The Obama/Nixon Moment

May 14th, 2013

I was about 10 hours ahead of the curve:

George Will:

The burglary occurred in 1972, the climax came in 1974, but40 years ago this week — May 17, 1973 — the Senate Watergate hearings began exploring the nature of Richard Nixon’s administration. Now the nature of Barack Obama’s administration is being clarified as revelations about IRS targeting of conservative groups merge with myriad Benghazi mendacities.

Snip.

Jay Carney, whose unenviable job is not to explain but to explain away what his employers say, calls the IRS’s behavior “inappropriate.” No, using the salad fork for the entree is inappropriate. Using the Internal Revenue Service for political purposes is a criminal offense.

The IRS was using the information to build an enemies list.

In fact, the Obama Administration’s use of the IRS to harass political enemies, and the threat to do so, has been long-running and pervasive.

The Boston Herald also breaks out the N Word (Nixon):

President Obama’s second-term campaign slogan was “Forward,” but instead we’ve got cover-ups, congressional investigations and the government persecution of political opponents and reporters.

That sounds like “backward” to me. All the way to, say, 1972.

Who would have guessed that just a few months into his second term, President Obama would be compared to Tricky Dick. And by a liberal Massachusetts Democrat — U.S. Rep. Michael Capuano.

Republicans could not even have scripted this one. The agency most hated by voters, the Internal Revenue Service, admits to going on a Nixonian witch hunt against Tea Party and conservative groups during the re-election campaign.

This is a story even the most partisan Massachusetts liberal cannot defend. It’s so bad that even Ed Markey is calling for heads to roll.

The man behind The Pentagon Papers thinks that Obama is worse than Nixon ever was.

The multiple scandals are so obvious that even the MSM is waking up. Jay Carney has spent six months peeing on reporters’ legs and calling it rain. Reporters have finally started waking up. “Hey, wait a minute! I don’t think rain is usually this warm!”

And here’s a nice image from Buzzfeed:

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Posted in Media Watch, Obama Scandals | No Comments »

Obama Is Not A Crook!

May 13th, 2013

Or so he would have us believe. But the Obama Administration has been acting pretty Nixonian as of late.

First there’s how the White House lied about Benghazi, and how the CIA’s original talking points were altered to support the lie. (Exactly how those edits in talking points evolved can be found here.) And they’re still lying.

Then there’s the IRS scandal. Not only was the IRS targeting and auditing Tea Party groups, there were asking for a ridiculous amount of personal information. Like the names of family members and a list of all the members of the news media the group has ever interacted with. Then they released some completed comments to ProPublica before they had been approved, i.e., they weren’t public documents yet.

And here’s the IRS crew responsible.

Then there’s that whole getting all AP telephone records for two months thing.

Time even breaks out the Kleins in an attempt to poo-poo the very idea of Obama’s resemblance to Tricky Dick.

Indeed, Obama seems to be following the Nixonian blueprint far more effectively than Nixon ever could.

Of course, there is one big difference between Obama and Nixon…

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Media Watch, Obama Scandals, video | 1 Comment »

LinkSwarm for May 10, 2013

May 10th, 2013

For a shocking change of pace, the Friday LinkSwarm will be on Friday:

  • “How can we ‘gun people’ honestly be expected to come to the table with anti-gunners when anti-gunners are willfully stupid about guns, and openly hate, despise and ridicule those of us who own them?” Read the whole thing.
  • Sheila Jackson Lee wants a National Gun Registry.
  • The lovely qualities of Jihadi Facebook pages: “The further I crawled down the extremist rabbit hole and the more caved-in skulls and headless corpses I saw.”
  • Union politics helped create the Baltimore Booty House.
  • “The Euro cannot be destroyed by any craft that we here possess. It was made in the fires of Frankfurt. Only there can it be unmade.” What does it say when Sauron wants the ring, er, Euro destroyed as well? Though once again: Austerity hasn’t failed in Europe, it hasn’t been tried.
  • “It was one thing to do amnesty during the white hot Reagan economy of the mid to late 80s. It’s quite another to do it in the midst of the Obama depression.”
  • Harry Reid unwilling to bargain in raising the debt ceiling? I say fine and dandy. Just cut government spending across the board until the budget is balanced.
  • “Detroit in worse shape than previously thought.” I don’t see how that statement can be true for any story that doesn’t include the word “cannibalism.”
  • London mayor Boris Johnson thinks it would be a good thing for democracy if the UK were to just walk away from the EU.
  • Travis County Democratic District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg is out of the clink after serving half a 45 day sentence for DWI. A jury will evidently determine “whether her drunken driving was habitual or whether the recent arrest was the result of a one-time event.” Because lots of people without alcohol problems suddenly decide “Hey, I’m going to go cruising around town with an open bottle of vodka and a blood alcohol level of .239! That sounds like a great idea!” I might believe that…if Lehmberg was 21.
  • Ted Cruz 1, Obama 0:

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    Posted in Austin, Budget, Crime, Guns, Texas | No Comments »

    Texas vs. California Update for May 9, 2013

    May 9th, 2013

    Time for another Texas vs. California update!

  • “It’s time for public employee unions to wake up and take a look around. Government services are shrinking, cities are crumbling, and they’re enjoying pay and benefit packages that many in the private sector would kill for. They need to give a little back…Because up and down the state of California, and beyond, public officials foolishly negotiated contracts they can’t pay for without taking a cleaver to basic services, including police and fire protection, park maintenance, street repair.”
  • California’s total government debt, at all levels, is estimated between $848 billion and $1.126 trillion. Funny how the word “trillion” crops up in reference to debt when Democrats are in charge of things…
  • ObamaCare is going to hit California harder than most states.
  • A group of California teacher’s has filed suit against the California Teachers Association for using their money for political purposes. You don’t say.
  • More on Compulsory California union “agency fees.”
  • The New York Times all but comes out and says that the LA Times is an extension of the Democratic Party. Which is why both the MSM and the Left are panicking that it might be sold to the Koch Brothers.
  • Average employee pay at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power rose 15% over the last five years, despite an economic slump that ravaged the city’s budget, records released Tuesday show.
  • In a rare spot of good news for California, their revenue are running just far enough ahead of schedule that they no longer need to make do with internal borrowing between state agencies. But I would suggest that this windfall will prove to be temporary…
  • Texas once again named the best state for business by CEO Magazine. And California was once again named the worst.
  • A tale of two oil states.
  • Raytheon moving HQ from California to Texas.
  • Texas doctors open up a new front against ObamaCare.

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    Posted in Budget, Economics, Media Watch, ObamaCare, Texas, video | 3 Comments »

    South Carolina CD1 Election Fallout

    May 8th, 2013

    A roundup of interesting commentary on Mark Sanford’s defeat of Elizabeth Colbert-Busch in the SC1 special election:

  • Erick Erickson on Mark Sanford’s victory: “[Colbert-Busch] opted out of most debate opportunities. Instead of debating her, Mark Sanford toured the district with a life-sized cutout of Nancy Pelosi. It worked.” More: “Between Bill Clinton and Kermit Gosnell, no one would ever accuse the Democrats of being for family values.”
  • Human Events joins the smackdown parade:

    “We gave it a heck of a fight,” Colbert Busch said in her concession speech. No, you didn’t. You were obliterated by the most beatable Republican in the House. Between campaign and independent spending, you blew upwards of $2 million, and got trounced by a candidate the National Republican Congressional Committee refused to support. You ran a weak, lazy campaign that never had much to say beyond harping on Sanford’s extramarital affair, and reminding voters that your brother is a TV star, while he threw himself furiously into shoe-leather retail politics. Sanford was still holding public events on Election Day, while you were nowhere to be found. You backed away from a crucial debate opportunity, leaving Sanford to own the stage by debating a cardboard cutout of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. It’s hard to imagine how you could have fought less for the seat, short of holding all your campaign events by closed-circuit TV from your brother’s house.

    More:

    The mythical backlash against opponents of gun control didn’t materialize to help Colbert Busch, which should only come as a surprise to those who take liberal media manipulation seriously. She took labor union money, which wasn’t going to endear her to voters in the state where unions tried to kill a Boeing plant. Between the ObamaCare disaster, the failure of their Sequester Terror efforts to cudgel more taxes out of the American people, and the gathering Benghazi storm, the Democrat Party isn’t looking its best at the moment…I would imagine we’ll be hearing a lot about Nancy Pelosi in tight 2014 races.

  • How the MSM carried Colbert-Busch’s water:

    What we see here is another refutation of what I’ve called a “beautiful little fairy tale that liberals tell themselves,” that the American public is broadly supportive of their worldview, and they only lose because Republicans manage to Jedi-Mind-Trick the electorate into caring about distractions, silliness, and those irrelevant ‘wedge issues.’…The fairy tale is that Americans, deep down, really agree with liberals on all of these issues and would heartily embrace their agenda if only these side issues, scandals, and manufactured distractions would just get out of the way. But the electorate doesn’t always think liberal ideas are better, and we may argue that they rarely do.

    More: “Today you’re hearing a lot of talk along the lines of, ‘Oh, everyone knew this was a really conservative district and that Sanford would probably win.’ Well, you don’t spend more than $2 million ($1.2 million in donations to Colbert Busch, more than $929,000 on independent expenditures against Sanford) for a race you know you can’t win.”

  • PPP’s polls were not exactly oracular: “At one point, PPP had Colbert Busch ahead by nine points…The fact that Sanford, a deeply flawed candidate, substantially outperformed the polls is just one data point. But it suggests that the Obama phenomenon may not be easily replicable. If that is the case, 2014 could look a lot like 2010.”
  • Colbert-Busch sucked as a campaigner. “At a Chamber of Commerce forum last week, the Democrat delivered four minutes of remarks and was then hustled out of the room by a team of handlers.”
  • MSM reports of Mark Sanford’s political demise were notably premature.
  • Heh. “Any time a Democrat white woman related to a famous man as the source of her fame fails to excite Democrat turnout, I chalk up a double victory for the GOP.”

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    Posted in Elections | No Comments »

    Sandford Beats Colbert-Busch

    May 7th, 2013

    In the South Carolina First Congressional District race. In fact, it wasn’t even particularly close.

    Stephen Colbert may be America, but his sister can’t be a U.S. Representative on his coattails.

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    Posted in Elections | No Comments »

    LinkSwarm for May 6, 2013

    May 6th, 2013

    Time for another LinkSwarm!

  • Silly Joanne Chesimard. If she had just served her time, she’d have tenure by now.
  • Europe is “bleeding out”. Youth unemployment? “59.1% of those under 25 are unemployed in Greece, 55.9% in Spain, 38.4% in Italy, 38.3% in Portugal, 26.5% in France.” More: “Hope and Change economies are crony capitalist systems which pick winners and losers. They maintain the status quo at all costs — and reward those who have captured government over those who innovate.”
  • So which is funnier, violence against women, or intimidating crime witnesses? Mountain Dew puts both in the same ad! Hilarity ensues! (Oh, and some people think it’s racist. It is, but not any more than a random gangsta rap video.)
  • People don’t like being bossed around by the political class. But that’s the Democratic Party’s entire model!
  • Will the welfare state dstroy democracy?
  • Did the Boston Bombers kill illegal alien amnesty?
  • “We found 15 Trial Court cases, and 12 Appellate Court cases, where Shariah was found to be applicable in these particular cases. The facts are the facts: some judges are making decisions deferring to Shariah law even when those decisions conflict with Constitutional protections.”
  • Another day, another green car bankruptcy filing.
  • According to the IRS, the sins of the mothers are, in fact, the sins of the sons.
  • War on terror? What war on terror?
  • Israel hits Syrian weapons bound for Hezbollah. World yawns.
  • And just in case it wasn’t clear before, Syria’s army sucks at fighting Israel. Though they seem quote adequate for killing their own people…
  • Gun businesses continue to leave Colorado.
  • Former New Mexico Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson says that Ted Cruz isn’t allowed to be a Hispanic because he opposes illegal alien amnesty. Maybe they should just declare that you can’t be Hispanic unless you’re a Democrat and be done with it.
  • Speaking of Cruz, here’s a piece in The New Republic that, when stripped of standard TNR talking points, boils down to “Yes, Ted Cruz could be elected President.”
  • Another day, another another 20 dead in an Islamist attack on a Christian church.
  • Obama vows to stick hands into the open flame even longer this time.
  • Three year old black girl is the NRA’s youngest lifetime member.
  • China’s new Communist Party headquarters looks like a wang.
  • There are some Williamson County elections coming up May 11. None I’m voting in, but lots of city and ISD elections.
  • Nothing says “confidence” quite like insulting the genitalia of a stranger’s 11-year old child on the Internet.

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    Posted in Border Control, Communism, Democrats, Guns, Welfare State | 3 Comments »

    I’m Not at the NRA Meeting in Houston. But Ted Cruz Is.

    May 3rd, 2013

    I couldn’t go to the NRA annual meeting in Houston this weekend, as much as I would have liked to, because I went to a family even in Houston last week.

    But fortunately, Ted Cruz is there.

    “The Constitution matters. All of the Constitution matters. You don’t get to pick and choose.”

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    Posted in Guns, Republicans, Texas, video | 1 Comment »

    The Decline and Fall of the Austin American-Statesman

    May 2nd, 2013

    I’m not sure if you noticed (and it’s entirely possible you haven’t), but the Austin American-Statesman has instituted a paywall on their website. Obviously the Statesman feels that their slow, steady decline just isn’t getting the job done, so they’ll move straight to assisted suicide.

    The Statesman website was not my first choice for news. Or my second. Or my tenth. In fact, they probably come in slightly ahead of Pravda (though behind Russia Today, which is pretty quick at putting up relevant disaster videos). Despite living in Austin for decades, I’ve never subscribed to the Statesman, and purchases of single issues has been limited to the day after national elections and UT winning a national football championship.

    The Statesman was never a great newspaper in the best of times, and these are not the best of times.

    It’s no secret that the Statesman has suffered severe declines in circulation (possibly even more severe than the average suffered by the print newspaper industry a whole), despite publishing in one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country. But finding a single source for year by year Statesman circulation figures has proved elusive. Here’s what I found from various heterogeneous sources for daily (rather than Sunday) circulation, so they may very well not line up with “official” circulation figures (especially for the three most recent years), but are probably close enough to the ballpark to get a good idea of the decline.

  • 2004: 184,907
  • 2005: 184,398
  • 2006: 183,952
  • 2007: 173,579
  • 2008: 170,309
  • 2009: 151,520
  • 2010: 142,787
  • 2011: 137,681
  • 2012: 125,305

    • So, here’s a chart for Daily Average Circulation Figures for the Austin American Statesman for 2004-2012:

    (Click to embiggen. Crappy chart courtesy of a 12 year old version of Excel. I’m sure Will Franklin could do much better.)

    And some of that most recent number may be even more dubious, given that sometimes the Statesman won’t actually cancel people’s subscription when asked. And try to charge people more than they agreed to for the discount subscriptions they do sell. And don’t always deliver the issues people have actually paid for.

    The Statesman has been in a long, steady decline in staff as well. They bought out 71 employees in 2009, another accepted by 33 people in June of 2011, and laid off an additional 53 employees in October 2011. And even after that, more copy editing jobs were to be consolidated in Florida by Cox Media.

    Cox tried to sell the paper in 2009, but backed out of the deal.

    One big reason for declining newspaper circulation is the obvious and pronounced liberal bias in so much of the MSM. With so many choices for news on the Internet, local news is no longer a reason to continue funding a carrier medium for liberal opinion.

    The paywall seems to be the last thing newspapers institute before they go under entirely (a few of the bigger ones excepted). Initial reactions to the move are hardly ecstatic. I don’t expect the Statesman to go straight out of business next year, but I do expect their decline in circulation to accelerate.

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    Posted in Austin, Media Watch, Texas | 4 Comments »

    May 1st: Victims of Communism Day

    May 1st, 2013

    Today is an important day.

    I’m speaking, of course, of Victims of Communism Day.

    People may say that anti-communism is a cause that’s passe, but keep in mind that:

  • The Hermit Kingdom of North Korea continues to starve and torture its own people.
  • China continues to be a one party dictatorship, with 250-500 protests a day.
  • Communist Cuba continues to oppress its own people.

    • Plus, the crimes of an ideology that killed 100 million people should never be forgotten. Especially one that still has friends in high places.

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    Posted in Communism | No Comments »

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