The federal government helped fund a study that examined what effect a gay man’s penis size has on his sex life and general well-being. . . .
This particular research resulted in a 2009 report titled, “The Association Between Penis Size and Sexual Health Among Men Who Have Sex with Men.” . . .
Though it’s difficult to trace exactly how much federal funding went to the project, the study was one of many linked to an $899,769 grant in 2006. The grant was administered by NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse, and went first to a group called Public Health Solutions and a researcher with the National Development and Research Institutes before going to individual researchers.
Those researchers then compiled data from a survey of more than 1,000 gay and bisexual men at events in New York City for the gay community.
And if you’re against using taxpayer dollars for that, you’re anti-science — and quite possibly anti-sex, too!
“I think there’s still time to get something big done,” [White House budget director Jack] Lew said. . . .
Lew said on NBC’s “Meet The Press” that the president “made clear he wants the largest deal possible.”“He wants to do the most we can to reduce the deficit,” Lew said. “But he also said that if we can’t get the most done, then in addition to extending the debt we should do as much as we can.” House Republicans are preparing to vote this week on allowing an increase in the government’s borrowing limit through 2012 as long as Congress approves a balanced-budget constitutional amendment.
Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., called that proof that Republicans are willing to compromise and “hardly a radical idea” but the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, Dick Durbin of Illinois, said that bill doesn’t have the needed support in the Senate.
“This notion that we have to change the Constitution to do what we were elected to do is just plain wrong,” Durbin said. Both senators spoke on “Meet the Press.”
Lew, appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union,” also did not like the idea.
“What these ideas do is say let’s kick the can down the road so that others will deal with it,” he said. “The challenge is for Washington now to do the job the American people sent us here to do.”
Three words: Bipartisan kabuki dance.
Making the debt-ceiling increase contingent on passing a balanced budget amendment is the kind of meaningless symbolic gesture that will deceive no one with enough intelligence and knowledge to actually comprehend what the current debate is about.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, suggested during a House floor speech Friday that raising the debt ceiling was being held up by members of Congress because President Obama is black.
“Only this president — only this one — only this one has received the kind of attacks and disagreements and inability to work,” she said. “Only this one. Read between the lines.”
“What is different about this president that should put him in a position that he should not receive the same kind of respectful treatment of when it is necessary to raise the debt limit in order to pay our bills?” she added. . . .
“In the minority community that is the question that is being raised. Why is this president being treated so disrespectfully?”
To the sin of racial demagoguery, Jackson-Lee adds also blatant hypocrisy because (as Don Surber reminds us) she voted against raising the debt ceiling when Bush was president. And y’know who else voted against raising the debt ceiling during the Bush administration?
Yeah. Senator Barack Hussein Obama, who said increased federal debt was the result of “reckless fiscal policies” and “failed leadership.” And he certainly is a world-class expert on those subjects.
I hope and pray that when the Texas legislature re-draws their congressional district lines, they find some way to force Jackson-Lee into a primary battle against another Democrat. Then liberals will get a taste of what kind of “civility” she practices.
President Obama is a “bully” who is “clearly failing” on economic policy, according to Newt Gingrich , and House Republicans should stop negotiating with the White House and move forward with passing their own solutions to the debt-ceiling and budget deficit.
“Obama has put the ‘bully’ back in the bully pulpit,” Gingrich told reporters Friday afternoon. The former Speaker of the House and current GOP presidential hopeful accused Obama of “intellectual dishonesty,” and said congressional Republicans should “take Social Security off the table” in the current debate over the federal debt ceiling.
John Boehner and House Republicans should “quit talking to Obama and start passing legislation,” Gingrich said in a conference call with a number of writers for conservative publications and blogs. . . .
Read the rest at The American Spectator. In a situation like that — where everybody and his dog is on the same conference call — the trick is to take good notes, figure out your lede before the call ends, and be the first to whip out a quick 200 words. Let somebody else transcribe the whole thing and write an 800-word analysis, if they want. Just get the scoop while the getting’s good.
Take notes, kids. This will be on your final exam.
UPDATE: The conference call was billed as a follow-up on Gingrich’s recent appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show:
The way it is written I think is basically a surrender by the Republicans. Now is the time to be calm, courageous, creative and clear. To be calm, first I want you to understand. Obama is under as much pressure as the Republicans are. Does he want to be the first president in American history to default? Is he really going to go out to the world and say I can’t do my job and I can’t get Washington to work? I don’t think so. I think in the end he’s going to have to reach an agreement.
Second, I think that they have got to be courageous because this is a hard business. This is history. This isn’t politics. This isn’t 30-second attack commercials. This is a power struggle between the 80 percent of the American people who believe in a citizen-centered government and the 20 percent who believe in a Washington-centered government. That power struggle is as deep and as real as anything since the civil war. You have to have the courage to stand there and take the heat.
They’ve also got to be creative that’s why I suggested just now, pass a one-month debt ceiling increase and pay for it with the same number of dollars in savings and be prepared to come back a month later and do the same thing. And do it once a month until we win the presidency.
And finally, I think you have to be clear so the American people understand it.
Gingrich called on “everyone in the conservative movement” to “do what I’ve done, and call it the Obama Depression.”
“You can go everywhere in this country and find ways Obama kills jobs,” he asserted. “Obama is the best food stamp president in American history, but we need a paycheck president.”
Gingrich believes today’s congressional Republican leadership holds much higher ground than he did, during his legendary battles with President Bill Clinton. “Clinton was a natural centrist, but Obama is a radical.” He says Clinton won re-election [in 1996] by adopting Republican policies, such as welfare reform, while Obama is incapable of such ideological flexibility.
“Do we have the nerve to take on the most radical President in American history?” is the question Newt Gingrich wants every conservative to ask. . . .
Read the whole thing. Friendly advice to John: Never begin your story with “In a conference call with bloggers today . . .” Why? Because the real news-value is what he said, not where he said it or to whom he said it. Also, by leading with “conference call,” you’re telling the reader up front that what you’re reporting isn’t exclusive. But if your story contains important material that the other reporters on the call forgot to include, your story is exclusive to that extent, and therefore you don’t want to start off by signaling the reader, in effect: “Hey, a dozen other publications have the same story, so this isn’t really anything special.”
Therefore, when reporting a conference call, do what I did:
Lead with the news.
Slip into the second paragraph the fact that the subject “told reporters” such-and-so; and then
At some point later in the story, mention that all this stuff was said in a conference call, or during a speech to a Kiwanis Club, or overheard in a bar while the politician was sloppy drunk and trying to pick up a 17-year-old.
On second thought, sometimes where a politician says something is more important than what he says, but that’s just the exception that proves the rule.
Newt Gingrich thinks that Republicans should only hike the debt ceiling by as much as Democrats are willing to cut spending by.
“The principle for a long-term debt ceiling hike ought to be very simple: the president does not get any more money in the debt ceiling than he signs into savings. So if he wants a trillion dollars increase in the debt ceiling, there has to be a trillion dollars in savings in how the government is run,” Gingrich said in a conference call with reporters this afternoon.
Gingrich focused on waste, fraud and abuse when talking about how spending could be cut, arguing that applying Six Sigma business practices to the government could save as much as $500 billion. He also cited a study done by his Center for Health Transformations that estimated Medicare and Medicaid theft amounted to $70 billion to $120 billion. He pointed to Rep. Paul Ryan’s $700 billion savings estimate for block granting Medicaid, and recommended that cabinet officers should eliminate the 10 percent of workers least effective under them. . . .
Read the rest. Katrina got her story online about 30 minutes after I did, and adds serious news value with the detail about the specifics of Gingrich’s policy ideas, but I still think his “bully” remark was the obvious headline from the story. To have a candidate for president call the incumbent a “bully” is news, any way you slice it.
“I don’t trust this President. . . . He doesn’t know how to make those cuts. He’s never had to do this before. He’s always just been one to spend other people’s money even if that money is just borrowed money or printed out of thin air. He’s never had to exercise real executive authority like that.”
Exactly right! Go through Obama’s resume and try to find when he was ever in a position of executive authority, responsible for making tough decisions about budget matters, especially in a situation like this, where spending must be cut or else.
Say what you will about Sarah Palin, love her or hate her, she has put the hammer on the nail of the essential problem with Obama’s presidency: He won the Democratic nomination by out-flanking Hillary Clinton to the left on opposition to the Iraq War (which Hillary had voted for) and also on health-care, where he advocated a Canadian style single-payer system. The presidency he and his supporters originally had in mind was one in which America would have the political luxury of pursuing a pacifist foreign policy while expanding the liberal Welfare State domestically.
On whether House Republicans have enough power to force a politically successful outcome:
I think what we’re losing sight of here is in the end, all this is about who gets the blame. It’s like with Gingrich and Clinton. . . . Gingrich attempted to govern when the Republicans had [control of] two houses of Congress in the absence of the presidency and were defeated. And now the idea is that Republicans are going to govern and impose all the cuts holding only the House? It’s impossible.
And if they lose the battle here — the public relations battle — it can be like ‘96 all over again. They’re going to lose the presidency. If they want real change, they’re going to have to elect a Republican.
This is the part where the blogs are standing athwart history yelling “POST!”
We have got to post blog article after article screaming that the debt crisis is not about whether the Democrat or Republican deck chair arrangement is inferior on our economic Titanic, but rather that the ship has been on a statist course for far too long.
Krauthammer’s realpolitik point certainly captures the Ruling Class vantage point accurately. But the blame game, itself, is mere distraction.
Lawmakers and the White House had what nearly every party is describing as a “tough” and “testy” meeting on the debt ceiling Wednesday afternoon, culminating in a stormy exchange between President Obama and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.). . . .
At issue was Cantor’s repeated push to do a short-term resolution and Obama’s insistence that he would not accept one. “Eric, don’t call my bluff. I’m going to the American people on this,” the president said, according to both Cantor and another attendee. “This process is confirming what the American people think is the worst about Washington: that everyone is more interested in posturing, political positioning, and protecting their base, than in resolving real problems.”
Cantor, speaking to reporters after the meeting, said that the president “abruptly” walked off after offering his scolding.
“I know why he lost his temper. He’s frustrated. We’re all frustrated,” the Virginia Republican said.
If you’re a hopeless rube, you might get the idea that Obama was JFK and this was the Cuban Missile Crisis. In fact, the outcome is pre-ordained — a bipartisan budget “compromise” on the debt-ceiling will be reached, somehow — and people who voted Republican last fall will wake up feeling sore and ashamed.
POH Diaries writes that there was “quite a bit of debate about whether or not Mitch McConnell was just trying to snooker Obama into ‘owning’ the debt or if he’s really planning on being a spineless capitulator like a lot of us feared.” But there’s nothing to debate: Mitch is a spineless capitulator.
Like Trent Lott and Bob Dole before him, Mitch is the Senate Republican leader, and the job of the Senate Republican leader is to make conservative voters say to themselves: “What the hell is the point in voting for those worthless RINO douchebags? Might as well stay home on Election Day!”
It is a fact of history that no one has ever tried to assassinate a Senate Republican leader — not even the wildest madman would bother wasting ammunition on such worthless creatures.
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham conceded Wednesday that he and his fellow Republicans are now eating their own words as they try to convince the country they are working to stave off a federal default.
“Our problem is we made a big deal about this for three months. How many Republicans have been on TV saying, ‘I’m not going to raise the debt limit.’ You know, Mitch [McConnell] says, ‘I’m not going to raise the debt limit unless we talk about Medicare.’ And I’ve said I’m not going to raise the debt limit until we do something about spending and entitlements.’ So we’ve got nobody to blame but ourselves,” Graham told reporters after a GOP caucus lunch.
“We shouldn’t have said that if we didn’t mean it.”
What kind of fool expects Republican senators to mean what they say?
Let’s just hope someone will slip an earmark into the final bill to fund a grant from the National Institutes of Health for researchers to conduct a mental-health survey of South Carolina Republican voters. We need to prevent the spread of whatever dangerous insanity caused them to make Lindsey Graham a senator.
