In the [latest issue of Consumer Reports] I received today, the first thing that I noticed was how student debt can have an impact on the entire economy. That’s pretty much common knowledge but one large factoid that stood out in one of the “Did you know?” boxes was “9.1 %: That’s the unemployment rate for young college graduates in 2010, the highest annual rate on record, says “The Institute for College Access & Success.” 9.1% is a higher unemployment rate than the overall rate.
Naturally, news industry polling shows that college-age kids still support Obama.
“And I’d just remind conservative commentators that for years what we’ve heard is the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint. That an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law. Well, this is a good example, and I’m pretty confident this court will recognize that and not take that step.”
Judicial activism. You keep using that phrase. I don’t think it means what you think it means.
Which is true. But the real point is, just watch; this’ll be the opening salvo of an effort by the Administration, Media Matters and the left and media (ptr) to reframe “Judicial Activism” as a synonym for “Originalism”.
I’ve held for quite some time now that I think Obama is likely to get re-elected.
Incumbency is a powerful bit of inertia – and America’s media has abandoned all that “speaking truth to power” and “afflicting the powerful and empowering the afflicted” twaddle in favor of becoming a sort of info-Praetorian Guard. Obama, by another measure, holds all the cards.
1. To a Leftist, Rights do not come from God, there is only Power which flows from the government. That’s why a good result doesn’t mean people are “blessed,” but are “empowered.”
2. Here’s the clever bit: the implicit Liberal mindset underlying every Chanting Point
“Government is great, government is good, and Obama is its prophet.”
Geez, maybe I should trademark that and get T-Shirts printed
Joe Doakes
Como Park
I can hear the “cha-ching” all the way down on Minnehaha.
Sandra Fluke got laid off from her position as “Obama Administration Stage Prop”.
Trayvon Martin has the gig now.
I’ve been pondering why the Administration has been going so long on the Martin case.
Certainly the Obama administration has hated guns all along; the President tried use the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to pin responsibility for Mexico’s ‘drug wars on the law-abiding American gun owner. The fact that the media has been so utterly hands-off with “Fast and Furious” should show you just what an explosive scandal it should be; the Government trying to set up the majority of its own population?
Can you imagine what they’d have said if George W. Bush had used the FBI to set up a sting to try to blame 9/11 on Democrats, purely for political gain on a wedge issue?
So of course, Obama would like to find some way to take a chunk out of firearm rights, a movement that has spit in the eye of the left and (are you listening, MNGOP Legislative caucus) won, and won consistently for the past thirty years, by setting its bar high and not compromising on core principle
But gun control is only part of the story.
Here’s the real story: Afro-Americans are losing their enthusiasm for Obama. Oh, not in a way that’ll lose him the black vote – but Obama’s initial election depended entirely on a whipped up base. Obama is going to face an uphill fight getting his based whipped up, though; whatever “recovery” we’re in has largely skipped the black community; the black unemployment rate of 14% (actually up in the past month) only tells part of the story; while 59.6% of the general population is actually working, only 53% of the black working-age population has a job.
That’s catastrophic. Not only has the black community not gotten any of the hopey-changey yet, it’s inescapable that if you’re black in America, you are worse off than you were four years ago.
Of course, a black kid getting killed is hardly news. It’s sad but true; it happens all the time. And the white liberal media could hardly care less; confronting the horrendous death and incarceration rate among black youth – to say nothing of black unemployment – would force them to confront liberalism’s failures, which means confronting its institutional racism. So while the possibly unjust death of a young black man may be good for enthusiasm points, if it doesn’t get media coverage, it’s the proverbial tree falling alone in a forest.
But when you combine a dead black kid with an issue that does get the white liberal media exercised – their fear of citizens with guns? You’ve got political gold. Suddenly, you’ve got media coverage!
And that’s why Trayvon Martin is in the news, and Sandra Fluke is out. Every dim-bulb that can be fooled into thinking “Republicans will ban contraception” has already been fooled. Now it’s time to hoodwink the ones that think Republicans want to arm white people to kill black people.
And the media – wittingly or not – is totally on board with that.
Claudia Rosett on the real story behind the Obama daughters’ vacation:
It’s not actually about the First Daughter, per se, who according to serially vanishing stories has been vacationing with a group of friends in Mexico — a country for which the State Department just last month issued a new warning to all U.S. travelers.
It’s about the judgment of the White House, which apparently deems there is “no vital news interest” to this story.
How so?
Read the whole thing.
Think “patricians versus plebeians”, and the media that props our Patrician President up.
You don’t know my telephone number, but I hope your staff is busy trying to find it. Ever since you called Sandra Fluke after Rush Limbaugh called her a slut, I figured I might be next. You explained to reporters you called her because you were thinking of your two daughters, Malia and Sasha. After all, you didn’t want them to think it was okay for men to treat them that way:
“One of the things I want them to do as they get older is engage in issues they care about, even ones I may not agree with them on,” you said. “I want them to be able to speak their mind in a civil and thoughtful way. And I don’t want them attacked or called horrible names because they’re being good citizens.”
And I totally agree your kids should be able to speak their minds and engage the culture. I look forward to seeing what good things Malia and Sasha end up doing with their lives.
All very, very true.
But here’s why I’m a little surprised my phone hasn’t rung. Your $1,000,000 donor Bill Maher has said reprehensible things about my family. He’s made fun of my brother because of his Down’s Syndrome. He’s said I was “f—-d so hard a baby fell out.” (In a classy move, he did this while his producers put up the cover of my book, which tells about the forgiveness and redemption I’ve found in God after my past – very public — mistakes.)
If Maher talked about Malia and Sasha that way, you’d return his dirty money and the Secret Service would probably have to restrain you. After all, I’ve always felt you understood my plight more than most because your mom was a teenager. That’s why you stood up for me when you were campaigning against Sen. McCain and my mom — you said vicious attacks on me should be off limits.
It didn’t work, of course; the hog trough that is the lefty “alternative” media spawned an entire movement of “Triggers”.
Yet I wonder if the Presidency has changed you. Now that you’re in office, it seems you’re only willing to defend certain women. You’re only willing to take a moral stand when you know your liberal supporters will stand behind you.
But…
What if you did something radical and wildly unpopular with your base and took a stand against the denigration of all women… even if they’re just single moms? Even if they’re Republicans?
Y’see, that’s the thing; the President could do it. He’s got his Daily Koses and Bill Mahers and NPR and a herd of George Stephanopouli to do the actual dirty work for him; the Prez could take the high road!
But he won’t!
Because Bristol Palin, and Alan West, and 4th CD candidate Tony Hernandez, and every black, hispanic, asian, gay or female Republican conservative that you see is the single biggest threat the Democrats face; they’re the apostates.
As the Democrat parts of this country shrink – mostly due to the pathologies that come from Democrat mismanagement – the Dems big long-term hope is “demographic shift” – the idea that as “minorities” become the majority, the Dems will eventually be unstoppable.
That is, of course, entirely predicated on minorities staying on the plantation. and voting in lock step for Democrats forevermore. And those that don’t – the apostates – are the greatest threat that exists to that vision.
Centuries ago, as the Catholic Church’s struggling and corrupt bureaucracy struggled with change, they sent out the various Inquisitions to find and convince the various heretics and apostates to get back in line – by killing them for their own good, if necessary.
It didn’t prevent half a billion unforced turnovers as the Protestant movement established itself – but it wasn’t for lack of trying.
Bristol Pallin may not have expected the Chicago Inquisition. But her mother, and Alan West, and Laura Ingraham and every Asian and Latino conservative that showed up at caucuses this year certainly should.
Because they are the visible signs of the Democratic party bleeding to death.
Like many conservatives, I watched the video of Obama cuddling up to the usual dog’s breakfast of radicals in college..
…and thought “OK, that’s maddening, but it’s hardly anything to run a campaign on”.
I mean, many of us said, did and wrote things in college and high school we’d not like to have turn up now. I was a liberal, for crying out loud. The platform I wrote for 1980 North Dakota Boys’ State would have made Paul Wellstone look like Ron Paul. I’d rather it nor turn up, if you catch my drift.
But the President’s past isn’t going to defeat him – and only partly because, like Mark Dayton’s mental health and alcoholism, the media will cover it up for all they’re worth. No, it’s just not the kind of thing most Americans outside the conservative wonk class will ever care about.
I don’t quite hold with either view. The debate is miscast, both because it treats the past and present as sharply different, and because it assumes we actually know and understand what Obama has been doing these last three-and-a-half years. I disagree. Many aspects of Obama’s present–to say nothing of his plans for the future–are as guarded and mysterious as his radical past. In fact, the poorly-known side of Obama’s world makes the clearest sense only when you combine research into his past and present alike….There are many aspects of Obama’s current policies that the public knows little or nothing about, and seemingly familiar things that are still poorly understood. When you put the total picture together, the links between Obama’s present and past can be drawn much more convincingly than many now imagine.
That’s the slow, steady drip in the background, for those of us who are paying attention; if Obama wins re-election, and has either house of Congress, he’s going to go on a hopey-changey orgy.
Can you imagine a “White People For Romney” group?
No?
Because it’d be roundly condemned on all sides of the aisle, right?
Just remember – “Republicans and conservatives…
…are obsessed with race”.
No, keep saying it!
Remember – the only reason not to vote for a utopian socialist who believes in radically transforming American society and the economy, who has a three year record of failure and is the worst president of your lifetime is…because he’s black.
People have been cooling on “The One” pretty much since inauguration day.
And The One needs to get that enthusiasm going again.
And so what better to take peoples’ minds off their miseries and rile the (female) troops?
“Republicans want to take away your contraceptives!”
Notwithstanding the fact that, as Romney noted in December when George Stephanopoulos incongruously broached the subject in a debate, the subject has never come up in GOP circles. Period. It’s a non-issue to the GOP.
No matter. The media is in lock-step behind the Administration’s meme that the GOP wants to outlaw contraception. The theatrical “walk-out” of Democrats from Darrel Issa’s hearings was a classic bit of Goebbelsian theatre; while the useful idiots in the media (in this case, the gleefully dim Amanda Terkel at Huffpo) called the hearings “about contraception” they were in fact hearings on the constitutionality of mandating that religious groups offer contraception against their beliefs.
Catch that? The Democrats don’t even need to hijack Republicans’ meetings themselves. The mainstream media will do it for them, after the fact.
At any rate, that’s Obama’s message to female voters: “Never mind the economy; never mind the unemployment rate; never mind the fiscal catastrophe waiting for you, your kids, and their kids; and above all, don’t believe your lying ears when the GOP mentions that they’ve never said word one about taking anyone’s contraceptives away. Look! Boogeyman!”
Women, in Barack Obama’s world, are not just dim little dolts; they seem to think that women are intellectual slaves to their reproductive systems.
In 10 states plus the District of Columbia, a majority of residents approved of the job Barack Obama was doing as president last year, according to aggregated data from 2011. His greatest support came from District of Columbia, Maryland, and Hawaii residents, while Utah and Idaho residents gave him his lowest levels of support — below 30%.
Now, let’s remember it’s still early in the year, and that the Democrat noise machine and media (pardon the redundancy) willl eke out some more points for The One, and that this is an aggregate approval number, not a candidate-vs-candidate number.
And memes like “No president has ever (gotten some number or another) and still won the election” tend to be true until they’re not.
But if you accept the meme that no President with popularity below 50% has ever won re-election, and you apply that number state-by-state, it looks rought for The One, according to Conn Carroll at the WashEx:
Carroll (with emphasis added):
Gallup released their annual state-by-state presidential approval numbers yesterday, and the results should have 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue very worried. If President Obama carries only those states where he had a net positive approval rating in 2011 (e.g. Michigan where he is up 48 percent to 44 percent), Obama would lose the 2012 election to the Republican nominee 323 electoral votes to 215.
Again, that’s just popularity numbers based on the old “50%” meme. Maybe it sticks, maybe it doesn’t.
But bit by bit, I think this election might be doable – if we Real Americans don’t shoot ourselves in the foot.
My Catholic priest, Father Larry Swink, delivered a homily on Sunday that I told him would make headlines. In the toughest sermon I have ever heard from a pulpit, he attacked the Obama Administration as evil, even demonic, and warned of religious persecution ahead. What was also newsworthy about the sermon was that he cited The Washington Post in agreement—not on the subject of the Obama Administration being evil, but on the matter of its abridgment of the constitutional right to freedom of religion.
What is happening is extraordinary and unprecedented. The Catholic Church is in open revolt against the Obama Administration, with Fr. Swink noting from the pulpit that priests across the archdiocese were joining the call on Sunday to rally Catholics to resistance against the U.S. Government. He said we are entering a time of religious persecution and that Catholics and others will have to make a final decision about which side they are on.
If true, that’s great news – but I gotta say I’m not nearly as sanguine.
I’m not Catholic – and in my observation, most Catholics outside the clergy and intelligentsia are as diligently observant of the Vatican’s rules as most Jews are of Kosher laws; birth control and hamburger on Friday are as common among Catholics as the odd bit of ham and Saturday shopping trips are among mainstream Jews.
And I know – exceptions exist, including among readers of this blog. But in my observation, there are vast swathes of the Catholic Church, in major cities, that either turns a blind eye to the inconvenient parts of the Vatican’s rules, or is willing to rationalize and ignore them in pursuit of a “progressive” political agenda – which accounts for a huge number of Catholic liberals I personally know.
Oh, the Bishops will make a ruckus:
The issue is what the Catholic Bishops have called a “literally unconscionable” edict by the Obama Administration demanding that sterilization, abortifacients and contraception be included in virtually all health plans.
At a time when the media are full of reports about who is ahead and behind in the polls, and who will win the next Republican presidential primary, this incredible uprising in the Catholic Church is something that could not only overshadow the political campaign season, but also may have a major impact on the ultimate outcome—if Republicans know how to handle it. This matter goes beyond partisan politics to the growing perception of an unconstitutional Obama Administration assault on religious freedom. To hear the Catholic Bishops and Priests describe it, our constitutional republic and our freedoms hang in the balance.
But if you go to St. Joan of Arc (to pick a far-left parish of my acquaintance), it’s all an un-issue, ignored for the “greater good”; many, perhaps the majority of Catholic parishes I know of in the Twin CIties would trade, at the clerical level as well as among a fair chunk of the laity, the Nicene Creed for single-payer health care and Cap and Trade.
So am I wrong? I’d especially like to hear from Catholics, here. Does anyone at your parish – from your priests on down – care about Obamacare? Has that “caring” been manifested in the form of “telling the congregation that it’s wrong, and that it’s going to screw with the what the Catholic Church supposedly holds dear?”
“Take your message of equality of achievement, take your message of economic dependency, take your message of enslaving the entrepreneurial will and spirit of the American people somewhere else. You can take it to Europe, you can take it to the bottom of the sea, you can take it to the North Pole, but get the hell out of the United States of America,” Rep. Allen West (R-FL) said at the Palm Beach County Republican Party Lincoln Day dinner. West represents the district in the U.S. Congress.
The Navy SEAL operation that freed two Western hostages in Somalia is representative of the Obama administration’s pledge to build a smaller, more agile military force that can carry out surgical counterterrorist strikes to cripple an enemy.
That’s a strategy much preferred to the land invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan that have cost so much American blood and treasure over the past decade. The contrast to a full-bore invasion is stark: A small, daring team storms a pirate encampment on a near-moonless night, kills nine kidnappers and whisks the hostages to safety.
It all sounds good. And so far, it is.
Here’s where the logic breaks down:
Special operations forces, trained for such clandestine missions, have become a more prominent tool in the military’s kit since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that led to the ongoing war in Afghanistan. The administration is expected to announce Thursday that it will invest even more heavily in that capability in coming years.
Cool, except that creating special operations troops is not just a matter of “Investment”. You can’t create them with money. You have to start with troops – traditionally people from the infantry and airborne, although they come from all corners of all services today – who learn the basics of being a soldier (or sailor, or airman, or Marine). Then, the ones that have the urge to try will audition – and, mostly, fail – less than half of those who try to get into the Rangers succeed; the even-more-selective elite-of-the-elite units like the US Special Forces (“Green Berets”), SEALs and “Detlas” are vastly more selective; from6-12% of those who try out make the cut over a training-and-selection regimen that runs two solid years and change…
…and starts with people who are already proficient at soldiering; you don’t enlist to be a SEAL or a Green Beret or a Delta; you make your bones as a highly-competent infantryman or tanker or gunners mate or helicopter mechanic or paratrooper or Ranger or combat engineer first; to get into “Delta”, one usually starts the selection process as a highly-regarded, supremely fit NCO, a fairly senior sergeant with the beginnings of a solid career, before even volunteering for the brutally-exclusive selection process.
And in hearing the Obama Administration’s plan, I get the impression He thinks that you create SEALs and Deltas and Green Berets and Pararescue Jumpers by throwing a lot of money at an underemployed Georgetown Public Policy grad.
In his State of the Union Address to Congress, President Obama talked about what he called “the basic American promise” — that if people worked hard, they could afford a home, college for their kids and some savings for retirement.
Is that still YOUR expectation of America?
They’ve put it in the form of a survey question.
My answer went a little something like this: It’s one of the questions that defines the difference between conservatives and liberals.
In my world, America isn’t defined by our government or any material possessions or financial status symbols. It’s about opportunity and liberty; the opportunity to succeed by dint of my merits and talents (or fail through the lack of them).
My “expectation of America” is that the government that I elect will shut up and get out of the way and let private enterprise – me – take care of things.
Are your children going to be better, paying off fifteen trillion in debt (and counting)?
Your grandchidren?
Don’t be an idiot. Of course you’re not doing better now than you were four years ago. One out of eight Americans who want to work can’t find a job – so even if you have a job, and have managed to improve your outlook, you are going to be pulling the cart, on the job and at tax time, for everyone else.
We’re not a foodstamp nation; most of the nation still has a strong work ethic. And our Administration is counting on that – for just enough of us to keep pulling.
We’re a sled dog nation. And Barack Obama is the musher.
While the Democrats will yip like a bunch of over caffeinated Jack Russell terriers about the “jobs” “lost” in the inevitable rejection of Governor Dayton’s idiotic Jerbs plan – jobs that would have either existed without the Jerbs plan (because the $3K one-time deduction would merely confirm a big company’s plan to hire someone) or would never have existed were it to pass (for example, virtually any small business hiring), they are downright proud of Obama’s rejection of the Keystone Pipeline, a private-sector initiative that would have created thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of real private-sector jobs, and create an oil supply to prevent inflation that would kill even more jobs.
The Obama administration announced that it would deny a federal permit for the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline, which would run 1,700 miles across six US states bringing toxic, highly corrosive tar sands crude from Alberta, Canada, to refineries and ports in Texas.
The president stood up to Big Oil, backed by the voices of hundreds of thousands of activists just like you, who have built the movement to stop this dirty, dangerous oil project.
So there’s your message, American electorate: government-sponsored jobs good; private sector jobs, expendable.
If the GOP doesn’t pound that home in November, they don’t deserve to win.
Long article, gist is Obama administration creating new statistical model to define “poverty” which will have the effect of making it look as if millions of people suddenly are no longer poor, just in time for the election.
Gotta be careful – we could all be “the rich” at this rate.
I had a brief burst of nostalgia from my teens earlier this week.
I was filling in for Tom Taylor on the night shift at KEYJ on a lonely, chilly Sunday night when the AP said that Iranian “students” had sacked the US embassy. Jimmy Carter was president – and, I figured, he would be for four more years “I mean”, thought the young Democrat-leaning Mitch mind, “who do the GOP have? Baker? Reagan? Huh?”
President Obama’s slow ride down Gallup’s daily presidential job approval index has finally passed below Jimmy Carter, earning Obama the worst job approval rating of any president at this stage of his term in modern political history.
Since March, Obama’s job approval rating has hovered above Carter’s, considered among the 20th century’s worst presidents, but today Obama’s punctured Carter’s dismal job approval line. On their comparison chart, Gallup put Obama’s job approval rating at 43 percent compared to Carter’s 51 percent.
As the story notes, Carter was well below Obama’s current numbers; Americans actually rallied around the president after the crisis erupted; Carter worked long and hard to squander that national mandate.
How does this compare with other presidents’ first terms?
According to Gallup, here are the job approval numbers for other presidents at this stage of their terms, a year before the re-election campaign:
— Harry S. Truman: 54 percent.
— Dwight Eisenhower: 78 percent.
— Lyndon B. Johnson: 44 percent.
— Richard M. Nixon: 50 percent.
— Ronald Reagan: 54 percent.
— George H.W. Bush: 52 percent.
— Bill Clinton: 51 percent.
— George W. Bush: 55 percent.
What’s more, Gallup finds that Obama’s overall job approval rating so far has averaged 49 percent. Only three former presidents have had a worse average rating at this stage: Carter, Ford, and Harry S. Truman. Only Truman won re-election in an anti-Congress campaign that Obama’s team is using as a model.
