Democrats have gotten too clever for themselves in battling voter ID. Requiring people to show the same ID to vote that they must show to buy cigarettes or beer somehow disenfranchises them according to those great super-duper thinkers on the Left. It’s comical. And the British business wire service, Reuters, bought into the liberal line so much that it inadvertently makes Barack Obama seem like one big crook.
BRIT HUME ON THE OBAMA-EATS-DOGS STORY: Payback’s A Bitch. Plus, from the comments: “Payback had better run like hell. Obama eats bitches ya’ know. #ObamaEatsDog.”
DOG BITES NETWORK: ABC Flip-Flops on #ObamaAteADog. “ABC went from promoting the ‘Dog Wars’ to declaring the issue dead within 24 hours. Actually, their flip-flop on the issue took about 14 hours.” Long enough for them to figure out it might actually hurt Obama.
As Don Surber notes: “Sadly, the economy still slogs along with gun sales as the lone bright spot.” Aware that this is not the kind of record you win re-election on, Obama’s crack campaign staff has — with the aid of their media lapdogs — set up a series of diversions, each of which is exploding in Obama’s face like Wile E. Coyote’s Acme exploding cigars.
GREEN FIGHT: It’s On: Romney Campaign Takes on Fisker Over Federal Loans. “Stick with me to the end on this, and if you’re worried that Mitt Romney’s campaign will be too weak to take on Obama’s you’ll leave happy. Well, unless you’re an Obama fan.”
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: FDA proposes rules for nanotechnology in food. “The Food and Drug Administration issued tentative guidelines Friday for food and cosmetic companies interested in using nanoparticles, which are measured in billionths of a meter. Nanoscale materials are generally less than 100 nanometers in diameter. A sheet of paper, in comparison, is 100,000 nanometers thick. A human hair is 80,000 nanometers thick. The submicroscopic particles are increasingly showing up in FDA-regulated products like sunscreens, skin lotions and glare-reducing eyeglass coatings. Some scientists believe the technology will one day be used in medicine, but the FDA’s announcement did not address that use.”
Then: Liberal journalists in the 1960s told us all to “Question Authority.”
Now: Journalists on the Left reminisce about the days when they were “The Voice of Authority.”
Van Jones wishes you would just “sit down and shut up,” and in a slightly more reserved way — and more on that in a moment — if you’re a blogger or Tea Partier, so does Joe Nocera of the New York Times.
They don’t have arguments. And increasingly, they don’t have authority, either.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: At The NYT: Clueless Blue Deer Meet Onrushing Truck. “Schadenfreude alert: readers, and especially those who don’t much like the New York Times, should make sure they are not eating soup or holding hot liquids before viewing the video below. Uncontrollable gales of laughter stemming from excessive levels of schadenfreude may cause spilling and staining. . . . The Guild is talking about a strike, and an array of Times staffers, including some famous bylines that are well known in news circles, worry aloud that the new plan could make them eat cat food and sleep in boxes on the street in old age. (Or late middle age, anyway; not one staffer talks about working past 65.)”
Standing on the deck of his rusted steel trawler, Naz Sanfilippo fumed about the latest bad news for New England fishermen: a decision by Whole Foods to stop selling any seafood it does not consider sustainable.
Starting Sunday, gray sole and skate, common catches in the region, will no longer appear in the grocery chain’s artfully arranged fish cases. Atlantic cod, a New England staple, will be sold only if it is not caught by trawlers, which drag nets across the ocean floor, a much-used method here.
“It’s totally maddening,” Mr. Sanfilippo said. “They’re just doing it to make all the green people happy.”
The thing I’ve noticed is how much more expensive seafood — even formerly cheap stuff — has gotten over the last year or two. I’m not sure if this is supply-and-demand, or a function of the weak dollar, but it’s really noticeable.
HTC and the other guys are talking about two different things. First, there’s what an experienced user thinks about their phone a year after they’ve bought it. That favors battery life.
Second, there’s what a person thinks when they’re in the showroom looking at phones trying to decide which one to buy. Physical size and
attractiveness wins there.
And what HTC has clearly decided is that the second one leads to more sales — and they’re probably right.
Good point. And reader Roger Baumgarten says that battery life matters to him and that’s why he has the Mophie Juice Pack for his iPhone.
EATING MEAT helped early humans reproduce. “If early humans had been vegans we might all still be living in caves, Swedish researchers suggested in an article Thursday. When a mother eats meat, her breast-fed child’s brain grows faster and she is able to wean the child at an earlier age, allowing her to have more children faster, the article explains. That provided a distinct competitive advantage for early humans when limited resources and a small population made it difficult for them to thrive.”
MANAGEMENT: “The Department of Energy’s top safety officer in Washington, D.C., has issued a special alert on contaminated respirators in the wake of problems at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant.”
IS THE WASHINGTON POSTrunning a sweatshop? “They said that they felt as if they were out there alone in digital land, under high pressure to get Web hits, with no training, little guidance or mentoring and sparse editing. Guidelines for aggregating stories are almost nonexistent, they said. And they believe that, even if they do a good job, there is no path forward. Will they one day graduate to a beat, covering a crime scene, a city council or a school board? They didn’t know. So some left; others are thinking of quitting.”
WAR AGAINST WOMEN IN WISCONSIN: Who’s pushing the female candidate aside in the Scott Walker recall primary? “It seems like the lady is supposed to cede her ground and let the man take over. Talk about a war on women!” Kinda like with Hillary when the Democratic Party powers decided they’d rather have a young man with a Harvard degree.
Plus, from the comments: “She has a duty to retreat.”
MICKEY KAUS: Obama’s Fatal Pivot? “Why Not Tax Reform in 2009? Did Obama blow it by shifting to the health care bill in 2009 instead of focusing on the economy? Barney Frank recently suggested as much, and Michael Hirsh amplifies the charge.”
Britain’s Daily Mail, demonstrating a greater interest in the story than the court eunuchs of the Obamamedia, provides some pictures of the hotel accommodations these guys were enjoying while they “scouted security for the President’s visit”.
We have a dependency culture from top to toe. Forty-five million Americans are on food stamps. The “public servants” manning the government that hands out the food stamps are themselves on Vegas hot-tub stamps, beach-resort stamps, Colombian hooker stamps, third-of-a-century retirement stamps…
A few more years of this, and it won’t be necessary to go to Cartagena: it’ll be Latin America at home, too.
Bashir’s sermon wasn’t the only Mormon-related message coming from Democrats and their allies in the press. That same day, Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer said Romney’s family “came from a polygamy commune in Mexico.” “I am not alleging by any stretch that Romney is a polygamist and approves of [the] polygamy lifestyle,” Schweitzer told the Daily Beast, “but his father was born into [a] polygamy commune in Mexico.”
It is true that Romney’s more distant Mormon ancestors did move to Mexico to escape a U.S. crackdown on polygamy, but it is also true that Romney himself (married 43 years) does not practice polygamy, his father did not practice polygamy, and his grandfather did not practice polygamy. Romney’s great-grandfather Miles Romney was the last polygamist in the line. And, just to point out one of the more unique features of this election, President Obama also has polygamy in his background.
In any event, the general election campaign is only a few days old, and voices on the Democratic side have already made hard-edged statements about Mormonism. Does anyone expect that to change as the campaign goes on?
Nope. Hate and bigotry is all they’ve got left.
UPDATE: A reader writes:
You say that “Hate and bigotry is all they’ve got left”
The problem for them as a strategy is that they are preaching to the choir.
They already have the base; the people who hate, the racists , the religious bigots, are already solidly on Obama’s side.
I have rarely seen such a divide where virtually all the racism and religious bigotry is found on the Left. The Right is made up of people you find at a typical Tea Party rally: well behaved, middle-American, working people who go to church and only want to live their lives in peace and raise their families.
Team Obama will lose, and they lose badly, both in the manner and the magnitude of their loss.
Let’s hope. You get more of what you reward, and America doesn’t need more racism and bigotry.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Andrew Piederer writes:
There is an aspect to this story that hasn’t been covered and has implications for future attempts to use Romney’s Mormonism as an attack vector.
I’m not sure what Martin Bashir was trying to accomplish by citing ‘Mormon’ scripture, but he succeeded in making himself look foolish by getting the citation wrong in the second instance (There is no Nephi 2:34–the verse he is looking for is 2 Nephi 9:34), and completely misunderstanding the context of both citations, which don’t refer to lying as an unforgivable sin worthy of ‘hell-fire’ , but a particularly egregious form of apostasy (becoming anti-Christ).
We see Democrats quoting scripture on a regular basis, and I’ve never quite understood why they do it. It clearly has no authority with the irreligious (mostly Democrat) and for those who are religious, the awkward and–let’s be charitable–’unconventional’ ways in which scripture is uses, marks them as ignorant and self-serving. Obama’s claims to Christian faith have suffered specifically from his use of scripture, which bear no resemblance to standard exegesis.
The bottom line is, ‘successful’ attacks on Romney’s Mormonism require being actually conversant with Mormon doctrines. Failing that, it’s better to stick with the Seamus the dog stories…
What we do know is this: First, that people in the McCain campaign thought they had evidence of election tampering that cost McCain the election. Second, that McCain thought it best for the country to do nothing about it, in part because of fears of mob violence.
America is coasting along a slippery surface, and small concessions to the mob can resonate in ways we can’t predict. In seven months, we have a chance to reverse the mistakes of 2008, even if only to stand up to the mob this time. . . .
If you are sitting on the couch on Election Day watching it on TV, if you are at work instead of not using available leave, if you aren’t inside the polls on Election Day to prevent the mess of 2008 from repeating, you aren’t doing enough. If not 2012, when?
BARRY RUBIN: Secrets Of The Soft-Core Obama Supporters. “If Obama wins, he will be elected by those who stayed home because they thought Romney not conservative enough. If Obama loses, it will be because of people who voted for Romney and then lied about it.”
REX MURPHY: dog and president show, starring Romney and Obama. “So now the presidential campaign is down to basics. Americans are to be given a stark, unequivocal choice. Which is it to be? Dog in a Crate, or Dog on a Plate? I do not think we have seen such clarity of choice in any presidential race of our time.”
Say, remember back when Obama was complaining that “They talk about me like a dog?” Maybe he just didn’t want to be dinner. . . .
It seems that liberal commenters on constitutional law just can’t resist bringing of the issue of child labor, regardless of whether what they’re saying is historically accurate. The latest offender is Dahlia Lithwick. In criticizing Judge Janice Brown’s call for a return to pre-New Deal, Lochnerish concern for economic rights Lithwick writes, “Let’s put aside the extraordinary nature of Brown’s substantive argument, which holds so little regard for ‘democratic processes’ and would gladly upend such odious regulatory regimes like child labor laws.”
So let me repeat it one more time. In the middle of the so-called Lochner era, the Supreme Court upheld state regulation of child labor by a 9-0 vote (Sturges & Burn Mfg. Co. v. Beauchamp, 231 U.S. 320 (1913)). I’ve blogged before that I’m not aware of ANY court in any American jurisdiction ever holding that child labor laws violate a constitutional right to economic freedom or “liberty of contract”, and no one has written in to correct me (for examples of state courts upholding child labor laws within a few years of the Lochner decision, see Ex Parte Weber, 149 Cal. 392 (1906); United Steel Co. v. Yedinak, 87 N.E. 229 (Ind. 1909); Bryan v. Skillman Hardware Co., 76 N.J. 45 (1908); People v. Taylor, 192 N.Y. 398 (1908); State v. Shorey, 86 P. 881 (Ore. 1906)). All fifty states passed child labor laws before 1937, when Lochner was overruled. Economic liberty concerns were not a barrier to the spread of such legislation. . . .
Federal child labor laws before FDR’s appointees took over the Supreme Court: constitutionally questionable as an exercise of the power to regulate interstate commerce. State and local child labor laws: clearly constitutional as within the police power. Doctrine did make a difference, and it’s high time that Lithwick and others stop relying on myths that could be quickly rebutted with a modicum of research.
Well, if it takes a “modicum of research” instead of simply repeating political cliches, don’t expect much change.
The president ate dog when he lived in Indonesia, or at least there’s a passage in his book that says he did. It turns out, eating dog is not a common custom in Indonesia. You have to go out of your way to fetch a Scooby snack. A genuinely inquisitive media might whistle up a question or two to bring this question to heel.
This whole dog-eared story is a can of worms for Obama now. For PolitiFact, Barack Bites Dog represents a nasty dilemma: Rule “True” and confirm that POTUS ate Chow Chow Mein, rule “False” and suggest that he either embellished or didn’t even write his own book. Rule somewhere in between and you just muddy up the water bowl. So PolitiFact put its tail between its legs and didn’t chew on the Truth-O-Meter at all.
Politifact=Lapdog. Be careful guys. You don’t want to look too tasty . . . .
PEOPLE POWER 2.0: How civilians helped win the Libyan information war. “Some information warriors set up their own operations. For Rida Benfayed, an orthopedic surgeon then based in Denver, getting online was the first priority when he reached his hometown of Tobruk, 290 miles east of Benghazi. Benfayed got hold of the city’s only two-way satellite Internet connection and started accepting hundreds of requests to connect on Skype. He organized his contacts into six categories: English media, Arabic media, medical, ground information, politicians, and intelligence. His contacts included ambassadors and doctors, journalists and freedom fighters. A source of high-grade military intelligence soon turned his ad hoc operation into a control room. . . . After about a hundred hours of work, Martin had 250 or so direct contacts in Libya and elsewhere. He created, in effect, a private intelligence network. Initially, he expected only “ambient” or background information, but the intelligence he gathered soon proved useful for both strategy and tactics.”
UPDATE: Related thoughts from Bob Krumm: In nothing we trust: and that’s the way it should be. “The institutions are not what made America great. The American people, who according to the Constitution were to be largely unconstrained by those institutions, are what made this nation great. Over the years we’ve strayed from that notion.”
HE’S GOOD AT CLAIMING CREDIT AND CASTING BLAME: A reader emails: “Obama is taking credit for unemployment declines in Ohio . . . When those declines are actually due to 1) shale gas development in the state, 2) drill and casing steel manufacturing as a result of incased oil and gas development on state and private leases throughout many states, 3) taxpayer funded bailouts of GM and Chrysler, and 4) workforce relocation to other states.”
With new domestic oil and gas production being one of the few bright spots in the otherwise lousy Obama economy, it’s ironic that Dick Cheney’s legacy may be helping Obama get re-elected.
TAKING THE GAS-PUMP POST-IT CAMPAIGN TO A NEW LEVEL: Reader Alex Lecea emails, “Saw an ad for this site on Drudge this morning, thought you’d be interested.” Heh.
UPDATE: Reader Chris Fox writes:
Could we have possibly drawn a more stark comparison between the Tea Party minded and the OWS minded? We say it with Post-It notes. They say it with feces and spray paint. They made a mess of DC and Wisconsin. We cleaned it up and left it better than we found it. Oh, and we also didn’t rape or kill anyone.
Post-its are also the tool of the business-minded. No wonder it never occurred to the OWS crowd.
WELL, GLAD TO BE OF HELP: Reader Dan O’Brien writes:
Last fall I started a workout program at the local gym. I hired a personal trainer who worked there and he had me doing general strength training. I went so far and eventually didn’t renew my PT sessions. I worked a bit on my own, but was generally lost and frustrated with the process. THEN I watched your interview with Mark Rippetoe and all that changed. I bought Mark’s latest edition Starting Strength and started his program. I now have a direction and a purpose to my work outs. I’ve added equipment to my home gym and again, through your recommendation of Amazon Prime membership, saved a ton of money on equipment purchases and shipping fees.
For example, I bought 2 45lb grip style lifting plates for $40 each with zero shipping costs. This beat the price of my local Wal-Mart not counting the savings on purchase tax.
Again, your interview with Mark and your recommendation of Amazon Prime have change my life. Thank you.
You can’t beat Amazon Prime. And since that interview I’ve incorporated more of Rippetoe’s approach into my own workouts, and I’ve definitely seen an improvement.
Other readers favor Gary Taubes. Reader David Brown writes: “Thank you for the Gary Taubes links. Fifteen #’s down so far.” And reader Jack Howard emails:
How many times have you linked to Gary Taubes and others’ books that point out that the Death Food is carbs, not fat?
I’ve lost 76 pounds to date on the ‘Low Food Diet’ (my term) using a simple calorie counting phone app (there’s lots of them out there)
The discovery in this was not finding out how little we get to eat now. It was realizing the industrial quantities we used to eat without so much as a thought. It was realizing there is no hard line between being overweight and those 600-700 pounders on The Learning Channel and the half tonners in the Guinness Book of World Records. There is only eating more or eating less. I have decided to give Less a shot.
Yes, I use the Livestrong App to track calories and exercise, and it works quite well. I was inspired to try it by a friend’s wife who lost over 60 pounds and now looks fabulous. It lets you check the calories and composition of restaurant food from its database before ordering, too, which is very useful.
The thing is, for most people not being fat is a choice you have to make. If you follow the path of least resistance in today’s world, you’ll probably be (at least) pudgy, and quite possibly downright corpulent. Watching both your overall food intake and in particular keeping carbs down, and doing weight training, will take you a long way toward staying healthy and fit.
Alternatively, you can get one of those motorized scooters with a double-wide seat. I understand from the commercials that you may not have to pay a dime out of your own pocket . . . .
I should also note that although I’m skeptical of his approach, quite a few readers have written to say thanks for the link to Dr. William Davis’s Wheat Belly. One of my blog-buddies wrote me a while back to say he’d lost 30 pounds and felt much better.
While some of these diets are better than others — and some are better for some people than for others, I suspect — almost anything that makes you pay attention to what you eat is likely to do some good.
Nearly four million more people have left the Golden State in the last two decades than have come from other states. This is a sharp reversal from the 1980s, when 100,000 more Americans were settling in California each year than were leaving. According to Mr. Kotkin, most of those leaving are between the ages of 5 and 14 or 34 to 45. In other words, young families.
The scruffy-looking urban studies professor at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., has been studying and writing on demographic and geographic trends for 30 years. Part of California’s dysfunction, he says, stems from state and local government restrictions on development. These policies have artificially limited housing supply and put a premium on real estate in coastal regions.
“Basically, if you don’t own a piece of Facebook or Google and you haven’t robbed a bank and don’t have rich parents, then your chances of being able to buy a house or raise a family in the Bay Area or in most of coastal California is pretty weak,” says Mr. Kotkin.
While many middle-class families have moved inland, those regions don’t have the same allure or amenities as the coast. People might as well move to Nevada or Texas, where housing and everything else is cheaper and there’s no income tax.
And things will only get worse in the coming years as Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown and his green cadre implement their “smart growth” plans to cram the proletariat into high-density housing. “What I find reprehensible beyond belief is that the people pushing [high-density housing] themselves live in single-family homes and often drive very fancy cars, but want everyone else to live like my grandmother did in Brownsville in Brooklyn in the 1920s,” Mr. Kotkin declares.
UPDATE: Reader Lars Theriot writes: “It occurs to me that any other thing that caused people to react the way Orrin Hatch is reacting when you threaten to take it away from them would be labeled an addictive substance and banned.”
JAMES TARANTO: Another attack on Romney predictably backfires. “The truth is that Romney and Obama are both products of distinctively American subcultures–respectively, the Mormon church and the academic left. The difference is that whereas the Mormons, for more than a century, have aspired to join the American mainstream, the academic left is aggressively adversarial. It’s true that there is much about Mormonism that seems odd to people of other faiths. But a contest over whose opponent is weirder is one Obama cannot possibly win.”
THAT’S THE “NONPARTISAN CBO” SPEAKING: CBO: Obama Budget Would Reduce Economic Growth. “Larger deficits caused by the budget would cause the government to issue more bonds, sucking up private capital to finance its debts and thereby reducing the funds businesses could use to expand and hire, the CBO said. An increased tax on capital gains included in the president’s plan would also tend to reduce private capital, it says.”
INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY:Are Democrats Fleeing Obama’s Sinking Ship? “Perhaps Democrats know something the rest of us don’t about Barack Obama’s political fortunes. What else explains the increasing numbers who are openly defying the president on two key election issues? The notoriously thin-skinned Obama could not have been happy with the news last week that, as the Hill newspaper put it, ‘an increasing number of Democrats are taking potshots at President Obama’s health care law.’ . . . This fear is even more evident when you look at the growing opposition among Democrats to Obama’s position on the Keystone XL pipeline. Obama may have thought he’d cleverly handled the issue by putting it off until next year, and that no one would think to defy his veto threats. But when Republicans called his bluff with a bill to force a start on construction, 69 Democrats rushed to join them, giving the House bill a veto-proof majority. The Senate bill is just a vote or two away from overcoming a Democratic filibuster.”
A TOM MAGUIRE CRITIQUE: Zimmerman Bond Hearing – Media Reaction. Plus, from the comments: “When the Guardian did a better liveblog, than any of the ‘usual suspects’ you know they dropped the ball.”
So a candidate is increasingly unpopular with American donors but retains a vestige of foreign popularity, particularly in certain countries which would like to see “flexibility” on issues in like missile defense in a 2nd term. If there were some way this theoretical candidate could accept foreign donations, it would be awfully tempting. Of course, such a gambit would require drastic measures, like using a series of small and untraceable donations. Cash would be too cumbersome, so this candidate would probably want to use credit cards…hmm…, ah, but the address verification system would need to be disabled to allow that….hmmm…, tempting, but there’s no way the press would let a candidate get away with something that blatant. So I guess we’re safe. Whew! I was getting worried for a minute there.
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!”) And the above articles appear on a subsidiary Website of General Electric, whose CEO is Obama’s “Jobs Czar,” when he’s not sending GE’s own jobs to China, and whose on-air talent at the sister network to CNBC thinks of half the American people in arguably even worse terms than Obama himself does.
Read the whole thing.
Plus: “Barack Obama’s reelection campaign has released the most recent list of names of fundraising bundlers. On that list is Jon Corzine, the former governor of New Jersey and embattled money man, the former head of MF Global.”
MEDIAITE’S TOMMY CHRISTOPHER IS OBVIOUSLY A RACIST: I mean, who but a racist would assume that isn’t working has something to do with black people?
When I first saw the banner this afternoon, the multiple meanings were clear: President Obama‘s policies aren’t working, the Obama presidency isn’t working, President Obama…isn’t working, as in, doing any work. That’s not a nice thing to say about any president, but like it or not, it becomes a more loaded accusation when leveled at our first black president.
Christopher is obviously someone who reflexively thinks of black people as lazy. Sure, he says that some “friends” agreed with him, but they’re probably just bigots who share his prejudices. For shame. And shame on Mediaite for having this latter-day Theodore Bilbo on its staff!
Jumbotron-sized Obama with a message for Fenway Park’s 100th anniversary game this afternoon against Yankees. Half the crowd–by our guess–was actually booing, and only a few cheers aloud. This is Boston! Bad tidings.
Don’t use my name, since I’m a Red Sox fan lurking in NY.
Was anybody else there to hear this?
UPDATE: Reader Chris Lynch writes: “A number of the Boston based sportswriters I follow on Twitter reported Obama’s video message getting booed. I didn’t see it because they didn’t show it on NESN (the network 75% owned by the Red Sox). The fact that they tacked the message from the ‘most powerful man in the world’ onto the end of the celebration when most people were going to the beer lines or bathrooms and went to commercial on TV instead of showing it is even more telling. Almost as if ‘yeah yeah – not this guy again’ even in the heart of the Bluest State in the Union.”
