Of course it must be racist, right? Cue sarcasm. NY Magazine points out again, that in the media, racism only goes 1 way: their way. Breitbart breaks it down. Read the original here.
'NY MAG': HITTING OBAMA FOR 'YOU DIDN'T BUILD THAT' IS RACIST
by JOHN NOLTE
27 Jul 2012
Breitbart.com
With Rasmussen showing Romney enjoying a five-point lead (and that's a pollster everyone in media knows is reliable, which is why they preferjuiced NBC polls), the media is now in pure panic mode. Furthermore, Obama's Media Palace Guards know that when the full context is played of Obama's revealing "you didn't build that" quote, it's absolutely devastating for Obama because the full context of those comments show the President openly ridiculing America's small business owners.
So what's a panicked media to do?
Well, at first the corrupt media lied about Obama being taken out of context. But that's a desperate lie and everyone knows it, which means the Romney campaign was comfortable to keep on keeping on with its use of the President's comments.
So NOW what's a desperate media to do?
Well, I think we all know what the media does when it's at its mostdesperate to protect Obama, don't we, boys and girls?
That's right, the corrupt media screams... RACISM!
Mitt Romney’s plan of blatantly lying about President Obama’s “you didn’t build that” speech is clearly drawing blood. But what makes the attack work so well is not so much the lie itself but the broader subtext of it. Watch Obama’s delivery in the snippet put together by this Republican ad[.] ...
The key thing is that Obama is angry, and he’s talking not in his normal voice but in a “black dialect.” This strikes at the core of Obama’s entire political identity: a soft-spoken, reasonable African-American with a Kansas accent. From the moment he stepped onto the national stage, Obama’s deepest political fear was being seen as a “traditional” black politician, one who was demanding redistribution from white America on behalf of his fellow African-Americans.
So desperate to reelect Obama he's unafraid to embarrass himself, that's a flailing Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine and this is the ad he's attempting to declare racist.
Sorry, Jonathan, but the only one "blatantly lying" here is you. And your vile race-baiting is equal parts hilarious, maddening, unAmerican, and just plain pathetic.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
Saturday, July 28, 2012
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Taranto on Obamacare's Effect
Is anyone surprised by this? If so, I have many things to sell you, starting with a bridge. Read the original here.
The ObamaCare Tax Increase
WSJ BEST OF THE WEB TODAY
Updated July 25, 2012, 12:39 p.m. ET
By JAMES TARANTO
The ObamaCare Tax Increase
WSJ BEST OF THE WEB TODAY
Updated July 25, 2012, 12:39 p.m. ET
By JAMES TARANTO
The Congressional Budget Office has revised its estimates of the effects of ObamaCare, taking into account last month's Supreme Court decision that upheld most of the law. The office found that "of the 33 million people who had been expected to gain coverage under the law, 3 million fewer" now will because of changes in Medicaid., the New York Times reports. By 2022, CBO predicts, "30 million people will be uninsured." Universal health care, baby!
Here are the revenue and spending numbers:
With the expected changes as a result of the court decision, the budget office said the law would cost $84 billion less than it had previously predicted.
"The insurance coverage provisions of the Affordable Care Act will have a net cost of $1.168 billion over the 2012-2022 period--compared with $1.252 billion projected in March 2012 for that 11-year period--for a net reduction of $84 billion," or about 7 percent, the budget office said.
In addition, the budget office said that repealing the health care law would add $109 billion to federal budget deficits over the next 10 years. Specifically, it said, repeal of the law would reduce spending by $890 billion and reduce revenues by $1 trillion in the years 2013 to 2022.
Now, how can it "cost" money to repeal a massive new entitlement? Well, the entitlement comes with even more massive new taxes. So right now the prospect of cutting taxes is serving as an argument against cutting spending. The logic of Grover Norquist's "starve the beast" philosophy has never seemed clearer.
Here are the revenue and spending numbers:
With the expected changes as a result of the court decision, the budget office said the law would cost $84 billion less than it had previously predicted.
"The insurance coverage provisions of the Affordable Care Act will have a net cost of $1.168 billion over the 2012-2022 period--compared with $1.252 billion projected in March 2012 for that 11-year period--for a net reduction of $84 billion," or about 7 percent, the budget office said.
In addition, the budget office said that repealing the health care law would add $109 billion to federal budget deficits over the next 10 years. Specifically, it said, repeal of the law would reduce spending by $890 billion and reduce revenues by $1 trillion in the years 2013 to 2022.
Now, how can it "cost" money to repeal a massive new entitlement? Well, the entitlement comes with even more massive new taxes. So right now the prospect of cutting taxes is serving as an argument against cutting spending. The logic of Grover Norquist's "starve the beast" philosophy has never seemed clearer.
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
WSJ on the debate on Gun Control
Taranto hits the nail on the head...again. Read the original here.
OK, Let's Debate Gun Control!
A second Obama term could kill the Second Amendment.
By JAMES TARANTO
OK, Let's Debate Gun Control!
A second Obama term could kill the Second Amendment.
By JAMES TARANTO
WSJ BEST OF THE WEB TODAY
Updated July 23, 2012, 4:05 p.m. ET
Last week's horrific crime in Aurora, Colo., has, predictably enough, prompted many leftist politicians and commentators to call for more antigun laws. Actually, that's not quite right. Rather than directly call for more antigun laws, some of them are complaining about the absence of a debate over gun control. Where's the "searching conversation over what rational steps can be taken by individuals, communities and various levels of government to make the recurrence of a comparable tragedy less likely"? the Washington Post's E.J. Dionnewants to know.
"Where a gun massacre is concerned," Dionne writes, "an absolute and total gag rule is imposed on any thinking beyond the immediate circumstances of the catastrophe." It doesn't seem to occur to him that this assertion is self-refuting. If "an absolute and total gag rule" were actually in effect, it would prevent Dionne from saying so.
When people find it necessary to demand a "debate" or complain about the absence of same, it usually means they're frustrated because there is a debate and their side is losing. Sure enough, Dionne's complaint is that those who disagree with him--whom he labels "the gun lobby," "worshipers of weapons" and adherents to "the theology of firearms"--make their case far more effectively than his side does. "The rest of us," he whines, suffer from a "profound timidity," as a result of which they "allow" their opponents' arguments "to work every time."
Dionne is claiming that those on his side have good arguments but fail to advance them because they have poor character. That may be true, especially the part about poor character, but it's still an odd thing to say.
But anyway, by all means let's debate gun control! The Associated Press's Steven Hurst begins a dispatch on the subject by "reporting" that "controlling access to guns would appear, on its face, the simple answer to preventing public massacres like the movie-theatre tragedy in Colorado." He does not reveal the source of this information, but we'll bet it was an exclusive interview with the Associated Press's Steven Hurst.
New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who governs a city some 1,800 miles from Aurora, demanded to know what President Obama and Mitt Romney are "going to do about" making it "harder to get guns." Bloomberg asserted that lawmakers "have been cowed by a handful of advocates who think that the right to bear arms allows you to go out and kill people at random." It is unlikely that anybody actually holds the position that Bloomberg ascribes to his opponents.
The president got into the act too. He "condemned U.S. gun laws as 'mistaken' and urged Washington to review them after a shooter killed 12 people and injured more than 50 others at a U.S. movie theater on Friday,"Reuters reports, quoting his tweet: "Because of the Aurora, Colorado tragedy, the American Congress must review its mistaken legislation on guns. It's doing damage to us all."
Oh, we should specify that was Felipe Calderon, president of Mexico. We'll get to what President Obama said in due course.
Now, there's a very good reason why coastal elites' arguments for gun control fall on deaf ears in most of Middle America. Those who value the Second Amendment suspect that people like Dionne and Bloomberg advocate "reasonable" gun restrictions as a camel's nose to a total or near-total ban on private ownership of firearms and their use for self-defense.
This suspicion is entirely justified. At his press conference, for instance, Bloomberg professed to believe that "there's nothing wrong with you having a gun. . . . If you comply with the law you will have responsible people who know the danger that a weapon or the responsibility that somebody who has a weapon in their hands has."
Well, this columnist lives in Bloomberg's New York, and we would like to own a pistol. But our understanding is that the procedures for acquiring a permit are so onerous that it isn't worth our while to apply. In more than a decade as mayor, Bloomberg has never sought to relax the city's gun restrictions, which are among the nation's most oppressive. He has always pushed in the other direction, demanding loudly if ineffectually that the rest of the country make its laws more like New York's. His actions give every reason to think his claims to respect gun rights are in bad faith.
A New York Times editorial makes similarly disingenuous concessions but carelessly lets the mask slip at the end. The editorialists allow that "many perfectly reasonable people" (though not they themselves) are of the view that the Second Amendment "gives each individual the right to bear arms." They pretend to seek a reasonable middle ground: "The country needs laws that allow gun ownership, but laws that also control their sale and use in careful ways."
The editorial concludes by quoting Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas: "It does make me wonder, you know, with all those people in the theater, was there nobody that was carrying? That could have stopped this guy more quickly?" To which the Times responds: "That sort of call to vigilante justice is sadly too familiar, and it may be the single most dangerous idea in the debate over gun ownership."
The answer to Gohmert's question is that the chain that owns the theater where the massacre took place has a no-weapons policy, which oddly enough did not deter the shooter any more than Colorado's strict laws against murder did.
But what gives away the game is the Times's characterization of Gohmert's musing as a "call to vigilante justice." To see why that is not just mistaken but pernicious, let's consider the story of another shooting in Aurora.
On April 22, Denver's KCNC-TV reports, a man ran into an Aurora church "and told people to take cover." The pastor's mother "came out of the church to see what was happening in the parking lot and got shot." She was killed, but further carnage was averted because "an off-duty [police] officer was at a service and went outside and shot the man who shot the woman." The officer, a cousin of the pastor, was unhurt, but the suspect later died.
Now, the Times might find this acceptable because the man who shot the murderer was not a "vigilante" but a law-enforcement officer with a (presumably) government-issued gun. But the crucial point is that the shooting was not an act of "justice," which is to say that it was not punitive. If the killer had dropped his weapon, held up his hands, and surrendered to the cop, shooting him would have been an act of murder. Even if he arguably deserved to die, he also has a right to due process of law.
The policeman shot him because there was an immediate danger that he would wound or kill more innocent people. It was an act of defense, not justice. Vigilante justice is contrary to the rule of law, but self-defense is an essential part of it. If the latter is indistinguishable from the former, as the Times claims, then individual self-defense is never justified. To put it another way, the Times editorialists claim not merely that guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens are dangerous but that it is wrong in principle to save innocent lives by stopping a mass murder in progress.
Does President Obama agree with this extreme and un-American position? He professes not to. "The White House signaled [yesterday] that President Obama . . . did not intend to make a push for stricter gun controls," reports ABC's Jake Tapper, Press secretary Jay Carney says the president stands by "the op-ed that was published in an Arizona newspaper."
That would be Tucson's Daily Star, in which the following assertion appeared under the president's byline in March 2011: "Like the majority of Americans, I believe that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to bear arms. And the courts have settled that as the law of the land."
Is that a sincere expression of Obama's views? If you believe it is, we have a bridge we'd like to sell you. (Disclosure: We didn't build that.) After all, this is the man who in 2008, when he thought only his snotty and well-heeled San Francisco supporters were listening, said of Middle Americans: "It's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
To be sure, the political exigencies are such that Obama's true feelings may not matter. As Politico notes: "The gun control caucus in Congress is increasingly urban, liberal and shrinking. . . . The handful of bills introduced this Congress that would tighten gun restrictions have languished, with a Republican majority in the House. No gun-control bills have cleared the Democratic-controlled Senate, either."
New federal gun-control legislation is highly unlikely to be enacted even if Obama is re-elected. None passed Congress in 2009-10, when Democrats had a filibuster-proof 60-seat majority in the Senate. It's virtually impossible the Dems will reach 60 seats anytime before 2017.
But there's a third branch of government, and it is the reason why a second Obama term could prove deadly to the Second Amendment. Obama's professions of support for the right to keep and bear arms sounds awfully familiar. They sound, in fact, a lot like this: "Like you, I understand that how important the right to bear arms is to many, many Americans. . . . I understand the individual right fully that the Supreme Court recognized in Heller."
That was Sonia Sotomayor, Obama's first appointee to the Supreme Court, answering a question at her 2009 confirmation hearing from Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, chairman of the Judiciary Committee. She was referring to District of Columbia v. Heller, which astonishingly was the first Supreme Court decision ever to recognize this fundamental right. Sotomayor's statement was a careful one. She did not say that she agreed with Heller or even that she would respect it as precedent. She could easily turn out to "understand" it and wish to wipe it from the books.
And she did. In 2010 the court decided McDonald v. Chicago, which applied the "incorporation" doctrine to the Second Amendment--that is, it held that the amendment, coupled with the 14th, forbids states as well as the feds from encroaching on the right to keep and bear arms. Sotomayor (along with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg) joined Justice Stephen Breyer's dissent, which flatly asserted: "The Framers did not write the Second Amendment in order to protect a private right of armed self-defense."
McDonald, like Heller, was decided 5-4. One of the dissenters, Justice John Paul Stevens, has since retired from the court. His successor, Justice Elena Kagan, has not yet had occasion to cast a vote in a gun-rights case (and as solicitor general she did not file a brief in McDonald). But we are going to go out on a limb and guess that she agrees with Ginsburg, Breyer and Sotomayor that the Second Amendment is essentially a nullity.
If that is correct, then the court is one vote away from having a majority to reverse Heller. Two of the justices in the pro-Second Amendment majority, Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy, will be 80 by the end of the next presidential term. If either or both of them were to leave the court during a second Obama term, it is far likelier than not that an Obama appointee would join what is now the minority to kill the Second Amendment.
Ginsburg and Breyer are also in their 70s. If Romney were to replace one or both of them, it is likely that the right to keep and bear arms would be secure, backed by a 6-3 or 7-2 majority.
So by all means, let's have a vigorous debate about gun control and the Constitution. But it's not too much to ask of President Obama that in describing his own views on the subject and the consequences of re-electing him, he be at least as honest as the New York Times editorial page.
Updated July 23, 2012, 4:05 p.m. ET
Last week's horrific crime in Aurora, Colo., has, predictably enough, prompted many leftist politicians and commentators to call for more antigun laws. Actually, that's not quite right. Rather than directly call for more antigun laws, some of them are complaining about the absence of a debate over gun control. Where's the "searching conversation over what rational steps can be taken by individuals, communities and various levels of government to make the recurrence of a comparable tragedy less likely"? the Washington Post's E.J. Dionnewants to know.
"Where a gun massacre is concerned," Dionne writes, "an absolute and total gag rule is imposed on any thinking beyond the immediate circumstances of the catastrophe." It doesn't seem to occur to him that this assertion is self-refuting. If "an absolute and total gag rule" were actually in effect, it would prevent Dionne from saying so.
When people find it necessary to demand a "debate" or complain about the absence of same, it usually means they're frustrated because there is a debate and their side is losing. Sure enough, Dionne's complaint is that those who disagree with him--whom he labels "the gun lobby," "worshipers of weapons" and adherents to "the theology of firearms"--make their case far more effectively than his side does. "The rest of us," he whines, suffer from a "profound timidity," as a result of which they "allow" their opponents' arguments "to work every time."
Dionne is claiming that those on his side have good arguments but fail to advance them because they have poor character. That may be true, especially the part about poor character, but it's still an odd thing to say.
But anyway, by all means let's debate gun control! The Associated Press's Steven Hurst begins a dispatch on the subject by "reporting" that "controlling access to guns would appear, on its face, the simple answer to preventing public massacres like the movie-theatre tragedy in Colorado." He does not reveal the source of this information, but we'll bet it was an exclusive interview with the Associated Press's Steven Hurst.
New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who governs a city some 1,800 miles from Aurora, demanded to know what President Obama and Mitt Romney are "going to do about" making it "harder to get guns." Bloomberg asserted that lawmakers "have been cowed by a handful of advocates who think that the right to bear arms allows you to go out and kill people at random." It is unlikely that anybody actually holds the position that Bloomberg ascribes to his opponents.
The president got into the act too. He "condemned U.S. gun laws as 'mistaken' and urged Washington to review them after a shooter killed 12 people and injured more than 50 others at a U.S. movie theater on Friday,"Reuters reports, quoting his tweet: "Because of the Aurora, Colorado tragedy, the American Congress must review its mistaken legislation on guns. It's doing damage to us all."
Oh, we should specify that was Felipe Calderon, president of Mexico. We'll get to what President Obama said in due course.
Now, there's a very good reason why coastal elites' arguments for gun control fall on deaf ears in most of Middle America. Those who value the Second Amendment suspect that people like Dionne and Bloomberg advocate "reasonable" gun restrictions as a camel's nose to a total or near-total ban on private ownership of firearms and their use for self-defense.
This suspicion is entirely justified. At his press conference, for instance, Bloomberg professed to believe that "there's nothing wrong with you having a gun. . . . If you comply with the law you will have responsible people who know the danger that a weapon or the responsibility that somebody who has a weapon in their hands has."
Well, this columnist lives in Bloomberg's New York, and we would like to own a pistol. But our understanding is that the procedures for acquiring a permit are so onerous that it isn't worth our while to apply. In more than a decade as mayor, Bloomberg has never sought to relax the city's gun restrictions, which are among the nation's most oppressive. He has always pushed in the other direction, demanding loudly if ineffectually that the rest of the country make its laws more like New York's. His actions give every reason to think his claims to respect gun rights are in bad faith.
A New York Times editorial makes similarly disingenuous concessions but carelessly lets the mask slip at the end. The editorialists allow that "many perfectly reasonable people" (though not they themselves) are of the view that the Second Amendment "gives each individual the right to bear arms." They pretend to seek a reasonable middle ground: "The country needs laws that allow gun ownership, but laws that also control their sale and use in careful ways."
The editorial concludes by quoting Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas: "It does make me wonder, you know, with all those people in the theater, was there nobody that was carrying? That could have stopped this guy more quickly?" To which the Times responds: "That sort of call to vigilante justice is sadly too familiar, and it may be the single most dangerous idea in the debate over gun ownership."
The answer to Gohmert's question is that the chain that owns the theater where the massacre took place has a no-weapons policy, which oddly enough did not deter the shooter any more than Colorado's strict laws against murder did.
But what gives away the game is the Times's characterization of Gohmert's musing as a "call to vigilante justice." To see why that is not just mistaken but pernicious, let's consider the story of another shooting in Aurora.
On April 22, Denver's KCNC-TV reports, a man ran into an Aurora church "and told people to take cover." The pastor's mother "came out of the church to see what was happening in the parking lot and got shot." She was killed, but further carnage was averted because "an off-duty [police] officer was at a service and went outside and shot the man who shot the woman." The officer, a cousin of the pastor, was unhurt, but the suspect later died.
Now, the Times might find this acceptable because the man who shot the murderer was not a "vigilante" but a law-enforcement officer with a (presumably) government-issued gun. But the crucial point is that the shooting was not an act of "justice," which is to say that it was not punitive. If the killer had dropped his weapon, held up his hands, and surrendered to the cop, shooting him would have been an act of murder. Even if he arguably deserved to die, he also has a right to due process of law.
The policeman shot him because there was an immediate danger that he would wound or kill more innocent people. It was an act of defense, not justice. Vigilante justice is contrary to the rule of law, but self-defense is an essential part of it. If the latter is indistinguishable from the former, as the Times claims, then individual self-defense is never justified. To put it another way, the Times editorialists claim not merely that guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens are dangerous but that it is wrong in principle to save innocent lives by stopping a mass murder in progress.
Does President Obama agree with this extreme and un-American position? He professes not to. "The White House signaled [yesterday] that President Obama . . . did not intend to make a push for stricter gun controls," reports ABC's Jake Tapper, Press secretary Jay Carney says the president stands by "the op-ed that was published in an Arizona newspaper."
That would be Tucson's Daily Star, in which the following assertion appeared under the president's byline in March 2011: "Like the majority of Americans, I believe that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to bear arms. And the courts have settled that as the law of the land."
Is that a sincere expression of Obama's views? If you believe it is, we have a bridge we'd like to sell you. (Disclosure: We didn't build that.) After all, this is the man who in 2008, when he thought only his snotty and well-heeled San Francisco supporters were listening, said of Middle Americans: "It's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
To be sure, the political exigencies are such that Obama's true feelings may not matter. As Politico notes: "The gun control caucus in Congress is increasingly urban, liberal and shrinking. . . . The handful of bills introduced this Congress that would tighten gun restrictions have languished, with a Republican majority in the House. No gun-control bills have cleared the Democratic-controlled Senate, either."
New federal gun-control legislation is highly unlikely to be enacted even if Obama is re-elected. None passed Congress in 2009-10, when Democrats had a filibuster-proof 60-seat majority in the Senate. It's virtually impossible the Dems will reach 60 seats anytime before 2017.
But there's a third branch of government, and it is the reason why a second Obama term could prove deadly to the Second Amendment. Obama's professions of support for the right to keep and bear arms sounds awfully familiar. They sound, in fact, a lot like this: "Like you, I understand that how important the right to bear arms is to many, many Americans. . . . I understand the individual right fully that the Supreme Court recognized in Heller."
That was Sonia Sotomayor, Obama's first appointee to the Supreme Court, answering a question at her 2009 confirmation hearing from Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, chairman of the Judiciary Committee. She was referring to District of Columbia v. Heller, which astonishingly was the first Supreme Court decision ever to recognize this fundamental right. Sotomayor's statement was a careful one. She did not say that she agreed with Heller or even that she would respect it as precedent. She could easily turn out to "understand" it and wish to wipe it from the books.
And she did. In 2010 the court decided McDonald v. Chicago, which applied the "incorporation" doctrine to the Second Amendment--that is, it held that the amendment, coupled with the 14th, forbids states as well as the feds from encroaching on the right to keep and bear arms. Sotomayor (along with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg) joined Justice Stephen Breyer's dissent, which flatly asserted: "The Framers did not write the Second Amendment in order to protect a private right of armed self-defense."
McDonald, like Heller, was decided 5-4. One of the dissenters, Justice John Paul Stevens, has since retired from the court. His successor, Justice Elena Kagan, has not yet had occasion to cast a vote in a gun-rights case (and as solicitor general she did not file a brief in McDonald). But we are going to go out on a limb and guess that she agrees with Ginsburg, Breyer and Sotomayor that the Second Amendment is essentially a nullity.
If that is correct, then the court is one vote away from having a majority to reverse Heller. Two of the justices in the pro-Second Amendment majority, Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy, will be 80 by the end of the next presidential term. If either or both of them were to leave the court during a second Obama term, it is far likelier than not that an Obama appointee would join what is now the minority to kill the Second Amendment.
Ginsburg and Breyer are also in their 70s. If Romney were to replace one or both of them, it is likely that the right to keep and bear arms would be secure, backed by a 6-3 or 7-2 majority.
So by all means, let's have a vigorous debate about gun control and the Constitution. But it's not too much to ask of President Obama that in describing his own views on the subject and the consequences of re-electing him, he be at least as honest as the New York Times editorial page.
Podcast: James Taranto on gun control.
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Who built what?
Who is responsible for success? If something is given, it can be taken away. James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal gives his $0.02. Read the original here.
You Didn't Sweat, He Did
Constructing a sentence is hard work when you're the World's Greatest Orator.
By JAMES TARANTO
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.
The Team then explains: "The President's full remarks show that the 'that' in 'you didn't build that' clearly refers to roads and bridges--public infrastructure we count on the government to build and maintain."
That's bunk, and not only because "business" is more proximate to the pronoun "that" and therefore its more likely antecedent. The Truth Team's interpretation is ungrammatical. "Roads and bridges" is plural; "that" is singular. If the Team is right about Obama's meaning, he shoudl have said, "You didn't build those."
Barack Obama is supposed to be the World's Greatest Orator, the smartest man in the world. Yet his campaign asks us to believe he is not even competent to construct a sentence.
You Didn't Sweat, He Did
Constructing a sentence is hard work when you're the World's Greatest Orator.
By JAMES TARANTO
Wall Street Journal
"If you've got a business, you didn't build that." If the World's Greatest Orator turns out to be a one-term president, it is likely to go down as the most memorable utterance of his career. Mitt Romney certainly hopes that happens. HotAir.com's Ed Morrissey has highlights of Mitt Romney's response, in a speech yesterday at Irwin, Pa.:
The idea to say that Steve Jobs didn't build Apple, that Henry Ford didn't build Ford Motor, that Papa John didn't build Papa John Pizza, that Ray Kroc didn't build McDonald's, that Bill Gates didn't build Microsoft, you go on the list, that Joe and his colleagues didn't build this enterprise, to say something like that is not just foolishness, it is insulting to every entrepreneur, every innovator in America, and it's wrong.
And by the way, the president's logic doesn't just extend to the entrepreneurs that start a barber shop or a taxi operation or an oil field service business like this and a gas service business like this, it also extends to everybody in America that wants to lift themself [sic] up a little further, that goes back to school to get a degree and see if they can get a little better job, to somebody who wants to get some new skills and get a little higher income, to somebody who have, may have dropped out that decides to get back in school and go for it. . . . The president would say, well you didn't do that. You couldn't have gotten to school without the roads that government built for you. You couldn't have gone to school without teachers. So you didn't, you are not responsible for that success. President Obama attacks success and therefore under President Obama we have less success and I will change that.
I've got to be honest, I don't think anyone could have said what he said who had actually started a business or been in a business. And my own view is that what the President said was both startling and revealing. I find it extraordinary that a philosophy of that nature would be spoken by a president of the United States. It goes to something that I have spoken about from the beginning of the campaign. That this election is, to a great degree, about the soul of America. Do we believe in an America that is great because of government or do we believe in an America that is great because of free people allowed to pursue their dreams and build our future?
There's a website called didntbuildthat.com with a variety of hilarious treatments of the Obama philosophy. Of course, whoever's running the site didn't build that. As he acknowledges, Al Gore did. And hey, remember Julia, Barack Obama's composite girlfriend? At 42, she starts a Web business. Under President Obama, she didn't build that.
Obama may be God's gift to comedy, but Romney is right that the philosophical stakes here are serious. The president's remark was a direct attack on the principle of individual responsibility, the foundation of American freedom. If "you didn't build that," then you have no moral claim to it, and those with political power are morally justified in taking it away and using it to buy more political power. "I think that when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody," Obama said in another candid moment, in 2008.
This isn't even Obama's only such revelatory comment of the past week. Politico.com reports that the president, in an interview with WTOL-TV of Toledo, Ohio, let the mask slip again when asked about the ObamaCare mandate tax. "It's less a tax or a penalty than it is a principle--which is you can't be a freeloader on other folks when it comes to your health care, if you can afford it," he said.
Of course this is a dodge. The administration claimed that the mandate was not a tax for political purposes but was a tax for legal purposes. Chief Justice John Roberts tied himself in knots to accept the argument Obama is now running away from. Between them, the solicitor general and the chief justice look as if they were too clever by 1.
What's objectionable about Obama's comment, however, is not "tax" or "penalty" or even "principle." It's the way he uses the word "freeloader."
Normally we think of a freeloader as somebody who sponges off others, which in the context of public policy means the government. A freeloader is an able-bodied welfare recipient, or someone who fakes a disability to collect Supplemental Security income, or who waits until his unemployment runs out before looking for a job.
Now, think about how the ObamaCare mandate tax is structured. As Roberts noted in his opinion for the court in NFIB v. Sebelius, "It does not apply to individuals who do not pay federal income taxes because their household income is less than the filing threshold in the Internal Revenue Code. For taxpayers who do owe the payment, its amount is determined by such familiar factors as taxable income, number of dependents, and joint filing status."
The only people who pay the ObamaCare mandate tax are people who make a living. Actual freeloaders are exempt. What Obama calls a freeloader is someone who makes his own money and pays his taxes but does not spend his money in the government-approved way.
The Obama campaign hotly disputes Romney's contention that the president meant what he said. A "fact check" from the Obama-Biden "Truth Team" (formerly Attack Watch) claims that Romney "is taking President Obama's words out of context" to produce "a complete distortion." Here is the full context, as presented by the Truth Team:
"If you've got a business, you didn't build that." If the World's Greatest Orator turns out to be a one-term president, it is likely to go down as the most memorable utterance of his career. Mitt Romney certainly hopes that happens. HotAir.com's Ed Morrissey has highlights of Mitt Romney's response, in a speech yesterday at Irwin, Pa.:
The idea to say that Steve Jobs didn't build Apple, that Henry Ford didn't build Ford Motor, that Papa John didn't build Papa John Pizza, that Ray Kroc didn't build McDonald's, that Bill Gates didn't build Microsoft, you go on the list, that Joe and his colleagues didn't build this enterprise, to say something like that is not just foolishness, it is insulting to every entrepreneur, every innovator in America, and it's wrong.
And by the way, the president's logic doesn't just extend to the entrepreneurs that start a barber shop or a taxi operation or an oil field service business like this and a gas service business like this, it also extends to everybody in America that wants to lift themself [sic] up a little further, that goes back to school to get a degree and see if they can get a little better job, to somebody who wants to get some new skills and get a little higher income, to somebody who have, may have dropped out that decides to get back in school and go for it. . . . The president would say, well you didn't do that. You couldn't have gotten to school without the roads that government built for you. You couldn't have gone to school without teachers. So you didn't, you are not responsible for that success. President Obama attacks success and therefore under President Obama we have less success and I will change that.
I've got to be honest, I don't think anyone could have said what he said who had actually started a business or been in a business. And my own view is that what the President said was both startling and revealing. I find it extraordinary that a philosophy of that nature would be spoken by a president of the United States. It goes to something that I have spoken about from the beginning of the campaign. That this election is, to a great degree, about the soul of America. Do we believe in an America that is great because of government or do we believe in an America that is great because of free people allowed to pursue their dreams and build our future?
There's a website called didntbuildthat.com with a variety of hilarious treatments of the Obama philosophy. Of course, whoever's running the site didn't build that. As he acknowledges, Al Gore did. And hey, remember Julia, Barack Obama's composite girlfriend? At 42, she starts a Web business. Under President Obama, she didn't build that.
Obama may be God's gift to comedy, but Romney is right that the philosophical stakes here are serious. The president's remark was a direct attack on the principle of individual responsibility, the foundation of American freedom. If "you didn't build that," then you have no moral claim to it, and those with political power are morally justified in taking it away and using it to buy more political power. "I think that when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody," Obama said in another candid moment, in 2008.
This isn't even Obama's only such revelatory comment of the past week. Politico.com reports that the president, in an interview with WTOL-TV of Toledo, Ohio, let the mask slip again when asked about the ObamaCare mandate tax. "It's less a tax or a penalty than it is a principle--which is you can't be a freeloader on other folks when it comes to your health care, if you can afford it," he said.
Of course this is a dodge. The administration claimed that the mandate was not a tax for political purposes but was a tax for legal purposes. Chief Justice John Roberts tied himself in knots to accept the argument Obama is now running away from. Between them, the solicitor general and the chief justice look as if they were too clever by 1.
What's objectionable about Obama's comment, however, is not "tax" or "penalty" or even "principle." It's the way he uses the word "freeloader."
Normally we think of a freeloader as somebody who sponges off others, which in the context of public policy means the government. A freeloader is an able-bodied welfare recipient, or someone who fakes a disability to collect Supplemental Security income, or who waits until his unemployment runs out before looking for a job.
Now, think about how the ObamaCare mandate tax is structured. As Roberts noted in his opinion for the court in NFIB v. Sebelius, "It does not apply to individuals who do not pay federal income taxes because their household income is less than the filing threshold in the Internal Revenue Code. For taxpayers who do owe the payment, its amount is determined by such familiar factors as taxable income, number of dependents, and joint filing status."
The only people who pay the ObamaCare mandate tax are people who make a living. Actual freeloaders are exempt. What Obama calls a freeloader is someone who makes his own money and pays his taxes but does not spend his money in the government-approved way.
The Obama campaign hotly disputes Romney's contention that the president meant what he said. A "fact check" from the Obama-Biden "Truth Team" (formerly Attack Watch) claims that Romney "is taking President Obama's words out of context" to produce "a complete distortion." Here is the full context, as presented by the Truth Team:
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.
The Team then explains: "The President's full remarks show that the 'that' in 'you didn't build that' clearly refers to roads and bridges--public infrastructure we count on the government to build and maintain."
That's bunk, and not only because "business" is more proximate to the pronoun "that" and therefore its more likely antecedent. The Truth Team's interpretation is ungrammatical. "Roads and bridges" is plural; "that" is singular. If the Team is right about Obama's meaning, he shoudl have said, "You didn't build those."
Barack Obama is supposed to be the World's Greatest Orator, the smartest man in the world. Yet his campaign asks us to believe he is not even competent to construct a sentence.
Friday, July 13, 2012
Why the "Arab Spring" may be a cautionary tale
The phrase "The devil I know versus the devil I don't know" and "The lesser of two evils" come to mind. Was Mubarak a bad guy? Yes. Was Ghaddafi a bad guy? Yes with exclamation points. But when overthrowing a bad guy like Saddam Hussein or Mohammed Omar, it is important to know what to do about the power vacuum that will inevitably occur. This also inevitably requires a truly significant investment of time, energy, resources, personnel, political capital, and risk. However, when you ignore that need, and simply support an overthrow of an existing regime, and move on to your next fundraiser and the next news cycle, you may find that you do not like what or who has filled that vacuum. As usual, Krauthammer takes everyone to school. Read the original here.
The Islamist ascendancy
By Charles Krauthammer, Published: July 12
Washington Post
Post-revolutionary Libya appears to have elected a relatively moderate pro-Western government. Good news, but tentative because Libya is less a country than an oil well with a long beach and myriad tribes. Popular allegiance to a central national authority is weak. Yet even if the government of Mahmoud Jibril is able to rein in the militias and establish a functioning democracy, it will be the Arab Spring exception. Consider:
Tunisia and Morocco, the most Westernized of all Arab countries, elected Islamist governments. Moderate, to be sure, but Islamist still. Egypt, the largest and most influential, has experienced an Islamist sweep. The Muslim Brotherhood didn’t just win the presidency. It won nearly half the seats in parliament, while more openly radical Islamists won 25 percent. Combined, they command more than 70 percent of parliament — enough to control the writing of a constitution (which is why the generals hastily dissolved parliament).
As for Syria, if and when Bashar al-Assad falls, the Brotherhood will almost certainly inherit power. Jordan could well be next. And the Brotherhood’s Palestinian wing (Hamas) already controls Gaza.
What does this mean? That the Arab Spring is a misnomer. This is an Islamist ascendancy, likely to dominate Arab politics for a generation.
It constitutes the third stage of modern Arab political history. Stage I was the semicolonial-monarchic rule, dominated by Britain and France, of the first half of the 20th century. Stage II was the Arab nationalist era — secular, socialist, anti-colonial and anti-clerical — ushered in by the 1952 Free Officers Revolt in Egypt.
Its vehicle was military dictatorship, and Gamal Nasser led the way. He raised the flag of pan-Arabism, going so far as changing Egypt’s name to the United Arab Republic and merging his country with Syria in 1958. That absurd experiment — it lasted exactly three years — was to have been the beginning of a grand Arab unification, which, of course, never came. Nasser also fiercely persecuted Islamists — as did his nationalist successors, down to Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and the Baathists, Iraqi (Saddam Hussein) and Syrian (the Assads) — as the reactionary antithesis to Arab modernism.
But the self-styled modernism of the Arab-nationalist dictators proved to be a dismal failure. It produced dysfunctional, semi-socialist, bureaucratic, corrupt regimes that left the citizenry (except where papered over by oil bounties) mired in poverty, indignity and repression.
Hence the Arab Spring, serial uprisings that spread east from Tunisia in early 2011. Many Westerners naively believed the future belonged to the hip, secular, tweeting kids of Tahrir Square. Alas, this sliver of Westernization was no match for the highly organized, widely supported, politically serious Islamists who effortlessly swept them aside in national elections.
This was not a Facebook revolution but the beginning of an Islamist one. Amid the ruins of secular nationalist pan-Arabism, the Muslim Brotherhood rose to solve the conundrum of Arab stagnation and marginality. “Islam is the answer,” it preached and carried the day.
But what kind of political Islam? On that depends the future. The moderate Turkish version or the radical Iranian one?
To be sure, Recep Erdogan’s Turkey is no paragon. The increasingly authoritarian Erdogan has broken the military, neutered the judiciary and persecuted the press. There are more journalists in prison in Turkey than in China. Nonetheless, for now, Turkey remains relatively pro-Western (though unreliably so) and relatively democratic (compared to its Islamic neighborhood).
For now, the new Islamist ascendancy in Arab lands has taken on the more benign Turkish aspect. Inherently so in Morocco and Tunisia; by external constraint in Egypt, where the military sees itself as guardian of the secular state, precisely as did Turkey’s military in the 80 years from Ataturk to Erdogan.
Genuinely democratic rule may yet come to Arab lands. Radical Islam is the answer to nothing, as demonstrated by the repression, social backwardness and civil strife of Taliban Afghanistan, Islamist Sudan and clerical Iran.
As for moderate Islamism, if it eventually radicalizes, it too will fail and bring on yet another future Arab Spring where democracy might actually be the answer (as it likely would have been in Iran, had the mullahs not savagely crushed the Green Revolution). Or it might adapt to modernity, accept the alternation of power with secularists and thus achieve by evolution an authentic Arab-Islamic democratic norm.
Perhaps. The only thing we can be sure of today, however, is that Arab nationalism is dead and Islamism is its successor. This is what the Arab Spring has wrought. The beginning of wisdom is facing that difficult reality.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
The Islamist ascendancy
By Charles Krauthammer, Published: July 12
Washington Post
Post-revolutionary Libya appears to have elected a relatively moderate pro-Western government. Good news, but tentative because Libya is less a country than an oil well with a long beach and myriad tribes. Popular allegiance to a central national authority is weak. Yet even if the government of Mahmoud Jibril is able to rein in the militias and establish a functioning democracy, it will be the Arab Spring exception. Consider:
Tunisia and Morocco, the most Westernized of all Arab countries, elected Islamist governments. Moderate, to be sure, but Islamist still. Egypt, the largest and most influential, has experienced an Islamist sweep. The Muslim Brotherhood didn’t just win the presidency. It won nearly half the seats in parliament, while more openly radical Islamists won 25 percent. Combined, they command more than 70 percent of parliament — enough to control the writing of a constitution (which is why the generals hastily dissolved parliament).
As for Syria, if and when Bashar al-Assad falls, the Brotherhood will almost certainly inherit power. Jordan could well be next. And the Brotherhood’s Palestinian wing (Hamas) already controls Gaza.
What does this mean? That the Arab Spring is a misnomer. This is an Islamist ascendancy, likely to dominate Arab politics for a generation.
It constitutes the third stage of modern Arab political history. Stage I was the semicolonial-monarchic rule, dominated by Britain and France, of the first half of the 20th century. Stage II was the Arab nationalist era — secular, socialist, anti-colonial and anti-clerical — ushered in by the 1952 Free Officers Revolt in Egypt.
Its vehicle was military dictatorship, and Gamal Nasser led the way. He raised the flag of pan-Arabism, going so far as changing Egypt’s name to the United Arab Republic and merging his country with Syria in 1958. That absurd experiment — it lasted exactly three years — was to have been the beginning of a grand Arab unification, which, of course, never came. Nasser also fiercely persecuted Islamists — as did his nationalist successors, down to Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and the Baathists, Iraqi (Saddam Hussein) and Syrian (the Assads) — as the reactionary antithesis to Arab modernism.
But the self-styled modernism of the Arab-nationalist dictators proved to be a dismal failure. It produced dysfunctional, semi-socialist, bureaucratic, corrupt regimes that left the citizenry (except where papered over by oil bounties) mired in poverty, indignity and repression.
Hence the Arab Spring, serial uprisings that spread east from Tunisia in early 2011. Many Westerners naively believed the future belonged to the hip, secular, tweeting kids of Tahrir Square. Alas, this sliver of Westernization was no match for the highly organized, widely supported, politically serious Islamists who effortlessly swept them aside in national elections.
This was not a Facebook revolution but the beginning of an Islamist one. Amid the ruins of secular nationalist pan-Arabism, the Muslim Brotherhood rose to solve the conundrum of Arab stagnation and marginality. “Islam is the answer,” it preached and carried the day.
But what kind of political Islam? On that depends the future. The moderate Turkish version or the radical Iranian one?
To be sure, Recep Erdogan’s Turkey is no paragon. The increasingly authoritarian Erdogan has broken the military, neutered the judiciary and persecuted the press. There are more journalists in prison in Turkey than in China. Nonetheless, for now, Turkey remains relatively pro-Western (though unreliably so) and relatively democratic (compared to its Islamic neighborhood).
For now, the new Islamist ascendancy in Arab lands has taken on the more benign Turkish aspect. Inherently so in Morocco and Tunisia; by external constraint in Egypt, where the military sees itself as guardian of the secular state, precisely as did Turkey’s military in the 80 years from Ataturk to Erdogan.
Genuinely democratic rule may yet come to Arab lands. Radical Islam is the answer to nothing, as demonstrated by the repression, social backwardness and civil strife of Taliban Afghanistan, Islamist Sudan and clerical Iran.
As for moderate Islamism, if it eventually radicalizes, it too will fail and bring on yet another future Arab Spring where democracy might actually be the answer (as it likely would have been in Iran, had the mullahs not savagely crushed the Green Revolution). Or it might adapt to modernity, accept the alternation of power with secularists and thus achieve by evolution an authentic Arab-Islamic democratic norm.
Perhaps. The only thing we can be sure of today, however, is that Arab nationalism is dead and Islamism is its successor. This is what the Arab Spring has wrought. The beginning of wisdom is facing that difficult reality.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
Sunday, July 8, 2012
Coincidence or Systemic Change?
Is this a coincidence or a result of an actual systemic change and improvement? You decide, and read the original here.
UNEMPLOYMENT RATE DROPPED IN EVERY STATE THAT ELECTED A REPUBLICAN GOV. IN 2010
by TONY LEE 8 Jul 2012, 6:24 AM PDT
UNEMPLOYMENT RATE DROPPED IN EVERY STATE THAT ELECTED A REPUBLICAN GOV. IN 2010
by TONY LEE 8 Jul 2012, 6:24 AM PDT
In 2010, influenced by the Tea Party and its focus on fiscal issues, 17 states elected Republican governors. And, according to an Examiner.com analysis, every one of those states saw a drop in their unemployment rates since January of 2011. Furthermore, the average drop in the unemployment rate in these states was 1.35%, compared to the national decline of .9%, which means, according to the analysis, that the job market in these Republican states is improving 50% faster than the national rate.
Since January of 2011, here is how much the unemployment rate declined in each of the 17 states that elected Republican governors in 2010, according to the Examiner:
Kansas - 6.9% to 6.1% = a decline of 0.8%
Maine - 8.0% to 7.4% = a decline of 0.6%
Michigan - 10.9% to 8.5% = a decline of 2.4%
New Mexico - 7.7% to 6.7% = a decline of 1.0%
Oklahoma - 6.2% to 4.8% = a decline of 1.4%
Pennsylvania - 8.0% to 7.4% = a decline of 0.6%
Tennessee - 9.5% to 7.9% = a decline of 1.6%
Wisconsin - 7.7% to 6.8% = a decline of 0.9%
Wyoming - 6.3% to 5.2% = a decline of 1.1%
Alabama - 9.3% to 7.4% = a decline of 1.9%
Georgia - 10.1% to 8.9% = a decline of 1.2%
South Carolina - 10.6% to 9.1% = a decline of 1.5%
South Dakota - 5.0% to 4.3% = a decline of 0.7%
Florida - 10.9% to 8.6% = a decline of 2.3%
Nevada - 13.8% to 11.6% = a decline of 2.2%
Iowa - 6.1% to 5.1% = a decline of 1.0%
Ohio - 9.0% to 7.3% = a decline of 1.7%
On the other hand, the unemployment rate in states that elected Democrats in 2010 dropped, on average, as much as the national rate decline and, in some states such as New York, the unemployment rate has risen since January of 2011.
This is yet another example of how the so-called “blue state” model is not working.
Since January of 2011, here is how much the unemployment rate declined in each of the 17 states that elected Republican governors in 2010, according to the Examiner:
Kansas - 6.9% to 6.1% = a decline of 0.8%
Maine - 8.0% to 7.4% = a decline of 0.6%
Michigan - 10.9% to 8.5% = a decline of 2.4%
New Mexico - 7.7% to 6.7% = a decline of 1.0%
Oklahoma - 6.2% to 4.8% = a decline of 1.4%
Pennsylvania - 8.0% to 7.4% = a decline of 0.6%
Tennessee - 9.5% to 7.9% = a decline of 1.6%
Wisconsin - 7.7% to 6.8% = a decline of 0.9%
Wyoming - 6.3% to 5.2% = a decline of 1.1%
Alabama - 9.3% to 7.4% = a decline of 1.9%
Georgia - 10.1% to 8.9% = a decline of 1.2%
South Carolina - 10.6% to 9.1% = a decline of 1.5%
South Dakota - 5.0% to 4.3% = a decline of 0.7%
Florida - 10.9% to 8.6% = a decline of 2.3%
Nevada - 13.8% to 11.6% = a decline of 2.2%
Iowa - 6.1% to 5.1% = a decline of 1.0%
Ohio - 9.0% to 7.3% = a decline of 1.7%
On the other hand, the unemployment rate in states that elected Democrats in 2010 dropped, on average, as much as the national rate decline and, in some states such as New York, the unemployment rate has risen since January of 2011.
This is yet another example of how the so-called “blue state” model is not working.
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Status check on POTUS: Article from November, 2008
Here is an article from Investor's Business Daily from November 10, 2008. Read it in its entirety, and it will make you think:
A Checklist Of
Obama's Many Promises
By INVESTOR'S
BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, November 10, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Few presidential
candidates have made more specific promises to American voters than Barack
Obama. They came so fast and furious in the latter part of the campaign, you'd
be excused for not keeping up. So as a public service, we've put together a
handy checklist of some of the biggest Obama promises — culled from his
"Blueprint for Change," his campaign speeches and advertisements.
Clip it. Save it. And see how he did in four years.
Taxes
• Give a tax break
to 95% of Americans.
• Restore
Clinton-era tax rates on top income earners.
• "If you make
under $250,000, you will not see your taxes increase by a single dime. Not your
income taxes, not your payroll taxes, not your capital gains taxes.
Nothing."
• Dramatically
simplify tax filings so that millions of Americans will be able to do their
taxes in less than five minutes.
• Give American
businesses a $3,000 tax credit for every job they create in the U.S.
• Eliminate capital
gains taxes for small business and startup companies.
• Eliminate income
taxes for seniors making under $50,000.
• Expand the child
and dependent care tax credit.
• Expand the earned
income tax credit.
• Create a universal
mortgage credit.
• Create a small
business health tax credit.
• Provide a $500
"make work pay" tax credit to small businesses.
• Provide a $1,000
emergency energy rebate to families.
Energy
• Spend $15 billion
a year on renewable sources of energy.
• Eliminate oil
imports from the Middle East in 10 years.
• Increase fuel
economy standards by 4% a year.
• Weatherize 1
million homes annually.
• Ensure that 10% of
our electricity comes from renewable sources by 2012.
Environment
• Create 5 million
green jobs.
• Implement a
cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
• Get 1 million
plug-in hybrids on the road by 2015.
Labor
• Sign a fair pay
restoration act, which would overturn the Supreme Court's pay discrimination
ruling.
• Sign into law an
employee free choice act — aka card check — to make it easier for unions to
organize.
• Make employers
offer seven paid sick days per year.
• Increase the
minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2009.
National security
• Remove troops from
Iraq by the summer of 2010.
• Cut spending on
unproven missile defense systems.
• No more homeless
veterans.
• Stop spending $10
billion a month in Iraq.
• Finish the fight
against Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaida terrorists.
Social Security
• Work in a
"bipartisan way to preserve Social Security for future generations."
• Impose a Social
Security payroll tax on incomes above $250,000.
• Match 50% of
retirement savings up to $1,000 for families earning less than $75,000.
Education
• Demand higher
standards and more accountability from our teachers.
Spending
• Go through the
budget, line by line, ending programs we don't need and making the ones we do
need work better and cost less.
• Slash earmarks.
Health care
• Lower health care
costs for the typical family by $2,500 a year.
• Let the uninsured
get the same kind of health insurance that members of Congress get.
• Stop insurance
companies from discriminating against those who are sick and need care the
most.
• Spend $10 billion
over five years on health care information technology.
Preparing for Voter Fraud
Seriously, someone please explain to me why I need an ID to drive a car, buy alcohol, validate my airline boarding pass, and so many other things, but there are political interests that don't want me to need an ID to vote. Is there an other logical reason other than making it possible TO commit voter fraud to prevent the showing of an ID to vote? Read the original here.
Obama prepping thousands of lawyers for election
By MIKE BAKER
Associated Press
Jun 26, 9:33 PM EDT
OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) -- President Barack Obama's campaign has recruited a legion of lawyers to be on standby for this year's election as legal disputes surrounding the voting process escalate.
Thousands of attorneys and support staffers have agreed to aid in the effort, providing a mass of legal support that appears to be unrivaled by Republicans or precedent. Obama's campaign says it is particularly concerned about the implementation of new voter ID laws across the country, the possibility of anti-fraud activists challenging legitimate voters and the handling of voter registrations in the most competitive states.
Republicans are building their own legal teams for the election. They say they're focused on preventing fraud - making sure people don't vote unless they're eligible - rather than turning away qualified voters.
Since the disputed 2000 presidential election, both parties have increasingly concentrated on building legal teams - including high-priced lawyers who are well-known in political circles - for the Election Day run-up. The Bush-Gore election demonstrated to both sides the importance of every vote and the fact that the rules for voting and counting might actually determine the outcome. The Florida count in 2000 was decided by just 537 votes and ultimately landed in the Supreme Court.
This year in that state alone, Obama and his Democratic allies are poised to have thousands of lawyers ready for the election and hope to have more than the 5,800 attorneys available four years ago. That figure was nearly twice the 3,200 lawyers the Democrats had at their disposal in 2004.
Romney has been organizing his own legal help for the election. Campaign attorney Ben Ginsberg did not provide numbers but said the campaign has been gratified by the "overwhelming number of attorneys who have volunteered to assist."
"We will have enough lawyers to handle all situations that arise," he said.
The GOP doesn't necessarily need to have a numerical counterweight to Obama's attorneys; the 2000 election showed that experienced, connected lawyers on either side can be effective in court.
Former White House counsel Robert Bauer, who is organizing the Obama campaign's legal deployment, said there is great concern this year because he believes GOP leaders around the county have pursued new laws to impede the right to vote.
"The Republican Party and their allies have mapped out their vote suppression campaign as a response to our success in 2008 with grass-roots organization and successful turnout," Bauer said. "This is their response to defeat: changing the rules of participation so that fewer participate."
Several states with Republican leaders have recently pursued changes that could make voting more difficult, including key states such as Florida and Ohio, despite objections from voting rights groups that believe that the laws could suppress votes from low-income and minority blocs.
Republicans dispute that the laws are political, pointing to cases of election fraud and arguing that measures like those requiring voters to show identification are simply common sense. Pennsylvania's Republican House majority leader, Mike Turzai, however, told GOP supporters over the weekend that the state's new ID law "is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania."
Independent from the Romney team, a conservative group is prepping an Election Day team of its own to combat possible fraud.
Catherine Engelbrecht, president and founder of True the Vote, said the organization hopes to train and mobilize up to one million volunteers this year, many of them to serve poll watchers. One of the group's main initiatives is to "aggressively pursue fraud reports."
"Being a poll watcher is an age-old tradition and we're fortunate that so many volunteers are ready and willing to take a day off, learn what they need to know and help out at the polls," Engelbrecht said. True the Vote already has thousands signed up to help and had 500 trained election workers monitoring the Wisconsin recall vote earlier this month.
"They serve as volunteer guardians of the republic, to ensure that procedures at the polls are in keeping with state law," she said.
It's one of the efforts that have Obama's team fretting. The Democrats fear that anti-fraud activity could get out of hand, with vigilante poll watchers targeting and intimidating voters who may not know their rights.
"We will have the strategy and the resources to address the threat and protect the voter," Bauer said.
The Obama-aligned attorneys, most of whom are not election experts by trade, undergo training and have materials to show them how to help at the polls on Election Day.
Charles Lichtman, who is helping advise the effort in Florida this year after leading it in the last two cycles, first created the Florida Democratic Lawyers Council after the 2000 election, vowing that there would never be a repeat of that disputed vote. He contends Democrat Al Gore would have won the presidency over Republican George W. Bush if a similar legal infrastructure had been in place then.
Lichtman's efforts have since been replicated for other states. He said that is vital to provide voter protection.
"My experience has been that, in every election, the other side has taken drastic measures to try to suppress the vote," Lichtman said. The volunteer organization has not been involved in the 2012 legal disputes so far, though they are monitoring the developments.
Four years ago, the teams of lawyers organized by Obama and Republican candidate John McCain in 2008 went largely unused since the election wasn't very close.
But this year may be different given all the changes to voting laws - and the closeness of the race in recent polling.
The states with the strictest ID laws require voters to show photo identification before casting ballots. If they don't have proper identification or fail to bring it, they can cast a provisional ballot but must later go to meet with state elections administrators to sort things out before the ballot is counted.
Voting groups see a variety of potential problems, such as how voters are informed of the rule changes, how poll workers handle voters who fail to bring IDs and whether voters are provided adequate notice of the steps they need to take after casting an absentee ballot.
About 30 states have some form of an ID law, with varying methods of implementation.
Legal challenges typically start coming in the weeks before the election, but "litigation has started coming sooner and more vociferously" this year, says Edward Foley, an elections law expert with Ohio State University. That includes lawsuits surrounding Florida's plan to purge ineligible voters from the rolls.
Foley said. "We're in an era of increased litigiousness over the voting process."
He said lawsuits after Election Day may occur only if votes in a battleground state are within the "margin of litigation." That would probably be a difference of just hundreds of votes, a result that would be rare.
---
Associated Press writer Mike Baker can be reached on Facebook:http://on.fb.me/HiPpEV
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Obama prepping thousands of lawyers for election
By MIKE BAKER
Associated Press
Jun 26, 9:33 PM EDT
OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) -- President Barack Obama's campaign has recruited a legion of lawyers to be on standby for this year's election as legal disputes surrounding the voting process escalate.
Thousands of attorneys and support staffers have agreed to aid in the effort, providing a mass of legal support that appears to be unrivaled by Republicans or precedent. Obama's campaign says it is particularly concerned about the implementation of new voter ID laws across the country, the possibility of anti-fraud activists challenging legitimate voters and the handling of voter registrations in the most competitive states.
Republicans are building their own legal teams for the election. They say they're focused on preventing fraud - making sure people don't vote unless they're eligible - rather than turning away qualified voters.
Since the disputed 2000 presidential election, both parties have increasingly concentrated on building legal teams - including high-priced lawyers who are well-known in political circles - for the Election Day run-up. The Bush-Gore election demonstrated to both sides the importance of every vote and the fact that the rules for voting and counting might actually determine the outcome. The Florida count in 2000 was decided by just 537 votes and ultimately landed in the Supreme Court.
This year in that state alone, Obama and his Democratic allies are poised to have thousands of lawyers ready for the election and hope to have more than the 5,800 attorneys available four years ago. That figure was nearly twice the 3,200 lawyers the Democrats had at their disposal in 2004.
Romney has been organizing his own legal help for the election. Campaign attorney Ben Ginsberg did not provide numbers but said the campaign has been gratified by the "overwhelming number of attorneys who have volunteered to assist."
"We will have enough lawyers to handle all situations that arise," he said.
The GOP doesn't necessarily need to have a numerical counterweight to Obama's attorneys; the 2000 election showed that experienced, connected lawyers on either side can be effective in court.
Former White House counsel Robert Bauer, who is organizing the Obama campaign's legal deployment, said there is great concern this year because he believes GOP leaders around the county have pursued new laws to impede the right to vote.
"The Republican Party and their allies have mapped out their vote suppression campaign as a response to our success in 2008 with grass-roots organization and successful turnout," Bauer said. "This is their response to defeat: changing the rules of participation so that fewer participate."
Several states with Republican leaders have recently pursued changes that could make voting more difficult, including key states such as Florida and Ohio, despite objections from voting rights groups that believe that the laws could suppress votes from low-income and minority blocs.
Republicans dispute that the laws are political, pointing to cases of election fraud and arguing that measures like those requiring voters to show identification are simply common sense. Pennsylvania's Republican House majority leader, Mike Turzai, however, told GOP supporters over the weekend that the state's new ID law "is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania."
Independent from the Romney team, a conservative group is prepping an Election Day team of its own to combat possible fraud.
Catherine Engelbrecht, president and founder of True the Vote, said the organization hopes to train and mobilize up to one million volunteers this year, many of them to serve poll watchers. One of the group's main initiatives is to "aggressively pursue fraud reports."
"Being a poll watcher is an age-old tradition and we're fortunate that so many volunteers are ready and willing to take a day off, learn what they need to know and help out at the polls," Engelbrecht said. True the Vote already has thousands signed up to help and had 500 trained election workers monitoring the Wisconsin recall vote earlier this month.
"They serve as volunteer guardians of the republic, to ensure that procedures at the polls are in keeping with state law," she said.
It's one of the efforts that have Obama's team fretting. The Democrats fear that anti-fraud activity could get out of hand, with vigilante poll watchers targeting and intimidating voters who may not know their rights.
"We will have the strategy and the resources to address the threat and protect the voter," Bauer said.
The Obama-aligned attorneys, most of whom are not election experts by trade, undergo training and have materials to show them how to help at the polls on Election Day.
Charles Lichtman, who is helping advise the effort in Florida this year after leading it in the last two cycles, first created the Florida Democratic Lawyers Council after the 2000 election, vowing that there would never be a repeat of that disputed vote. He contends Democrat Al Gore would have won the presidency over Republican George W. Bush if a similar legal infrastructure had been in place then.
Lichtman's efforts have since been replicated for other states. He said that is vital to provide voter protection.
"My experience has been that, in every election, the other side has taken drastic measures to try to suppress the vote," Lichtman said. The volunteer organization has not been involved in the 2012 legal disputes so far, though they are monitoring the developments.
Four years ago, the teams of lawyers organized by Obama and Republican candidate John McCain in 2008 went largely unused since the election wasn't very close.
But this year may be different given all the changes to voting laws - and the closeness of the race in recent polling.
The states with the strictest ID laws require voters to show photo identification before casting ballots. If they don't have proper identification or fail to bring it, they can cast a provisional ballot but must later go to meet with state elections administrators to sort things out before the ballot is counted.
Voting groups see a variety of potential problems, such as how voters are informed of the rule changes, how poll workers handle voters who fail to bring IDs and whether voters are provided adequate notice of the steps they need to take after casting an absentee ballot.
About 30 states have some form of an ID law, with varying methods of implementation.
Legal challenges typically start coming in the weeks before the election, but "litigation has started coming sooner and more vociferously" this year, says Edward Foley, an elections law expert with Ohio State University. That includes lawsuits surrounding Florida's plan to purge ineligible voters from the rolls.
Foley said. "We're in an era of increased litigiousness over the voting process."
He said lawsuits after Election Day may occur only if votes in a battleground state are within the "margin of litigation." That would probably be a difference of just hundreds of votes, a result that would be rare.
---
Associated Press writer Mike Baker can be reached on Facebook:http://on.fb.me/HiPpEV
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Stimulus money went to cheats...
...and in other news, the sky is blue. Read the original here.
GAO: $1.4 billion in stimulus credits went to tax cheats
Stimulus cash bought homes
By Stephen Dinan
The Washington Times
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Tax cheats were given $1.4 billion in government-backed mortgage loans under President Obama’s economic stimulus, and the government doled out at least an additional $27 million in tax credits to delinquents who took the first-time-homebuyer tax break, according to a government audit released Tuesday.
Under government rules, delinquent taxpayers are supposed to be ineligible for the mortgage insurance program unless they have reached a repayment agreement with the Internal Revenue Service. But theFederal Housing Administration didn’t have the right controls to weed out bad applications, said the Government Accountability Office, Congress‘ chief investigative arm.
That meant FHA insured $1.4 billion in mortgages for 6,327 borrowers who collectively owed $77.6 million in unpaid taxes, or an average of more than $12,000 each.
The auditors said that as a category, the tax cheats had foreclosure rates up to three times as high as other borrowers, which meant the delinquent taxpayers exposed the government to even greater risks.
“In the name of ‘stimulus,’ the federal government gave mortgage insurance to thousands of people we knew were tax cheats and had a bad track record paying their debts,” said Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, who joined a bipartisan group of other lawmakers to request the investigation. “The federal government needlessly put taxpayers on the line to help tax cheats buy homes. Congress needs to ensure that tax cheats are no longer allowed to take advantage of FHA programs.”
In addition to the mortgages, the auditors found that more than half of the tax-delinquent borrowers claimed the first-time-homebuyers’ credit, worth up to $8,000.
GAO said there is no prohibition against someone claiming the credit, even though they still have unpaid tax bills. The credit is refundable, meaning taxpayers can get a check back from the government if the benefit exceeds their liability. IRS rules generally call for the agency to subtract any unpaid taxes from the refund, but in three of the nine cases that GAO analyzed in depth, it said the taxpayers had declared bankruptcy, meaning the IRS was prevented from docking the refunds.
The report was the GAO’s second study looking at tax cheats and the stimulus.
In the first report, GAO said thousands of contracts and grants were paid out under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to those with unpaid tax bills.
Mr. Obama pushed the $831 billion economic stimulus in early 2009 as a means of bolstering the faltering economy, and promised to use strict controls to cut fraud and abuse. At its peak in mid-2010, it was responsible for as many as 3.6 million jobs, but could have funded as few as 700,000, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Part of the Recovery Act was aimed at shoring up the housing market, which included the first-time-homebuyer tax credit and the mortgage assistance, which let the FHA insure loans at a higher rate in high-cost housing markets.
About 1.7 million individuals claimed the tax credit, while FHA insured more than $20 billion in mortgages for 87,000 homeowners, thanks to the Recovery Act provisions.
Under a White House policy, buyers who are delinquent on their federal taxes are not supposed to receive the mortgage assistance, unless they have worked out a repayment agreement with the IRS. But FHA rules don’t prod private lenders to ask for that information, and the FHAdoesn’t have a system to work with the IRS to get that information.
Mr. Coburn joined Sens. Max Baucus, Montana Democrat; Carl Levin, Michigan Democrat; Chuck Grassley, Iowa Republican; and Orrin G. Hatch, Utah Republican, to request a review of the program.
“The stimulus-spending program was ill-conceived, with far too little oversight,” Mr. Grassley said. “It shouldn’t surprise anyone, unfortunately, that tax dollars have gone to tax cheats. It’s another one of many negative consequences of writing checks without enough checks and balances.”
Compounding the matter, those with tax problems are more likely to end up in foreclosure. Nearly a third of mortgage holders with unpaid taxes were “seriously delinquent” on their payments, and 6.3 percent had been foreclosed - a rate nearly three times higher than homeowners who were paid up with the IRS.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development accepted the report and will work with the IRS to try to get access to information that would help it cull tax cheats, Carol J. Galante, an acting assistant secretary, said in the department’s official response.
She said they also will try to clarify FHA rules so lenders are clear about the eligibility requirements for loans.
GAO: $1.4 billion in stimulus credits went to tax cheats
Stimulus cash bought homes
By Stephen Dinan
The Washington Times
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Tax cheats were given $1.4 billion in government-backed mortgage loans under President Obama’s economic stimulus, and the government doled out at least an additional $27 million in tax credits to delinquents who took the first-time-homebuyer tax break, according to a government audit released Tuesday.
Under government rules, delinquent taxpayers are supposed to be ineligible for the mortgage insurance program unless they have reached a repayment agreement with the Internal Revenue Service. But theFederal Housing Administration didn’t have the right controls to weed out bad applications, said the Government Accountability Office, Congress‘ chief investigative arm.
That meant FHA insured $1.4 billion in mortgages for 6,327 borrowers who collectively owed $77.6 million in unpaid taxes, or an average of more than $12,000 each.
The auditors said that as a category, the tax cheats had foreclosure rates up to three times as high as other borrowers, which meant the delinquent taxpayers exposed the government to even greater risks.
“In the name of ‘stimulus,’ the federal government gave mortgage insurance to thousands of people we knew were tax cheats and had a bad track record paying their debts,” said Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, who joined a bipartisan group of other lawmakers to request the investigation. “The federal government needlessly put taxpayers on the line to help tax cheats buy homes. Congress needs to ensure that tax cheats are no longer allowed to take advantage of FHA programs.”
In addition to the mortgages, the auditors found that more than half of the tax-delinquent borrowers claimed the first-time-homebuyers’ credit, worth up to $8,000.
GAO said there is no prohibition against someone claiming the credit, even though they still have unpaid tax bills. The credit is refundable, meaning taxpayers can get a check back from the government if the benefit exceeds their liability. IRS rules generally call for the agency to subtract any unpaid taxes from the refund, but in three of the nine cases that GAO analyzed in depth, it said the taxpayers had declared bankruptcy, meaning the IRS was prevented from docking the refunds.
The report was the GAO’s second study looking at tax cheats and the stimulus.
In the first report, GAO said thousands of contracts and grants were paid out under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to those with unpaid tax bills.
Mr. Obama pushed the $831 billion economic stimulus in early 2009 as a means of bolstering the faltering economy, and promised to use strict controls to cut fraud and abuse. At its peak in mid-2010, it was responsible for as many as 3.6 million jobs, but could have funded as few as 700,000, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Part of the Recovery Act was aimed at shoring up the housing market, which included the first-time-homebuyer tax credit and the mortgage assistance, which let the FHA insure loans at a higher rate in high-cost housing markets.
About 1.7 million individuals claimed the tax credit, while FHA insured more than $20 billion in mortgages for 87,000 homeowners, thanks to the Recovery Act provisions.
Under a White House policy, buyers who are delinquent on their federal taxes are not supposed to receive the mortgage assistance, unless they have worked out a repayment agreement with the IRS. But FHA rules don’t prod private lenders to ask for that information, and the FHAdoesn’t have a system to work with the IRS to get that information.
Mr. Coburn joined Sens. Max Baucus, Montana Democrat; Carl Levin, Michigan Democrat; Chuck Grassley, Iowa Republican; and Orrin G. Hatch, Utah Republican, to request a review of the program.
“The stimulus-spending program was ill-conceived, with far too little oversight,” Mr. Grassley said. “It shouldn’t surprise anyone, unfortunately, that tax dollars have gone to tax cheats. It’s another one of many negative consequences of writing checks without enough checks and balances.”
Compounding the matter, those with tax problems are more likely to end up in foreclosure. Nearly a third of mortgage holders with unpaid taxes were “seriously delinquent” on their payments, and 6.3 percent had been foreclosed - a rate nearly three times higher than homeowners who were paid up with the IRS.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development accepted the report and will work with the IRS to try to get access to information that would help it cull tax cheats, Carol J. Galante, an acting assistant secretary, said in the department’s official response.
She said they also will try to clarify FHA rules so lenders are clear about the eligibility requirements for loans.
Thursday, June 21, 2012
Anyone surprised
When you aren't playing with your own money, you have no sense of obligation to spend it wisely. When was the last time the government spent money efficiently and intelligently? Seriously, why is anyone surprised that so much of the money was wasted and didn't accomplish what they said it would? Not only are the people making these policies and spending this money government bureaucrats, but in this administration, many of them come from academia as well. So that's twice removed reality. Read the original here.
$9 Billion in ‘Stimulus’ for Solar, Wind Projects Made 910 Final Jobs -- $9.8 Million Per Job
By Michael W. Chapman and Fred Lucas
June 20, 2012
(CNSNews.com) – The Obama administration distributed $9 billion in economic “stimulus” funds to solar and wind projects in 2009-11 that created, as the end result, 910 “direct” jobs -- annual operation and maintenance positions -- meaning that it cost about $9.8 million to establish each of those long-term jobs.
At the same time, those green energy projects also created, in the end, about 4,600 “indirect” jobs – positions indirectly supported by the annual operation and maintenance jobs -- which means they cost about $1.9 million each ($9 billion divided by 4,600).
Combined (910 + 4,600 = 5,510), the direct and indirect jobs cost, on average, about $1.63 million each to produce.
As explained in a report by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which is part of the U.S. Department of Energy, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (“economic stimulus”) of 2009 included Section 1603, a grant program run through the Treasury Department.
The 1603 program offered “renewable energy project developers a one-time cash payment” to reduce the need for green energy companies “to secure tax equity partners” and also help them to achieve “ ‘the near term goal of creating and retaining jobs’ in the renewable energy sector.”
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (EREL) tracked the grant program from its inception in 2009 through Nov. 10, 2011. Its report is entitled, Preliminary Analysis of the Jobs and Economic Impacts of Renewable Energy Projects Supported by the 1603 Treasury Grant Program.
The report explains that the program provided “approximately $9.0 billion in funds to over 23,000 PV and large wind projects.” PV stands for photovoltaic, which is the method by which solar power is turned into electricity, usually with solar panels or solar cells. There were specifically 197 large wind projects and 23,692 PV projects that received funds, according to the EREL report.
For calculating the number of green jobs created, the EREL did not actually count the people working at the facilities but instead relied upon Jobs and Economic Development Impact, or JEDI, computer models.
In its summary, the EREL report states that for the 2009-11 timeframe there were an average 52,000-75,000 “direct and indirect jobs per year” created for the construction, installation, and related work on the wind and solar projects.
These were temporary jobs, construction and installation work at the facilities, not long-term positions at the green energy sites.
The number of these “indirect,” temporary construction jobs averaged between 43,000 and 66,000, according to the EREL, and the “direct” jobs “supporting the design, development, and construction/installation of systems” averaged out to about 9,400 per year.
For the operation and maintenance (O&M) of the photovoltaic and large wind systems, however, the report states there are “between 5,100 and 5,500 direct and indirect jobs per year on an ongoing basis over the 20- to 30-year estimated life of the systems.”
The report further clarifies that from that number there are 910 direct jobs and 4,200-4,600 indirect jobs per year.
The 910 jobs are “directly supporting the O&M of the systems” and that number “is significantly less than the number of [indirect] jobs supporting manufacturing and associated supply chains.”
Through the grant program, $9 billion was spent to, in the end, establish 910 jobs that will last upwards of 30 years. That means those jobs cost, in the end, about $9.8 million to create.
Add in the indirect jobs -- high estimate of 4,600 -- and there are 5,510 total jobs (direct and indirect). Starting with the $9 billion in grants, the end result to establish 5,510 jobs averages out to $1.63 million per job.
$9 Billion in ‘Stimulus’ for Solar, Wind Projects Made 910 Final Jobs -- $9.8 Million Per Job
By Michael W. Chapman and Fred Lucas
June 20, 2012
(CNSNews.com) – The Obama administration distributed $9 billion in economic “stimulus” funds to solar and wind projects in 2009-11 that created, as the end result, 910 “direct” jobs -- annual operation and maintenance positions -- meaning that it cost about $9.8 million to establish each of those long-term jobs.
At the same time, those green energy projects also created, in the end, about 4,600 “indirect” jobs – positions indirectly supported by the annual operation and maintenance jobs -- which means they cost about $1.9 million each ($9 billion divided by 4,600).
Combined (910 + 4,600 = 5,510), the direct and indirect jobs cost, on average, about $1.63 million each to produce.
As explained in a report by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which is part of the U.S. Department of Energy, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (“economic stimulus”) of 2009 included Section 1603, a grant program run through the Treasury Department.
The 1603 program offered “renewable energy project developers a one-time cash payment” to reduce the need for green energy companies “to secure tax equity partners” and also help them to achieve “ ‘the near term goal of creating and retaining jobs’ in the renewable energy sector.”
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (EREL) tracked the grant program from its inception in 2009 through Nov. 10, 2011. Its report is entitled, Preliminary Analysis of the Jobs and Economic Impacts of Renewable Energy Projects Supported by the 1603 Treasury Grant Program.
The report explains that the program provided “approximately $9.0 billion in funds to over 23,000 PV and large wind projects.” PV stands for photovoltaic, which is the method by which solar power is turned into electricity, usually with solar panels or solar cells. There were specifically 197 large wind projects and 23,692 PV projects that received funds, according to the EREL report.
For calculating the number of green jobs created, the EREL did not actually count the people working at the facilities but instead relied upon Jobs and Economic Development Impact, or JEDI, computer models.
In its summary, the EREL report states that for the 2009-11 timeframe there were an average 52,000-75,000 “direct and indirect jobs per year” created for the construction, installation, and related work on the wind and solar projects.
These were temporary jobs, construction and installation work at the facilities, not long-term positions at the green energy sites.
The number of these “indirect,” temporary construction jobs averaged between 43,000 and 66,000, according to the EREL, and the “direct” jobs “supporting the design, development, and construction/installation of systems” averaged out to about 9,400 per year.
For the operation and maintenance (O&M) of the photovoltaic and large wind systems, however, the report states there are “between 5,100 and 5,500 direct and indirect jobs per year on an ongoing basis over the 20- to 30-year estimated life of the systems.”
The report further clarifies that from that number there are 910 direct jobs and 4,200-4,600 indirect jobs per year.
The 910 jobs are “directly supporting the O&M of the systems” and that number “is significantly less than the number of [indirect] jobs supporting manufacturing and associated supply chains.”
Through the grant program, $9 billion was spent to, in the end, establish 910 jobs that will last upwards of 30 years. That means those jobs cost, in the end, about $9.8 million to create.
Add in the indirect jobs -- high estimate of 4,600 -- and there are 5,510 total jobs (direct and indirect). Starting with the $9 billion in grants, the end result to establish 5,510 jobs averages out to $1.63 million per job.
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Paid to Protest
Are protesters being paid to protest Mitt Romney? Doesn't this go against the principle of protesting? Read the original here.
Anti-Romney Protesters Say They're Paid To Heckle
Two protesters and an Obama official say “Good Jobs Now” protesters are compensated for their time. A protest leader denies it.
McKay Coppins BuzzFeed Staff
Posted Jun 19, 2012 4:06pm EDT
DeWitt, Mich. — The protesters popping up at Mitt Romney's rallies throughout Michigan Tuesday look like run-of-the-mill grassroots liberals — they wave signs about "the 99 percent," they chant about the Republican's greed, and they describe themselves as a loosely organized coalition of "concerned citizens."
They're also getting paid, two of the protesters and an Obama campaign official told BuzzFeed.
At the candidate's afternoon stop outside a bakery in DeWitt, a group of about 15 protesters stood behind a police barricade, a few of them chanting in support of Obama. Asked why he was protesting, a man dressed in a grim reaper costume pointed a reporter to a pair of "designated representatives" standing in the shade.
"I can't talk, you gotta get one of those people over there to talk to y'all," he said. "They're the ones who can talk to reporters."
Neither of the representatives agreed to give their names, but two protesters said they were getting paid to stand outside of the rally, though their wage is unclear: one said she was getting $7.25 per hour, while another man said they were being paid $17 per hour.
Meanwhile, about 50 feet away, another protest had been organized by local Democrats in conjunction with the Obama campaign. A campaign official told BuzzFeed they had nothing to do with the other group — which he said he believed they had been sent by the labor-backed "Good Jobs Now" — and confirmed that they were being paid.
"I mean, it's a free country, they can go anywhere they want, but they're not with us," the official said.
The protesters also made an appearance at Romney's rally in Frankenmuth earlier in the day. There, a young man who identified himself only as Demarcus stood with a group of about five others, stopping reporters after the candidate's speech and saying they were there "to represent the 99 percent and tell Romney to stand up for us." He said he was from the group, "Good Jobs Now," but did not indicate whether he was being paid.
Brittany Smith, a spokeswoman for Good Jobs Now, confirmed that they had protesters at the events, but said their "activists are NOT paid to protest. We are a statewide community advocacy group."
The politics of heckling has been a point of frequent debate lately, with both campaigns allowing demonstrators to derail public events in recent weeks. At a press conference in Boston last month, Romney campaign aides and volunteers drowned out a press conference featuring David Axelrod. And the Romney campaign was forced to skip a scheduled stop at a WaWa gas station in Pennsylvania last Saturday after a group of protesters positioned themselves outside the location.
But while both sides enjoy a good, loud demonstration, it's generally acknowledged that paying people to protest is a form of cheating — which explains why the Obama campaign was quick to distance themselves from the group.
By the end of Romney's remarks, most of the "Good Jobs Now" group was standing in the shade, chatting amongst themselves and letting their signs hang to the the ground. And while the Democrats aligned with the Obama campaign continued to shout at rally-goers as they filed out of the event, the other group of demonstrators made their way down the street and loaded on to a charter bus.
Anti-Romney Protesters Say They're Paid To Heckle
Two protesters and an Obama official say “Good Jobs Now” protesters are compensated for their time. A protest leader denies it.
McKay Coppins BuzzFeed Staff
Posted Jun 19, 2012 4:06pm EDT
DeWitt, Mich. — The protesters popping up at Mitt Romney's rallies throughout Michigan Tuesday look like run-of-the-mill grassroots liberals — they wave signs about "the 99 percent," they chant about the Republican's greed, and they describe themselves as a loosely organized coalition of "concerned citizens."
They're also getting paid, two of the protesters and an Obama campaign official told BuzzFeed.
At the candidate's afternoon stop outside a bakery in DeWitt, a group of about 15 protesters stood behind a police barricade, a few of them chanting in support of Obama. Asked why he was protesting, a man dressed in a grim reaper costume pointed a reporter to a pair of "designated representatives" standing in the shade.
"I can't talk, you gotta get one of those people over there to talk to y'all," he said. "They're the ones who can talk to reporters."
Neither of the representatives agreed to give their names, but two protesters said they were getting paid to stand outside of the rally, though their wage is unclear: one said she was getting $7.25 per hour, while another man said they were being paid $17 per hour.
Meanwhile, about 50 feet away, another protest had been organized by local Democrats in conjunction with the Obama campaign. A campaign official told BuzzFeed they had nothing to do with the other group — which he said he believed they had been sent by the labor-backed "Good Jobs Now" — and confirmed that they were being paid.
"I mean, it's a free country, they can go anywhere they want, but they're not with us," the official said.
The protesters also made an appearance at Romney's rally in Frankenmuth earlier in the day. There, a young man who identified himself only as Demarcus stood with a group of about five others, stopping reporters after the candidate's speech and saying they were there "to represent the 99 percent and tell Romney to stand up for us." He said he was from the group, "Good Jobs Now," but did not indicate whether he was being paid.
Brittany Smith, a spokeswoman for Good Jobs Now, confirmed that they had protesters at the events, but said their "activists are NOT paid to protest. We are a statewide community advocacy group."
The politics of heckling has been a point of frequent debate lately, with both campaigns allowing demonstrators to derail public events in recent weeks. At a press conference in Boston last month, Romney campaign aides and volunteers drowned out a press conference featuring David Axelrod. And the Romney campaign was forced to skip a scheduled stop at a WaWa gas station in Pennsylvania last Saturday after a group of protesters positioned themselves outside the location.
But while both sides enjoy a good, loud demonstration, it's generally acknowledged that paying people to protest is a form of cheating — which explains why the Obama campaign was quick to distance themselves from the group.
By the end of Romney's remarks, most of the "Good Jobs Now" group was standing in the shade, chatting amongst themselves and letting their signs hang to the the ground. And while the Democrats aligned with the Obama campaign continued to shout at rally-goers as they filed out of the event, the other group of demonstrators made their way down the street and loaded on to a charter bus.
Friday, June 15, 2012
UK Telegraph calls shenanigans on US Media bias
Seriously, imagine if the tables were turned and it was a GOP candidate that made these claims. Read the original here.
Elizabeth Warren's 'Native American' claims: if she was a Republican, the media would call her a racistBy Tim Stanley
Elizabeth Warren's 'Native American' claims: if she was a Republican, the media would call her a racistBy Tim Stanley
Last updated: June 14th, 2012
UK Telegraph
Imagine if a Republican candidate claimed, confidently, that she was part Native American. Imagine if she had actually used that identity to have herself listed as a minority at Harvard, qualifying her for special treatment and celebration as proof of how diverse and progressive her department is. Imagine if, many years later, it turned out that her claims to Native heritage were dubious and, when pressed for proof, she offered her “high cheekbones.” Oh, and she once contributed a recipe to a Native American cookbook called “Pow Wow Chow” (that may even have been plagiarised).
Chances are, that Republican candidate would be hounded night and day by the press, branded a racist and probably be winding down her political career. Right now, she’d be sitting by the phone, praying for a call from the producers of Celebrity Apprentice (gotta pay the mortgage on that wigwam somehow).
The incredible thing is that all this has happened to a Democratic senatorial candidate called Elizabeth Warren. And not only has she been given a pass by her party, which normally treats race with the respect it deserves, but also by the mainstream media. Last night she was chatting with Chris Matthews on MSNBC and Matthews failed to mention the scandal once. If there’s any one reason why Democrats and liberals aren't showing the expected anger about this, it’s because their section of the media has declined to discuss it.
The sad thing is that Warren is, otherwise, an intelligent and credible candidate for the Senate. The product of a working-class family, this self-made academic was one of the bright sparks behind the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and is one of the leading liberal minds of her generation. She’s competing in a naturally Democratic state (Massachusetts) that turned bellwether when it elected Tea Party Republican Scott Brown. The 2012 senate race ought to be about jobs and the economy.
Alas, Warren’s bizarre posturing as a Native American (which she has pursued with all the conviction of a full blown delusion) has sapped her credibility. Race shapes a lot of the way that Democrats think about economics and social justice – and within that narrative, Native Americans were the very first minority that the Europeans oppressed on American soil. It thus ought to be not just odd but immoral that Warren would try to borrow their heritage of suffering in order to advance her political career. Worse still, the Harvard Law Journal described her as a “woman of color,” as if it was translating her claimed identity into proof that it was reaching out to African-Americans. A lot of liberals invested a lot of emotional effort into sustaining this myth. This sort of thing is just as inappropriate as Mitt Romney suddenly claiming to be the descendent of slaves.
But what is almost worse is how much the liberal media has tried to smooth the story over. They want the Massachusetts senate race to be a straightforward fight between Warren’s populism and Brown’s conservatism. And so headlines have been massaged, innuendoes have gone unreported, and only one local paper has pursued Warren with the righteousness that the issue deserves. Articles have been written expressing sympathy along the lines of “Well, we’re probably all a little bit Native American.” The Matthews softball interview is only a representative pass.
The takeaway from all of this is that racial insensitivity only matters if it’s done by a Republican. That isn’t to say that conservatives don’t deserve everything they get when they flirt with racially coded appeals (George Allen ought to be hiding in shame, not running for office again). But Democrats can have records of racist activity (the former Senate Majority Leader, Robert Byrd, was a member of the KKK in his youth), express racist sentiments towards Asians (step forward, Marion Barry) and appropriate the racial heritage of others – and no one seems to mind. When it comes to racism, the Democratic credo is “Do as I say, not as I do.”
UK Telegraph
Imagine if a Republican candidate claimed, confidently, that she was part Native American. Imagine if she had actually used that identity to have herself listed as a minority at Harvard, qualifying her for special treatment and celebration as proof of how diverse and progressive her department is. Imagine if, many years later, it turned out that her claims to Native heritage were dubious and, when pressed for proof, she offered her “high cheekbones.” Oh, and she once contributed a recipe to a Native American cookbook called “Pow Wow Chow” (that may even have been plagiarised).
Chances are, that Republican candidate would be hounded night and day by the press, branded a racist and probably be winding down her political career. Right now, she’d be sitting by the phone, praying for a call from the producers of Celebrity Apprentice (gotta pay the mortgage on that wigwam somehow).
The incredible thing is that all this has happened to a Democratic senatorial candidate called Elizabeth Warren. And not only has she been given a pass by her party, which normally treats race with the respect it deserves, but also by the mainstream media. Last night she was chatting with Chris Matthews on MSNBC and Matthews failed to mention the scandal once. If there’s any one reason why Democrats and liberals aren't showing the expected anger about this, it’s because their section of the media has declined to discuss it.
The sad thing is that Warren is, otherwise, an intelligent and credible candidate for the Senate. The product of a working-class family, this self-made academic was one of the bright sparks behind the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and is one of the leading liberal minds of her generation. She’s competing in a naturally Democratic state (Massachusetts) that turned bellwether when it elected Tea Party Republican Scott Brown. The 2012 senate race ought to be about jobs and the economy.
Alas, Warren’s bizarre posturing as a Native American (which she has pursued with all the conviction of a full blown delusion) has sapped her credibility. Race shapes a lot of the way that Democrats think about economics and social justice – and within that narrative, Native Americans were the very first minority that the Europeans oppressed on American soil. It thus ought to be not just odd but immoral that Warren would try to borrow their heritage of suffering in order to advance her political career. Worse still, the Harvard Law Journal described her as a “woman of color,” as if it was translating her claimed identity into proof that it was reaching out to African-Americans. A lot of liberals invested a lot of emotional effort into sustaining this myth. This sort of thing is just as inappropriate as Mitt Romney suddenly claiming to be the descendent of slaves.
But what is almost worse is how much the liberal media has tried to smooth the story over. They want the Massachusetts senate race to be a straightforward fight between Warren’s populism and Brown’s conservatism. And so headlines have been massaged, innuendoes have gone unreported, and only one local paper has pursued Warren with the righteousness that the issue deserves. Articles have been written expressing sympathy along the lines of “Well, we’re probably all a little bit Native American.” The Matthews softball interview is only a representative pass.
The takeaway from all of this is that racial insensitivity only matters if it’s done by a Republican. That isn’t to say that conservatives don’t deserve everything they get when they flirt with racially coded appeals (George Allen ought to be hiding in shame, not running for office again). But Democrats can have records of racist activity (the former Senate Majority Leader, Robert Byrd, was a member of the KKK in his youth), express racist sentiments towards Asians (step forward, Marion Barry) and appropriate the racial heritage of others – and no one seems to mind. When it comes to racism, the Democratic credo is “Do as I say, not as I do.”
US Politics: The rules of mixing business with raising money
Not sure what to think. Would it have been better if he separated them into 2 trips? Maybe, maybe not. Does it add to the feeling that POTUS is disconnected from middle-class America and increase resentment that the American tax-payers have to pay for him to continually campaign and raise money? Maybe, maybe not. Is he the only politician to do this? Fat chance. It still feels dirty to me...regardless of which politician does it. Bolding is done by me. Read the original here.
Campaigner-in-chief: Obama jets out of New York on Air Force One after an evening of star-studded fundraisers... but a short trip to the World Trade Center means TAXPAYERS must pick up the check
By HUGO GYE and LOUISE BOYLE
PUBLISHED: 17:39 EST, 14 June 2012 | UPDATED: 08:01 EST, 15 June 2012
UK Daily Mail
President Barack Obama brought Manhattan to a standstill last night as he held two star-studded fundraising events at exclusive addresses in the city - raising a total of $4.5 million. However, the President's re-election campaign will not have to pay the full cost of his jaunt to the Big Apple, because he combined the trip with an official event which will be charged to the taxpayer. Before the fundraisers, one at actress Sarah Jessica Parker's house and one at the five-star Plaza Hotel, Mr Obama scheduled a visit to the World Trade Center site. Following his visits across New York he headed home to the White House in Washington DC aboard the presidential helicopter, Marine One.
Mr Obama has now held more fundraising events than the last six presidents combined, leading to his opponents coining the derisive nickname 'Campaigner in Chief'. He frequently combines the events with his official duties, which allows his re-election campaign to defray the President's travel costs by charging part of them to the public purse.
For a trip like yesterday's, involving both official duties and campaign events, a formula is applied so that the campaign pays part of the costs - but it still works out cheaper than making a trip purely for campaigning. Mr Obama must be accompanied by Secret Service protection and fly on Air Force One at all times for security reasons, further increasing the cost of his travel.
The World Trade Center, which Mr Obama has visited several times before, is a major building project and recipient of generous federal aid, as well as an iconic national memorial. It is unclear what prompted the President to return to the site - where he took the chance to hail 'the American spirit' - on this occasion.
The intimate dinner at the house of Sex and the City star Ms Parker and her actor husband Matthew Broderick banked about $2million, with 50 people paying $40,000 each to attend.
Ms Parker, dressed in a navy lace cocktail dress, a jewel-studded necklace and a giant diamond ring, gave the president a hug and kiss as she introduced him to the donors in her Manhattan home.
She referred to Michelle Obama as 'our radiant and extraordinary First Lady' and said the group of 50 donors had gathered 'hopefully, with enormous enthusiasm'.
Speaking in a dimly-lit, art-filled room, Mr Obama told supporters they would play a critical role in an election that would determine a vision for the nation's future.
'The other side is going to spend $500 million with a very simple message, which is "You’re frustrated, you’re disappointed, and it’s the fault of the guy in the White House",' he said. 'And that’s an elegant message. It happens to be wrong. But it’s crisp. You can fit it on a bumper sticker.
'So we’re going to have to work hard in this election. We’re going to have to work harder than we did in 2008.' He went on: 'You're the tie-breaker. You're the ultimate arbiter of which direction this country goes.'
Among the celebrities on hand to hear the President's remarks were Oscar winner Meryl Streep, fashion designer Michael Kors and Vogue editor Anna Wintour, who moderated a private question-and-answer session between the Mr Obama and the guests.
Mr Broderick, who was starring in a Broadway musical, was absent. New Orleans jazz musician Trombone Shorty performed for the guests, who were seated at two long tables that spanned two rooms, with the dividing doors thrown open.
Aretha Franklin, who left the party after just 20 minutes, told TMZ she ate 'chicken with a mustard sauce, diced tomatoes and a lot of relishes on the side of the plate'. The meal was prepared by Michael White, owner of Marea in Manhattan. Olivia Young, his publicist tweeted: 'I'm eating Marea steak in Sarah Jessica Parker's kitchen wearing no shoes. Oh and Obama is upstairs.'
During his address, Obama poured praise on Wintour, saying she was 'working hard in New York and Chicago' to help his campaign for re-election. He also had praise for his wife: 'I recognise that most of you are here to see Michelle,' he joked.
'I always explain I rank fifth in the hierarchy in the White House. There’s Michelle, my mother-in-law, the two girls and Bo. So that actually makes it six. In terms of star wattage, people come to the White House and say, "Where’s Michelle?"'
When the president mentioned that U.S. car manufacturer GM is 'back on top', Ms Parker's nine-year-old son started clapping, impromptu. 'That’s worth applauding,' Obama said with a smile as the donors laughed and also began clapping. 'Right on cue,' Obama said.
The night's second glitzy fundraiser was held at the Plaza Hotel for 250 guests, paying $10,000 each for dinner and a performance by Mariah Carey.
Co-host Newark Mayor Cory Booker and singer Alicia Keys addressed the crowd before Obama took the microphone to speak of the challenges the economic downturn has brought Americans. 'The crux of this campaign is going to be about the economy,' he said.
Some New Yorkers reacted with anger at the prospect of footing the bill for Mr Obama's fundraising visit to the city. Lauren Greenwood, a 28-year-old who works in medical sales, told MailOnline that while she had no objection to the President attending campaign events, 'it shouldn’t be on New York taxpayers’ dollars to support him having parties.' But Jonathan Fischer, 24, disagreed, saying: 'He came here on business, he handled his business... He spends his days protecting the country, the rest is up to his own free will. He also pays taxes, so it doesn’t bother me.'
Much of downtown Manhattan was temporarily sealed off for the duration of Mr Obama's visit, and the street in the West Village neighbourhood where Ms Parker's house is situated was closed to pedestrians. Some pedestrians bemoaned the disruption caused to the New York streets by the presidential motorcade - Mary Grach told ABC that Mr Obama's visit was 'really inconveniencing a lot of commuters'. She added: 'There has to be a better way to go about it rather than putting out how many thousands of riders out of commission, and having to find another way home.'
In 2004, Democrats criticised George W. Bush for combining fundraisers with official duties, and Republicans have responded in kind this year. Mr Obama has been furiously fundraising ever since a Supreme Court decision removed most restrictions on spending by super PACs, outside groups which raise money to promote causes and candidates.
The President initially opposed super PACs, but earlier this year he relented and allowed top officials to speak at fundraising events organised by such groups. The Republican party has officially complained about Obama’s campaign activities.
In a letter, Reince Priebus, Republican National Committee chairman, alleged: 'Throughout his administration, but particularly in recent weeks, President Obama has been passing off campaign travel as "official events", thereby allowing taxpayers, rather than his campaign, to pay for his re-election efforts.'
During the 2008 election, Mr Obama declined public money for his campaign, allowing him to raise an unlimited amount privately. He ended up spending around $730million, almost double the amount raised by his rival John McCain.
Republicans also lambasted Obama for courting celebrities for dollars while middle-class angst rides high. The party lampooned the President when his campaign promoted Ms Parker's event on the same day news broke of climbing unemployment.
Priebus wrote a column on conservative website Breitbart.com criticising the president for declaring the private sector was 'doing fine' during a news conference last week. 'Where would President Obama get an outrageous idea like "the private sector is doing fine?" Perhaps from one of his many star-studded fundraisers,' he wrote.
'The president has his priorities all backward. He puts growing government ahead of growing the economy, his job above American jobs, and celebrity galas above presidential duties.' Obama, who has been seen at recent events with George Clooney, Tobey Maguire and Jessica Alba, appears increasingly reliant on the celebrity draw for his campaign fundraisers. His next Dinner With Barack raffle tells would-be donors they can help pick Obama's guest, naming Clooney and Parker as examples.
Neither Mr Obama nor his Republican opponent Mitt Romney is expected to take public financing for November's election.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2159554/Barack-Obama-New-York-President-jets-evening-star-studded-fundraisers.html#ixzz1xrsvLrwe
Campaigner-in-chief: Obama jets out of New York on Air Force One after an evening of star-studded fundraisers... but a short trip to the World Trade Center means TAXPAYERS must pick up the check
By HUGO GYE and LOUISE BOYLE
PUBLISHED: 17:39 EST, 14 June 2012 | UPDATED: 08:01 EST, 15 June 2012
UK Daily Mail
President Barack Obama brought Manhattan to a standstill last night as he held two star-studded fundraising events at exclusive addresses in the city - raising a total of $4.5 million. However, the President's re-election campaign will not have to pay the full cost of his jaunt to the Big Apple, because he combined the trip with an official event which will be charged to the taxpayer. Before the fundraisers, one at actress Sarah Jessica Parker's house and one at the five-star Plaza Hotel, Mr Obama scheduled a visit to the World Trade Center site. Following his visits across New York he headed home to the White House in Washington DC aboard the presidential helicopter, Marine One.
Mr Obama has now held more fundraising events than the last six presidents combined, leading to his opponents coining the derisive nickname 'Campaigner in Chief'. He frequently combines the events with his official duties, which allows his re-election campaign to defray the President's travel costs by charging part of them to the public purse.
For a trip like yesterday's, involving both official duties and campaign events, a formula is applied so that the campaign pays part of the costs - but it still works out cheaper than making a trip purely for campaigning. Mr Obama must be accompanied by Secret Service protection and fly on Air Force One at all times for security reasons, further increasing the cost of his travel.
The World Trade Center, which Mr Obama has visited several times before, is a major building project and recipient of generous federal aid, as well as an iconic national memorial. It is unclear what prompted the President to return to the site - where he took the chance to hail 'the American spirit' - on this occasion.
The intimate dinner at the house of Sex and the City star Ms Parker and her actor husband Matthew Broderick banked about $2million, with 50 people paying $40,000 each to attend.
Ms Parker, dressed in a navy lace cocktail dress, a jewel-studded necklace and a giant diamond ring, gave the president a hug and kiss as she introduced him to the donors in her Manhattan home.
She referred to Michelle Obama as 'our radiant and extraordinary First Lady' and said the group of 50 donors had gathered 'hopefully, with enormous enthusiasm'.
Speaking in a dimly-lit, art-filled room, Mr Obama told supporters they would play a critical role in an election that would determine a vision for the nation's future.
'The other side is going to spend $500 million with a very simple message, which is "You’re frustrated, you’re disappointed, and it’s the fault of the guy in the White House",' he said. 'And that’s an elegant message. It happens to be wrong. But it’s crisp. You can fit it on a bumper sticker.
'So we’re going to have to work hard in this election. We’re going to have to work harder than we did in 2008.' He went on: 'You're the tie-breaker. You're the ultimate arbiter of which direction this country goes.'
Among the celebrities on hand to hear the President's remarks were Oscar winner Meryl Streep, fashion designer Michael Kors and Vogue editor Anna Wintour, who moderated a private question-and-answer session between the Mr Obama and the guests.
Mr Broderick, who was starring in a Broadway musical, was absent. New Orleans jazz musician Trombone Shorty performed for the guests, who were seated at two long tables that spanned two rooms, with the dividing doors thrown open.
Aretha Franklin, who left the party after just 20 minutes, told TMZ she ate 'chicken with a mustard sauce, diced tomatoes and a lot of relishes on the side of the plate'. The meal was prepared by Michael White, owner of Marea in Manhattan. Olivia Young, his publicist tweeted: 'I'm eating Marea steak in Sarah Jessica Parker's kitchen wearing no shoes. Oh and Obama is upstairs.'
During his address, Obama poured praise on Wintour, saying she was 'working hard in New York and Chicago' to help his campaign for re-election. He also had praise for his wife: 'I recognise that most of you are here to see Michelle,' he joked.
'I always explain I rank fifth in the hierarchy in the White House. There’s Michelle, my mother-in-law, the two girls and Bo. So that actually makes it six. In terms of star wattage, people come to the White House and say, "Where’s Michelle?"'
When the president mentioned that U.S. car manufacturer GM is 'back on top', Ms Parker's nine-year-old son started clapping, impromptu. 'That’s worth applauding,' Obama said with a smile as the donors laughed and also began clapping. 'Right on cue,' Obama said.
The night's second glitzy fundraiser was held at the Plaza Hotel for 250 guests, paying $10,000 each for dinner and a performance by Mariah Carey.
Co-host Newark Mayor Cory Booker and singer Alicia Keys addressed the crowd before Obama took the microphone to speak of the challenges the economic downturn has brought Americans. 'The crux of this campaign is going to be about the economy,' he said.
Some New Yorkers reacted with anger at the prospect of footing the bill for Mr Obama's fundraising visit to the city. Lauren Greenwood, a 28-year-old who works in medical sales, told MailOnline that while she had no objection to the President attending campaign events, 'it shouldn’t be on New York taxpayers’ dollars to support him having parties.' But Jonathan Fischer, 24, disagreed, saying: 'He came here on business, he handled his business... He spends his days protecting the country, the rest is up to his own free will. He also pays taxes, so it doesn’t bother me.'
Much of downtown Manhattan was temporarily sealed off for the duration of Mr Obama's visit, and the street in the West Village neighbourhood where Ms Parker's house is situated was closed to pedestrians. Some pedestrians bemoaned the disruption caused to the New York streets by the presidential motorcade - Mary Grach told ABC that Mr Obama's visit was 'really inconveniencing a lot of commuters'. She added: 'There has to be a better way to go about it rather than putting out how many thousands of riders out of commission, and having to find another way home.'
In 2004, Democrats criticised George W. Bush for combining fundraisers with official duties, and Republicans have responded in kind this year. Mr Obama has been furiously fundraising ever since a Supreme Court decision removed most restrictions on spending by super PACs, outside groups which raise money to promote causes and candidates.
The President initially opposed super PACs, but earlier this year he relented and allowed top officials to speak at fundraising events organised by such groups. The Republican party has officially complained about Obama’s campaign activities.
In a letter, Reince Priebus, Republican National Committee chairman, alleged: 'Throughout his administration, but particularly in recent weeks, President Obama has been passing off campaign travel as "official events", thereby allowing taxpayers, rather than his campaign, to pay for his re-election efforts.'
During the 2008 election, Mr Obama declined public money for his campaign, allowing him to raise an unlimited amount privately. He ended up spending around $730million, almost double the amount raised by his rival John McCain.
Republicans also lambasted Obama for courting celebrities for dollars while middle-class angst rides high. The party lampooned the President when his campaign promoted Ms Parker's event on the same day news broke of climbing unemployment.
Priebus wrote a column on conservative website Breitbart.com criticising the president for declaring the private sector was 'doing fine' during a news conference last week. 'Where would President Obama get an outrageous idea like "the private sector is doing fine?" Perhaps from one of his many star-studded fundraisers,' he wrote.
'The president has his priorities all backward. He puts growing government ahead of growing the economy, his job above American jobs, and celebrity galas above presidential duties.' Obama, who has been seen at recent events with George Clooney, Tobey Maguire and Jessica Alba, appears increasingly reliant on the celebrity draw for his campaign fundraisers. His next Dinner With Barack raffle tells would-be donors they can help pick Obama's guest, naming Clooney and Parker as examples.
Neither Mr Obama nor his Republican opponent Mitt Romney is expected to take public financing for November's election.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2159554/Barack-Obama-New-York-President-jets-evening-star-studded-fundraisers.html#ixzz1xrsvLrwe
Friday, June 8, 2012
CBS Boss admits journalism is partisan
Not really anything to add to this one, quote kinda speaks for itself. Read the original here.
CBS CHIEF MOONVES ATTENDS OBAMA FUNDRAISER, OUTS JOURNALISM AS 'PARTISAN'
by JOHN NOLTE
7 June 2012
breitbart.com
Last night in Los Angeles as our economy burned, President Barack Obama continued along his record-setting fundraising pace(events, not cash raised) with a stop among the glittery Top 1% at a LGBT fundraiser that included Ellen Degeneres, Cher, Chaz Bono, andCBS Corp. CEO and chairman Les Moonves. Part of what Moonves does is oversee the CBS News division, which makes the fact that he attended a political fundraiser fascinating, but not as fascinating as what he told The Los Angeles Times:
CBS chief Les Moonves and his wife, Julie Chen, waited patiently for their wristbands. Obama, Moonves said, "has shown great leadership" on the issue of gay marriage.
Though he heads a news division, Moonves said, "ultimately journalism has changed … partisanship is very much a part of journalism now."
He hastened to add that despite his presence, "I run a news division. I've given no money to any candidate."
It's plausible Moonves could've attended this bigtime fundraiser as a guest, meaning someone else paid for his ticket so he could maintain that he has "given no money to any candidate." But what's the head of a major news division doing at this kind of partisan event to begin with? He certainly wasn't there to cover it for CBS. And what's he thinking publicly gushing over Obama's "great leadership" on the divisive issue of same-sex marriage?
Anyway, his statement about how "partisanship is very much a part of journalism now" is not only interesting considering he said it at a Obama fundraiser, but it's also a falsehood.
Partisanship has always been a part of journalism, especially at CBS News. It's just that the network always has and always will hide its partisanship behind a phony shield of objectivity and nonsense loopholes such as, "I'm at this bigtime fundraiser but have never given money to any candidate."
But what Moonves is doing here is finally (and probably by accident) admitting that the media is partisan. It's also interesting that he's outing journalism in general, not just the openly partisan media that has blossomed online or on talk radio.
He's calling "journalism" partisan -- and indeed it is.
So the only surprise is that someone with Moonves's status is finally admitting it.
More irony: Moonves outing all of journalism at an LGBT event.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
CBS CHIEF MOONVES ATTENDS OBAMA FUNDRAISER, OUTS JOURNALISM AS 'PARTISAN'
by JOHN NOLTE
7 June 2012
breitbart.com
Last night in Los Angeles as our economy burned, President Barack Obama continued along his record-setting fundraising pace(events, not cash raised) with a stop among the glittery Top 1% at a LGBT fundraiser that included Ellen Degeneres, Cher, Chaz Bono, andCBS Corp. CEO and chairman Les Moonves. Part of what Moonves does is oversee the CBS News division, which makes the fact that he attended a political fundraiser fascinating, but not as fascinating as what he told The Los Angeles Times:
CBS chief Les Moonves and his wife, Julie Chen, waited patiently for their wristbands. Obama, Moonves said, "has shown great leadership" on the issue of gay marriage.
Though he heads a news division, Moonves said, "ultimately journalism has changed … partisanship is very much a part of journalism now."
He hastened to add that despite his presence, "I run a news division. I've given no money to any candidate."
It's plausible Moonves could've attended this bigtime fundraiser as a guest, meaning someone else paid for his ticket so he could maintain that he has "given no money to any candidate." But what's the head of a major news division doing at this kind of partisan event to begin with? He certainly wasn't there to cover it for CBS. And what's he thinking publicly gushing over Obama's "great leadership" on the divisive issue of same-sex marriage?
Anyway, his statement about how "partisanship is very much a part of journalism now" is not only interesting considering he said it at a Obama fundraiser, but it's also a falsehood.
Partisanship has always been a part of journalism, especially at CBS News. It's just that the network always has and always will hide its partisanship behind a phony shield of objectivity and nonsense loopholes such as, "I'm at this bigtime fundraiser but have never given money to any candidate."
But what Moonves is doing here is finally (and probably by accident) admitting that the media is partisan. It's also interesting that he's outing journalism in general, not just the openly partisan media that has blossomed online or on talk radio.
He's calling "journalism" partisan -- and indeed it is.
So the only surprise is that someone with Moonves's status is finally admitting it.
More irony: Moonves outing all of journalism at an LGBT event.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
Thursday, June 7, 2012
Harassment in the 21st century...
...classy move. I wonder how Attorney General Holder will react to the Senator's request. I'm predicting that this story will just go away, and no investigation will be opened by the DOJ. Flip the ideologies, and you better believe that Holder would have hearings and investigations and arrests. At least that's my $0.02. Read the original here.
Senator Asks DOJ to Investigate SWAT-ting Attacks on Conservative Bloggers
Senator Asks DOJ to Investigate SWAT-ting Attacks on Conservative Bloggers
Jun 6, 2012 6:37pm
A number of conservative bloggers allege they have been targeted through the use of harassment tactics such as SWAT-ting (fooling 911 operators into sending emergency teams to their homes), in retaliation for posts they have written, and now Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., has stepped into the matter. He has sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder urging him to investigate the SWAT-ting cases to see if federal laws have been violated.
“I am writing with concern regarding recent reports that several members of the community of online political commentators have been targeted with harassing and frightening actions. Any potentially criminal action that incites fear, seeks to silence a dissenting opinion, and collaterally wastes the resources of law enforcement should be given close scrutiny at all levels,” Chambliss wrote in the letter.
“Regardless of any potential political differences that may exist, threats and intimidation have no place in our national political discourse. Those who choose to enter into that political discourse should not have to worry about potential threats to their or their family’s safety,” Chambliss continued. “While I am certain that local law enforcement is reviewing each of these instances, I am asking you to please look into each of these cases as well to determine if any federal laws may have been violated. Future targets of SWAT-ting, whether engaged in political speech or not, may not be so fortunate as to escape physical harm.”
ABC News spoke with two prominent conservative bloggers who were victims of SWAT-ting, a hoax tactic used by some hackers to infiltrate a victim’s phone system, often through voice over IP (VOIP) technology to make calls appear as if they are coming from a residence. The perpetrators call police to report a violent crime at that home to which the police respond, sometimes with SWAT teams.
Just after midnight on July 1, 2011, Patrick Frey, a deputy District Attorney in Los Angeles and a conservative blogger who writes under the name “Patterico,” heard a pounding at his door as sheriff’s deputies arrived to investigate a call from Frey’s home about a man who claimed he had killed his wife. But no one in Frey’s home had been killed, and no one had made a phone call to the police.
“It’s a phone call that could have gotten me killed,” Frey wrote on his blog about the incident.
Frey was cuffed by police while they woke up his wife, who was asleep in their room, and questioned her about the safety of the children. Helicopters swarmed overhead with searchlights as the sheriff’s deputies investigated.
Frey told ABC News he received email threats prior to the SWAT-ting incident.
Late last month, Erick Erickson, the editor of the conservative site RedState.com, was the victim of the same type of targeting. He had written about Frey’s case just a few days before.
Erickson sat at home in Macon, Georgia with his family while his children played outside over Memorial Day weekend when two sheriff’s deputies drove to the house after receiving a phone call about Erickson allegedly shooting his wife.
“My first thought was, ‘What have the kids done?’” Erickson said after seeing the police car outside his home. “The police officer approached me in the driveway and said it was a call about an accidental shooting. According to the 911 call, the person claimed I had killed my wife.”
Erickson, who said he has received other types of threats in the past, had alerted the sheriff’s department after Frey’s experience in case he became the victim of a similar occurrence.
The Bibb County District Attorney’s office in Georgia currently is investigating the case and could not offer comment on it. Asked who he suspected was responsible for the phone call to police, Erickson declined to speculate.
But several conservative bloggers have been vocal about who they believe is responsible for the SWAT-tings and other forms of harassment — Brett Kimberlin, a man who was convicted of a series of bombings in Speedway, Indiana in the 1980s and made headlines in 1988 when he claimed to have once sold marijuana to then-vice presidential candidate Dan Quayle.
The group of conservative bloggers organized “Everybody Blog About Brett Kimberlin Day” on May 25, during which they urged the blogging community to write about the actions of Kimberlin.
Kimberlin, who is now the director of a non-profit organization called Justice Through Music, told ABC News that he did not commit or ask anyone to conduct the SWAT-ting hoaxes that were perpetrated against Erickson and Frey.
“Of course not, it’s ridiculous. It’s totally irresponsible for them to even say this,” Kimberlin told ABC News. “There is no truth to anything about the SWAT-ting.”
But some conservative bloggers contend Kimberlin and his associates are responsible for other forms of harassment as well. Robert Stacy McCain, a contributor to the American Spectator and founder of The Other McCain Blog, wrote about Kimberlin, and shortly after, his wife’s place of employment received a phone call from Kimberlin accusing McCain of harassment. Based on Kimberlin’s ability to find his wife’s employer, McCain became concerned Kimberlin also knew the location of his home, so the McCain family relocated to an undisclosed location.
“If I was going to continue doing this story, I couldn’t do it from my home,” McCain told ABC News. ”This kind of intimidation — it’s a threat to protected first amendment expression.”
“It’s being treated as these are just bloggers playing around on Twitter, but this is serious business. It’s much more serious I think than most people now realize,” McCain said.
Ali Akbar, the president of the National Blogger’s Club, an organization established to support bloggers, recently was targeted by an anonymous website which posted the address of his mother’s home in Forth Worth, Texas, along with a picture of the house. Akbar and other bloggers believe the website, “Breitbart Unmasked,” is linked to Kimberlin.
The National Blogger’s Club recently started a relief fund to help ease the financial woes of bloggers who are undergoing lawsuits, including one lawsuit by Kimberlin against blogger Aaron Walker, and Akbar believes the anonymous post of his mother’s home address was a response to the creation of this fund.
“They decided to take this from a discussion about me trying to help some members of my club, and they tried to disable us,” Akbar said.
Akbar and his mother are cooperating with the Tarrant County District Attorney’s office regarding the incident.
Kimberlin denied he was responsible for the post, even saying that he does not maintain any online presence and said he and his family have been victims of threats themselves and accused the bloggers of constructing a “false narrative” about him.
“I don’t blog, I don’t comment, I don’t tweet on any blogs at all. This is a right-wing attack on me and my organizations and it’s a smear job. It’s a swift boat action against us,” Kimberlin said. “What they’re doing is an obstruction of justice and it’s defamatory. We’re cooperating with the authorities in this matter. They have engaged in a massive smear campaign against us that has resulted in death threats to me and my family and to others associated with us.”
The FBI has investigated a number of SWAT-ting incidents in the past. In 2009, Carlton Nalley was sentenced to nine years in federal prison after pleading guilty to offenses related to a SWAT-ting conspiracy in Fort Worth, Texas.
Arlette Saenz
ABC NEWS
A number of conservative bloggers allege they have been targeted through the use of harassment tactics such as SWAT-ting (fooling 911 operators into sending emergency teams to their homes), in retaliation for posts they have written, and now Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., has stepped into the matter. He has sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder urging him to investigate the SWAT-ting cases to see if federal laws have been violated.
“I am writing with concern regarding recent reports that several members of the community of online political commentators have been targeted with harassing and frightening actions. Any potentially criminal action that incites fear, seeks to silence a dissenting opinion, and collaterally wastes the resources of law enforcement should be given close scrutiny at all levels,” Chambliss wrote in the letter.
“Regardless of any potential political differences that may exist, threats and intimidation have no place in our national political discourse. Those who choose to enter into that political discourse should not have to worry about potential threats to their or their family’s safety,” Chambliss continued. “While I am certain that local law enforcement is reviewing each of these instances, I am asking you to please look into each of these cases as well to determine if any federal laws may have been violated. Future targets of SWAT-ting, whether engaged in political speech or not, may not be so fortunate as to escape physical harm.”
ABC News spoke with two prominent conservative bloggers who were victims of SWAT-ting, a hoax tactic used by some hackers to infiltrate a victim’s phone system, often through voice over IP (VOIP) technology to make calls appear as if they are coming from a residence. The perpetrators call police to report a violent crime at that home to which the police respond, sometimes with SWAT teams.
Just after midnight on July 1, 2011, Patrick Frey, a deputy District Attorney in Los Angeles and a conservative blogger who writes under the name “Patterico,” heard a pounding at his door as sheriff’s deputies arrived to investigate a call from Frey’s home about a man who claimed he had killed his wife. But no one in Frey’s home had been killed, and no one had made a phone call to the police.
“It’s a phone call that could have gotten me killed,” Frey wrote on his blog about the incident.
Frey was cuffed by police while they woke up his wife, who was asleep in their room, and questioned her about the safety of the children. Helicopters swarmed overhead with searchlights as the sheriff’s deputies investigated.
Frey told ABC News he received email threats prior to the SWAT-ting incident.
Late last month, Erick Erickson, the editor of the conservative site RedState.com, was the victim of the same type of targeting. He had written about Frey’s case just a few days before.
Erickson sat at home in Macon, Georgia with his family while his children played outside over Memorial Day weekend when two sheriff’s deputies drove to the house after receiving a phone call about Erickson allegedly shooting his wife.
“My first thought was, ‘What have the kids done?’” Erickson said after seeing the police car outside his home. “The police officer approached me in the driveway and said it was a call about an accidental shooting. According to the 911 call, the person claimed I had killed my wife.”
Erickson, who said he has received other types of threats in the past, had alerted the sheriff’s department after Frey’s experience in case he became the victim of a similar occurrence.
The Bibb County District Attorney’s office in Georgia currently is investigating the case and could not offer comment on it. Asked who he suspected was responsible for the phone call to police, Erickson declined to speculate.
But several conservative bloggers have been vocal about who they believe is responsible for the SWAT-tings and other forms of harassment — Brett Kimberlin, a man who was convicted of a series of bombings in Speedway, Indiana in the 1980s and made headlines in 1988 when he claimed to have once sold marijuana to then-vice presidential candidate Dan Quayle.
The group of conservative bloggers organized “Everybody Blog About Brett Kimberlin Day” on May 25, during which they urged the blogging community to write about the actions of Kimberlin.
Kimberlin, who is now the director of a non-profit organization called Justice Through Music, told ABC News that he did not commit or ask anyone to conduct the SWAT-ting hoaxes that were perpetrated against Erickson and Frey.
“Of course not, it’s ridiculous. It’s totally irresponsible for them to even say this,” Kimberlin told ABC News. “There is no truth to anything about the SWAT-ting.”
But some conservative bloggers contend Kimberlin and his associates are responsible for other forms of harassment as well. Robert Stacy McCain, a contributor to the American Spectator and founder of The Other McCain Blog, wrote about Kimberlin, and shortly after, his wife’s place of employment received a phone call from Kimberlin accusing McCain of harassment. Based on Kimberlin’s ability to find his wife’s employer, McCain became concerned Kimberlin also knew the location of his home, so the McCain family relocated to an undisclosed location.
“If I was going to continue doing this story, I couldn’t do it from my home,” McCain told ABC News. ”This kind of intimidation — it’s a threat to protected first amendment expression.”
“It’s being treated as these are just bloggers playing around on Twitter, but this is serious business. It’s much more serious I think than most people now realize,” McCain said.
Ali Akbar, the president of the National Blogger’s Club, an organization established to support bloggers, recently was targeted by an anonymous website which posted the address of his mother’s home in Forth Worth, Texas, along with a picture of the house. Akbar and other bloggers believe the website, “Breitbart Unmasked,” is linked to Kimberlin.
The National Blogger’s Club recently started a relief fund to help ease the financial woes of bloggers who are undergoing lawsuits, including one lawsuit by Kimberlin against blogger Aaron Walker, and Akbar believes the anonymous post of his mother’s home address was a response to the creation of this fund.
“They decided to take this from a discussion about me trying to help some members of my club, and they tried to disable us,” Akbar said.
Akbar and his mother are cooperating with the Tarrant County District Attorney’s office regarding the incident.
Kimberlin denied he was responsible for the post, even saying that he does not maintain any online presence and said he and his family have been victims of threats themselves and accused the bloggers of constructing a “false narrative” about him.
“I don’t blog, I don’t comment, I don’t tweet on any blogs at all. This is a right-wing attack on me and my organizations and it’s a smear job. It’s a swift boat action against us,” Kimberlin said. “What they’re doing is an obstruction of justice and it’s defamatory. We’re cooperating with the authorities in this matter. They have engaged in a massive smear campaign against us that has resulted in death threats to me and my family and to others associated with us.”
The FBI has investigated a number of SWAT-ting incidents in the past. In 2009, Carlton Nalley was sentenced to nine years in federal prison after pleading guilty to offenses related to a SWAT-ting conspiracy in Fort Worth, Texas.
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