abu Yahya al-Libi, who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan in June, and he said the U.S. consulate should have been better protected. Confirming al-Libi’s death for the first time in a video posted online Monday, al Qaeda chief Ayman Al-Zawahri called on Muslim’s in al-Libi’s native Libya to take revenge for his death.”

Follow the logic with me: on Monday, September 10, Al Qaeda instructs Libyan Muslims to take revenge on Americans. On Tuesday, September 11, Libyan Muslims storm the embassy, Libyan officials betray the ambassador’s safe house, Muslim terrorists kill him and drag his body through the streets. This was a terrorist act, not a religious one.

The “your film clip insulted Mohammad” line is a cover story to divert American attention from the fact that Muslim terrorists struck Americans on 9/11 AGAIN, three years into Obama’s watch, as a direct result of the President’s specific war policy choices and we knew it was coming.

The cover story is intended to protect Obama by appealing to American Liberals who want to blame Jewish filmmakers and Christian ministers for Muslim violence under the same “look what you made me do” reasoning used by wife-beaters everywhere. Saddest of all, it seems to be working.

Joe Doakes

Saint Paul, Minnesota

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

In 2008, Candidate Obama’s pick for Energy Czar, Steven Chu, said: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”

On June 30, 2008, gas prices were $4.00 and Candidate Obama said: “I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment.”

On January 20, 2009, when President-Elect Obama took office, the price of gas was down to $1.84 a gallon. Going backwards, for him.

Today, in St. Paul, gas is back up to:

So have we achieved Secretary Chu and Candidate Obama’s goal?

Gas Prices in Europe are in the $9.00 per gallon range.

No, we have not achieved the President’s goals. We’re only half-way there.

At the convention, President Obama asked for more time to accomplish his goals.

It’s going to be a long four years.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Dying to see what he does with natural gas…

The employment numbers are out today.

Obama’s supporters are saying “Yaaaay, 8.1%” out one side of their mouth…

…and “thank Gaia these numbers didn’t come out before The Light Worker’s speech yesterday” out the other.

While unemployment is down 0.2% to 8.1%, that would seem to be entirely due to the workforce participation rate also dropping 0.2%, to an all-time low of 63.5%.

Let’s put this in context:  this means that 58.36% of the workforce is actually working.   Not only is this 2.22% lower than when Obama took office in 2009 – it’s worse than when the economy had an ostensible 10% unemployment rate in October of 2009 (when the participation rate was 65%).

Most telling, perhaps?  Since mid-2010, we had not been above 58.5% of the workforce employed, except for a few months earlier this year, when the employment rate bounced between 58.5 and 58.6.  It’s been steadily down since June, as the participation rate has resumed its slide.

The Dems are trying to put lipstick on the pig, of course; Extreme-DFL Representative Jim Davnie of Minneapolis tweeted this morning:

Jobs 8/12: Up 96K, Jobs 8/08: Down 84K. Net 180K jobs to the good. Yes better off than 4 yrs ago. Imagine if #GOP worked to help

In August of 2008, the labor force participation rate was 66.1%; today, it’s 63.5%.  That’s 2.6% lower.  The unemployment rate was 6.1% (and getting worse), two points lower than today.  The actual employment rates?  62.07% then, 58.35% today.  Go ahead, Rep. Davnie; make my day, and keep using these stats in public.

If the participation rate drops low enough, we’ll technically have full employment, I guess.

Upside, sorta? I actually heard some of the morning news people mentioning the full context of the unemployment number drop – it’s a function of the number of people leaving the work force – this morning.  Maybe even they can’t ignore it anymore?

,,.there are not “4.5 million new jobs”.  Or rather, while there may have been 4.5 million jobs created in the past four years, it’s been a piker compared to the jobs lost, downgraded, and sent overseas.

We are not better off than we were four years ago.

But keep on chanting, Dems.  There are only so many dumb voters.

What Obama claims:  GM has come “Roaring” back:

Reality:

“GM is going from bad to worse,” reads the headline on Automotive News Editor in Chief Keith Crain’s analysis. That’s certainly true of its stock price.

The government still owns 500 million shares of GM, 26 percent of the total. It needs to sell them for $53 a share to recover its $49.5 billion bailout. But the stock price is around $20 a share, and the Treasury now estimates that the government will lose more than $25 billion if and when it sells.

That’s in addition to the revenue lost when the Obama administration permitted GM to continue to deduct previous losses from current profits, even though such deductions are ordinarily wiped out in bankruptcy proceedings.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that GM is bleeding money because of decisions made by a management eager to please its political masters — and by the terms of the bankruptcy arranged by Obama car czars Ron Bloom and Steven Rattner.

The Democrat plan: to get the stupid and uninformed to the polls in the greatest numbers possible.

A reader emails:

Driving home from [outstate] today. Going east by Monticello I saw a rig with a big picture of Obama on the rear of his trailer. Below it the caption read “Does this Ass make my Truck look Big?”

I just about lost control of the car with convulsive laughter.

I don’t suspect Obama and his gas prices and his “let’s import oil from Brazil!” policy are seeing a lot of traction among truck drivers.

What does this chart represent?

No, it’s not the Brett Favre Media Bell Curve. It’s the comparison between:

• Obama’s projected unemployment with Porkulus (Dark blue line)
• Obama’s projected unemployment without Porkulus (Light blue line)
• The actual unemployment rate (Red dots)

Question for all you Democrats; if Romney releases his tax returns, will those red dots merge with the blue line?

(Via Instapundit)

Remember back in 2004? When a bunch of Navy Vietnam vets dared criticize the account their former commander, Senator and former Lieutenant (JG) John Kerry, gave of his time in Vietnam, and were rewarded with a scabrous campaign of character assassination by the left’s plutocracy that has entered the lexicon – “swiftboating” – as a synonym for “we don’t care what you say, you must not attack our candidate in any way”.

So I’m dying to see how the Dems try to defame these guys:

Maybe they’ll demand to see the SEALs’ income tax returns?

“They wanna put y’all in BUD/S”?

It may be the only consistent line of substantive defense of his record that Barack Obama has come up with in almost four years; “it’s Bush’s fault!”.

And according to a Fed economist, it may not be true.

The latest BLS statistics are out.  The media are portraying this as a mild win for the Administration.

It’s not

The unemployment rate ticked up to 8.3% – which is about .3% higher than the peak “The One” promised before unleashing Porkulus.

But worse than that?  The Labor Force Participation Rate, which this past April was the lowest it’d been in thirty years (68.6%) before ticking up in May and June, dropped another tenth to 68.7%.  That’s a good chunk of the reason the unemployment rate held as steady as it did – people left the workforce.

What that means, if you remove the unemployment rate from the participation rate, is that 58.41% of the workforce is working.  That is…:

• 2.16% (3.6 million people) worse than when Obama took office in January of 2009.
• Two and a half points – 3.7 million or so – lower than George W. Bush’s worst record, and 5.3% lower than Bush’s peak (that’s over seven million jobs)
• Almost a tenth of a power lower than when unemployment “peaked” at 10%, in October of 2009
• 4.2% – thats 6.3 million jobs – lower than the nadir of the 9/11 Recession.

Put another way?  It’s been three years since more than 59% of the American people were working.

How long can economy sustain itself with less than three out of five people working?

…that the Light Worker’s campaign is aimed at the one group he’s got a shot with: the not very well informed:

This is an ad, as Ed points out, that even left-leaning Politifact has rated “pants on fire”.

As this blog has been noting for quite some time now, the Democrat strategy seems to be to just toss crap in front of the electorate and hope just enough of it sticks to the dim, uninformed, adolescent, solipsistic and over-emotional to eke out a win.

It worked for Mark Dayton.