This amount of arrogance, the sheer impardonable pretension, is bound to be popular.
President Obama threw out the first pitch at the MLB All-Star Game.
It did not bounce before getting to the catcher. That bactrian trajectory is a new pitch perfected by Obama in preparation for the game.
The president threw out the first pitch without a teleprompter.
There is no evidence that the Commander-in-Chief was distracted by a hot Brazilian teenager, nor even that any were present at the game.
U.S. News and World Report's Peter Rolff puts steel to work:
It is true that the U.S. economy was in bad shape when Obama came into office. But he and his top appointees want us to believe that their preferred solution—pushing huge increases in federal spending in his so-called economic recovery act and his budget for the upcoming fiscal year though Congress to prime the Keynesian pump, putting money in the hands of their political constituencies—are in no way related to the just announced record $1.8 trillion federal deficit.Perhaps the worm is turning. RTWT.
Capital is what you have. Capitol is where they take it.
Obama tightens reins on capital
By MANU RAJU & MIKE ALLEN | 3/16/09 4:07 AM EDT
No longer will the president tread gingerly in his dealings with Congress and lose control of the message war.
Marking a new season in his young presidency, President Barack Obama and his allies around Washington are about to give the capital a bracing lesson in one-party rule.
From many, one. From many of us in flyover country to whomever inside the beltway would continue to disparage the Voice Crying In The Wilderness:
Rush Limbaugh is a formidable force. Do you know why? Because he says what conservatives believe, and he is extraordinarily articulate, witty, insightful, and yes, courageous. There is a very large portion of Americans that still strongly believe what the Founding Fathers believed, and don’t care much for what Alinsky and Marx believed. You might think Rush (and his 20 million listeners) gauche, obtuse, obvious, unsophisticated, and ignorant. That’s OK, because we think you are self-important gas-bag idiots without a lick of common sense, with DC-centric tunnel vision and no idea what real America and real Americans are. When pressed, we can do disdain better than you can too.Read the whole thing, and understand that it's not about Rush Limbaugh: it's about us.
Robert Gibbs, the partially sentient White House Press Secretary, lashed out in an ad hominem attack at Rick Santelli.
My, what thin skins these Obamians have.
Mr Santelli had the audacity to say that if the Keynesian multipliers were above 1.0, that is, if every dollar of government spending yielded more than a dollar in private sector growth, then why do we need to worry any more? Just keep spending, and spending, and spending as we have been, and everything would be fine.
But the fact that no sane policy maker would do that, shows that the "multiplier" is not above 1.0. Instinctively, we know that to be so.
In fact, the multiplier is not a constant number at all, but a variable depending on a number of factors we don't even fully understand, and cannot predict. The multiplier is a random function, rather than a constant. The effect of government spending is not linear, but decreases after some maximum point.
But Mr. Gibbs did not address that point. He merely attacked an American citizen who dared to speak out, to raise his head up from his miserable work to question the One.
It's from a whole blue-on-blue essay.
You're not a coward merely because you're afraid to seek the truth when it might not conform to your views ... rather your chickensh** views are shaped by the fact you're a coward.
Josh Treviño is a terrific writer who confidently strides the ridgeline of his own convictions, while maintaining the vision to change his path when seeing a better way.
If the rumors are true and Josh gets picked to write in the New York Times, I would read the opinion section, at least on the days his columns appeared.
Right now, two days past his inauguration, the media are all shouting hosannas at Barack Obama.
But I wonder how long it will be before the shouts of "Hosanna! Glory to Obama in the Highest!" turn to "Crucify!" or "Impeach!".
In Captain Ed's Redefining Hard Intelligence post, he points to a WaPo article in which an Afghan tribal chief is convinced to help our side when a CIA officer gives him Viagra.
Great, WaPo. Now every tribal leader with whom we meet will be the butt of Viagra jokes, followed soon after by Al Qaeda trafficking in pallets of the stuff, probably on trucks emblazend with a Red Crescent banner. Humanitarian medical aid, it is.
And for a CIA officer to give up this tool of the trade? What a treasonous, or at the very least unethical, moron. While it may be immoral, I don't suppose it's unethical for a CIA man to give Viagra to a tired old polygamist. But it's certainly unethical for him to divulge tactics to a reporter.
Bob Owens at Pajamas Media publishes an Op Ed from Larry Grathwohl, the FBI agent who penetrated the Weather Underground domestic terrorist group in the 1970s. Grathwohl submitted the piece to the New York Times, which declined to print it.
Ahead of that comes the quote of the day, from Owens:
Bill Ayers would like to use the fog of time to plead his case that he was just another protester against the Vietnam war, a point that the Times is perhaps willing to let him make considering his longtime association with the president-elect they so nakedly support. No amount of inspired fantasy, however, can omit the simple truth that there is only one significant difference between Bill Ayers and Timothy McVeigh.
Competence.
As Todd at VC reminds us, today is the traditional celebration of Festivus.
So let the airing of grievances begin. I myself have no grievances, preferring to hold all of my troubles inside and finally melt down one day outside a Kroger.
Prediction: even though the stock market lost over 20% of its value, from 9600 to 7600, in the 16 days following Barack Obama's election, what will be reported is the big run up it will make getting back to 9600. It will be the Obama Bull Market.
You watch.
But when anything bad happens, it will be blamed on President Bush.
After the idiocy of the bailout mania under Bush and Paulson, I'm not sure I'll even disagree.
TPM is reporting that Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) is set to replace John Dingell (D-MI) as Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Waxman's main contribution in Congress is the production of public hearings at which he excoriates people for some alleged mistake they've made. And what kind of show trials should we expect? The Hill says:
Waxman is considered more liberal on issues like climate change, energy and business regulation, and potentially more aggressive on healthcare. Dingell, the longest-serving House lawmaker, is close to the auto industry and autoworkers.
Somehow managing to type wearing a helmet and drool bucket, David Sarota writes:
It wouldn't be the George W. Bush we all know if our shamed president didn't spend his remaining White House days in a final fit of polarization.Wha? Talk about paranoia! Mr. Bush wants the Columbia Free Trade deal to go through, and knows that it's union opposition which makes Obama also oppose it. And why are the Democrats so in favor of an auto maker bailout? The unions want it, to keep their fat, blood-sucking lifestyle going.
Therefore, if Bush successfully uses the economic emergency to hustle a faction of Wall Street Democrats into supporting the deal, he will have potentially engineered 1994 redux: Democratic infighting, a demoralized progressive base, and these newly elected fair-trade Democrats humiliated — and thus electorally endangered — by their own party's standard bearers.
If there was a moment that highlights to what extent the Democratic Party has become captive to its special interests, this might be it. Mrs. Pelosi and Harry Reid have spent this week demanding that Washington stave off a car-maker collapse. What makes this a little weird is that Mrs. Pelosi and Mr. Reid are Washington. If they so desperately want a Detroit bailout they could always, you know, pass one.
Much earlier. But the 1600-year-old Philogelos: The Laugh Addict contains just the one-liner,
A man complains that a slave he was sold had died.not a fully developed sketch.
"When he was with me, he never did any such thing!"
With all of this talk of the Censorship Doctrine (from which the Democrats may be backing away), it seems like no one can talk about the topic without using the phrase "public airwaves".
Maybe it's a fine point, and I'm just picky. But while the public "owns" the air, the public doesn't own everything transmitted over that air.
You can put up a sign in your yard, and unless you obscure someone else's view or something, you don't have to present an opposing view. And yet, you are transmitting, in a very real sense, the images over the exact same air as a radio show uses. It's just that we can see light with our eyes, but radio waves are of too long a wavelength for us to detect with the naked eye.
What the public owns is spectrum. The set of frequencies allowable to radio broadcast is controlled by the FCC, so that radio stations close together don't broadcast on the same frequency, and so bureaucrats have something to do.
But the actual radio waves being propagated are not the property of the government nor the public, but of the broadcaster. You could say they are no longer even the broadcaster's property in any real sense, either, but they certainly don't belong to you and me.
So while I get the idea that idioms don't have to make sense, this is a case where the idiom has the potential to deceive.
Just saying.
The GOP governors spoke to CNN on condition of anonymity.
Tremendous catch, Treacher.
Let's parse this carefully.
Which governors (plural)? And would the treatment have been different for Democrats?
The GOP governors
The GOP governors spoke to CNNWhy were governors of States speaking to CNN about one of their colleagues? The condition of the Republican party boggles the mind.
The GOP governors spoke to CNN on condition of anonymity.Governors of States actively concealing their identities, like so many furtive little rodents scurrying about, wagging their tongues as their eyes dart this way and that. Eleven score and twelve years ago 13 States united together to bring forth upon this continent a great nation. The governors of these States now are reduced to the low act of currying favor with a network correspondent while effectively besmirching one of their own.
spoke to CNN on condition of anonymity.Finally, to CNN: if your work is not falsifiable, it is unfounded rumor, not journalism. Name names, or I say your story is indistinguishable from fiction.
Writing to accelerate his newspaper's fall into negative net worth, David Brooks says:
The other camp, the Reformers, argue that the old G.O.P. priorities were fine for the 1970s but need to be modernized for new conditions. The reformers tend to believe that American voters will not support a party whose main idea is slashing government. The Reformers propose new policies to address inequality and middle-class economic anxiety. They tend to take global warming seriously. They tend to be intrigued by the way David Cameron has modernized the British Conservative Party.
