Meanwhile, another aspect of WeinerGate is long overdue for an in-depth examination: What kind of “fan” was the 17-year-old Delaware girl with whom the New York Democrat admits he exchanged private messages on Twitter? Prudence Paine writes a long post in which she observes:
Boy, can she cuss. She drops the F-bomb and the C-bomb and the S-bomb and all the other bombs. Sometimes that’s all a tweet is, just a single curse word; sometimes she strings it oooouuuuuuuutttttttt for emphasis on the frustration or agony or whatever inspired the unladylike blast. Some pages of her tweets are just F, F, F, F. F this, F that, i hate F-ing this, F, F, FFFFFF.
Read the whole thing. As Prudence says, it’s “troubling” that Weiner would be following this girl on Twitter even if, as the congressman says, his communications with her weren’t “indecent” or “explicit.”
Janice Hahn, Los Angeles City Council member and
Democrat candidate in CA-36 special election
An online attack ad highlighting a Democratic congressional candidate’s support for a controversial “gang intervention” program has generated more than 75,000 views at YouTube.com since its release Tuesday afternoon.
“It will probably hit 100,000 [views] by the end of today,” video director Ladd Ehlinger Jr. said in a brief interview Wednesday morning. Ehlinger noted that the video now requires an 18-and-older age verification after it was repeatedly flagged as offensive by liberal blog readers. “I don’t see them going and flagging any other rap videos,” the director said.
Funded by a conservative political action committee, the rap-themed video focuses on the record of Los Angeles city council member Janice Hahn, a Democrat who faces Republican Craig Huey in a July 12 special election for California’s 36th District congressional seat, vacated by the retirement of Democrat Jane Harman.
The video has drawn almost universal condemnation, not only from Democrats, but also from California GOP officials and the Huey campaign. Ehlinger has refused to apologize for the online ad, which one leading liberal blog called “Willie Horton on steroids.”
As David Weigel of Slate reports, Ehlinger’s objective was to “create something so shocking that it would get people talking about a spot on the Hahn record that no one had paid attention to.”
Justin Elliott of Salon claimed that the ad relies on a “debunked” 2008 TV news report. However, the Torrance (Calif.) Daily Breeze article cited by Elliott did not address other evidence that the controversial “gang intervention” program aided criminals.
A June 2009 Associated Press article about the criminal activities of leading “gang intervention” workers Alex Sanchez, Marlo “Bow Wow” Jones and Hector “Big Weasel” Marroquin.
An article about Sanchez’s trial in The Nation, a leading liberal magazine, noting among other things that advocates are “fearful of police or political undermining of gang intervention programs.” (The article was written by former SDS radical Tom Hayden, ex-husband of Jane Fonda.)
The indictment of Sanchez was also reported by the New York Times. In May 2008, Hahn urged a tax increase to expand funding for L.A.’s gang intervention program to $40 million. Here is the 2009 report by KTTV in Los Angeles about Crips gangster Steve Myrick, a career criminal who received a certificate of appreciation from Janice Hahn, and other gangsters who collected checks from the program:
And here is Ehlinger’s ad for the conservative Turn Right USA PAC:
Deguello is my personal favorite ZZ Top release.
Oh yeah, Insty is on about an article on The Hill where Speaker Boehner is turning up the heat on the POTUS over Libya:
Boehner wrote: “Given the mission you have ordered to the U.S. Armed Forces with respect to Libya and the text of the War Powers Resolution, the House is left to conclude that you have made one of two determinations: either you have concluded the War Powers Resolution does not apply to the mission in Libya, or you have determined the War Powers Resolution is contrary to the Constitution.
“The House, and the American people whom we represent, deserve to know the determination you have made.”
Citing Obama’s oath of office and the Constitution, Boehner asks the president to provide the administration’s legal analysis regarding the War Powers Resolution and demands an answer by Friday. That is also the date by which the House-passed measure demands a response from the White House.
Boehner intensified his criticism of Obama’s handling of Libya and noted “the ongoing, deeply divisive debate originated with a lack of genuine consultation prior to commencement of operations and has been further exacerbated by the lack of visibility and leadership from you and your administration.”
The Speaker has suggested that if the White House does not respond adequately to the House-passed resolution, which is non-binding, the House could take further action, such as withholding funds for the mission.
Does Sprinklerman have the stones to go to the mat with BHO?
Wouldn’t touch it with a Ten Foot Pole.
One of the problems with ObamaCare is that this massive new entitlement program will steadily drain away tax money from the federal budget — including the defense budget, so that the United States can no longer afford to defend its interests abroad. In fact, something similar is already happening to our allies:
The British military intervention in Libya is unsustainable, the head of the Navy has said.
Adml Sir Mark Stanhope said the campaign would have been more effective without the Government’s defence cuts.
The aircraft carrier and the Harrier jump-jets scrapped under last year’s strategic defence review would have made the mission more effective, faster and cheaper, he said.
Sir Mark warned that the Navy would not be able to sustain its operations in Libya for another three months without making cuts elsewhere.
The First Sea Lord’s comments will stir the debate over defence cuts that have left Britain without a working aircraft carrier and forced the Royal Navy’s Harrier jump jets to be mothballed.
William Katz comments: “Britain is a symbol of what’s happened all over Europe — defense cuts made to fuel the welfare state.” (Hat-tip: William Jacobson.)
Conveniences you’ve enjoyed for decades have suddenly become a cause of long-term unemployment:
“There are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers. You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM, you don’t go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you’re using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate.”
— Barack Obama
The president is attempting here to offer a simplistic explanation of the difference between cyclical unemployment and structural unemployment. As important as that distinction is, however, it fails to explain many obvious things about this recession.
Unemployment isn’t at 9% because of out-of-work bank clerks and airline ticket agents. Unemployment is most severe in construction trades and other housing-related sectors. Whatever else Obama’s policies have done, they have not led to a meaningful recovery of the housing market and, one might easily argue, have made things much worse. Why? Because for two years, the administration and Democrats in Congress did everything possible to impede the foreclosure process, to keep deadbeats in homes they can’t afford. This has slowed re-sales, prevented mortgage lenders from cutting their losses on bad loans and, in general, hindered the kind of price “re-set” necessary to making the housing market efficient again.
Something else: The recession is not equally bad everywhere. Why is unemployment nearly 12% in California but less than 6% in Oklahoma? Don’t people in Oklahoma use ATMs and automated airline ticket kiosks?
Finally: ObamaCare places mandates on employers to provide health insurance to their employees. And by so doing, it increases the cost of hiring people. Whenever government policy makes something more expensive to do, people will do less of whatever that something is, and ObamaCare is a classic example of that. It’s like a good news/bad news joke: The good news is, your employer is now required to provide you health insurance. The bad news is, you ain’t got a job.
You don’t have to be a genius to figure out why Obamanomics doesn’t work. It’s one of those things that is so obvious that it takes a special kind of stupid not to see it.
And I guess they teach that special kind of stupid at Harvard.
UPDATE: Professor William Jacobson (who teaches at Cornell, not Harvard) explains that the President’s perspective “is a perfectly static view, which would have protected jobs in the buggy whip industry by preventing the creation and expansion of the auto industry; would have protected jobs at glass tube manufacturers against the advent of flat screen televisions; would have barred the creation of the cell phone industry because of all the jobs lost in the land line business, and so on and so on.”
Acting with unusual speed, the state Supreme Court on Tuesday reinstated Gov. Scott Walker’s plan to all but end collective bargaining for tens of thousands of public workers.
The unions, Democrats and their liberal allies are, as you might expect, apoplectic with rage. For example, Ed Schultz on MSNBC was even more obnoxious than usual today.
