Obama's Epic Fail On Transparency

Michelle Malkin exposes the Obama Administration's failure to fulfill the big guy's campaign promise of increased transparency. Instead we get secret meetings via what she terms the "coffee house loophole". Excerpt:

"Lobbyists say some White House officials will agree to an initial meeting with a lobbyist and his client at the White House," the Times' once-zealous champions of Obama reported, "but then plan follow-up sessions at a site not subject to the visitors' log." Said one financial lobbyist who has met more than a half-dozen times off-campus with White House officials: "I'll call and say, 'I want to talk to you about X,' and they'll say, 'Sure, let's talk at Starbucks.'"

You see: When Obama promised to "change the way Washington works," what he really meant was changing where the usual Beltway backroom wheelers and dealers do their business. And when he talked about changing the "culture" in the nation's capitol, what he really meant was just changing titles.

York on the alleged Al Gore incident

I'm not going to excerpt any of Byron York's article, but I agree with him that there doesn't appear to be anything about the sexual assault allegation against Al Gore which undermines it's credibility. Al Gore's increasing nuttiness and egotism over the years makes it all too believable. I do think it's a little sad that the woman making the accusation seems to have a deep-rooted prejudice against poodles. But other than that, her story seems to confirm that Gore was extremely well suited to take over all of Clinton's more interesting job functions had he become incapacitated.

Domain name idea

www.factcheckdotorgcheck.org

Artificial Ignorance

Here's a good example of ignorance paving the way to greater knowledge. Only this time it's not human ignorance, but the artificial ignorance of a computer program designed to demonstrate artificial intelligence. I am, of course, referring to the spellchecker embedded in Microsoft's Word and Outlook editors. It turns out that Word doesn't know the word charism, so it suggested several words which I knew: chrism, charisma and charismas. It also suggested a word which I had not heard: czarism. Obviously anyone would immediately and naturally discern the meaning of that word if they knew what a czar is. This immediately made me think of Obama's many czars, and so I mused wittily unto myself that the President's charism is czarism.

Jeremy Lott on Biden's Summer Propaganda Tour

Jeremy Lott provides us with a good comparitive analysis between the current economic hard times and the situation in another mid-term election year, 1982. Here's a teaser:

What they are hoping for is something like a replay of the 1982 elections. Going into those midterms, Republicans controlled the White House and held a majority of seats in the Senate. They also enjoyed considerable sway in the House of Representatives, thanks to a bloc of conservative Southern Democrats. John Samples, political scientist at the Cato Institute, wrote in his new book The Struggle to Limit Government that the midterms "should have been an unmitigated disaster for the GOP." Consider: "It was held during a severe recession. Unemployment was over 10 percent of the workforce. The election of 1982 focused on the economic policies of the president." (Full disclosure: I used to work for Cato in the media department.)

But the Reagan administration "urged voters to stay the course" and, to a certain extent, Samples argues, it worked. Republicans lost 26 seats in the House and zero in the Senate. It wasn't a walk off grand slam but several economic models had predicted they would lose 50 to 58 seats in the House alone. For the Republicans it was a setback but a minor one. Reagan followed it two years later with a 49-state victory over former Vice President Walter Mondale.

At this point in 2010, things are looking so bad for President Obama's party that a loss of only 26 House seats would be seen as a resounding victory and a slap in the face to obstructionist Republicans and tempestuous tea partiers. If Obama can escape blame for the abysmal state of the economy, the current thinking goes, then his party might escape with only minimal losses.

Then he goes on to illustrate the differences between Reagan's and Obama's situations. In his first two years as President, Reagan's approval had not slipped into negative territory like Obama's has. Current polling demonstrates that most people think the administrations efforts to stimulate the ecomony has failed. And, of course, Reagan did not have to suffer the crippling effect of having Joe Biden as a spokesperson for his policies.

Biden last week acknowledged that, though he thought the administration's efforts would do some good, an awful lot of damage has been done. "There's no possibility to restore 8 million jobs lost in the Great Recession," he told an audience of Wisconsin Democrats. (On the same visit to Milwaukee, he called a custard shop manager a "smartass" for suggesting the administration lower taxes.)

Honestly....

Cooking the Internet for the White House

Here's that "General Betray Us" ad that MoveOn.org was so proud of until recently. I got it from FreeRepublic, of course.


Click on it for the full size version. Here's the text:

GENERAL PETRAEUS OR GENERAL BETRAY US?
Cooking the Books for the White House

General Petraeus is a military man constantly at war with the facts. In 2004, just before the election, he said there was "tangible progress" in Iraq and that "Iraqi leaders are stepping forward." And last week Petraeus, the architect of escalation of troops in Iraq, said, "We say we have achieved progress, and we are obviously going to do everything we can to build on that progress."

Every Independent report on the ground situation in Iraq shows that the surge strategy has failed. Yet the General claims a reduction in violence. That's because, according to the New York Times, the Pentagon has adopted a bizarre formula for keeping tabs on violence. For example, death by car bombs don't count. The Washington Post reported that assassinations only count if you're shot in the back of the head -- not the front. According to the Associated Press, there have been more civilian deaths and more America soldier deaths in the past three months than in any other summer we've been there. We'll hear of neighborhoods where violence has decreased. But we won't hear that those neighborhoods have been ethnically cleansed.

Most importantly, General Petraeus will not admit what everyone knows: Iraq is mired in an unwinnable religious civil war. We may hear of a plan to withdraw a few thousand troops. But we won't hear what Americans are desperate to hear: a timtable for withdrawing all our troops. General Petraeus has actually said that American troops will need to stay in Iraq for as long as ten years.

Today, before Congress and before the American people, General Petraeus is likely to become General Betray Us.

Isn't it sad to see people who have money, power, but who don't possess the courage of their convictions?

Make sure you click on the link and save this image. We need to help "keep the dream alive" by spreading the word about the true nature of General Petraeus. We need to do it for the poor peacenik saps who gave money to MoveOn.org. It looks like they've been betrayed this time in the name of political expediency.

Rove Summarizes Democrats' Woes

Karl Rove provides a dozen or so insightful paragraphs which should give us some hopey changy for November. Here's my favorite:

Then there is the intensity gap, which is particularly important in midterms. In Gallup, 45% of Republicans are "very enthusiastic" about voting this fall versus 24% of Democrats. This staggering 22-point gap is the largest so far this election year. And in the NPR survey of 60 swing Democratic districts, 62% of Republicans rated their likelihood of voting as 10, the highest. Only 37% of Democrats were similarly excited.

The intensity gap has always been intriguing to me because I'm one of those folks who has voted in almost every election since my 18th birthday. I don't have to feel intense about it any more that I need to feel intense about taking out the trash. I remember the time I missed an off-year primary; I felt awful, like I'd let my country down. Remember Anthony Michael Hall's geeky character in Breakfast Club who had procured a fake ID so he could vote? Yeah, that was me.

At some point I learned that many people don't vote at all and they don't have the least bit of guilt about it. My first thought at that point was "then they really have no right to complain". But I noticed also that these people usually complain the most; they're also the ones spouting the mantra "There's no sense voting anyway; the ________* control everything. That's the elephant in the living room. There's no real difference between Republicans and Democrats. The fix is in as usual...." Yawn. Don't you need to go pick up your unemployment check or something?

Trivia: I cast my first Presidential vote in 1988 for Ron Paul.

(* = usually Jews.)

"Divine happenings, going beyond the limits of our human frailty"

From a sermon of Saint Augustine on the Birth of John the Baptist. (source)

The Church observes the birth of John as a hallowed event. We have no such commemoration for any other fathers; but it is significant that we celebrate the birthdays of John and of Jesus. This day cannot be passed by. And even if my explanation does not match the dignity of the feast, you may still meditate on it with great depth and profit. John appears as the boundary between the two testaments, the old and the new. That he is a sort of boundary the Lord himself bears witness, when he speaks of “the law and the prophets up until John the Baptist.” Thus he represents times past and is the herald of the new era to come. As a representative of the past, he is born of aged parents; as a herald of the new era, he is declared to be a prophet while still in his mother’s womb. For when yet unborn, he leapt in his mother’s womb at the arrival of blessed Mary. In that womb he had already been designated a prophet, even before he was born; it was revealed that he was to be Christ’s precursor, before they ever saw one another. These are divine happenings, going beyond the limits of our human frailty. When John was preaching the Lord’s coming he was asked, “Who are you?” And he replied: “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness.” The voice is John, but the Lord “in the beginning was the Word.” John was a voice that lasted only for a time; Christ, the Word in the beginning, is eternal.

He must increase; I must decrease.