The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Silly AFP, Thinking BHO Will Hold To Any Prior View

Posted on | May 10, 2012 | 4 Comments

by Smitty

Watch this ad:

Here is the WaPoo with some background:

The House voted Wednesday to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank for another three years, permitting the agency to continue providing hundreds of millions of dollars in trade assistance to U.S. firms.
Lawmakers approved the plan 330 to 93, easily surpassing the two-thirds majority needed to pass the measure under a suspension of the normal House rules. All 183 Democrats voted for the bill, along with 147 Republicans, but 93 GOP lawmakers voted against it.
Signaling how quickly Congress hopes to resolve a weeks-long dispute on the agency, Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) has said that the Senate likely will move quickly to approve the measure.
The agency’s charter expires this month, and the bank is on the verge of hitting a $100 billion borrowing limit. The proposal approved Wednesday would raise the bank’s borrowing limit to $140 billion over the next three years. The limit would jump to $120 billion immediately, and then by $10 billion the next two years, so long as the bank’s default rates stay below 2 percent. As part of the deal, the Treasury Department will have to submit regular reports on the status of negotiations with other countries to cut or reduce import and export subsidies.

Because nothing says ‘reform’ quite like business as usual.

In this Breitbart audio excerpt from “Dream From My Father”, #OccupyResoluteDesk admits both to #Occupying a corner of the playground, and bullying a girl. No word on whether Coretta grew up to be a feminist or not.

Category: Barack Obama, Economics

‘Zimbabwe’ Ben Bernanke, AC/DC Fan?

Posted on | May 10, 2012 | 4 Comments

by Smitty

Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge:

From the lows in March 2009, 1150 S&P points have been ‘created-or-saved’ thanks to central bank largesse. That is a cost of $2 million for every S&P 500 point since the Fed started to expands its balance sheet by $2.3 trillion. Money-well-spent, we are sure you’ll agree.

I love the sound of financial manipulations in the morning. It sounds like Bernanke's zipper!
I am reminded of being very young, (was I even four years old?) at the grocery store with mom. She paid for our stuff, and handed the cashier a $10 or $20, and he made change. Seeing that mom had a higher number of bills and coins than she had started with, I valiantly attempted to argue that she had made money in the transaction. Indeed, you have to view the insanity of our financial system through a four-year-old’s to see any sense to it.

Alternately, the S&P score is all just an expensive AC/DC reference:

Category: End The Fed

Probably Just a Coincidence

Posted on | May 10, 2012 | 33 Comments

After public schools have spent the past two years engaged in elaborate (and federally funded) “anti-bullying” programs — with especial emphasis on protecting kids from the evils of homophobia — the Washington Post publishes a 5,000-word article portraying Mitt Romney as having been a high school bully who picked on gay kids.

By the way: The typical news story is 450-750 words. Five thousand words is enough copy to fill two entire pages of a newspaper.

We’ve never seen Barack Obama’s college transcripts, or senior thesis, and the only former girlfriend of his we know about is a composite perhaps based on a dead ex-girlfriend of his ghost writer, radical terrorist Bill Ayers. But the Washington Post can send a reporter out to do deep investigative journalism on Mitt Romney’s high-school days.

This is probably just a coincidence.

UPDATE: Question the timing, you say?

Funny how this appears one day after Obama’s forced-by-my-daughters’-emotions evolutionary announcement of support for same-sex “marriage.”

A Shermanesque statement from Professor Jacobson:

I once participated in a group which gave someone a wedgie when I was at summer camp in the 1960s. That’s why I’ll never run for President, my record is stained.

Dang it — another possible GOP contender fails the media vetting. At this rate, I’ll never get that ambassadorship to Vanuatu.

UPDATE II: These paranoid conspiracy theorists are everywhere!

Some critics saw the timing as evidence of media bias, suggesting that the motive had to do with making Romney look intolerant just as Obama had voiced his support for same-sex marriage.
Fox News host Brian Kilmeade, interviewing Romney on his radio show a few hours after the story landed online, said that since “everyone’s talking about same-sex marriage and tolerance and unions and what do you stand for, it’s amazing the timing of this Washington Post story … would seem to me it was somewhere shrink-wrapped, waiting to be unwrapped at the right time and this was the right time.”

Indeed. To report a story like that — to track down and interview somebody’s high-school classmates from a half-century ago — must have taken many weeks, if not months. The writing and editing of a 5,000-word story is not easy work. If you cranked out a thousand words a day (quite a rigorous pace, for original reporting), that’s a full week just to write the story, once you’d done all the interviews.

So, yeah, maybe they had it “shrink-wrapped,” ready to go.

UPDATE II: To give you some understanding of what it takes to produce 5,000 words of original reporting, I’ll cite a an article I wrote for the print edition of the American Spectator a couple years ago. “Battle Cry in the North Country” was 1,417 words and was written during a daylong gonzo frenzy in an airport lounge in Buffalo, N.Y., after I’d spent three weeks covering the Doug Hoffman campaign in NY-23. (I’d only been told that morning that I’d have to file by 5 p.m. to be able to get it in the December-January print edition.)

Cranking out 1,400 words in a single day left me completely fried. Now, try thinking about the amount of work needed to produce an article more than three times that long.

UPDATE III: You might ask, “How can the Washington Post afford to make such a massive investment of journalistic resources in vetting a politician’s activities in high school 50 years ago?” Well, if you’re willing to lose $22.6 million in a single three-month period . . .

UPDATE IV: Yeah, you get in a hurry on a 5,000-word story, and you’re bound to make a few mistakes, like claiming a guy has “long been bothered” by an incident he didn’t even know about until your reporter asked him about it. (Hat-tip: Ace of Spades.)

 


Category: Barack Obama, Election 2012, Media Bias, Mitt Romney

SEO, Social Networking and Other Crap I Don’t Have Time to Worry About

Posted on | May 10, 2012 | 11 Comments

If I had wanted to be a geek, I would have gone to Geek School and by now would probably be living in a mansion paid for with patent royalties and stock options. Instead, I became a journalist and — despite having nearly 12,000 Twitter followers — it never occurred to me to develop a comprehensive “digital strategy.” Maybe I can assign Smitty and Wombat to try to understand this stuff and put it to use for us:

The number of online news consumers has grown consistently over the past half-decade, yet not every publication has gotten the same lift as The Atlantic, whose web audience has catapulted from approximately 500,000 to 13.4 million monthly visitors since taking down its paywall in early 2008. . . .
Bob Cohn, who was recently promoted to editor of The Atlantic Digital, rejoices the change. “Before, it seemed Demand Media was going to own the Internet by assigning stories based on search returns. It was a cynical approach to journalism,” Cohn recalled. “We’re no longer writing to get the attention of Google algorithms. We’re writing to get you to share it, to digg it.”

Digg it. We’ve got those “share this” buttons at the bottom of every post, so if you wanted to Digg this, you could. Also, you could Tweet it, or link it at your Facebook page, or send it by e-mail to your friends. Especially if your friends are influential bloggers who might throw some more traffic our way, like Aleister at American Glob, for example.

See, that’s what we professional journalist types call a “transition,” whereby we change topics so seamlessly that the reader doesn’t even realize that all that stuff about “digital strategy” was just bait on the hook to get them to go over and hit Aleister’s tip jar.

It’s important to learn little tricks like that, and never publicly explain these tricks except in humorous “jokes,” because otherwise people might figure out that you’ve actually got a “digital strategy.” Read more

Category: Blogging

As a Notorious Homophobe, Of Course, I Don’t Do Broadway Show Tune Lyrics

Posted on | May 10, 2012 | 26 Comments

It would be too gay to say, for example, that you’ve got to be carefully taught to swallow Democrat Party propaganda without question. Therefore I’m grateful to Gay Patriot for invoking a tune from My Fair Lady in discussing Obama’s recent “evolution”:

He’s like the guy who tells his beloved how much he loves her, tells her wants to get married, but refuses to buy a ring or set a date.

Obama is treating his gay constituents as if they’ve got no other choice than to accept his contemptuous treatment of them. This is how Republicans often treat social conservatives, incidentally, and so there is probably more genuine empathy than most political observers could imagine: Hey, disgruntled gay Democrats, we feel your pain.

Being honestly in disagreement about an issue among friends is much better than being betrayed by dishonest people who want to exploit “friendship” as a one-way street, where you are obligated to be nice to them, but they have no obligation to be nice in return. You’d have to be a masochist to enjoy such a relationship, and this is why some of the loudest critics of the Democratic Party are, like me, ex-Democrats who finally wised up to the scam: “Vote for us, and we’ll give you a few meaningless table scraps, while we feast on the wealth and power that your support have provided us.”

That kind of exploitation is what the Obama machine has down to a science, and it’s rather amusing to see someone like John Cook of Gawker spot the bovine excrement or Adam Serwer of Mother Jones finally get a clue: “He did not support the North Carolina amendment, but he’s not saying he will bring up a piece of federal legislation on gay marriage.”

Oh, how nice of you to notice!

Attention, disgruntled gay Democrats: If you’re OK with free markets and a strong national defense, you might as well vote Republican. All that anti-gay talk you hear from the GOP? It’s just insincere political pandering, anyway. Those of us conservatives who sincerely believe in traditional marriage (a) don’t “hate” you, despite what you’ve been told by your Democrat overlords, and (b) have only enough influence to be pandered to every once in a while. Also, when the craven swindlers at GOP HQ lose an election, we’re always the scapegoats.

Just ask Sarah Palin or Christine O’Donnell.

So if you’re a gay Democrat — or any other kind of Democrat — who’s tired of pretending to believe all that “we care about you” crap from your party’s leaders, feel free to reconsider your partisan loyalty. If you want to get screwed over by a bunch of greedy treacherous swine, the Republican Party will be happy to oblige you. and at least Republicans don’t claim to be screwing you over in the pursuit of social justice.

Category: Democrats, Gays

President Obama Sends Me E-Mail

Posted on | May 10, 2012 | 23 Comments

Once you give Democrats your e-mail address, this kind of stuff just keeps showing up in your inbox:

Robert —
Today, I was asked a direct question and gave a direct answer:
I believe that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry.
I hope you’ll take a moment to watch the conversation, consider it, and weigh in yourself on behalf of marriage equality:
http://my.barackobama.com/Marriage
I’ve always believed that gay and lesbian Americans should be treated fairly and equally. I was reluctant to use the term marriage because of the very powerful traditions it evokes. And I thought civil union laws that conferred legal rights upon gay and lesbian couples were a solution.
But over the course of several years I’ve talked to friends and family about this. I’ve thought about members of my staff in long-term, committed, same-sex relationships who are raising kids together. Through our efforts to end the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, I’ve gotten to know some of the gay and lesbian troops who are serving our country with honor and distinction.
What I’ve come to realize is that for loving, same-sex couples, the denial of marriage equality means that, in their eyes and the eyes of their children, they are still considered less than full citizens.
Even at my own dinner table, when I look at Sasha and Malia, who have friends whose parents are same-sex couples, I know it wouldn’t dawn on them that their friends’ parents should be treated differently.
So I decided it was time to affirm my personal belief that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry.
I respect the beliefs of others, and the right of religious institutions to act in accordance with their own doctrines. But I believe that in the eyes of the law, all Americans should be treated equally. And where states enact same-sex marriage, no federal act should invalidate them.
If you agree, you can stand up with me here.
Thank you,
Barack

A few notes on this correspondence:

  • It’s about him. It’s always about him.
  • He congratulates himself on giving a direct answer to a question, because that doesn’t happen very often.
  • He tells you which side of the argument to “weigh in” on.
  • There are unnamed other people who do not believe “that gay and lesbian Americans should be treated fairly and equally.”
  • Obama, however, has always “believed  that gay and lesbian Americans should be treated fairly and equally” and, once his big-money gay donors threatened to stop writing him checks, he decided maybe he should say that out loud on national TV, six months before Election Day.
  • Also, Joe Biden had to go open his stupid mouth on national TV, which took away the option of saving this little surprise until after the election, damn it.
  • Obama was previously “reluctant” because of “very powerful traditions,” and we all know how respectful he’s always been toward traditions, right?
  • “I’ve talked to friends and family about this” — and by “friends and family,” he means major gay contributors who were threatening to cut of contributions to my re-election campaign.
  • He doesn’t name any “members of my staff in long-term, committed, same-sex relationships who are raising kids together,” because he wants to respect their privacy while using them as conveniently anonymous anecdotal evidence in a fundraising e-mail.
  • “I’ve gotten to know some of the gay and lesbian troops who are serving our country with honor and distinction” — these are the only members of the armed forces to whom he’s ever spoken. The Navy SEALs who took out Osama bin Laden? He didn’t give them any credit when he was spiking the football on the one-year anniversary, but he’s gotta make sure to give credit to the “honor and distinction” of The Gay and Lesbian Troops, so that gay people will write checks for his re-election campaign.
  • “Sasha and Malia . . . have friends whose parents are same-sex couples” — these are friends they met at Sidwell Friends School, the expensive ultra-snooty private school they attend, because I am such a proud supporter of Our Nation’s Public Education System.
  • “My personal belief that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry,” especially if gay donors are threatening to cut off their contributions to my re-election campaign.
  • “I respect the beliefs of others” — and by “respect,” I mean I’m planning to demonize them as deranged hateful bigots.
  • “[T]he right of religious institutions to act in accordance with their own doctrines” — hey, you remember how we’re going to force Catholic institutions to pay for abortion and contraceptives?
  • “[A]ll Americans should be treated equally” — especially major donors to my re-election campaign.
  • No fair wondering if this commitment to treating all Americans equally means that Obama is now opposed to affirmative action, you racists!
  • “And where states enact same-sex marriage, no federal act should invalidate them” — whereas, if you’re in one of the 32 states that have banned same-sex marriage, we’re going to crush you under the federal boot-heel as soon as I get re-elected.

You see, I’ve been getting these e-mails for years, so I am adept at translating Democratese.

Category: Barack Obama, Election 2012, Gays, Joe Biden, Marriage

If We Had an Actual Press Corps, They Would Be Asking …

Posted on | May 10, 2012 | 6 Comments

by Smitty

Driscoll links Harsanyi, “Obama supports same-sex marriage, cites states’ rights”:

Which begs an obvious question: If Obama has endorsed federalism and believes that states have the right to define marriage, then why doesn’t he support the ability of states to extricate themselves from Obamacare? Why don’t states have the right to dictate their immigration laws? And does he “personally” believe that states should be able decide the issue of abortion? Roe v. Wade exists, but so does the Defense of Marriage Act.

More generally, what are the meaningful political objects in our system, and by what rational, consistent, generally agreed upon rules are responsibilities assigned to them?

I anticipate #OccupyResoluteDesk would answer somewhere between a brief “Shut up,” or the even more elemental “Racist!” Now, if you’re a bundler dropping some cash, you might get told “I’ll do something beyond spewing words into the air after the election,” which is just long for “Hard questions are hahrd.”

Aside: Andrew McCarthy points to what an overweening, self-aggrandizing narcissist afflicts us. Let me stop there, before I get too upset.

Update: linked by Da Tech Guy

Category: Ed Driscoll, Instapundit

LIVE AT FIVE – 05.10.12

Posted on | May 10, 2012 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
Wreckage Of Russian Airplane Found In Java

Wreckage spotted on Mt. Salak near Jakarta; could be blow to Russian aircraft industry



Bombs Rip Damascus, Dozens Killed
Military intelligence building heavily damaged

Americans Divided As Obama Endorses Gay Marriage
Black preachers among those reconsidering support



POLITICS
Rick Santorum Explains Romney Endorsement To Jay Leno

Dismisses claims that endorsement is tepid

Former Deputy AG Nicholas Katzenbach Dies, 90

Parents Of Captured Soldier Want Prisoner Swap

Clooney’s Fundraiser For Obama Could Net $15 Million

Department Of Justice To Sue Sheriff Joe Arpaio

House Armed Services Committee Bans Gay Marriage On Military Bases, Authorizes East Coast Missile Defense Base

House Ethics Panel Won’t Launch Full Probe Of Vern Buchanan



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Oil Prices Continue Slide As US Stockpile Reaches Heights Not Seen In 22 Years; NYMEX $96.81
Spanish Stocks Strong As Government Commits To Nationalizing Troubled Bank
Wall Street Retreats Amid Greek Post-Election Gridlock
Cisco Shares Plunge On Weak Outlook
Bed, Bath & Beyond Buys Cost Plus
Rural Post Offices Granted Reprieve
Fed Allows Three PRC State-Run Banks To Expand In US
Facebook Opens New App Center
Google Seeks New Trial In Oracle Fight
“Bioshock Infinite” Release Delayed Until 2013
Sprint Bullish On WinPhone 8
T-Mobile Customer Growth Back Thanks To Prepaid & Wholesale
Al Franken Questions Comcast’s Commitment To Net Neutrality
Orangutans In Zoo Using iPads To Communicate



SPORTS
Heat Knock Out Knicks, Advance To Face Pacers

LeBron James leaves the court

Miami beats short-handed Knicks 106-94

Ovechkin Leads The Charge As Capitals Force Game 7

Grizzlies Hold Off Clippers, 92-80



Mets Pound Phillies 10-6 For Fifth Straight Win

Joyce Homers Off New Yankees Closer As Rays Win 4-1

Dale Earnhardt Jr. Has Advice For Struggling Danica

Mariano Rivera Has Blood Clot In Leg, May Not Pitch Again This Year

Lack Of Production Dooms Nationals As Pirates Win Again, 4-2



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
It’s Official: Britney Signs With “X Factor”

Britney Spears

Joins Simon Cowell, L.A. Reid as judge for $15 million

More Accusers Coming Forward In Travolta Groping Suit

Rihanna Hospitalized For Exhaustion After Met Gala

Iconic Hair Stylist Vidal Sassoon Dead At 84

“Grey’s Anatomy” Stars Close Deals To Return

Sofia Vergara Single Again

Cameron Diaz Joining All-Star Cast For “The Counselor”

Jennifer Love Hewitt On “Fifty Shades Of Grey”: I Want To Be Anastasia So Badly

Rebecca Hall In Talks To Join “Iron Man 3”



FOREIGNERS
In Putin’s Third Term, US-Russian Reset Revisited
Trade, Public Anger sharpening Beijing-Manila Spat
PRC’s Chen Accuses Officials Of “Crazed” Reprisals Against His Family
Tymoshenko Ends Hunger Strike After Move To Hospital
Queen’s Speech: Cameron Says Coalition Plans Will Rebuild Britain
Radical Imam Abu Qatada’s European Court Appeal Rejected
Military Spokesman Says Uganda Not Meddling In Sudan War



BLOGS & STUFF
Power Line: Obama Evolves To New fake Position On Gay Marriage
Dennis Prager: Conservatives And Gays – Where Do We Stand?
David Harsanyi: Does Obama Support Federalism On The Issue Of Abortion Too? If Not, Why?
Elliot Abrams: “On My Behalf”
Washington Free Beacon: Gay For Pay
James Taranto: Sore Lugar
Gateway Pundit: Former Senator Danforth Says GOP Becoming More Inconsequential, Intolerant
Weasel Zippers: FBI Director Claims PC Played No Part In Scrubbing Counterterror Manuals Of Material Offensive To Islam
Via Meadia: Israel And Egypt Gearing Up For War?
Heritage Foundation: WSJ – Conservatives Oppose National Education Standards
Just One Minute: Brain Lock In The House
Legal Insurrection: Rush Babes Intended Consequence

Category: Live at Five
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