“There is a delicious irony in seeing private luxury jets flying into Washington, D.C., and people coming off of them with tin cups in their hand, saying that they’re going to be trimming down and streamlining their businesses,” Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-New York, told the chief executive officers of Ford, Chrysler and General Motors at a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee.

“It’s almost like seeing a guy show up at the soup kitchen in high hat and tuxedo. It kind of makes you a little bit suspicious.”

He added, “couldn’t you all have downgraded to first class or jet-pooled or something to get here? It would have at least sent a message that you do get it.”

– “Big Three auto CEOs flew private jets to ask for taxpayer money,” CNN, November 19, 2008.

• “President Barack Obama’s broadside against giving corporate jet owners a tax break scored him some populist points while potentially saving taxpayers $3 billion over the next decade.”

– “Obama’s Private-Jet Offensive,” the Daily Beast, June 30th, 2011.

• “Obama aide promises $1B in corporate-jet subsidies.”

– Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner, today.

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Lending even more prescience to I Own the World’s Photoshop from the start of the month, the Politico reports today:

Elizabeth Warren has pushed back hard on questions about a Harvard Crimson piece in 1996 that described her as Native American, saying she had no idea the school where she taught law was billing her that way and saying it never came up during her hiring a year earlier, which others have backed up.

But a 1997 Fordham Law Review piece described her as Harvard Law School’s “first woman of color,” based, according to the notes at the bottom of the story, on a “telephone interview with Michael Chmura, News Director, Harvard Law (Aug. 6, 1996).”

The mention was in the middle of a lengthy and heavily-annotated Fordham piece on diversity and affirmative action and women. The title of the piece, by Laura Padilla, was “Intersectionality and positionality: Situating women of color in the affirmative action dialogue.”

(See also: 7 pols with Native American heritage)

“There are few women of color who hold important positions in the academy, Fortune 500 companies, or other prominent fields or industries,” the piece says. “This is not inconsequential. Diversifying these arenas, in part by adding qualified women of color to their ranks, remains important for many reaons. For one, there are scant women of color as role models. In my three years at Stanford Law School, there were no professors who were women of color. Harvard Law School hired its first woman of color, Elizabeth Warren, in 1995.”

Meanwhile, at Big Journalism today, “Buried in the ‘For the Record’ section, the Boston Globe today admitted that it made a major error in one of its initial reports on Elizabeth Warren’s claim of Native American ancestry.”

And speaking of Photoshops from I Own the World, for your monitor’s safety, please ensure that all beverages have been properly digested before clicking on this link.

Update: Linking to this post, Jonah Goldberg tweets, “Elizabeth Warren was Harvard Law’s ‘first woman of color’? It’s like a Tom Wolfe novel.” Indeed — and note that it’s filed under our “God and Man at Dupont University” category.

Related: Michelle Malkin tweets, “Only in ProgWorld am I considered white, while pasty Elizabeth Warren is heralded as a ‘woman of color.’”

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Past performance is no guarantee of future results:

• “THE PUBLIC EDITOR: Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? — OF course it is.”

– Daniel Okrent, then the Times’ ombudsman, July 25, 2004.

• “Obama campaign: New York Times poll is ‘biased’”

– Headline, the Washington Examiner, today.

Hey, to be fair, Mr. Obama himself declared yesterday that you couldn’t trust the same media that dubbed itself Obama’s “non-official campaign” back in 2008.  This is one time we’ll take the president at his word.

Update: The cocoon remains the same, though: “NYTimes Published Poll Showing Bad News for Obama on Gay Marriage Stand, Romney Matchup…on Page A17,” Newsbusters reports.

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As spotted by the Watts Up With That blog. Note the 2007 date and the highlighted passage in the article:

Its always important to remember what has been predicted by the elders of science, and to review those predictions when the time is right. In four months, just 132 days from now at the end of summer on the Autumnal Equinox September 22nd 2012, the Arctic will be “nearly ice free” according to a prominent NASA scientist in a National Geographic article on December 12, 2007.

Fred Siegel of City Journal once dubbed this trend “Progressives Against Progress:”

Crankery, in short, became respectable. In 1972, Sir John Maddox, editor of the British journal Nature, noted that though it had once been usual to see maniacs wearing sandwich boards that proclaimed the imminent end of the Earth, they had been replaced by a growing number of frenzied activists and politicized scientists making precisely the same claim. In the years since then, liberalism has seen recurring waves of such end-of-days hysteria. These waves have shared not only a common pattern but often the same cast of characters. Strangely, the promised despoliations are most likely to be presented as imminent when Republicans are in the White House. In each case, liberals have argued that the threat of catastrophe can be averted only through drastic actions in which the ordinary political mechanisms of democracy are suspended and power is turned over to a body of experts and supermen.

Which is why, not at all coincidentally, such crankery went into overdrive in the naughts, culminating in Obama’s now failed rash of venture socialism. As many recent “not-so-final countdowns” will be coming due in the next few months and years, the Internet is going to have lots of fun pointing them out — something the MSM “unexpectedly” does so rarely.

(H/T: SDA)

Related: “Warmist Professor: I Call Global Warming Skeptics ‘Deniers’ So People Compare Them To Holocaust Deniers — What makes this even more grotesque is the professor is a Holocaust survivor.”

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Wow, when Obama wrote in 2006, “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views,” he wasn’t kidding — six years later, an Atlantic writer dubs him, “Barack Obama: Our First Gay-Female-Hispanic-Asian-Jewish President,” running down the various encomiums Obama’s received from Andrew Sullivan, Kathleen Parker, Geraldo Rivera and other incredibly cheap dates fawning acolytes, including:

In June 2010, The Washington Post‘s Kathleen Parker took the question mark out of the way.  “Obama: Our first female president,” her headline declared. Her column made the case that his crisis management style was more typically female.

First Jewish President: Like this week’s issue of Newsweek, New York magazine went big on their Morrison reappropriation. Former White House counsel Abner Mikva told John Heilemann  “When this all is over, people are going to say that Barack Obama is the first Jewish president.” The magazine made it their cover.

First Asian-American President: In 2009, Associated Foreign Press ran with the headline, “Obama the first Asian-American president?” As evidence, the article notes that in his first hundred days,  “Obama appointed a record three Asian-Americans cabinet members and quickly focused his attention across the Pacific. He invited Japan’s prime minister as his first guest and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went to Asia on her maiden trip.”

First Hispanic President: Geraldo Rivera spoke in March 2009 about the hopes the Hispanic community had for Obama’s immigration policies, alleging “Barack Obama is the first Hispanic president the same way Bill Clinton was the first black [one].”

My God, he really is the second coming of Peter Lemon Moodring, isn’t he?

Related: Perhaps he’s Zelig as well: Seth Mandel of Commentary notes that Obama has had his name shoehorned into every White House presidential biography beginning with Coolidge, with the exception of Gerald Ford.

More: Chicago machine politician hyped to mythopoeic status by media at the start of his presidential bid cautions college students not to believe the same media that created his legend.

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I shouted out who played the Kennedys, when after all, it was Barack Hussein. At the Blaze, Jonathon M. Seidl writes, “Despite endorsing Obama in 2008, JFK’s daughter Caroline now considers Obama a ‘liar,’ according to a family source in Edward Klein’s new book on Obama called ‘The Amateur.’ After spotlighting numerous examples of bad blood between the Kennedy family and the man Teddy and Caroline designed as JFK’s successor in 2008, Seidl concludes:

Ethel Kennedy, “the matriarch of the family,” similarly felt scorned, according to Klein. He tells a story of her invitation — extended to the First Family — being ignored by the Obamas. She got so upset “that she went on a rampage inside her house, cursing the president and turning over furniture.”

And to top it all of, Caroline, the family source tells Klein in the book, believes “that as a loyal Democrat, she has nowhere to go, no one else to possibly support except Obama.”

(Related: Explosive New Book: Bill Clinton Thought Obama an ‘Amateur,’ Urged Hillary to Quit and Run in 2012)

And guess what: “the Obamas know that she has nowhere else to go, so they see no point in being nice to her.”

That “really pisses her off.”

Wait, the Obama administration is cruel to a prominent female Democrat — I’m shocked, shocked!

But really, where else can Caroline and the rest of the Kennedy clan go?

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Over at Time-Warner owned CNN, anchor  Ali Velshi believes the election is already over:

VELSHI: Joining me now from Washington is, CNN’s chief national correspondent John King. John, I have a thesis I want to run by you. Mitt Romney has already lost the election because of this.

Voters in Ohio, auto workers and union members are alienated by his stance on the bailout. You know, John, because you spend a lot of time in Ohio like I have. It is GM country in large part.

They will hand that state to President Obama and without Ohio, probably Romney doesn’t get to the White House. What do you think?

In February of 2010, Velshi was the CNN anchor who presented on-air a cake to the Obama administration, to celebrate the first anniversary of the Obama “stimulus” program, saying, “Happy birthday, dear stimulus. Our producer Ben Tinker (ph) baked this cake. It is a stimulus happy birthday — first birthday cake, which is also a pie chart. It is the birthday of the stimulus.” (See photo below.) So as even as CNN may be the last news network whose PR attempts to feign objectivity, it seems safe to say we know Velshi’s already picked sides in 2012. Similarly, as Noel Sheppard writes today at Newsbusters, “CNN’s Don Lemon Compares Mitt Romney to 60s Segregationist George Wallace,” for having the same views on gay marriage that Obama publicly professed to having until this past week.

In a new post titled “Newsweek’s Cover & Why Obama Turned Gay for Pay–He Knows He’s Being Fired,” Tammy Bruce also believes the election is over; but comes to an entirely opposite conclusion than Velshi:

The following revelation come from a dinner conversation at a fancy restaurant last night (she’s a 1percenter, I’m proudly Friends with 1percenters In the midst of some complaining about Obama, the conversation naturally turned to him becoming Gay for Pay, as phrase normally used for heterosexual young male hustlers who are willing to sleep with men if the price is right. Obama’s sudden support for gay marriage, and the fundraising-mania surrounding his confession, makes the phrase unfortunately apt for the Preezy of the United Steezy.

That said, we then wondered why Obama would really do it. We know he doesn’t give a damn about the issue, and oh sure, he’ll get a bit more cash from the left, but it really won’t even make a dent in what he wants to fund-raise or plans on spending. None of the swing-states at risk during the election were hanging by a thread on this issue (to say the least), and in fact this will likely hurt him in at least North Carolina and Virginia.

Then it dawned on me–Obama’s internal polls must show him losing to Romney, and handily. The latest Rasmussen certainly show the Golfer-in-Chief in trouble and behind the GOP nom. He must realize it’s over and is now simply looking to establish his “legacy,” while reinforcing leftist relationships he desperately wants to keep–like with Hollywood–after we kick his ass to the curb. For an obsessed, cynical and narcissistic president like Obama, he only makes moves that serve his agenda one way or another–and the only upside to this exists out of the White House. Liberal gays will vote for him anyway, and 1 in 6 of his top bundlers have already raised $500,000+ for him. I believe he’s frantic to not have his legacy be the truth–one of disaster brought by narcissism and incompetence, he hopes this sort of story, covers like Newsweek, will be the thing that allows him to walk away at least within his liberal/leftist base as not a complete pariah.

Even more telling–throughout this conversation in the table next to us were a couple of gay men. When I declared my realization that Obama knew he was out, it was, well, a little louder than I would have liked. The two fellows next to us looked over, and as I expected some snarky remark back, they both just looked depressed and then down at their very French appetizers. They knew, too, that they were being played by Obama and that as gays we were all now being saddled with a gigantic “gay friendly” failure of a Preezy.

Mickey Kaus reaches a somewhat similar conclusion; he ponders if Obama is “Thinking two steps ahead?”

If Barack Obama loses the 2012 election, do you think he’s going to quit elective politics, serve on a series of corporate and foundation boards, write a best-selling children’s book on being a Dad and a Lugaresque memoir describing how Fox News and Peter Orszag betrayed him? I don’t. I think he’s going to run again, Grover Cleveland style. That casts possible additional (distant) light on today’s endorsement of same-sex marriage: It may or may not help Obama in 2012. But it would much more reliably likely help him in 2016, when public opinion can be expected to have shifted further in favor of this social innovation. It would certainly help him in the Democratic primaries. ….

It certainly seems plausible (and as Kaus goes on to add, he’s not suggesting that Obama’s throwing in the towel this year, unlike Bruce’s theory). At least Bill Clinton seemed to enjoy governing — running for office is the only thing Obama seems qualified to do — but first we have to get through the campaign he’s running now. So who’s right? CNN’s cake-proffering palace guard anchor or Tammy Bruce? We’ll know in the coming weeks and months.

Update: Welcome Five Feet of Fury Readers.

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At the Tatler, Bryan Preston observes the shameless hackery of Patrick Pexton, the Washington Post’s ombudsman, who punts rather than dealing with the paper’s botched hit piece on Mitt Romney high school days this past week:

Pexton says the story holds up to scrutiny, despite the fact that the story directly quoted a dead man; it claimed things about him that, being dead, he is in no position to affirm or refute; it mischaracterized the opinion of one of its core witnesses; and the family of the dead man says the story is factually inaccurate.

Other than that, it holds right up.

Pexton also admits that the Post timed the story to help the president.

The other criticisms are that this story was published knowing that President Obama was going to announce his shift in favor of gay marriage. The allegation is that somehow The Post is working with the White House to time the story.

Do I think The Post took advantage of the timing? Yes. Vice President Biden had telegraphed the president’s position on gay marriage just days earlier. This story on Romney was in preparation for three weeks. It is part of a series of biographical stories on Romney being written by Horowitz and others and edited by The Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and associate editor, David Maraniss, who is known for his best- selling biographies of major U.S. political figures.

That’s a fallacious appeal to authority. Just because David Maraniss had a hand in it and a committee of liberals handed him a trophy does not make this story factual or fair. Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer too.

If I were an editor I might have sped it up a little, too, to take advantage of the national discussion on gay marriage. Does that mean Post editors are timing stories with the White House? I hope not, and I doubt that is the case.

As Bryan writes, “But he didn’t pick up the phone and ask them, so deep is his curiosity on the subject. Pitiful.”

Pexton’s line that “Does that mean Post editors are timing stories with the White House? I hope not, and I doubt that is the case” is even more of an eye-roller when you consider the Post’s deep involvement in the JournoList fiasco, not to mention an earlier report in MSM house organ Editor & Publisher that the Post was coordinating cover stories with the New York Times.

But hey, given the disastrous economic straits of the Obamaconomy, shaped by the man the Post admitted to championing in 2008, I’m sympathetic both to Pexton’s desire for job security, and for looking out for future employment. After all, having “Washington Post Ombudsman” on your resume won’t look anywhere near as impressive if it’s followed by “Washington Post Reporter: Baltimore Sewer Board Zoning Regulation Hearings,” which is where Pexton would likely be transferred, if not fired, if he actually lived up to his current job title.

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“Obama Scores as Exotic Who Says Nothing,” which, as we mentioned yesterday, Froma Harrop wrote at Real Clear Politics at the end of 2006:

What Obama really thinks should be done about health care and the terrorist threat remain secrets that his book does not unlock. His two years in the Senate certainly haven’t revealed any bold policy ideas.

This leave-them-guessing strategy slips out in the book’s prologue. “I serve as a blank screen,” Obama writes, “on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” He notifies readers that “my treatment of the issues is often partial and incomplete.” It takes some doing for a politician to write a 364-page book, his second volume, and skate past all controversy.

The leave ‘em guessing strategy worked so well that two years later, Tom Brokaw and Charlie Rose had the following exchange on the eve of the 2008 election:

CHARLIE ROSE: I don’t know what Barack Obama’s worldview is.

TOM BROKAW: No, I don’t, either.

ROSE: I don’t know how he really sees where China is.

BROKAW: We don’t know a lot about Barack Obama and the universe of his thinking about foreign policy.

ROSE: I don’t really know. And do we know anything about the people who are advising him?

BROKAW: Yeah, it’s an interesting question.

ROSE: He is principally known through his autobiography and through very aspirational (sic) speeches.

BROKAW: Two of them! I don’t know what books he’s read.

ROSE: What do we know about the heroes of Barack Obama?

BROKAW: There’s a lot about him we don’t know.

Almost a month after the election, a CNN journalist wrote, “The Americans who are comparing him to those remarkable predecessors are putting a lot of faith in a man they barely know.”

Flash-forward to yesterday, where Jonathan Bernstein wrote at the Washington Post:

There’s a Republican-driven idea out there, one Sarah Palin is big on repeating, that Barack Obama wasn’t fully vetted by the press in 2008. It’s preposterous. The truth is that Obama has been the mainstream Democrat he ran as, and I’d guess that it’s very difficult to tie whatever idiosyncrasies he’s had within that to anything in particular about his personal history, and certainly not anything we didn’t know about in November 2008.

Which seems fair, when Tom Brokaw, Charlie Rose and a CNN staffer each admitted they didn’t know anything about the guy they had just voted for and for whom they and their networks had spent the entire year leading his cheerleading squad.

Speaking of not knowing the president, the Post today runs an excerpt from David Maraniss’s Oba-biography, focusing on Barack Obama, JFK-style liberal hawk:

On a personal level, he seems at ease in the presence of soldiers and sailors, more so than he would be in the midst of an antiwar rally; on a policy level he seems increasingly comfortable wielding the powers of a commander in chief.

Obama is the first president to whom Vietnam is ancient history. He carries none of the psychological baggage of that war, for better or worse. Every young man in the baby-boom generation of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had to deal with Vietnam somehow, but by the time Obama came of age, the war and the draft were over. His liberal mother felt at home in the peace movement, and he took many characteristics from her, but he also chafed at her idealistic naivete, which he viewed as a relic of the ’60s. From an early age he wanted to be harder and cooler than his mother, less Pollyannaish, more pragmatic. His use of the military option in his foreign policy reflects that dual sensibility. Clinton grew up wanting to be JFK, but Obama thinks more like him.

He does? The guy who launched his political career in Bill Ayers’ living room? Who spent 20 years at the foot of Rev. Jeremiah “God Damn America” Wright’s pulpit? Who during his stopover for coffee in the Senate dressed down Gen. Petraeus? Whose early campaign ad promised he would gut military spending? Who returned the Churchill bust to England? The guy who says “Corpse-man?”

Incidentally, doesn’t this completely obliterate Bernstein’s column yesterday? Who in 2008 knew that compared to Obama, John McCain was such a dovish pantywaist?

Of course, to whatever extent Obama is comfortable with the military, it could be because he’d like more of civilian America to resemble them, as Matthew Continetti writes at the Washington Free Beacon on “Generalissimo Obama:”

The way to “honor” American heroes who serve overseas, Obama said, is “by coming together, all of us, and working to secure the dream that so many generations have fought for—the dream that a better life awaits anyone who is willing to work for it and reach for it.”

What does “coming together” mean? Why, silly, it means passing Obama’s domestic agenda: more money for education and job training and to “jumpstart industries that create jobs, and end our dependence on foreign oil,” and just happen to be owned by donors to the president’s campaigns. Missing from the 2010 speech was a line saying the path to heroism is through support for the Buffett Rule, probably because David Axelrod hadn’t yet come up with that particular gimmick.

The nation-as-army metaphor reemerged, dramatically, as the 2012 campaign began. Jonah Goldberg was justifiably disgusted at the message of this year’s State of the Union Address, in which the president suggested that Americans as a whole might take their cues from uniformed soldiers who are “not consumed with personal ambition,” “don’t obsess over their differences,” “focus on the mission at hand,” and “work together.”

Obama finds inspiration in the most hierarchical and selfless elements of military life. “Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example,” he said. We imagine all of us would have to buy health insurance. Taxes and spending would be high. A new Volt would sit in every driveway.

The commander-in-chief issued additional orders in recent days. When he unveiled his latest campaign slogan Monday, he told his supporters, and presumably the rest of the country, that it is time to march “Forward,” lemming-like, off a cliff.

And on Tuesday, in the televised address at the close of his targeted Afghan night raid, Obama challenged his audience to “summon that same sense of common purpose” one finds in “our soldiers, our sailors, our airmen, Marines, Coast Guardsmen, and civilians in Afghanistan,” and “redouble our efforts to build a nation worthy of their sacrifice.”

Obama’s social militarism inverts civil-military relations in a democratic republic. Traditionally—and one suspects that this is still the case for practically all servicemen—men and women join the Armed Forces because they believe America is worthy of their duty and protection. But Obama seems to suggest that, sorry, we are not quite there yet. The America that actually is “worthy of their sacrifice” has not come into existence. It exists “forward,” somewhere in the future. We must bring it into being by emulating the self-sacrificing troops, by suppressing our ambition and disagreement and differences, by “focusing on the mission” of building our country on a New Foundation.

The left’s century-old Moral Equivalent of War trope sure has some half-life, huh?

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At Commentary, Seth Mandel explores how Elizabeth Warren, running against Scott Brown in Massachusetts, is “playing an important role in our political discourse: she is the ghost of liberalism future.” As Mandel writes, “Warren’s alleged use of affirmative action, if true, would have to be the most egregious abuse of the system at the expense of minorities we’ve seen yet. Elizabeth Warren is, as a white woman, statistically speaking very much a member of this country’s majority. The only category in which she is a true minority is wealth: Elizabeth Warren is very, very rich:”

The sad part about all this is that Warren is clearly intelligent and dedicated to her (redistributionist) cause. Back in August, Christopher Caldwell wrote a piece on her in the Weekly Standard in which he praised her earlier writing as “brilliant and counterintuitive work.” Though many on the right object to Warren’s politics, no one thought she was ill-equipped intellectually for the important debate on economic policy now sweeping the public sphere.

Yet in the age of Obama, this is how campaigns are run. Warren may have interesting things to say, but she, too, has become something of a liberal cliché. Despite her obvious smarts, she has reflexively fallen back on charges of sexism, even when they are so ridiculous as to make you cringe. If Warren, a rich, white, Harvard professor, is a victim, everyone is.

Why does this matter? Because it reveals that the left thinks affirmative action is a joke, another cudgel with which to attack political opponents at the expense of minorities who might, thanks to liberalism’s insistence on keeping students in failed school districts, actually put the policy to some good use. And because if Elizabeth Warren is unable to advance coherent liberal policy arguments, then there may be none to advance.

John Fund dubs Warren the Check-the-Box Lady:

Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic candidate running against Massachusetts senator Scott Brown, claimed for a decade in law-school directories that she was Native American even though her only evidence for her status was family “lore.”

After days of stonewalling, she now says she claimed minority status only in order to find others with tribal roots. “I listed myself in the directory in the hopes that it might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group something that might happen with people who are like I am. Nothing like that ever happened, that was clearly not the use for it, and so I stopped checking it off,” she told reporters this week.

“Being Native American has been part of my story I guess since the day I was born,” Warren said, who has never mentioned her Native American heritage while she has been a Senate candidate. Yesterday, however, the candidate informed a Boston news station that her “high cheekbones” were testimony to her Native American background.

After a week of digging, helpful scholars at the New England Historic Genealogical Society say they have a hint that Warren’s great-great-great-grandmother may have been Cherokee. An electronic transcript of an 1894 marriage application back in Warren’s Oklahoma lists her ancestor as Cherokee. That would make Warren 1/32nd Native American. But the genealogists say the actual marriage certificate doesn’t list any Cherokee ancestry.

Noting that Warren suddenly dropped any claim to Native American ancestry as soon as she was hired at Harvard, Howie Carr of the Boston Herald concludes: “Once she’d reached the pinnacle of her trade, she ditched the fake-Indian routine. Maybe White Eyes Warren saw the smoke signals and figured out that someone was going to call her out on her ancestry. She was right.”

Actually, this is one time where a couple of pictures really is worth a thousand words. With a little help from her fellow “liberals” in the MSM, she’s also doing a wonderful job making a hash of racism in 2012 as well:

 Update: At Hot Air, Ed Morrissey writes, “Democrats worried about Warren in Massachusetts,” quoting Larry Sabato:

“This takes her biography into a bizarre dimension,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “It has derailed the effort to define Warren in a voter-friendly way.”

Sabato also said that Warren’s claim that she didn’t list herself as a minority to gain an employment advantage is not believable.

“This is what happens when candidates don’t tell the truth,” he said. “It’s pretty obvious she was using (the minority listing) for career advancement.”

“This is what happens when candidates don’t tell the truth” — as opposed to say fellow Massachusetts liberals such as John Kerry and the late Ted Kennedy? But then, as Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe once wrote, “That which is permitted to Massachusetts congressmen is not permitted to congressmen from other states” — apparently that applies to would-be liberal senators there, as well.

More: Oh, and speaking of Kerry, our one-time proponent of radical chic, and champion of the Great Recession’s ability to “reduce” “global warming” has somehow transformed himself along the way into quite the “prescient” investor…

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Tesla, the “green” automaker for those whom its fellow lefties in Occupy Wall Street would dub the “One Percent,” now claims that the batteries in its current line of electric cars are no longer susceptible to “bricking.” That’s the issue that was originally claimed back in February by Gawker-owned Jalopnik.com, which reported that the batteries inside Tesla’s electric cars would require an expensive replacement not under warranty, if they were allowed to run down to zero.

The brain of 80 year old Bay Area Congressman Pete Stark (D-CA), whose mental batteries have never seemed 100 percent charged, may have finally bricked itself however:

Chronicle: You got Silicon Valley in your district, or a slice of it.
Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA): Do I?*
Chronicle: Solyndra’s down by your way, as a matter of fact.
Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA): Yes.
Chronicle: What specifically are you going to do in the next term to work with the tech sector?
Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA): I wish I had big enough expense allowance to get one of those new “S’s” that Solyndra’s going to make down there, the electric car. My 10 year old is after me. He no longer wants a Porsche. He wants dad to have an “S” sedan. They sound wild. I guess they run $60,000-$90,000.”

Video of the sclerotic San Francisco Democrat’s gaffe at the Tatler. I only hope Pete’s civil for a change if he calls in to complain.

On the other hand, as the Weekly Standard notes, for President Obama, Solyndra has become an un-company, having scrubbed the crony corporatist start-up from its latest “green” “energy” campaign ads. Not surprisingly, the virtual clean-up was far more successful than Solyndra’s own efforts to remove its toxic after-effects.

(more…)

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Wikipedia — where anyone can falsely accuse an associate of Robert F. Kennedy of being “directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby,” but any mention that Obama ate a dog — despite Obama having now mentioned said fact on the record at least three times himself — is apparently verboten, at least during the election year.

Back in 2004, Robert McHenry, the former editor in chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica, dubbed its would-be Internet successor “The Faith-Based Encyclopedia” at Tech Central Station; in terms of quality control, it looks like little has changed in the interim.

Say, has anybody heard from Comrade Ogilvy recently?

Related: Speaking of Obama and the Memory Hole, meet “Barry’s Imaginary Girlfriend.” As Jim Geraghty writes, with some thoughts on both Obama’s college-era girlfriend and Elizabeth Warren, the 1/32nd Indian maiden, the password for 2012 is…“Composite.”

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Charles Cooke’s latest article at NRO on Occupy Wall Street dovetails perfectly with my previous item on German socialists using “climate change” as a pretext to transform their nation. (Which seems to happen on a regular basis in Germany, oddly enough…) After dropping by Madison Square Park, Cooke writes:

“Naomi Klein went to the Heartland Institute’s International Conference on Climate Change,” the speaker was saying, “which must have been an unpleasant experience.” (Snickers greeted this addition.) “And what she discovered was that the conservatives get it. She wrote about it in The Nation.” He picked up a piece of paper and read aloud: “Here’s what she said they think:

. . . climate change is a Trojan horse designed to abolish capitalism and replace it with some kind of eco-socialism. As conference speaker Larry Bell succinctly puts it in his new book Climate of Corruption, climate change “has little to do with the state of the environment and much to do with shackling capitalism and transforming the American way of life in the interests of global wealth redistribution.”

The assembled Occupiers laughed nervously, and some nodded. “Yes!” smiled the speaker. “The Right gets it. They spread misinformation about the science, as they know that it means the end of how we’ve been living. And they’ll do anything to keep the system as it is.” At this, everyone nodded. “So,” he continued. “What can we do?” The group had a brief conversation about the importance of educating Americans in scientific truth — which will, no doubt, have raised a few hackles among those intent on relitigating the Science Wars — and an agreement that everybody needs to stop driving cars, and then moved on to more important things.

“Well,” the speaker said, “I want to move on a bit. A lot of people live in the suburbs and they have a few cars and they live in houses that they probably bought in the 1980s. We need to morally exclude those who don’t recognize the problem, and let them know that they have no place in a future America.” This sounded a bit off to my ears, so I waited until they were finished and then asked one of the friendlier-looking participants a question: “I understand that you think these people in the suburbs can’t continue their lifestyles. Where will they live if not there?”

“Where will they live? In a community!” she replied.

“They do live in a community,” I said.

She laughed nervously. “A different community. One that we’d all design together.”

“Forgive me,” I said. “But you just described America. This is a community that we all designed together. How would yours differ?”

After a while, we established that what she actually meant was that people who shared her views would need to design the parameters of others’ lives — for the “common good,” of course. She was very nice — more Tom Friedman than Mussolini — and would surely be horrified if I were to buy her a copy of Liberal Fascism and suggest that people like her are exactly what the book is about. But neither her basic decency nor her naïveté can change the fact that she and her fellow panelists have succumbed to the totalitarian temptation, and adopted wholesale the seductive idea that the future is just too important to be left to individuals and free institutions and must thus be bent to the will of experts who happen to look very much like them.

There’s an unintentionally hilarious disconnect in this article yesterday in the San Francisco Chronicle on Occupy Oakland, that dovetails well with Jonah’s latest book, The Tyranny of Cliches:

At one point, one group of protesters surrounded a Bank of America branch on Lakeside Drive, pounded on windows and chanted, “Oakland is the people’s town, strike occupy, shut it down.”

“We are here today because capitalism has destroyed basic human need,” said a 20-year-old protester who only identified himself as Connor.

“I am sort of into the libertarian/communist thing myself,” he said. “I am an advocate of human need, not monetary need.”

I know Brink Lindsey of the Cato Institute had his paradoxic “liberaltarian” movement around 2006 or so, which largely ran out of steam once Obama took office and “liberals” found themselves rather intoxicated by their newfound power, but how exactly does “libertarian-communism” work? As Jonah and I recently discussed when I interviewed him about the new book:

DRISCOLL:  Let’s discuss some of the liberal clichés that are debunked in the new book.  One of your chapters spends quite a bit of time debunking a newly favorite phrase of President Obama, “social Darwinism.”

GOLDBERG:  Yeah, this is, you know—this is a good example of the sort of—the spinoffs from Liberal Fascism.  One of the things, when you start studying fascism, that you have to deal with, is this thing called “social Darwinism.”  And you’re constantly told in various, you know, textbooks and all the rest, that Nazism was a doctrine of social Darwinism.  And at the same time, we’re told that the Robber Barons and people like Herbert Spencer were champions of something called social Darwinism in the United States.

And there’s a huge disconnect here.  Right?  I mean, it sort of gets at sort of the same problem you have where people call libertarians fascists.  You know, a libertarian fascist is almost, by definition, an oxymoron.  Hitler was not a real leave-’em-alone kind of guy.

Neither was Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Che, etc., oddly enough.

Watch for my interview with Jonah early next week. In the meantime, Zombie has video of the mostly peaceful Occupy San Francisco throwing bricks off a rooftop in a mostly peaceful way at police and innocent bystanders.

Related: “History is replete with Peoples’ movements that, claiming weight of numbers and well-meaning intentions for others, have changed the course of society–but not necessarily for the better. In other words, pathologically altruistic movements.”

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“Germany Succeeds Making Energy Unaffordable For 15% Of Its Population – 600,000 Households Disconnected Annually,” the No Tricks Zone Website, devoted to “climate news from Germany” claims:

Every year 600,000 households (2 million people) are getting their power switched off in Germany because they can’t afford the skyrocketing electric bills. At that rate the country (population 80 million) will become blacked-out like North Korea by 2050.

It’s one way of reducing carbon emissions – just catapult your population back to the Stone Age. Online German flagship daily Die Welt has an article on how skyrocketing electricity prices are making electricity unaffordable for a large number of Germans.

Many people in Germany are no longer able to pay their electricity bills. And energy prices continue to climb – rapidly. The president of the VdK social association Ulrike Masche, accuses the German federal government “of having neglected the social dimension of the energy transformation”.

It’s not that they neglected it — it’s that, like Obama promising to bankrupt coal companies, and his energy advisors promising $9.00/a gallon gas, they view these as features, much as how Democrats John Kerry and Claire McCaskill trumpet the carbon-reducing benefits of the recession.

Or as Will Collier writes today on the aftermath of East Germany, “How fundamentally f***** up does a system have to be to produce impoverished… Germans?” But then global warming is simply a different means to the same end.

Speaking of which, longtime readers of our site will will member back in 2010, during our “Springtime for Algore,” when we had lots of fun with an article in that month’s edition of Condé Nast’s Traveler* praising to the hilt what they called Germany’s “Eco–Anschluss.” Could Germany’s future yet again resemble the post-1945 aftermath of the original Anschluss? Survey says….maybe.

(more…)

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“Is New York Times boss piloting a ‘ghost ship?’” The above video asks. (Short answer: yes.)

To make sense of the latest bit of timely Taiwanese digital surrealism, P.J. Gladnick of Newsbusters has the backstory:

New York Times publisher Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr has suddenly become the moose in the room that everybody now wants to talk about, including his disgruntled staffers…and Taiwanese animators who have produced an hilarious video about his bizarre management style (below the fold). The Taiwanese parody is based on a recent email sent by Times science and health reporter Don McNeil to about 150 fellow staffers.

Reading McNeil’s explosive email, one gets the impression that Sulzberger’s primary qualification to helm the Times was to live through birth:

The Times is in labor turmoil. Journalists are openly angry. Even the sacred Page One meeting has had a protest.

The company has no C.E.O.

Arthur has cancelled his annual State of the Times address.

He didn’t even speak at Anthony Shadid’s memorial. Jill “greeted us in his name” as he sat there.

The antlers that the animated version of Sulzberger wears throughout the above video are a reference to Pinch’s infamous stuffed moose from the Jayson Blair-era:

The moose is loose On the empty stage, Sulzberger, Raines and Boyd sat side by side. They got no applause and no catcalls, though some audience comments were cheered. In a surreal moment that reminded one staffer of Shari Lewis’ old TV show, Sulzberger produced a stuffed toy moose that he sometimes trots out as a symbol of open communication. Its use struck some in the audience as a tone-deaf and patronizing gesture. Sulzberger handed the moose to Raines, who laid it aside.

As James Lileks wrote at the time, “grown-ups do not use metaphorical mooses to break the ice:”

Let’s imagine how that would have worked in WW2:

Patton: Dammit, Ike, I -

Eisenhower: uh uh uh, George. I don’t see Mr. Moose. I hear moosey feelings, but the table looks pretty mooseless to me.

Patton: (fingers pearl handle of his revolver) (drops a dirty, wet rag on the table) That’s my moose. It fell under the tank treads. Sir, about Normandy -

Eisenhower: What did you call you moose? You’re supposed to give it a name!

Patton: As soon I saw it was under the treads, I named it Monty.

Lileks wrote almost a decade ago that “adults no longer run the Times;” today, they’re also pretty scarce at the other end of the Northeast Corridor. QED:

“The president has a very difficult time with the business community. Most people in business and most people who are successful are Republican that’s just a fact of life.”

– Bill Daley, President Obama’s former Chief of Staff.

But then, as Ann Althouse asks, while Obama is “slow-jamming the news” with a late-night television host and hitting the fund-raising circuit 24/7, who is running the show at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

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“To recap: Not a self-appointed vigilante. Not a racist. Did not utter a racist slur and was not suspicious of Martin because of his skin color. Stand your ground laws probably don’t apply to his case, Bryan Preston writes at the Tatler. “Other than that, the MSM has done a bang-up job on this story.”

Hey, it’s not like the racers in the MSM ever went race first, and decided where to aim later before in recent years. Oh wait:

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As Victor Davis Hanson wrote in February, “Now What? The Obama administration’s real problem is existential: What if it gets what it wants, but then finds that either it or the country really is uncomfortable with what it got?”

The same question applies to the MSM, which is but an extension of the Obama administration.  Or perhaps it’s the other way around. In any case, you can NBC see the cognitive dissonance at work by comparing two quotes; the first from the happy shiny birth of Hopenchange, when the Office of the President Elect was punking President Bush, the second from earlier today, during the administration’s possible twilight.

Here’s Tom Brokaw, hosting NBC’s Meet the Press, interviewing President-Elect Obama on December 7th, 2008, with a question that will live in infamy for the MSM:

Let’s talk for a moment about consumer responsibility when it comes to the auto industries. As soon as gas prices dropped, consumers moved back to the larger cars once again. The SUVs are the big gas consumers. Why not take this opportunity to put a tax on gasoline, bump it back up to $4 a gallon where people were prepared to pay for that, and use that revenue for alternative energy and as a signal to the consumers: “Those days are gone. We’re not going to have gasoline that you could just fill up your tank for 20 bucks anymore.”

Brokaw’s sentiments were echoed during that same month by the Washington Post and the New York Times.

Flash-forward to NBC alumnus Keith Olbermann on ABC’s This Week, earlier today. Despite his most recent former employer also being in favor of high gas prices (except during an election year), for Olbermann in 2012, high gas prices are suddenly a mysterious conspiracy with the potential to derail Mr. Obama’s reelection bid:

One of the things I turned to, to try to establish that was to look at the average gas price at various key moments, and the lowest price in the last six years, the nadir of gas prices at the pump, was the day of this president’s inauguration in 2009. There has to be some connection between that being the least busy political moment of a president’s career, where you’re not going to — you’re not going to hurt them, you’re not going to harm him that way, and the price of gas. There has to be an almost deliberate or at least a side effect quality to that. There must be.

There must be! Perhaps Faber College’s Eric Stratton knows the answer.

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At Newsweek, the sky is always falling, but it does so in different ways:

• “The Cooling World”

– Headline at Newsweek, April 28, 1975.

• “Earth Day: Discussing the Coming Climate Crisis With Heidi Cullen.”

– Headline at the Daily Beast, Newsweek’s successor, today.

However, give Tina’s magazine its due. While it has called for the deaths of Wall Street bankers, Dick Cheney, and George Zimmerman, and cheered the death of Andrew Breitbart, (and that was all just in the last four months), to the best of my knowledge, it has yet to suggest that the houses of religious non-believers be allowed to burn down. That dubious distinction goes to ordinarily calm and reserved Forbes.

Related: “Next They’ll Say We Have Too Many Polar Bears.”

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Unexpectedly! “Weekly Jobless Claims Hit Higher Level Than Expected,” a CNBC headline reports, using a variation on what Jim Geraghty dubbed a year ago, “the most common adverb of the Obama years.”

The It’s Only Words blog replies:

It’s always unexpected with these people. Seriously, can’t you picture the entire Obama Administration standing on the White House lawn, gazing eastward and marveling that the sun has risen yet again?

The image will be that much sunnier, when the Photoshop I create last year for a Victor Davis Hanson post titled “The Coming Post-Obama Renaissance” becomes a reality:

In the meantime, the Washington Dispatch contrasts today’s malaise-ridden Obamaconomy with the recovery of the 1980s under President Reagan in graphic terms:

Click over to their blog to see the two charts full size — and then check out Jim Pethokoukis at the American Enterprise Blog, who writes, “I wish Obama could time travel back to 1980″:

In 1980, there were plenty of forecasters who thought the American standard of living would decline over coming decades. Just look at all the dystopian films back then: Blade Runner, Soylent Green, Americathon, Escape from New York. Gloomy stuff.

But by the mid-1980s, those films were giving way to ones depicting a much sunnier tomorrow such as Back to the Future, Part II and the Star Trek revival. Indeed, from 1983-2007, U.S. real GDP grew by 3.3% a year, 2.2% on a per capital basis. Now, this was not as fast as the 1950s and 1960s when GDP growth averaged near 4%. But as Sumner explains, “Growth has been slower, but that’s true almost everywhere. What is important is that the neoliberal reforms in America have helped arrest our relative decline.

And the key reforms, by the way, are lower marginal tax rates and less intrusion by government into markets and the private sector via deregulation, eliminating price controls, and privatization.

Why would the president want to reverse course instead of recommitting America to the successful policies of the past decades?

By the way, it isn’t just the labor force that’s shrunk under Mr. Obama, as CNBC noted earlier this month, with another “unexpected” subtext:

It’s one of the biggest mysteries on Wall Street. How can stocks be in their fourth year of a bull market and trading activity be so low?

During March, average daily volume in equity shares was at their lowest level since December 2007, according to new data from Credit Suisse. This is the same month that marked the three-year anniversary of the bull market that caused the Standard & Poor’s 500 to double from its March 2009 credit-crisis low.

Actually that same CNBC article partially clears up the mystery, but the reader has to click on a hyperlink embedded first. Buried much deeper in the same article is this little tidbit:

“The financial industry has placed itself above the investing public (‘muppets‘) and will take every advantage it can secure,” said Alan Newman, author of the Crosscurrents financial newsletter. “The public’s confidence has been shattered, possibly beyond repair.”

And buried within the word “muppets” is a link to an earlier CNBC story from late March:

Goldman Sachs has begun scanning internal emails for the term “muppet” and other evidence that employees referred to clients in derogatory ways, Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein told partners in a conference call this week, according to people familiar with the call.

The company-wide email review comes after an executive director named Greg Smith resigned last week in a scathing op-ed column in the New York Times in which he said he saw five Goldman managing directors refer to clients as “muppets,” at times over internal email.

In the United States, “muppet” brings to mind lovable puppets such as Kermit the Frog, but in Britain “muppet” is slang for a stupid person.

On the conference call with partners this week, Blankfein said the company was taking Smith’s claims seriously and was conducting a review of his assertions, including the email scan, according to these people.

Consider this another example of Blair’s Law: Goldman Sachs, the company that thinks of its customers as “muppets,” is deeply in bed with the Obama administration, right down to their fundraising operations. The leader of said administration thinks of most Americans as lethargic bitter clingers, typical white people, who’ve acted stupidly, who’ve become soft, and who have lost their imagination and willingness to go along with the big government projects he envisions for them. (“What about more smart grids?” “We need more moon shot!”)

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Peggy Noonan walks us through the daily horrors of the TSA (with a nice reference to a video shot by Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit), and the GSA partying on our dime in Vegas, before observing the Secret Service scandal:

That one broke through too, and you know the facts: overseas to guard the president, sent home for drinking, partying, picking up prostitutes.

What’s terrible about this story is that for anyone who’s ever seen the Secret Service up close it’s impossible to believe. The Secret Service are the best of the best. That has been their reputation because that has been their reality. They have always been tough, disciplined and mature. They are men, and they have the most extraordinary job: take the bullet.

Remember when Reagan was shot? That was Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy who stood there like a stone wall, and took one right in the gut. Jerry Parr pushed Reagan into the car, and Mr. Parr was one steely-eyed agent. Reagan coughed up a little blood, and Mr. Parr immediately saw its color was a little too dark. He barked the order to change direction and get to the hospital, not the White House, and saved Reagan’s life. From Robert Caro’s “Passage of Power,” on Secret Service agent Rufus Youngblood, Nov. 22, 1963: “there was a sharp, cracking sound,” and Youngblood, “whirling in his seat,” grabbed Vice President Lyndon Johnson and threw him to the floor of the car, “shielding his body with his own.”

In any presidential party, the Secret Service guys are the ones who are mature, who you can count on, who’ll keep their heads. They have judgment, they’re by the book unless they have to rewrite it on a second’s notice. And they wore suits, like adults.

This week I saw a picture of agents in Colombia. They were in T-shirts, wrinkled khakis and sneakers. They looked like a bunch of mooks, like slobs, like children with muscles.

Special thanks to the person who invented casual Friday. Now it’s casual everyday in America. But when you lower standards people don’t decide to give you more, they give you less.

Gee Peggy, too bad that last sentence didn’t occur to you in the fall of 2008, when you laid out “The case for Barack Obama, in broad strokes:”

He has within him the possibility to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy, which need changing; his rise will serve as a practical rebuke to the past five years, which need rebuking; his victory would provide a fresh start in a nation in which a fresh start would come as a national relief. He climbed steep stairs, born off the continent with no father to guide, a dreamy, abandoning mother, mixed race, no connections. He rose with guts and gifts. He is steady, calm, and, in terms of the execution of his political ascent, still the primary and almost only area in which his executive abilities can be discerned, he shows good judgment in terms of whom to hire and consult, what steps to take and moves to make.

To borrow one of Obama’s favorite words on the campaign trail in 2008, you were certainly bamboozled, Peggy:

As Glenn Reynolds notes:

Pictured on the left, above, is Jon Favreau, who still works for the White House at a salary of $172,200 a year. According to the linked article, Obama calls him his “mind reader.”

This leaves reader Paula Colozzi unimpressed: “$172,000 for recycled speeches, as recent reviews of Obama’s speeches have been shown to be. A bit overpaid perhaps.” Hey, recycling is going green.

Peggy concludes her latest column thusly:

In isolation, these stories may sound like the usual sins and scandals, but in the aggregate they seem like something more disturbing, more laden with implication, don’t they? And again, these are only from the past week.

The leveling or deterioration of public behavior has got to be worrying people who have enough years on them to judge with some perspective.

Something seems to be going terribly wrong.

Maybe we have to stop and think about this.

To recycle one of Mencken’s lines, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” That was certainly true in 2008, and the aftermath was the very opposite of the MSM’s favorite adverb in the years since, at least to those of us who didn’t drink the Obama-Kool-Aid at the time.

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