Barbara Espinosa is an excellent friend of this blog. She’s lovely, fun, busts Stacy McCain’s chops at a pleasant frequency, and supports any American running against a RINO with admirable aplomb.
Yet, at times, we all can use a bit of help with the modern nuance. See, when the President says “My Singular Focus” Is on Jobs.., that is best understood to read “My focus is on a singular job*”. Modern word processors can so make a mess of the order of words, with deadlines, copy/paste errors, software versions, markup bugaboos and such.
By having all attention drawn, for the gazillionth time, to jobs, the President is freed up from publicly announcing the pesky new regulations that decorate the citizens like a necklace, or a noose, depending on your viewpoint.
President Obama was supposed to travel to a trucking comany in Springfield, Virginia Tuesday to announce new fuel-efficiency standards for heavy trucks, buses, and other heavy-to-midsize vehicles, but the public event was scrapped without explanation two hours before it was supposed to begin.
My take is that the POTUS figures each page of regulation is worth about $10, and he’s just going to regulate us to solvency.
The poor President. Workin’ hard, tryin’ to fix stuff, and getting thrown under the bus by his owner. Is that a twinge of sympathy I feel in my left foot, or did a blister give way?
DES MOINES, Iowa
For the past several days I’ve been referring to the prospective Rick Perry 2012 candidacy as the “Phantom Menace” looming over the Ames Straw Poll. Today I unexpectedly encountered the menace in the form of perky Texas coeds in burnt orange “Americans for Rick Perry” T-shirts:
While I’m usually very much pro-coed — especially the perky Texas kind — the appearance of these girls in Des Moines clearly represents a disturbance in The Force. Don’t doubt my Jedi senses on this one, folks. I’m getting spooky vibes. Readers will remember that I wrote Friday:
My phone just rang with a tip from a source who says his Texas sources tell him that Rick Perry is going to unofficially announce this weekend that he’s going to make an official announcement next week.
That tip was just slightly off as to the timing: The unofficial announcement came Monday via a Politico story. Now, let me ask you something: Why would a Republican save a big exclusive like that for Politico, while a conservative journalist like me was left to rely on secondhand (if quite accurate) rumors?
This is just one of those tiny little things, perhaps utterly insignficant, but perhaps an ill omen. Yeah, I know political journalists aren’t supposed to believe in “omens.” Still, there’s something vaguely . . . hinky about the way Perry’s stealth campaign has been operating here in Iowa.
Call me crazy. Attribute my forebodings of doom to irrational prejudice. Say what you will, and I don’t care, but I felt a need to put on the record my instinctive sense that there’s something fundamentally wrong about the Perry campaign. And if Jan. 20, 2013, brings the joyous inauguration of President Perry, then you can say my fears were mistaken. Yet I can’t shake my gut hunch is that it won’t work out that way. Some kind of catastrophe will result, one way or another.
Anyway, my apologies to any Rick Perry fans whose mellow has been harshed by these gloomy reflections. Here’s my video inteview of the perky Texas coedsMinions of the Sith Lord:
Oh — almost forgot: They were on hand for what had been billed as an event at the state capitol featuring Tim Pawlenty. I showed up a few minutes late, and Pawlenty had already split the scene, having refused to answer questions from reporters. But these Texas girls were still there and, after I finished getting them on video, I couldn’t resist the temptation to tell them: “We killed your quarterback. Roll Tide!”
Texas Governor Rick Perry will make a his first trip to Iowa Sunday, Perry’s campaign confirms.
Perry will speak at a fundraiser hosted by the Black Hawk County Republicans in Waterloo, Iowa, just one day after he gives a speech in which intends to make clear he will seek the presidency.
The Texas governor’s trip to the Hawkeye state will round out a tour of key early primary and caucus states for the 2012 election. He begins the weekend in South Carolina, speaking at the RedState Gathering, a conference for conservative bloggers and privately meets with GOP leaders in South Carolina.
Perry will then fly to New Hampshire for a house party hosted by state Rep. Pamela Tucker to meet Granite State Republicans in Greenland.
Which means that I’ll need to stay here through Sunday. Which means you’ll need to hit the tip jar.
One of the phenomena I’ve struggled to explain to those who haven’t traveled with Herman Cain is how, wherever he goes, people want to shake his hand, talk to him, get their picture taken with him. Here’s a brief video clip from Council Bluffs, where Cain had just finished his speech and his campaign staff were trying to get him back on the bus, yet the crowd just followed him and kept getting autographs, pictures, etc.:
. . .that anybody who is surprised that a mortal man cannot magically fix the economy ought to have their head examined.
Yeah, he was supposed to be all that and scoop of ice cream, the most over-sold thin since XML.
Sure, it’s a bad thing that his ideas aren’t proving much.
But it’s an order of magnitude worse that a supposedly liberty-based country has gone so far in abdicating that liberty to some finite individual. It’s disgusting. Knock it off. Scale back this government, and let’s be about digging ourselves out, people.
Herman Cain speaks at Monday’s rally in Council Bluffs.
Last night there was no time to blog about the late-afternoon Herman Cain rally at Bayliss Park in Council Bluffs. Dave Weigel, who had been there for Michele Bachmann’s earlier event, said Cain actually drew a slightly larger crowd than Bachmann. But I didn’t have time to blog it, because I was working on my American Spectator column:
COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa — Lois Vanderbur drove 30 miles from her home in Mapleton to attend Herman Cain’s event Monday in Denison. When the event was over, she went to eat at a nearby McDonald’s, where I overheard her tell her friend Rose Wolden: “Obama was an hour late for his speech and promised to raise taxes, and then the Dow fell 550 points.”
Mrs. Vanderbur, 68, is a very well-informed grandmother. When I asked her about the stock market tumble, she whipped out her iPhone, called up the latest numbers and told me that the Dow Jones Industrial Average had, in fact, closed at 10,809.85 for a one-day loss of 634.67 points. Forget all that stereotypical talk about Iowans being a bunch of ignorant hicks from flyover country. Their state’s most famous product is still corn — and the cornfields here are better measured by the square mile than by the acre — but the first-in-the-nation Iowa Caucuses have made politics at least the state’s second-most important export, and few Americans are more civic-minded than a politically active Iowan.
Mrs. Vanderbur and Mrs. Wolden were among more than 60 area residents who crowded into Cronk’s Café in downtown Denison for Cain’s mid-afternoon event, the second stop on his statewide “Common Sense Solutions” bus tour. . . .
I’m in Des Moines today, and am taking the day away from the Cain campaign to catch up with Tim Pawlenty, who will speak at the state capitol this morning. Please hit the tip jar!
DENISON, Iowa
Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain today denounced as “pathetic” the response of President Obama and other Democrats to the recent downgrade of U.S. credit.
“Today, the president, Senator [John] Kerry and other Democrats now want to blame somebody for the credit downgrade – other than themselves,” Cain told a standing-room only crowd at Crunk’s Café here. “They control the Senate. They control the White House. Obama’s Treasury secretary [Tim Geithner] is in charge of the Treasury. Now they are trying to blame the Tea Party movement for the downgrade. How pathetic is that? That’s not leadership, folks – that’s not leadership.“
Cain’s campaign team was pleased with the strong attendance for the event here on the second stop of the Atlanta businessman’s “Common Sense Solutions” tour of Iowa leading up to the Aug. 13 Ames Straw Poll. After filling up the banquet room where Cain spoke, attendees sat outside the door of the room in the main dining area of Crunk’s, a local landmark here in Denison. Cain’s Iowa campaign director, Larry Tuel, credited Crawford County coordinator Gwen Eckland for the overflow crowd.
Immediately following the debt ceiling debacle, the White House announced that the president will take a three-day bus tour through the Midwest to hear people’s concerns about the economy, and talk about measures to boost economic growth and job creation.
Is President Obama that out of touch? . . .
After the president’s tour, we will get another speech. He will once again promise his laser-like focus on economic growth and job creation. We have heard this speech many times before only to get the same results. More talk, talk, talk.
I have been traveling the country and listening to people for the last year, and I can tell you their concerns and fears. Namely, the economy is stuck in neutral and the president’s policies of spend, spend, spend are not working. Since the president has not put forth any new ideas to boost economic growth and job creation, people also know that nothing is going to change simply because he is going to do another tour and give some more speeches.
Mr. President, speeches do not fuel the economic engine of this economy, which is the business sector. And speeches are not going to reduce the latest unemployment rate of 9.1 percent, nor will they ease the pain of the nearly 15 million people who can’t find jobs because your administration wants to raise taxes and continue your regulatory onslaught on American businesses. . . .
Althouse points to Western Governor’s University, where there is a notion of hiring adjuncts to do the grading.
Should we feel for the adjuncts who have a job consisting of the part of the job that the regular professors are freed from? The photo at the link depicts “Emily Child, an evaluator at Western Governors U., [who] grades 10 to 15 assignments a day, six days a week, working at home before her three children are up or while they nap.”
So… that’s either awfully nice for Ms. Child, who gets to work at home and arrange her hours around household responsibilities… or a restoration of the subordination of women. (Yes, yes, there are some men who keep house and take care of children… especially they’ve trained in an academic discipline that affords few career opportunities and their spouses have out-of-the-house jobs.)
I can’t picture law schools adopting this method of grading, partly because I’m habituated to the burden, which balances what is otherwise the overwhelmly pleasure of teaching law. In law schools, we avoid grade inflation by imposing a curve, with a restricted range for the average and a required distribution of grades (forcing you to at least give some Cs, even if Ds and Fs are optional). We also “blind grade,” identifying the students with code numbers, and it is, in fact, easier to be critical when you don’t have an individual’s name on the paper.
Listen for the squeals when, after enough data are collected to filter out grader bias, when the results are used to show that certain teachers really just suck.
The lure of academia is tenure, which is nearly civil-service level cushy. I expect much dismay, weeping, and gnashing of teeth to come from this practice, if wider-spread.
