Ah, the Obama economy. Sort of like the Carter economy but without that horrific toothy grin to entertain us. But as a young man during the Carter years, I can attest to the fact that it was virtually impossible to find a decent job. Even McDonald's was hiring adults desperate for a paycheck to feed their families. For teenagers in Washington, D.C. and California, finding a job just got a lot harder: As summer break approaches and school seasons conclude, teens in California...
It's brought down governments from the Czar, to Chang Kai Shek, to Somalia. When food runs out, the leader has got to go. Now, the turn of Syria. Reuters: Trade sources said a reluctance among foreign banks, shipowners and grain traders to sell to import-dependent Syria - even though food is not itself subject to sanctions - has forced Damascus into an array of unusually small deals, many arranged by shadowy middlemen around the Middle East and Asia. On Friday, in what might...
You've no doubt heard about the emails and documents released after an FOIA request from Judicial Watch regarding contact between the Department of Defense and film makers who are planning a movie about the bin Laden raid. Apparently, there was much discussion about giving Kathy Bigelow ("Hurt Locker") access to highly classified information, as well as giving her unprecedented access to secret CIA sites. The Pentagon claims that there was no follow through with most of the classified disclosures but it's clear that...
The 7th annual International Climate Change Conference ended on Wednesday with growing signs that skeptics are making steady progress in their efforts to turn back the tide of the alarmists. I covered the conference for PJ Media and pointed out that while progress is real, much remains to be done: Dodging the Waxman-Markey bullet may have been a high point, but, as many speakers at the conference pointed out, the failure to pass cap and tax gave Americans only temporary respite. The EPA's...
It has gotten so bad for the Obama campaign that even Politico is starting to notice that Obama's got nothing much to offer voters and can't articulate an appealing message. Of course, in order to break this news to inhabitants of the liberal bubble, it casts the problem as a "stumble out of the gate" -- sticking to the beloved horse race metaphor. Heavyweights Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei write: Obama, not Mitt Romney, is the one with the muddled message...
National Democrats - Obama included - are acting as if Wisconsin is on another planet these days. "Recall? What Recall?" they're telling their union friends who are livid that the national party has failed to support their increasingily quixotic effort to unseat Scott Walker on June 5. The Hill: Top union officials are lashing out at Washington Democrats, claiming they haven't done enough to help them unseat Gov. Scott Walker (R) in Wisconsin's recall election. President Obama has been silent on the race...
For want of a streetlight, a city was lost. Bloomberg: Detroit, whose 139 square miles contain 60 percent fewer residents than in 1950, will try to nudge them into a smaller living space by eliminating almost half its streetlights. As it is, 40 percent of the 88,000 streetlights are broken and the city, whose finances are to be overseen by an appointed board, can't afford to fix them. Mayor Dave Bing's plan would create an authority to borrow $160 million to upgrade and...
James Pethokoukis of the Enterprise Blog has been having a lot of fun at Rex Nutting's expense. Nutting was the guy who came out and said earlier this week that the GOP was lying about Obama being a big spender. First, Pethokoukis posted a blog showing how Nutting was, well...nuts. Federal spending as a share of GDP has skyrocketed under Obama. Now Jim has posted another graph that's even more devastating: the percentage increase in federal spending under Obama: Nutting's methodology assumes spending...
Reports from the NY Times and Reuters confirm that the Muslim Brotherhood's late entry "replacement" candidate, Mohammed Morsi, and a rival Muslim Brotherhood member candidate, Aboul Fotouh, garnered first and third place, 25% and 20% of the vote tally, respectively, during the first round of voting in the Egyptian Presidential elections. Second place went to another late entry in the contest. Ahmed Shafik, a former Air Force general who briefly served as Mr. Mubarak's last prime minister, and received 23% of the vote....
"Phui. That is flummery." That's what Rex Stout once had Nero Wolfe interject. Well, now Marc Thiesen has so said to the Obama Camp regarding its campaign against "Private Equity" and Governor Romney in his excellent Washington Post article. Their thesis (being a muddled bit along the lines of: "Profit for profit's sake is not what investing should be about") is deftly countered by Mr. Thiesen's disquisition on "Public Equity" best summarized as: After all, if Romney's record in private equity is fair game,...
In the fourth volume of his masterful biography of Lyndon Johnson, The Passage of Power, Robert Caro makes an interesting observation about the congressional budget fight of 1963. Caro, a liberal himself, notes approvingly, "Liberals wanted a larger role for government, wanted bigger, and new, government social welfare programs and therefore a larger budget." This much hasn't changed. What has changed is the way liberals scheme to fund those programs. "They believed," writes Caro casually, "the $11 billion tax cut would, by putting...
A doctor who assisted the US in finding Osama bin Laden hiding in Pakistan has been convicted of treason and sentenced to 33 years in prison. In retaliation, a rare bi-partisan show of unity ensued in the senate as angry members of the Appropriations Committee unanimously voted to slash $33 million from US aid to Pakistan - a million dollars for each year of the doctor's sentence. Reuters: U.S. senators scandalized by Pakistan's jailing of a doctor for helping the CIA find Osama...
One of the most talented members of the conservative blogosphere finally has his own website. Big Fur Hat, the irrepressible visual artist, writer, and phone interviewer, has established itsbigfurhat.com. Already famous for his activities on iOwntheWorld.com, including BFH is free to take chances and skate closer to the edge on his own site, while maintaining cordial relations with iOTW, called the Mothership on the site. The site is debuting today a new episode of BFH's 99 second internet radio show, in which he...
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Congratulations have to go to Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, better known as the Ground Zero Imam, for his splendid performance on Sean Hannity's May 23 evening interview. Whether Hannity knew it or not, Imam Feisal used his audience to deliver a well-thought out 'taqiyyah' act where he apologizes profusely, as a "moderate" Muslim, for his various "insensitive" remarks about Americans being accessories to 9/11, their role in spilling more blood than Al Queda, and for not condemning Hamas, Hezbollah and Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist...
Recently, I was back in Wisconsin with The Campaign To Defeat Barack Obama. I had never heard of Wausau, Wisconsin until my visit to challenge Team Obama's recall of Gov. Scott Walker. Downtown Wausau is extremely charming. Folks, I am talking Mayberry, USA. My first night in Wausau, a high school orchestra performed a concert on the beautiful stage in the picturesque town square. Streets are clean and lined with friendly, quaint shops. I kept an eye out for Andy, Aunt Bee, Barney,...
The Soros-funded website run by the eccentric David Brock featured American Thinker's article yesterday on the illusion of presidential leadership in the Bin Laden raid. Unable to actually engage the detailed analysis offered in the article, Media Matters chose to highlight an anomaly the article considered and explained was not likely to be significant. Accusing AT of making an accusation we didn't actually make. That's par for the course with this propaganda exercise which pays lavish six figure salaries to its senior staff,...
AT's Political Correspondent Rich Baehr believes that part of the reason for the surge in pro-life sentiment comes from an increase in the Hispanic population. This is no doubt true to some extent, but Gallup traces the history of the question they have asked since 1995: The 41% of Americans who now identify themselves as "pro-choice" is down from 47% last July and is one percentage point below the previous record low in Gallup trends, recorded in May 2009. Fifty percent now call...
National Public Radio (NPR) recently reported the unusual story of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analysts publicly sharing changes in the way CIA develops analysis used by policymakers, including the President, in the wake of seemingly inaccurate conclusions about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD). NPR felt this change particularly noteworthy given the continuing controversy about evaluations of Iran's possible nuclear capabilities. Among other changes in the way CIA trains its analysts and crafts its work product, CIA disclosed a move away from reaching...
Of course not. Cowboy Poetry Festivals are of vital importance to our national security. ABC: At a fundraiser for his re-election campaign in Denver tonight, President Obama set out to upend conventional Republican wisdom that his administration has been defined by excessive government spending. "I'm running to pay down our debt in a way that's balanced and responsible. After inheriting a $1 trillion deficit, I signed $2 trillion of spending cuts into law," he told a crowd of donors at the Hyatt Regency....
Recently, the Washingtonian reported that a pre-prom "prank" email appeared to have been sent from school administrators of Sidwell Friends School, the private $35K-per-year Washington DC institution that both Sasha and Malia Obama attend. The email was addressed to "Parents of the Sidwell Friends School Community" and advised parents of Upper School students that "their children would receive 'a voucher that may be redeemed for their choice of contraception' at this year's school prom." The striking thing about the email, besides being flawlessly...
Donald Douglas alerts us to this eye opening story about Will.I.Am.: The dude flew 286 miles in a private helicopter, touching down at Oxford's University Parks, and then rode an "environmentally-conscious bike" over to the Radcliffe Observatory in a lame attempt to avoid looking like a bigger hypocrite than Al Gore. The Telegraph explains: It is understood the journey, which is a 286 mile round-trip from London, used 71.5 gallons of fuel and released three-quarters of a ton of CO2 into the atmosphere....
The Trustees of Dartmouth College have been accused of corruption by a whistle-blower group of college insiders. The charge is a failure to supervise themselves and the endowment investment committee while they have taken close to $100 million in endowment manager fees. These alums are accused of making donations to the College in exchange for $600 million in business for the financial companies they run. And they are charged with directing $1 billion in endowment funds to their business friends, including to other...
Many writers, including me, shot out of the water the false math by Rex Nutting of Market Watch which places all of FY2009 spending at Bush's door step. But even if you take all of the FY2009 outlays and blame it on Bush - which would include the second half of TARP that Obama requested; most of the Auto Bailout which Obama pushed; The Mortgage/Loan Medication Program; The Omnibus Spending Bill signed by Obama March 2009; The Stimulus Bill, and the S-CHIP expansion...
Republicans in Congress better wake up and start freezing some of their own targets against the left if they hope to see a GOP victory in November. The level of corruption, from murdered federal agents to looting taxpayer monies got green companies like Solyndra to the war on religion should be enough to have our elected representatives up in arms. Yet, there are still legislators who remain squeamish in the face of our constitutional republic's impending demise. Sarah Palin got it right on Monday while...
Barack Obama is out knocking Mitt Romney's "profit maximizing" experience as irrelevant to the job of President and bad for individuals and communities. This line of thinking is sufficiently ignorant and incompetent so as to automatically disqualify Obama from the job he seeks. Profit maximizing, at the national level, is precisely what this nation now needs. This is so basic that writing it feels silly. Consider that gross domestic product (GDP) is the revenue line for the United States, with its most dynamic...
When I see the charge of "cultist" leveled against Republican standard-bearer Mitt Romney, I wonder how to respond when the pot calls the kettle black? The common meaning of a cult is a group of people who accept the leader's thoughts and decisions in place of their own individual judgments and choices. The cult leader is charismatic, often striking, and unshakable in the surety of his wisdom. The cult leader alone has God's phone number on speed dial. Those who follow the cult...
Scott Walker's campaign to avoid a recall on June 5 will receive a boost this week when a study performed by the Institute of Public Policy Research at Suffolk University is released showing that Walker's signature legislation reforming union collective bargaining will save state taxpayers more than a billion dollars. Wisconsin Reporter: Act 10, which curbed collective bargaining for most unionized public employees, in the whole has saved taxpayers more than $1 billion, according to The Economic Impacts of the Wisconsin Budget Repair...
On Monday 43 different Catholic institutions filed 12 separate lawsuits against Obama's HHS mandate requiring them to fund contraception, sterilization, and chemical abortions. The story has even greater impact than it appears at first glance because one of the institutions suing Obama is the University of Notre Dame, the same university that was derided by many Catholics for having Obama as a commencement speaker. In an election year where Obama needs to retain the Catholic vote it would seem newsworthy that the most...
Columnist Rex Nutting over at Market Watch has a story with the headline "Obama spending binge never happened." In it he argues "of all the falsehoods told about President Barack Obama, the biggest whopper is the one about his reckless spending spree." Nutting notes that Federal Spending from Fiscal Year 2008 to FY 2009 (Bush's last official budget) rose by 17% to $3.52 trillion, yet the 2013 Obama budget is only 1.4% larger than 2009; the smallest increase in sixty years. The reason,...
Yesterday, Tuesday 5/22/12, one year after his appointment, US ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker, announced he was stepping down, ostensibly for "health reasons." The announcement followed Monday's NATO summit in Chicago, where the alliance agreed to relinquish responsibility for Afghan security to that country's military forces by the middle of 2013, in preparation for the coalition's withdrawal of all of its 132,000 combat troops by the end of 2014. Notwithstanding his own pre-emptive departure, and ongoing "reconciliation" negotiations with (i.e., capitulation to) the...
