Daily Archives: October 29th, 2009

Agreed.
Rush Limbaugh reacted to Speaker Pelosi’s outrageous announcement today that her government run health care plan was “deficit neutral.”

Rush says this liar should go to jail and that Bernie Madoff is small fry compared to the theft going on in Washington today.

Here’s the transcript:

RUSH: As you have probably heard, ladies and gentlemen, Nancy Pelosi just once again claimed that the House health care reform bill will not add one penny to the federal deficit. Of course this is absurd. It will turn out to be absurdly untrue if this thing ever sees the light day of, and when it does, when it does, when it is exposed as a total fraud, when she and everybody else supporting this are exposed as total liars about all of this being deficit neutral, about all of this covering all these people, about everybody getting all this health care for what they think will be nothing, when all of that is exposed, shouldn’t people like Nancy Pelosi, who lie to get such things passed into legislation, have to face some kind of real consequences? This is nothing more than theft. Are they not thieves? They are stealing billions of dollars from US taxpayers, both taxpayers of today and tomorrow. You can’t even say that they’re enriched by their thievery ’cause they do it to buy votes and more power, and some of them do get enriched as a result of all this.

Why shouldn’t people who steal billions of dollars have to go to jail if the small fry like Bernie Madoff has to go to jail? Madoff is chump change compared to Nancy Pelosi, chump change compared to Barney Frank and Harry Reid. This is generational theft that is going on here. I mean let’s step back. Nancy Pelosi is the most radical Speaker of the House ever, from one of the most radical communities in the nation, San Francisco. She’s pushing this newest proposal now. She’s never cared about costs before, she doesn’t care about them now. She’s never cared about economic reality before because she’s insulated from it. She is wealthy. Her husband is wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. She is George McGovern on hormones, steroids and everything else, and she sees this as the best way for her and her ilk to remain in power for decades.

Folks, both the Senate bill, Dingy Harry’s little bill over there and Pelosi’s bill today are time bombs. They are ticking time bombs. They are designed to destroy private insurance companies and thus the economy. If you look at it from their standpoint these are brilliantly conceived bills and they’re guaranteed to work, they are going to do exactly what these Democrats intend. If they are passed, only massive Republican gains in 2010 and 2012 can diffuse this time bomb because the stuff doesn’t get implemented until after the 2012 election if it passes.

Mark Preston at CNN's Political Ticker reports there's a major Hollywood contingent judging a Health Reform Video Challenge contest for the Democratic Party's Organizing for American campaign. (See today's Open Thread for one flag-mangling contestant.)

Stars on the judging panel for the final 20 TV ads include John Cho ("Flash Forward"), Rosario Dawson ("Men in Black"), Dule Hill ("The West Wing"), Brandon Routh (who played Superman), Kate Walsh ("Private Practice"), Olivia Wilde ("House") and musician Will I. Am of the Black Eyed Peas.

But the most risky name is Seth MacFarlane, the abrasive atheist creator of the Fox cartoons "Family Guy," "American Dad," and "The Cleveland Show."

The harshest ad in the contest features grade-school kids talking about how they'll suffer (and even die) because health care is denied:

BOY: A year from now, I’ll break my leg and my parents will have to sell our house because we couldn’t afford health care

GIRL: Three months from now, I’ll need surgery, and my parents will go bankrupt because they couldn’t afford health care.

GIRL #2: Two years from now, I’ll be diagnosed with leukemia, and I’ll die. Because we couldn’t afford health care.

On her national radio show Wednesday, Laura Ingraham decried this ad as exploitative, and NBC reporter Chuck Todd agreed that using kids was wrong: "I hate it."

Read this post »

Thanks to Joe Hard for this cartoon and email:

Let me get this straight.

We’re going to pass a health care plan written by a committee whose head says he doesn’t understand it, passed by a Congress that hasn’t read it but exempts themselves from it, signed by a president that also hasn’t read it, and who smokes, with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn’t pay his taxes, overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, and financed by a country that’s broke.

What possibly could go wrong?

* * * * *

Rick sent this on the Pelosi Health Care Bill pages 1219-1246–

Just these 27 pages are enough to see what this bill is all about. I bet you will agree. PLEASE take time to read these 27 pages. Anyone who reads these pages and still says this bill isn’t about the government takeover of health care is either a fool or a liar. It’s just that simple.

* * * * *

This was timely… Today the Fraser Institute, one of Canada’s leading economic think-tanks, released the 19th edition of its annual report Waiting Your Turn: Hospital Waiting Lists in Canada.

The hospital waiting list survey measures median waiting times to document the degree to which queues for visits to specialists and for diagnostic and surgical procedures are used to control health care expenditures. The report measures the wait times between referral by a general practitioner and consultation with a specialist, the times between seeing the specialist and receiving treatment, and the total wait times from GP referral to treatment.

The report finds that Canadians seeking surgical or other therapeutic treatment are enduring a median wait time of 16.1 weeks, roughly the same delay they experienced in 2000-2001, even though governments have made substantial increases in health care spending since then.

* * * * *

Catholic Bishops call for unprecedented opposition to the ObamaCare plan.

I couldn’t agree more with Cavuto: This is a brilliant piece of retail politics, turning Corzine’s lame digs at his weight into a high-profile opportunity to charm voters. [...] Read the rest »

If I had been free to blog earlier, I would have added my voice to those, starting with Kathryn, who praised the president's dignified trip to Dover Air Force Base to comfort the families of our fallen, and honor the dead. It was well done, and the right thing to do, and I'm delighted.

Moreover, he has continued his regular visits to the wounded vets at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval. I had worried, in the first days of his presidency, that he might use these occasions as photo ops and promos for his presidency, but he has not.

Morale of our soldiers suffers when he dithers, and soars when they see he understands and honors them. Which he clearly does. Good on him.

Maybe the Mayans were right about 2012 being the End Times. [...] Read the rest »

State-Run Media Now Openly Jokes About Murdering Conservatives–
It is now acceptable for the state-run media to joke about killing conservative leaders, including Former President Bush.
It’s funny.

Gore Vidal is upset that he didn’t murder President Bush.

“That’s one murder I regret not committing.”

Joy Behar agrees, “It’s too late anyway.”

More on Gore’s missed opportunity here.

President Obama took the White House Press Pool with him today to Dover Air Force Base for a photo-op with slain troops as their plane arrived. Only one of the fifteen families allowed the president to use the occasion for his photo-op.

Liz Cheney discussed President Obama’s photo-op today at Dover Air Force Base with John Gibson.

Here’s the partial transcript:

There’s lying. There’s a pattern here… This White House needs to understand… every single day you ask them to serve without the resources they ask for without the reinforcements they need they are in more danger. I believe there is dithering going on and there is waffling…

(On the president’s photo-op at Dover) But I think that what President Bush used to do is do it without the cameras. And I don’t understand sort of showing up with the White House Press Pool with photographers and asking family members if you can take pictures. That’s really hard for me to get my head around. I think its an honorable and important thing for us to pay tribute. There’s no greater sacrifice people make to the nation. It was a surpsising way for the president to choose to do this. I’d like to add the most important way for the president to pay tribute to those who sacrifice is to back them up.

View the video »

Politico now reports new polling in the NY-23 special election that shows that the previous poll by the Club for Growth, which we talked about in an earlier post, was no fluke: Even the Daily Kos's polling now sees a huge surge towards conservative candidate Doug Hoffman in the last week before Tuesday's vote.

And just as we predicted, DIABLO* (Democrat in all but label only) Dierdre "Dede" Scozzafava, the liberal Republican hand-picked by eleven GOP committee apparatchiks, as we reported in More On Dierdre "Dede" Scozzafava, has all but fallen off the radar. The race has come down to a face-off between Hoffman and Democratic candidate Bill Owens:

The latest round of polling gave evidence that Hoffman is on the rise and has pulled even with, or ahead of, Owens as Scozzafava has fallen into third place. In a newly-released poll commissioned by the liberal blog Daily Kos, Hoffman is within one point of Owens, 33 percent to 32 percent, with Scozzafava lagging well behind in third place with 21 percent....

Even more encouraging to Hoffman’s backers, the Daily Kos poll shows Hoffman is winning over more Republican voters than the GOP’s own nominee. He leads Scozzafava 41 to 34 percent among Republicans -- a sign that GOP voters are increasingly identifying with Hoffman as the true Republican candidate.

And he holds a 19-point lead among independents over Owens, 47 percent to 28 percent, suggesting that his outsider message is resonating, and that his support isn’t confined to the conservative base.

Evidence is mounting (a favorite liberal-stream media word) that far from making a "blunder," Sarah Palin had her finger on the crystal ball: Hoffman looks like a winner now, and Palin was the first Republican heavy-hitter to come out for him. (Fred Thompson was an earlier endorser; but Thompson is a spent force. As great a guy as he usually was, he is the GOP's past, not its future.)

And at last, Hoffman is getting some lovin' from "mainstream" (that is, more conservative) Republicans: Politico reports that National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) Chairman Pete Sessions (R-TX, 92%) is making it clear that the Republican conference would be very pleased if Hoffman is elected:

“He would be very welcome, with open arms,” Sessions told POLITICO in an interview off the House floor.

And former NRCC Chairman Tom Cole (R-OK, 88%) now supports Hoffman's insolent campaign against Democrat Owens and formal Republican candidate Scozzafava. Meanwhile, Hoffman's popularity is still growing among the rank and file:

Hoffman, whose campaign barely had a presence in the district as recently as two weeks ago, is getting help from a well-oiled conservative ground game, with hundreds of volunteers from tea party groups and leading conservative organizations working in upstate New York to help him get out the vote next Tuesday.

Hoffman’s campaign now has five campaign offices teeming with volunteers across the sprawling district. By contrast, Scozzafava’s campaign has just one office in her home base.

The anti-tax Club for Growth, pro-life Susan B. Anthony’s List, Eagle Forum and anti-illegal immigration Minuteman PAC all have staffers on the ground knocking on doors, making calls to Republican voters and delivering pro-Hoffman literature to churches.

You may or may not have read it here first, but I think I might have been the first among all those blogs I personally follow -- that would be three, counting Big Lizards -- to flatly predict that:

• The race will, in the next couple of days, come down to a two-way between Doug Hoffman and Bill Owens;
• And that Hoffman will win -- and win convincingly. Perhaps not with an outright majority, unless Scozzafava sees the "mene mene" on the wall and drops out; but a solid victory of 5-8 points over Owens, with Scozzafava in third by double-digits.

As usual, when Big Lizards predicts, we invite everyone to track our predictions and see if we know what we're talking about... or whether we fall flat on our egg.

* The term DIABLO does indeed appear to have been minted by Mark Steyn; Charles "the Sauerkraut" Krauthammer was merely the fence.

Cross-posted to Hot Air's rogues' gallery...

I fly into Minneapolis on the average once a week, so I take local aviation stories pretty personally. The saga of two Delta (formerly Northwest) pilots who lost track of the time because they were absorbed with their laptops, reportedly analyzing how their schedules would be affected by Delta's acquisition of Northwest, struck close to home. Actually, I've been on many flights that have overshot the MSP airport. If you arrive early or traffic is heavy, they'll sometimes send you around Lake Minnetonka to eat up a little time. More often, if it looks like you might arrive early, they'll have you circle around Eau Claire, Wisconsin for a while. As a last resort, if you're on the ground ahead of schedule, they'll just let you sit on the runway until a gate opens up.

This incident was different, though, because the overshot was accidental. The image of 150 passengers hurtling through the sky, off course, while their pilots are engrossed in something else, is undoubtedly a scary one. It inspired a couple of editorial cartoons. This one is by Michael Ramirez; click to enlarge:

This one is by Nate Beeler:

Robert Kagan wondered this morning if The One will ever be prepared to play hardball with Iran or if the “plan” is, in fact, eternal negotiation while they perfect their bombmaking technique. [...] Read the rest »

There’s still hope for America as long as people like John Satawa continue to stand up for their right to religious expression.
Obama and the democrats haven’t been able to completely erase Christianity from our culture… yet.

(FOX News)
A Michigan man filed a federal lawsuit for the right to display a Nativity scene in the median of a public road. John Satawa and his family have been displaying the Nativity scene outside of St. Anne’s Church for 63 years.
FOX News reported:

A Michigan man has filed a federal lawsuit claiming his constitutional rights were violated when he was ordered to remove a Nativity scene from the median of a public road — a creche that his family has displayed at the location for 63 years.

John Satawa, of Warren, Mich., filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court on Friday in an attempt to be allowed to put back the 8- by 8-foot Nativity scene his late father built in 1945.

After receiving a complaint by the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation last December, the Road Commission of Macomb County told Satawa to remove the holiday display, citing incomplete permits. Satawa’s permit application was later denied because it “clearly displays a religious message” and violated “separation of church and state,” Macomb County Highway Engineer Robert Hoepfner wrote.

Satawa says he simply wants to restore the “tradition” on the median between Mound and Chicago Roads outside of St. Anne’s Parish Church.

“The Nativity display has been a tradition not just for my family, but for the whole community for 63 years,” Satawa told Foxnews.com in a statement. “I am disappointed the Road Commission would not stand up for our community and our Constitution and that is why I was compelled to file this lawsuit.”

The New York Times reports this afternoon that Iran has rejected the essence of a Western proposal under which it would have shipped some 75 percent of its stockpile of low-enriched uranium (LEU) abroad for further processing into fuel for a research reactor.

Instead, Iran is demanding that it first be supplied with reactor fuel fabricated from foreign uranium. Only then will it consider sending any of its own LEU abroad. In the intervening months, of course, Iranian centrifuges would continue to spin, additional LEU would be produced, and Iran’s defenses of its nuclear sites would continue to be hardened against possible military attack. The Times quotes a European official as saying, “The key issue is that Iran does not agree to export its lightly enriched uranium. That’s not a minor detail. That’s the whole point of the deal.”

Indeed. The Obama administration’s entire rationale for the LEU proposal was that it would result, in short order, in the removal of enough LEU from Iran to ensure that it no longer had sufficient fissile material in country to rapidly produce a bomb through further enrichment. Under the original U.S. plan, it would allegedly have taken Iran upwards of a year to produce enough additional LEU to once again have a militarily significant stockpile. The administration argued that the deal would set back Iran’s nuclear clock and put additional time on the diplomatic clock -- both of which, it hoped, would reduce Israel’s sense of urgency about taking unilateral military action.

If Iran’s position (as described by the Times) holds -- if it refuses to export existing LEU and continues producing new LEU -- the Obama administration’s proposal will have been blown to smithereens. The Times story says as much. Tehran’s response is yet one more sign of the absolute contempt with which the Iranian regime views the United States in general and President Obama’s nine-month effort at engagement in particular.

So what’s the president to do? What he should do, of course, is move aggressively to penalize Iran for its delaying tactics. Just after the October 1 meeting in Geneva at which the Iranians agreed “in principle” to accept the LEU deal, Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg told the Senate Banking Committee that “By the end of the month, I think we will have a clear indication of whether, on the . . . things that they apparently agreed to in Geneva, whether they’re taking action to show they’re serious. . . . I think the president and the secretary [of state] and others have made clear that if we see that they are unwilling to take action on the things that they’ve said they’re going to do, that we are prepared to move with stronger actions -- ideally through the Security Council and multilaterally, but we reserve the right to take action by ourselves.”

Will the administration do so if Iran’s response is as transparently deceptive as the Times story claims? Will it follow through even if Iran responds by threatening to break off further talks? Is the president prepared to endanger the diplomatic engagement on which he’s staked America’s vital interests, and do so just a month after the negotiations began? Is he prepared to do so even in the face of continued Russian resistance to additional sanctions? (Just yesterday, the Kremlin’s top foreign-policy advisor told reporters that “Sanctions in relation to Iran are hardly possible in the near future.”)

I doubt it -- but I’d be very happy if the administration proved me wrong.

-- John P. Hannah, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, served as national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney from 2005 to 2009.

Calendar 2009 is the 25th anniversary of the year immortalized by George Orwell as 1984 and the 60th anniversary of the publication of the book Nineteen Eighty Four in Britain and America.

You would think that the Main Stream Media (MSM), which marks 25th anniversaries of almost every breakthrough, tragedy, and historical event -- 2009 is the 25th anniversary of the Macintosh computer, the discovery of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), and of the computer game Tetris -- would outdo itself reflecting on the accuracy of Orwell’s warning of a coming totalitarianism state in Britain and America. Millions of American school children have read the classic, which introduced such universal terms as “Big Brother,” “doublethink,” “thoughtcrime,” and “Newspeak” into the vernacular. Yet no such retrospective has appeared.

You can bet that if “W” were still president and the sinister Dick Cheney still in the White House basement -- whittling away at the Constitution in between waterboarding innocent Moslem bystanders and chortling to Luke Skywalker, “I am your father!” -- that the anniversary would be front-page news. Charlie Gibson and Keith Olbermann would be asking, “Is George Bush Big Brother?” (In fact, in 2004, a quasi-documentary titled Orwell Rolls in His Grave, directed by Robert Pappas and peopled with celebrities of the Left such as Michael Moore, made that very point.)

But on the book’s 60th anniversary, with a liberal president, the MSM would rather not dwell on whether nine tenths of Nineteen Eighty Four’s “predictions” have come true, or that many occurred under liberal presidents such as Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, and Clinton (yeah, they happened under the other guys too!) Such is the opinion of futurist and neuroscientist Dr. David Goodman, a Southern California resident who has devoted much of his career to the study of "George Orwell," the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair.

Goodman has collected 137 “predictions” culled from Orwell’s masterpiece. Here’s one: “Forced metrification. The chap at the local pub chatting with Winston Smith complains that he is unable to get his pint. As his lament continues, it appears that the government declared for the metric system without consideration for the people and their wishes. Certainly Orwell writing in 1947 foresaw the continental system imposed on the Brits before calendar 1984,” says Goodman.

Or this: “Speakwrite machine. Perhaps Orwell's most original prediction; Winston Smith in his cubicle at the Ministry of Truth pulls the microphone towards him and dictates his memoranda. The machine translates his spoken words into a typed message. Every time I enter my local computer store and see software converting words into type, I think of Orwell and his invention of speakwrite to eliminate secretaries who became aware through memos of black and white propaganda,” says Goodman.

There are the obvious ones: two-way television; face-recognition software; never-ending wars (such as the “war” on drugs, or the current unpleasantness formerly known as the War on Terror); and the Patriot Act, which authorized inquiries into the reading habits of library patrons. [Nb. Not everyone at Big Lizards agrees with the implication of nefariousness in this element of that act! -- DaH]

Plus citizens being under constant surveillance (think of traffic cameras in the U.S. and the U.K. and face-recognition software in casinos); technology for wireless lie-detectors; or government authorities using cell phones to track our every move.

Intriguingly, documents have surfaced in recent years -- a letter written by Orwell to Sidney Sheldon in 1949, and a poem called “End of the Century, 1984” by Orwell's first wife Eileen, written years before Nineteen Eighty Four -- that bolster the argument that it was written as a satire on the socialist Fabian Society; the book is set one-hundred years to the day after the founding of the Fabian Society in London in 1884... that is, the "end of the (Fabian) century."

For 30 years Dr. Goodman has written and been interviewed about Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four predictions. When the famous date approached, Goodman calculated that 100 of 137 predictions had come true. More have come true since then, he says.

Recently he found proof that Orwell’s book was a biting satire on political and literary figures of the day, such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, and H.G. Wells, Fabians all. Most literary analyses of Nineteen Eighty Four and the publisher’s advertisement’s for the book emphasized that it was a satire on the Communist Russia of Stalin, but Goodman disputes that.

“Big Brother was supposedly Stalin and Goldstein, enemy of the people, was Trotsky and it was telling you what Russia would be thirty-five years ahead,” says Goodman. “That got me a little confused because Orwell had written Animal Farm, an obvious satire on Communist Russia -- then he got the idea for his next book. Why write two satires on Stalin?”

For many years the accepted interpretation was that Orwell was a Fabian socialist. The 1966 book Fabian Freeway: High Road to Socialism by Rose Martin lists Orwell as one of the conspirators of Fabian socialism in Britain. “I’ve read that citation all over the place, but I’ve also read several dozens of books about Orwell and found descriptions of terrible run-ins he had with influential Fabians, such as Beatrice and Sidney Webb.” Goodman believes that Goldstein in the book is fashioned after Sidney Webb. “The four ministries of Love, Peace, Plenty, and Truth, parody Fabian slogans of the 1920s. The book begins on April 4, 1984, the same date [plus a century] of the first pamphlet by the Fabian Society. When Orwell worked at the BBC during WWII he could look out his window at University College, where British Fabianism was at its strongest.”

Goodman isn’t the first to posit this type of connection. Walter Cronkite in his preface to the Signet Gold edition of Nineteen Eighty Four hypothesized that the book, “was a novelistic essay on power, how it is acquired and maintained, how those who seek it or seek to keep it tend to sacrifice anything and everything in its name.” That comment set Goodman off on his own 25 year search for the truth.

Since Fabian Freeway was published, documents have surfaced that support Goodman. One is the poem by Eileen Blair, a fierce Fabian Socialist who died in 1945. Goodman thinks it probable that references Martin found were of Orwell’s wife and not Orwell himself.

There is also a letter by author Sidney Sheldon, who wrote to Orwell shortly before the latter's death asking permission to do a play based on the book, and clarification on whether it was intended as an attack on Soviet Russia, as Sheldon had been told to stage it, or a prediction of what might happen if British socialism, which had come to power in 1945 under Clement Attlee’s Labor Party, were to continue on for another 35 years -- as Sheldon had originally proposed.

Orwell wrote him back: “Dear Mr. Sheldon, many thanks for your letter of August 9, I think your interpretation of the book’s political tendency is very close to what I meant… I was trying to chiefly imagine what communism would be like if it were firmly rooted in the English speaking countries and was no longer a mere extension of the Russian foreign office.”

Orwell’s hero, Winston Smith, was 39 in the book. That would have been about the age of Orwell’s adopted son, Richard (then aged 2), in 1984, along with an entire generation who would have grown up in a Socialist Britain.

Knowing that Orwell intended Nineteen Eighty Four as a warning against what might happen in a democracy if socialism is pursued to its ultimate goals should serve as a clear warning to the present generation in both the U.K. and the United States -- If only someone was listening to the warning!

Because we all know God is a socialist.
Michael Moore told us.

Sting says Obama was sent from God.

Does that mean Bill Ayers is like John the Baptist?… And Reverend G-D AmeriKKKa Wright is like a prophet?

This isn’t really a change — they never threatened to exclude him, after all — but when you’ve got the guy who’s been bankrolling Scozzafava now uttering warm, inclusive words about Hoffman, it’s safe to say the GOP has about given up on its nominee. [...] Read the rest »

It’s come to this.

This photo released by the Venezuelan Presidency show Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (L) during a meeting with US actor Sean Penn (R), at the presidential palace in Caracas, on October 28. Penn may film a movie in Venezuela, according to Chavez. (AFP/PRESIDENCIA)

After courting the Marxist Castro brothers in Cuba Sean Penn met with Marxist and leftist hero Hugo Chavez in Venezuela today.
He will pass a message from Chavez to Obama when he returns to the US.
THR reported:

President Hugo Chavez said he met privately with actor Sean Penn on Wednesday, and that the Oscar-winning celebrity may film a movie in Venezuela .

Penn may shoot a film based on a novel by Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, which is set largely in the jungle along Venezuela ’s southern Orinoco river, Chavez said. He appeared to be referring to Carpentier’s 1953 novel, “The Lost Steps,” about an American anthropologist and composer’s journey into the jungle region.

Penn’s publicist could not immediately be reached for comment.

Chavez added that he discussed politics with Penn, who said he would soon see U.S. President Barack Obama. Chavez said he’d asked Penn to tell Obama he should take action to earn his Nobel Peace Prize , and should scrap a plan for the U.S. military to increase its presence at bases in Colombia.

“They gave him the Nobel Prize, very well, now he should earn it,” the socialist leader said, paraphrasing an open letter by documentary filmmaker Michael Moore to the U.S. president.

Chavez also applauded Moore’s work, and dismissed comments the director made during an interview with Jimmy Kimmel on ABC earlier this month. Moore said he’d drunk tequila with Chavez at the Venice Film Festival and offered the Venezuelan president suggestions for an upcoming speech at the United Nations .

One of our trolls demanded to know this morning why my Headline for this story was so different from Politico’s headline. [...] Read the rest »

Candidate Barack Obama made a big deal about government transparency and giving citizens ample opportunity to read pieces of legislation before they're voted on.

With this in mind, all 40 Republican Senators signed a letter sent to Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) Thursday demanding the new healthcare reform proposal be published on the Internet so that ALL Americans can "learn how the federal government is spending their money."

The full text with signatories was posted on Sen. Jeff Sessions' (R-Ala.) Facebook page moments ago:

Today, all 40 Republican senators wrote a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) asking that in the interest of full transparency, as promised by President Obama, that he immediately release the new Senate Democrat health care bill to the American public.

Here's the text:

Hon. Harry Reid
Majority Leader
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510

Dear Mr. Leader,

On Monday, you announced that you had sent health care legislation to the Congressional Budget office (CBO). As you know, this legislation will have a profound impact on the lives of every American, including the next generation who will be forced to pay for it. Our national debt stands at nearly $12 trillion, with a deficit of $1.4 trillion. The health care bill will likely be more than 1,000 pages long and is the single most important legislation we will consider and debate this year in Congress.

With an issue this large and complex, we need full transparency at every stage in the legislative process. President Obama was elected, in part, on his promise to bring greater transparency to the workings of the federal government. The American people and every member of Congress should be allowed to read the bill that was sent to CBO. The bill should be made available for taxpayers to read and learn how the federal government is spending their money. We are writing to request that you immediately make all materials sent to CBO publicly available on the internet.

Sincerely,
Sen. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.)
Sen. John Barrasso (Wyo.)
Sen. Robert Bennett (Utah)
Sen. Christopher Bond (Mo.)
Sen. Sam Brownback (Kan.)
Sen. Jim Bunning (Ky.)
Sen. Richard Burr (N.C.)
Sen. Thad Cochran (Miss.)
Sen. Susan Collins (Me.)
Sen. John Cornyn (Texas)
Sen. Michael Crapo (Idaho)
Sen. Jim DeMint (S.C.)
Sen. John Ensign (Nev.)
Sen. Michael Enzi (Wyo.)
Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.)
Sen. Charles Grassley (Iowa)
Sen. Judd Gregg (N.H.)
Sen. Orrin Hatch (Utah)
Sen. Kay Hutchison (Texas)
Sen. James Inhofe (Okla.)
Sen. John Isakson (Ga.)
Sen. Mike Johanns (Neb.)
Sen. Jon Kyl (Ariz.)
Sen. Richard Lugar (Ind.)
Sen. Mel Martinez (Fla.)
Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.)
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Aka.)
Sen. Jim Risch (Idaho)
Sen. Pat Roberts (Kan.)
Sen. Richard Shelby (Ala.)
Sen. Olympia Snowe (Me.)
Sen. John McCain (Ariz.)
Sen. David Vitter (La.)
Sen. George Voinovich (Ohio)
Sen. Roger Wicker (Miss.) 

It will be fascinating to see how Obama-loving media report this in the next 24 hours.

Stay tuned. 

Noted Dick Cheney-basher Chris Matthews, on Thursday's "Hardball," finally found an area of common ground with the former Vice President – his endorsement of moderate Texas Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison over Rick Perry in the Texas governor's race. However, even a bit of praise from the MSNBC host came with a vicious shot, as Matthews sneered, "You might think an endorsement from Dick Cheney would be like a dinner invite from Uday and Qusay Hussein, but not in Texas."

After making the comparison to the brothers who infamously tortured Iraqi athletes for losing on the field, Matthews went on to ponder: "Can the torture man boost her backing from conservatives in beating secessionist governor Rick Perry?" [audio available here]

The following Matthews outbursts were aired on the October 29, "Hardball":

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Also you might think an endorsement from Dick Cheney would be like a dinner invite from Uday and Qusay Hussein, but not in Texas. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison says she's pleased to have the former Vice President's support in her race for governor. Can the torture man boost her backing from conservatives in beating secessionist governor Rick Perry? This is one of the races that matters to me and we'll break it down.

...

MATTHEWS: Former Vice President Dick Cheney is backing Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, proving, once again, that a broken clock is right twice a day. Astounding. Against the secessionist governor Rick Perry. [Sarah] Palin, by the way, the former governor of Alaska is backing, of course, Rick Perry.

Read this post »

The elitist in the White House is upset with the commoners for criticizing his £45,000 ($74,000) date night in New York City during the worst recession since the Great Depression .

“The notion that I just couldn’t take my wife out on a date without it being a political issue was not something I was happy with.”

The Daily Mail reported at the time that Obama’s date night in New York City cost £45,000.
It was not your average night out on the town.

The Daily Mail reported:

That’s for three private jets, two helicopter rides, extra planes for security and closing roads for motorcade

It was a campaign pledge that Barack Obama didn’t dare break – a promise to take his wife out for dinner and a show once the election was over.

So on the weekend he booked a babysitter, asked Michelle to put on a little black dress and swept her off for a date…

The romantic jaunt is estimated to have cost the taxpayer more than £45,000 in transport and security costs – because the date was in New York.

The President used three planes, one to carry the couple and two to ferry aides and reporters all the way from Washington.
The cost of each flight was thought to be nearly £15,000.

The bill was pushed even higher with the use of two helicopters, one to take the Obamas to catch their plane in Washington and another to zip the party into Manhattan from JFK airport.

And, it seems like it was just yesterday that Barack Obama was telling us that everyone was going to have to sacrifice for the greater good.
Well… Some of us have to sacrifice anyway.

I take issue with the tack our friend Victor Davis Hanson has taken in his criticism of the Obama administration’s conduct of the War on Terror (post of 5:05). He says, “Since January 2009, we have seen plenty of radical Islamists apprehended in the United States while planning mayhem on a massive scale,” and proceeds to ask, “Why . . . are these darn terrorists . . . not getting the ‘hope and change’ message?” I think, rhetorically, this comes dangerously close to blaming Obama for . . . succeeding. Imagine if someone wrote in October of 2001, “The Republicans promised us that they would be better at keeping the nation safe. But we just lost 3,000 innocent lives to the terrorists -- why are the terrorists not getting the ‘tough on national security’ message?” We conservatives would quite correctly have denounced this criticism as both simplistic and opportunistic - but at least it would have been criticism of an actual, you know, failure. The U.S. under Obama, in Victor’s own telling, has been busting the radical Islamists and breaking up the terrorist plots. I congratulate the president and all the federal, state, and local law-enforcement officials involved, and wish them continued success in doing so. There are legitimate questions to be raised about our current anti-terrorism policy; this approach, I think, is wrong-headed and counterproductive.

Columnists and reporters need to fill daily news quotas. Thus, each ebb and flow of the stock market, the GDP, the data on housing starts, and so on receive massive discussion. Historians, however, care more about long-term results, and it’s too early to discern any pattern for economic recovery in the Obama administration. Yes, housing prices are up slightly this month, and GDP is now up as well. But unemployment is still trending downward, and the uncertainties on taxes, health care, cap-and-trade, and sensitive foreign diplomacy all make short-term reports of limited value.

Many have compared the current economic crisis to the Great Depression, and it is useful to study FDR’s statistics on recovery to understand the problem with relying on short-term data. Unemployment, for example, was 21.4 percent in May 1934 and dropped to 13.2 percent by May 1937. That impressed many pundits and voters. But in May 1939, unemployment was back up to 20.7 percent. Why? FDR had raised taxes, introduced a new corporate tax, enacted a minimum-wage law, and granted unions unprecedented federal support to organize during the late 1930s. When those government interventions took hold, the economic recovery was thwarted. In fact, capital goods in May 1937 had almost returned to 1929 levels, but in May 1939 capital goods stood at a mere 59 percent of 1929 levels.

The key issue here is economic philosophy. FDR believed that massive intervention (followed by high taxes) would lead to economic recovery. Obama has a similar belief. They are wrong, and thus any short-term recovery we see during 2009 and 2010 is likely to be ephemeral. By contrast, Ronald Reagan and Calvin Coolidge believed that cutting tax rates and reducing federal intervention was the recipe for economic recovery, and both saw economic recoveries during the first terms of their presidencies. Economic growth during the 1920s and 1980s was, in fact, spectacular. When people are unshackled and allowed to be free, they can accomplish much. When that belief takes hold again in the United States, we will likely see a serious recovery.

-- Burton Folsom Jr. is a professor of history at Hillsdale College and author of New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America.

People have been buzzing about it and the indignant Catholic League statement has been duly issued, so I suppose this is worth a thread. [...] Read the rest »

We noted in The Corner yesterday this extraordinary New York Times story suggesting the Obama administration is considering blending the McChrystal and Biden strategies -- counter-insurgency in population centers, counter-terrorism outside of it. I've talked to a couple of McChrystal supporters who aren't as alarmed by this report as you might think. They believe it either reflects the account of White House officials who don't fully understand the McChrystal strategy (which does include an element of pulling back from the more remote areas), or pre-emptive spin to try to salvage something publicly for Biden when the internal debate is really turning against him.

Reading the tea leaves, it appears that defense, state, and the intelligence community has concluded that the Taliban is dangerous and it can't be fought effectively without something like McChrystal's 40,000 troops. The politicos, though, seem to want to turn the process on its head. The original idea was to come up with the strategy and ends first, then decide on what troop levels are necessary. The political aides seemingly want to come up with the most politically palatable troop number -- say splitting the difference at 20,000 -- and then ask what strategy can be supported with that number. The White House has given the impression of wanting to rig the process against McChrystal, but of failing as the facts -- reflected in the positions of defense, et. al -- lean the other way.

The other conflict is probably between Obama’s head and his heart. In his heart, there’s every reason to believe, he doesn’t want to do this. It’s not what he or his supporters are fundamentally about. But his head is likely having trouble coming up with a plausible reason to deny McChrystal. One other dynamic to be aware of: McChrystal is very Petraeus-like in how unvarnished he is in his assessments and how realistic he is about the low expectations we should have. With Petraeus in Iraq, that attitude was a useful corrective to President Bush’s resolute commitment to victory. With McChrystal, every time he talks that way he’s probably stoking the fears of the White House political aides and Obama’s own doubts.

What media bias?
State-run media darling Katie Couric advised Republicans to stay away from fringe players like Former VP Candidate Sarah Palin and the nation’s top talk radio host Rush Limbaugh.
Of course, Katie has always had the the GOP’s best interest at heart:

Watch CBS News Videos Online
NewsBusters has the transcript, via FOX Nation:

KATIE COURIC: As Politico reported, there’s growing concern among some GOP leaders that controversial commentators and far-right conservatives have hijacked the message. People like Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin appeal to the base - and you certainly need that base to win elections. But in an age when 42 percent of Americans call themselves Independents – you can’t win with just the base, either… Before the 2010 midterm elections roll around, Republicans need to get the focus back onto the Big Tent where all are welcome and off the sideshows that are popping up along the party’s fringe.

Note: Fringe according to Couric means any wildly popular conservative who can stir the base to action.

More… Magnum added this:

Is she going to give the libtards the same warning, or are Obama’s lefty fringe acquaintances acceptable?

Last time I checked neither Rush nor Palin bombed a clinic, killed a cop, or swore allegiance to the communist party.

Exactly.

A new coalition was launched Thursday to specifically target conservatives Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, Pat Buchanan, and Paul Brown.

Called StopTheWitchHunt.org, their goal is "to give voice to the millions of Americans who believe it is time for talk-show hosts and elected officials to stop stoking the racial anxieties of the fringes of America."

They accuse the quintet of spewing "lies and hate speech...in a nationwide witch hunt" against President Obama. 

They even call Limbaugh's "I hope he fails" remark "the verbal equivalent of putting a razor blade in a candy apple." 

Their press release is even more hysterical, especially the misspelling of one of the objects of their disaffection:

This Halloween, take action against the lies and hate speech that Glen [sic] Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Lou Dobbs, Paul Brown, and Pat Buchanan have been spewing in a nationwide witch hunt.  

Echo Justice, a coalition of national and local organizations launched a multi-media counter to the right-wing's echo chamber. StopTheWitchHunt.org is a newly formed multimedia watch dog portal that will use social media and mobile communications to take a grassroots stand and "call out" the mischaracterizations and hate speech that has been going on for too long.

"History has taught that bad things happen when good people are silent," says Makani Themba- Nixon, Executive Director of The Praxis Project and a member of the Echo Justice coalition. "StoptheWitchHunt.org allows us to confront these scare tactics and make our voices heard."

The website is designed to give voice to the millions of Americans who believe it is time for talk-show hosts and elected officials to stop stoking the racial anxieties of the fringes of America.

Beck and his fellow band of hooligans have been telling scary stories about President Obama whom Limbaugh has disrespectfully referred to as "the little black man child." Beck recently accused the biracial President of having "a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture." And he has attacked a number of key Administration officials accusing them of being socialist and anti-American. Limbaugh, who has a history of making racially charged remarks about Obama, has called the mixed-race president "a halfrican American." Days before the President's inauguration in January, Limbaugh said, "I hope he fails" - the verbal equivalent of putting a razor blade in a candy apple.

StoptheWitchHunt.org is just the beginning of a multi-media campaign to support a new resistance to these Halloween Goons.

Readers who aren't sufficiently frightened will want to take a gander at their logo (PDF here) which is a cartoon picture of the five gentlemen dressed in what appears to be Pilgrim attire carrying pitchforks and torches in front of the White House.

BOO, scary! 

*****Update: Our friend Michelle Malkin has more on this story.

Steve Waldman, the "founding soul of Beliefnet" and a former Newsweek reporter and US News & World Report editor is now spinning through the revolving door into the Obama FCC, reports Cathy Lynn Grossman of USA Today:

Steven Waldman, founder, editor and leading political blogger of Beliefnet.com, the nation's top Internet spirituality site, is leaving for a post in the Obama administration.

He's posted a farewell letter on his blog calling this "the most difficult (and surreal) post I've had to write" as he departs to become senior adviser to new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski.

Grossman's brief October 28 Faith & Reason blog post failed to mention Waldman's stint in the Clinton administration, but then again Waldman's Beliefnet blogger bio page also leaves out his work as senior advisor to the CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service -- the bureaucracy that runs AmeriCorps -- during the Clinton administration.

After his stint as a advisor for AmeriCorps, Waldman penned an April 1, 1999 article for the Democratic Leadership Council's Blueprint Magazine with his vision for how to "Nationalize National Service."

Conservatives wary of the pro-"Fairness Doctrine" inclinations of the Obama/Genachowski FCC might point back to Waldman's previous government service for clues as to how he'll advise the FCC on packaging its regulatory agenda in a palatable manner for public consumption.

For the third time in six months, the CBS Early Show provided a soap box for Levi Johnston to continue his vicious personal attacks against Sarah Palin, as co-host Maggie Rodriguez proclaimed: “He is back on the offensive in this he-said-she-said battle that began shortly after the presidential election....he says he’s trying to show the world the real Levi.”

During the first part of the exclusive interview, which aired on Wednesday, Rodriguez sympathetically asked: “Are you hurt by all of this?....you really sound like somebody who’s dead set on hurting these people the way they hurt you.” Johnston replied: “...if she’s going to go out there and say stuff to me – about me, I’m going to leak some things on her. I mean that’s just how it is.”

At the end of the second part of the interview, aired on Thursday, Rodriguez read a statement from Palin reacting to Johnston: “‘we have purposefully ignored the mean spirited, malicious and untrue attacks on our family. We, like many, are appalled at the inflammatory statements being made or implied.’” Palin went on to take the broadcast network to task for even having Johnston on: “CBS should be ashamed for continually providing a forum to propagate lies.” Rodriguez attempted to justify the repetitive interviews: “...we raised all those questions about credibility and his motivation for doing this with Levi...we should say that we’ve also offered more than a dozen times to interview Sarah Palin, but she has declined each of those requests.”   

During the Wednesday portion of the interview, Rodriguez highlighted one of Johnston’s most abhorrent allegations against Palin: “Levi says Sarah Palin repeatedly joked about her son Trig having Down Syndrome.” Johnston claimed: “you know she’d be like ‘where’s my retarded baby?,’ all of this, and it just wasn’t right.” Rodriguez was highly skeptical of the charge: “Can you understand why that’s really hard to believe that a mother would say that?.... On the trail, we saw her just love and kiss and be all about that baby.” Johnston admitted: “I have no proof of showing you it’s true, but you know, I know it is.”

Later, Rodriguez again questioned Johnston’s credibility: “Why should people believe you versus her?....Do you feel that you’ve betrayed them because your airing this dirty laundry?” Johnston argued: “They don’t really have a reason not to believe me....they were kind of betraying me at the same time, back stabbing me....And so I really don’t care anymore.”

Rodriguez went on to wonder: “Are you going to continue saying things? Could you say more that you haven’t said?” Johnston hinted at having more damaging information: “There are some things that I have that are huge....that would get her in trouble and could hurt her, will hurt her, but I’m not going to go that far. If I really wanted to hurt her, I could very easily.” Rodriguez pressed him: “Things that could get her in trouble as far as what?...That are illegal?...are they illegal or immoral? Or unethical?” Johnston simply offered: “Just things she has done while she was governor....I’m just not going to talk about them.”

During the Thursday portion of the interview, Rodriguez asked Johnston about his upcoming appearance in Playgirl magazine: “What if Sarah Palin and her husband and her family see this and think ‘this is not what we’re all about, this is not someone that we want close to our family’ and this winds up pushing you further apart from them?” Johnston argued: “I don’t think it should matter what – in their eyes – what I’m doing. She’s doing her thing, I’m doing mine. She’s doing her book, she’s quit governor for her money, so I don’t see how – we’re, you know, kind of on the same page here.”

Rodriguez repeated another unsubstantiated accusation from Johnston: “Levi claims Sarah Palin had other ideas about raising their son Tripp, in fact, he says she approached him and Bristol with a plan to hide the pregnancy and then adopt the baby herself.” Johnston explained: “It definitely hurt Bristol. She was – she was almost like in tears. And you know, it was – it wasn’t good....we just kind of blocked it out. We didn’t say anything, you know, and Bristol told her mom to shut up.”

Rodriguez again went after his credibility: “Some people might say you purposely were trying to hurt her and, therefore, maybe exaggerated things. Is that possible?” Johnston flatly denied the charge: “No. I stand by my story 100% and everything is the truth.”

Rodriguez decided to move on and sympathetically asked: “Do you feel that you were exploited by the Palins?” Johnston lamented: “I think they used me in the wong way....Just throwing me in that then saying ‘get out.’ It was, you know, kind of a bad move, it wasn’t right.” Rodriguez added: “So you feel like somebody who’s been used and discarded?” Johnston replied: “Uh-huh. Now that I think about it, see how she really was, you know, I kind of, you know, am mad at myself, that I wasn’t, you know – put my guard up more.”

Nearing the end of the interview, Rodriguez decided to take advantage of Johnston’s political wisdom: “Do you see Sarah Palin in politics in the future?” Johnston concluded: “No, not really....I think her run is over after she quit that governor job, I don’t think a whole lot of people are happy with her.”

After reporting on the release of Johnston’s Vanity Fair article on September 3, Rodriguez referred to one of her earlier interviews with him: “And when we talked last April, he made similar claims to me and Sarah Palin said he’s lying, he just wants publicity, he just wants his little moment in the spotlight.” Fellow co-host Harry Smith asked her: “Because you’ve met him, you’ve interviewed him. Does he seem like – seem credible to you?” Rodriguez was unsure: “I don’t know. How could I possibly answer that?”

Here is an excerpt of the Wednesday portion of the interview:

MAGGIE RODRIGUEZ: Why should people believe you versus her?

JOHNSTON: I don’t know. They don’t really have a reason not to believe me. I’ve known them since I was little. You know, I’ve – I mean I’ve grown up with them, played hockey with Track, you know, I was dating Bristol for a couple of years now. I mean I was like family in that house.

RODRIGUEZ: So they were saying things because they thought that they could trust you and they thought you were part of the family. Do you feel that you’ve betrayed them because your airing this dirty laundry?

JOHNSTON: Well, that might be true, but at the same time they threw me out there and then that came out that Sarah really didn’t really like me, Todd – I knew Todd didn’t like me. I mean, so they were kind of betraying me at the same time, back stabbing me, you know, just putting on a front to me to make Sarah look good at the convention and everything else. And so I really don’t care anymore.

RODRIGUEZ: Are you hurt by all of this?

JOHNSTON: I was, yeah. Now it’s just kind of like, alright, well – now it’s my turn.

RODRIGUEZ: What do you mean by that?

JOHNSTON: Well, like in Vanity Fair, I’m going to go out – I told a little bit of stuff and you know, I’m just not going to take it anymore.

RODRIGUEZ: But you really sound like somebody who’s dead set on hurting these people the way they hurt you.

JOHNSTON: I’m not really in it to hurt them though.

RODRIGUEZ: That’s what it sounds like, like somebody who’s bent on revenge and getting even, ‘now it’s my turn.’

JOHNSTON: Well, you know, that’s part of it, I guess. But at the same time, you know, if she’s going to go out there and say stuff to me – about me, I’m going to leak some things on her. I mean that’s just how it is.

RODRIGUEZ: Are you going to continue saying things? Could you say more that you haven’t said?

JOHNSTON: There are some things that I have that are huge. And I haven’t said them because I’m not going to hurt her that way.

RODRIGUEZ: So you draw the line somewhere?

JOHNSTON: Yeah. I mean I have things that could – you know – that would get her in trouble and could hurt her, will hurt her, but I’m not going to go that far. If I really wanted to hurt her, I could very easily, but there’s – I’m not going to do it. I’m not going that far.

RODRIGUEZ: Things that could get her in trouble as far as what?

JOHNSTON: Just things she has done while she was governor.

RODRIGUEZ: That are illegal?

JOHNSTON: Yeah, I’m just not going to talk about them.

RODRIGUEZ: But are they illegal or immoral? Or unethical?

JOHNSTON: I’m not going to talk about them.

RODRIGUEZ: So why do you draw the line? Why are some things okay and yet others not okay?

JOHNSTON: You know, because a lot of things I said weren’t that huge. I mean, those are just little – little things I put in Vanity Fair, you know, all the big things I got I’m keep – you know, I’m keeping it in. You know, it’s just something that probably will never come out.

RODRIGUEZ: Has Bristol talked to you since you said all that stuff in Vanity Fair?

JOHNSTON: Yeah, we’ve talked to her. I mean, we don’t talk like at you know – it’s just kind of like ‘hey, how’s the kid – how’s the baby doing? You know, can I come pick him up?’ That kind of thing.

RODRIGUEZ: And she never brought up the Vanity Fair?

JOHNSTON: No.

RODRIGUEZ: That seems odd. It was such a public thing and you said such damning things about her family.

JOHNSTON: I’m sure Sarah’s got something planned, she said ‘don’t say anything to him.’ I’m sure she’s something coming for me.

RODRIGUEZ: What do you think she has coming for you?

JOHNSTON: I don’t know, she might put a few things in the book. You know, I’m not worried about her saying anything about me. You know, I never really done anything bad. You know, I don’t have anything to hide. So, you know, she can go on and say what she wants.

Here is an excerpt from the Thursday portion of the interview:

RODRIGUEZ: Some people might say you purposely were trying to hurt her and, therefore, maybe exaggerated things. Is that possible?

JOHNSTON: No. I stand by my story 100% and everything is the truth.

RODRIGUEZ: Do you feel that you were exploited by the Palins?

JOHNSTON: I think they used me in the wong way.

RODRIGUEZ: What do you mean by that?

JOHNSTON: Just throwing me in that then saying ‘get out.’ It was, you know, kind of a bad move, it wasn’t right.

RODRIGUEZ: So you feel like somebody who’s been used and discarded?

JOHNSTON: Uh-huh. Now that I think about it, see how she really was, you know, I kind of, you know, am mad at myself, that I wasn’t, you know – put my guard up more.

RODRIGUEZ: Do you see Sarah Palin in politics in the future?
                    
JOHNSTON: No, not really.

RODRIGUEZ: How come?

JOHNSTON: I think her run is over after she quit that governor job, I don’t think a whole lot of people are happy with her.

RODRIGUEZ: Is it too late to turn back now? Is it too late to save that relationship, reconcile with the Palins?

JOHNSTON: Well I don’t – yeah, I don’t see myself over there for Christmas or what not. So I don’t know.

RODRIGUEZ: After our interview yesterday, where Levi said that he heard Sarah Palin refer to her son, Trig, who has Down Syndrome, as her ‘retarded baby,’ Palin issued this statement, quote, these are her words, ‘we have purposefully ignored the mean spirited, malicious and untrue attacks on our family. We, like many, are appalled at the inflammatory statements being made or implied. Trig is our blessed little angel who knows it and is lovingly called that every day of his life. Even the thought that anyone would refer to Trig by any disparaging name is sickening and sad. CBS should be ashamed for continually providing a forum to propagate lies. Consider the source of the most recent attention-getting lies. Those who would sell their body for money reflect a desperate need for attention and are likely to say and do anything for even more attention.’ Of course you heard we raised all those questions about credibility and his motivation for doing this with Levi and you heard how he answered. But we should say that we’ve also offered more than a dozen times to interview Sarah Palin, but she has declined each of those requests.

Like Geraghty says, get used to this. [...] Read the rest »

Was just talking to a Republican consultant-type who's not a starry-eyed optimist. He thinks Christie will win. Basic reasoning: He believes Corzine tops out around 42 percent, and as Daggett inevitably falls, Christie just comes out on top. Fwiw.

In today's example of "Are online polls reliable?" is a poll at NPR.org, which found an almost exact split among readers of the NPR blog "The Two-Way" on whether the White House or Fox News should win the battle over reputations. (As of 5 pm Eastern time.) NPR blogger Mark Memmott asked it this way. Are you supporting:

-- The White House on this one; Fox News isn't "fair and balanced." 49% (151,983 votes)

-- Fox News on this one; it asks questions others don't and the White House should be able to handle them. 49% (152,482 votes)

-- Neither side. They're both trying to play this "feud" to their advantage. 2% (5,896 votes)

Memmott wrote it in such a way that it did not require NPR fans to suggest Fox News is fantastic, but it does suggest that position is on the side of giving adequate scrutiny to the White House.

UPDATE: As of 4 pm Friday, the Fox News side of the question is now winning handily, 70 percent to 28.  

He mentions last week's David Folkenflik story for NPR on the Fox feud, but that story was stilted to avoid addressing the liberal bias of the rest of the news media. That was a concept that was merely alleged, not demonstrable:

FOLKENFLIK: Mr. Obama faces a changed media landscape with Fox News and now MSNBC, says John Harwood of The New York Times and CNBC. In newspapers, Harwood says, the hard news divisions determine the agenda; not the editorial page.

Mr. JOHN HARWOOD (Reporter, The New York Times, CNBC): But in cable television, the editorial page drives the train. That is where the power and the attention come from. And in Fox, you've got a network that is self-consciously set out to correct what it sees as the leftward bias of the rest of the media. And you're guaranteed to have a Democratic White House feeling the heat and feeling some frustration about it.

FOLKENFLIK: Dee Dee Myers asks: Does it makes sense to take on a cable channel whose top shows attract two to three million viewers, nearly half of whom are Independents? Myers was press secretary for President Clinton.

Ms. DEE DEE MYERS (Political Analyst): I think it feels good for people inside the White House more than it actually accomplishes everything they want to accomplish. You do get tired of being on the receiving end of a lot of critical media.

FOLKENFLIK: Dan Schnur was communications director of Republican Senator John McCain's presidential campaign in 2000. And he says attacking the media can be a distraction.

Mr. DAN SCHNUR (Former Communications Director): There's only so much of a window of opportunity for even the president of the United States or the White House to talk to voters. And every minute that they spend talking about Fox News is a minute that they're not being heard on health care or Afghanistan or the other policy priorities.

FOLKENFLIK: The White House says its message will get out and that the president will even appear on Fox sometime in the future, but that it's not willing to play ball - at least not right now.

(Hat tip: Nawlins)

Published on TheHill.com on October 27, 2009

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) had two problems. How would he get the healthcare bill out of the Senate Finance Committee without revealing the glaring potential fissures in his party over the public option on healthcare? And how could he lend a veneer of bipartisanship to a one-party bill?

(more…)

Golf, too?  If there was one sport you'd think might be immune from the liberal slant that has invaded too much of sports reporting, it's golf.  The fairways-and-greens guys are known for generally being Republicans.

But out of the blue [green?] on a Golf Channel show this afternoon, host Brandel Chamblee took a cheap shot at Dick Cheney with a rather nasty hunting reference.

Chamblee, who before retiring from the PGA Tour had one win in 370 career starts, was discussing with co-host Rich Lerner the putting woes of the affable Jason Gore . . .

RICH LERNER: Jason Gore—a lot of people want to know, because they like Jason, they remember him at Pinehurst at that U.S. Open. What's happened to Jason do you think?

BRANDEL CHAMBLEE: Well you know, it reminds me almost again of the City Slickers video where the guy says "if you could just do one thing."  And he really struggles with one area of the game.  Tee to green, he's got that part.  Last year he was the best driver on the PGA Tour, and he lost his [playing privileges] card.  The reason is he really struggles from inside ten feet.  He said that he went to Captain Faxon, Brad Faxon [known as one of the greatest putters ever], to get putting tips. This is not like getting hunting tips from Cheney: this is the good stuff right here, this is exactly, this is the guy you need to go to.

Suggestion to Mr. Chamblee: stick to calling the birdies and bogies and lay off the cheap political cracks.  We conservatives need at least one refuge on the sporting dial.

And do like I did -- send Doug Hoffman a few bucks.

Did Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush "probably" commit "impeachable offenses"? That's what influential New York Times editor Sam Tanenhaus thinks.

On Wednesday night, the influential editor of both the "New York Times Book Review" and the "Weekend Review" sections again appeared on Charlie Rose's late night PBS chat show to discuss his no-longer-new book "The Death of Conservatism."

Times Watch found Tanenhaus's slim essay of a book intellectually dishonest, not so much declaring the movement dead as trying to define it out of existence by blurring the meaning of "conservatism" to mean the preserving of liberal government interventions.

Tanenhaus made his assertion three minutes into the interview while discussing limits on presidential power:

Another great conservative philosopher I write about is James Burnham, another mentor to Buckley. And he was one of the first strong critics of what he saw as, called it "Caesarism," the presidency that grows so overweening in its power that it violates the strength of the other branches. It was conservatives who first made that criticism. But then once their own politicians got in office, they reversed course. With Nixon, with Reagan, and with George W. Bush -- decided there should be no constraints on the presidency at all. And we had three presidents in those three instances -- Nixon, Reagan, and Bush -- who committed impeachable offenses probably. And we had Democratic presidents who seemed to understand the limitations of power, and we had moderate Republicans who understood that -- Gerald Ford, Dwight Eisenhower, the elder Bush. 

Tanenhaus skipped a Democratic president who actually was impeached: Bill Clinton.

Don’t be put off by the dKos label. [...] Read the rest »

But the chief target of this two-year hate has been Lou Dobbs. The "Drop Dobbs" campaign, to get CNN to fire the only anchor on their network whose show anyone watches, is sponsored by -- surprise! -- La Raza, the SPLC, Media Matters, LULAC, et al. Last Wednesday, October 21, saw a series of coordinated protests by open-borders groups in cities around the country. The following day, Geraldo Rivera said in a speech that the opponents of amnesty have been "reckless beyond imagining" and that Dobbs in particular "is almost singlehandedly responsible for creating, for being the architect of the young-Latino-as-scapegoat for everything that ails this country."

Well, their efforts are starting to pay off. No, CNN hasn't decided to fire Dobbs (which would cause them to drop behind the Hallmark Channel in viewership). Instead, someone fired a shot at Dobbs's house. As reported today by Fox News (!), a shot was fired on October 5 at Dobbs's home while he and his (Mexican-American) wife were out front; New Jersey State Police took the bullet for analysis.

Whatever you think of Dobbs's schtick, he's always clear that his fulminating is about illegal immigration. He's not even a restrictionist, for heaven's sake, having said a number of times that he favors increased legal immigration. But the open-borders crowd believes -- sincerely believes -- that there can be no legitimate arguments against amnesty and for enforcement, so anyone taking those positions must, by definition, be evil. This is not a prescription for a healthy policy debate.

In a classic example of bad timing, this very evening America's Voice is set to air an ad on MSNBC (where else?) calling for Dobbs's firing because "Every weekday CNN airs 60 minutes of anti-immigrant hate." Will they have the decency to pull the ad, in light of the physical threat to Dobbs and his wife engendered by their hate campaign? Don't hold your breath.

Isn't a diplomat supposed to be--you know--diplomatic? Secretary of State Hillary Clinton doesn't seem to think so. On her current visit to Pakistan, she managed to insult both her own government and Pakistan's in the space of a few minutes.

The Associated Press has reported on interviews and a Q and A session that Clinton gave in Islamabad. I came across it via The Corner, where John Hannah was appalled by this partisan attack by Clinton on her own government:

As a way of repudiating past U.S. policies toward Pakistan, Clinton told the students "there is a huge difference" between the Obama administration's approach and that of former President George W. Bush. "I spent my entire eight years in the Senate opposing him," she said to a burst of applause from the audience of several hundred students. "So to me, it's like daylight and dark."

One can only agree with Hannah's comment:

Does anyone advising President Obama and the secretary of state really believe that this kind of partisanship and trash-talking abroad about another American president is going to buy us much long-term goodwill among either our friends or our adversaries? Do they imagine that this sort of thing really helps to advance U.S. national interests?

Interestingly, that paragraph has now been deleted from the version of the AP account to which Hannah linked, although it can still be found elsewhere. But the linked version adds this report of Clinton slandering the government of Pakistan, which is equally appalling, but for different reasons:

While U.S. officials have said they believe Osama bin Laden and senior lieutenants have been hiding in the rugged terrain along the border with Afghanistan, Clinton's unusually blunt comments went further as she suggested that Pakistan's government has done too little to act against al-Qaida's top echelon.

"I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn't get them if they really wanted to," Clinton said in an interview with Pakistani journalists in Lahore. "Maybe that's the case. Maybe they're not gettable. I don't know."

Is it really the position of the U.S. government that Pakistan's leaders could kill or capture bin Laden et al. if they wanted to, but they have chosen not to do so? That is an explosive charge, and one that to my knowledge is false. Moreover, Clinton doesn't seem to make the charge seriously, as she immediately sort-of-retracted it by saying "Maybe they're not gettable. I don't know." So was she just idly musing when she accused Pakistan's government of deliberately harboring al Qaeda's top leadership?

Does either of the above instances represent how a competent, professional diplomat would behave? I don't think so.

“They want to keep all the gains, and give nothing away themselves”: this from an article in the Guardian describing the dwindling hopes of Barack Obama’s engagement policy with Iran.

Hopes of a diplomatic breakthrough over Iran’s nuclear programme were dwindling tonight after Tehran demanded changes to a uranium exchange deal that European diplomats described as “unacceptable”.

If the deal collapses, as seemed likely, the apparent progress made over Tehran’s nuclear programme in recent weeks would evaporate, the diplomats said. It would deliver another critical blow to the Obama administration’s policy of engagement, and put international sanctions and Israeli military action back on the table. …

Hopes of a diplomatic breakthrough over Iran’s nuclear programme were dwindling tonight after Tehran demanded changes to a uranium exchange deal that European diplomats described as “unacceptable”.

If the deal collapses, as seemed likely, the apparent progress made over Tehran’s nuclear programme in recent weeks would evaporate, the diplomats said. It would deliver another critical blow to the Obama administration’s policy of engagement, and put international sanctions and Israeli military action back on the table.

The uranium deal, agreed in principle in Geneva at the beginning of the month, involved Iran shipping out most of its enriched uranium and, in return, being provided about a year later with fuel rods for its research reactor in Tehran.

Iran’s response, delivered after a week’s delay to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), was not made public, but according to diplomats familiar with the details, Tehran demanded two big changes. They would only ship their uranium out in batches, and only hand it over at the same time the French-made fuel rods were delivered.

That would remove the element of the deal that made it attractive to the west: the temporary removal of most of Iran’s enriched uranium, which is currently enough to make a nuclear weapon. Iran says its nuclear programme is peaceful.

“This is completely unacceptable,” said a European diplomat, who said discussions were under way in Brussels tonight to formulate a common response.

“They want to keep all the gains, and give nothing away themselves,” another diplomat said.

Gee, you would have thought they would have guessed. Meanwhile, in other news, Daniel Ortega is re-establishing himself as the dictator of Nicaragua.  The wolves are howling everywhere, even in the backyard.  Investors.com reports:

Daniel Ortega muscled Nicaragua’s courts to permit his permanent re-election, effectively making him dictator. He’s not alone. After the U.S.’ shabby treatment of tiny Honduras, a new wave of tyrants is rising.

‘Nothing can stop me from re-election,” crowed Ortega, a man Ronald Reagan once called “the little dictator.” Last Monday Nicaragua’s Supreme Court issued a ruling permitting the Marxist Ortega to run for a second term after he and a group of allied mayors petitioned them, overruling a one-term limit in the constitution. Same old Ortega: His dictatorial hunger hasn’t changed.

But one thing is different: U.S. actions since the Honduran crisis that have only emboldened him. Last June 28, Honduras’ Supreme Court ruled that then-President Manuel Zelaya’s bid to hold a reelection referendum was unconstitutional and subject to the sanctions of Honduras’ 1982 constitution: removal from office.

Out he went, but the U.S. cried foul, shortly after Zelaya’s patron in Caracas, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, yelled “military coup.” Unlike Chavez, whose means of striking at Honduras were threats and mayhem — such as sneaking Zelaya back to Tegucigalpa to whip up mobs — the Obama administration was in a position to inflict long-term punishment on the Hondurans.

Readers will recall how President Obama dramatically announced a showdown with Iran at a G20 press conference describing Teheran’s secret nuclear enrichment program. “The accusations were made public in an extraordinary joint statement by the US President, flanked by Gordon Brown and the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy before the start of the G20 economic summit in Pittsburgh”. But in the weeks following, President Ahmadinejad simply gloated over his Western opponents. The Telegraph reported the Iranian President “has proclaimed victory in his battle with the West, claiming he has compelled the US and its allies to ‘co-operate’ with Iran’s nuclear programme”. Maybe it was all show and nothing down.

As Iran’s nuclear negotiator handed in the country’s response to a proposed deal to process its enriched uranium stocks abroad, Mr Ahmadinejad hailed a change in Western policy from “confrontation to co-operation”.

“We welcome fuel exchange, nuclear co-operation, building of power plants and reactors and we are ready to co-operate,” he said in a speech shown live on state television. But he said he would not retreat “one iota” in his demand that the country continue with its nuclear programme, understood by most observers to mean its policy of enriching uranium.

What happens next? The President took a lot of the nation’s hopes as political capital into the Big Casino. Now, after sitting at the tables for 9 months, there’s only a small pile left of what was once a mountain of chips. Is the next hand going to win him big? Is he going to double down again? Or get up and catch a cab home, in case what’s left in his pocket will cover it. Or will he write out a check on the basis of the family farm and spin the wheel of fortune again on the basis of his faith in the fundamental goodness of America’s enemies?  Order another round of drinks for everybody on the Big Spender. Go watch a play on Broadway and keep being Diamond Jim long after all the real diamonds have been hocked for paste. Is there a point where betting on hope means being stuck on stupid? Kenny Rogers once had some advice for people in this situation. But I can’t see his hit tune being played in international diplomatic circles. It wouldn’t go with the wine and cheese.

On a warm summer’s evenin’ on a train bound for nowhere,
I met up with the gambler; we were both too tired to sleep.
So we took turns a starin’ out the window at the darkness
‘Til boredom overtook us, and he began to speak.

He said, “Son, I’ve made my life out of readin’ people’s faces,
And knowin’ what their cards were by the way they held their eyes.
so if you don’t mind my sayin’, I can see you’re out of aces.
For a taste of your whiskey I’ll give you some advice.”

So I handed him my bottle and he drank down my last swallow.
Then he bummed a cigarette and asked me for a light.
And the night got deathly quiet, and his face lost all expression.
Said, “If you’re gonna play the game, boy, ya gotta learn to play it right.

You got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.
You never count your money when you’re sittin’ at the table.
There’ll be time enough for countin’ when the dealin’s done.

Ev’ry gambler knows that the secret to survivin’
Is knowin’ what to throw away and knowing what to keep.
‘Cause ev’ry hand’s a winner and ev’ry hand’s a loser,
And the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep.”

A reader from Boulder, Colo., sends a note that may interest you. It responds to an item in Impromptus today. She says, “In 1994, the Fairview High School Christmas concert was going to close with the students processing out of the auditorium singing ‘Silent Night.’ Huge controversy, with multiple cries against ‘religion in the public schools.’ The school district’s attorneys said no. Since it was too late for the music teacher to arrange for something else, the students began to recess in silence. The audience was having none of it, and started singing ‘Silent Night’ themselves. That story still gives me goose-bumps.”

Holy mackerel, that took brass (and I’m not talking about trumpets and trombones). By the way, I imagine the Boulder people were not able to call that concert a “Christmas concert.” “Winter Serenade”?

Another reader writes to say, “Every December in Chicago, they have the Christkindlmarket. If they called it the ‘Christ Child Market,’ the world would come to an end! And the local bank flashes ‘Happy Holidays,’ followed by ‘Feliz Navidad.’” True, true: You can’t say “Merry Christmas,” but you can say it in Spanish. “And, in my daughter’s public school, they banned Handel but allow black spirituals.” For sure, and thank goodness for spirituals.

We could do this forever, but I’m stopping now. Happy Halloween! (Actually, it’s the day of the Crash, but in any case . . .)

Read this post »

I learned from reading Stuart Rothenberg's take on the the outlook for the 2009 elections that Jon Lerner was responsible for the Club For Growth poll showing conservative candidate Doug Hoffman taking a small lead in New York's 23rd Congressional District special election. Having managed Rudy Boschwtiz's unsuccessful 1996 Senate campaign against Paul Wellstone in which I served as Rudy's treasurer, Jon is an old friend of mine. Jon is now the principal of the political consulting firm Red Sea LLC and the polling firm Basswood Research.

Jon is a man of complete integrity. Rothenberg himself notes parenthetically that Jon is a straight shooter. "For the record," Rothenberg writes, "Club for Growth pollster Jon Lerner is among the least likely pollsters to fudge numbers or manipulate data." Rothenberg's got that right.

Following up on Rothenberg's column, I called Jon to ask for his take on the congressional election. He made so many interesting points that I asked him to reiterate them briefly in a message for Power Line readers. Jon writes:

To recap our discussion of NY-23, I have done three surveys for the Club for Growth. The initial survey was conducted at the very outset of the race, before any advertising was done by anyone. At that time, "Republican" Dede Scozzafava held a narrow lead. But it was apparent that her lead would not withstand the heat of battle.

About half of her support came from Democrats in the Watertown area who knew her pro-labor, liberal voting record and liked it. The other half came from Republicans who did not know about her liberal record but were supporting her because she was the Republican candidate. Once Democrats quickly learned that they could vote for a real Democrat, Bill Owens, they left Scozzafava. And once Republicans learned how liberal her record was, and that they had a conservative alternative in Doug Hoffman, they also left Scozzafava.

What remains is a close race between Owens and Hoffman, with Scozzafava continuing to collapse. Financially, Hoffman is in good shape, thanks largely to the Club for Growth and online donations. The DCCC, AFSCME, and SEIU are now 100 percent negative against Hoffman in their TV ads, which is proof of the closeness of the race.

What remains of Scozzafava's vote is still about 2:1 Republican, so Hoffman has a good chance of growing further. But it's a close one that could go either way.

Ironically, the one person who is doing the most harm in the race is Newt Gingrich. Scozzafava has no chance to win any longer. By Newt signaling to conservatives that it's okay to support Scozzafava, he is making it more likely that Owens wins.

Even the NRCC understands this, as they have wisely limited their advertising message to attacking Owens rather than promoting Scozzafava. If Hoffman wins, and he very well might, it will be a great victory for the conservative movement, and a great lesson to the Republican Party.

Newt Gingrich is a historic figure who is rightly proud of many accomplishments, but in this case he has made a mistake. His pride is preventing him either from seeing it or from acknowledging it. Message to Newt: Give it up!

NBC's Matt Lauer, on Thursday's "Today" show, handed San Francisco Democrat District Attorney Kamala Harris a virtual campaign contribution in the form of a full interview segment in the 8:30am half-hour as he billed her as the "Female Barack Obama." Harris, who was on to plug her new book, received the full star-treament as Lauer pressed if she had "ambitions for national office." Not surprisingly, the "rising political star" featured the segment all over her official Web site. 

The following teasers and full interview segment were aired on the October 29, "Today" show:

MATT LAUER: And coming up in this half hour, we're gonna meet a woman. Some are calling her "the female Barack Obama." Her name is Kamala Harris. She is a rising political star in California, has written a book on crime, and we're gonna talk, get her take on this, what she thinks we're doing wrong when it comes to fighting crime.

...

MEREDITH VIEIRA: Up next, a career crime-fighter on what we really need to do to keep our community safe.

...

MATT LAUER: Now to a woman named one of America's most powerful women by Newsweek magazine. As San Francisco's first female African-American and Indian-American district attorney, Kamala Harris has received praise for raising conviction rates against violent criminals while creating innovative programs to reduce crime and prevent repeat offenders. Now she's out with a new book called Smart On Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer. Kamala good morning.

KAMALA HARRIS: Good morning, Matt.

LAUER: Nice to have you here.

HARRIS: It's wonderful to be here.

LAUER: Crime is something we think about every single day, whether you've been directly impacted by it or indirectly. We pay for it every single day in this country.

HARRIS: Absolutely.

LAUER: And you think, in large part, we're going about fighting it wrong. Why?

HARRIS: Well, first of all, as a career prosecutor, I can tell you that there is no question in my mind or in anyone's mind, serious and violent crime? Lock ‘em up. We know that. And we know about serious and violent crime because it's on the front page of our paper every day and the leading story on the evening news.

LAUER: So you don't differ from anybody on that subject.

HARRIS: Absolutely.

LAUER: It's on non-violent crime where you differ.

HARRIS: Absolutely. If you look at crime, look at on a pyramid. On the top of the pyramid, serious and most violent crime. It's our priority, let's deal with it. But truly, it is the fewest number of crimes that are occupying so much space and so much money in our criminal justice system, and frankly, we cannot have a one size fits all approach. And that's why a lot of what I talk about in the book is let's bust the myths and get over, you know the idea, that for example, when we want to talk about criminal justice policy, we want tough talk and "lock ‘em up talk." Let's realize that the bulk of what we're dealing with is crime that is recidivist in nature. There's a revolving door around it and we've got to get smarter around cycling people out.

LAUER: You surprised some people by saying, "You know who we should target? We should take a hard look at elementary school truancy."

HARRIS: Absolutely.

LAUER: And other people say, "Wait a second. Let's go to high school truancy because they're most likely to get in trouble." You think, you say no, let's go to the elementary schools. Why?

HARRIS: Let me tell you, I have seen in my city and throughout this country where we have large number of elementary school students who are literally missing 60 to 80 days of a 180-day school year. And as far as I'm concerned, a child going without an education is tantamount to a crime and we need to treat it just as seriously as any other issue, because invariably, that kid will be the high school dropout, who will be the crime victim and the perpetrator.

LAUER: You started another program that's getting a lot of attention nationwide. You s tarted out there, but it's, it's being copied nationwide, called Back On Track.

HARRIS: Right.

LAUER: I'll paraphrase it. You jump in and correct me if I'm wrong.

HARRIS: Okay.

LAUER: You get a young offender-

HARRIS: Yeah.

LAUER: -they've committed a drug offense. They don't go to jail, they go to a boot camp for a year. They plead guilty.

HARRIS: Right.

LAUER: They go through drug testing. They get a GED while they're in this program, and when they're finished with it, if they don't screw up, they get that felony conviction dropped, which allows them to go off and get a job easier.

HARRIS: And Back On Track, as an initiative, has proven over the course of four-and-a-half years to reduce the recidivism or re-offense rate for that population from 54 percent to less than 10 percent.

LAUER: But not a perfect program. And because you're running for attorney general and you're raising a lot of money, they're targeting you. And one of the things your critics have dug up is that there were some illegal immigrants involved in that prison-

HARRIS: Absolutely.

LAUER: -who got their felony convictions dropped because of it. How did that happen?

HARRIS: Well first of all, let me say this, some would say that innovation in government and innovation in law enforcement is an oxymoron. I would suggest to you, that's not true. But inherent in innovation means you're gonna try to do something as it's never been done, but based on the idea that you can actually improve the system. So I created Back on Track. Did I figure out every scenario, no? So, early on, we realized we hadn't safe-guarded for illegal immigrants being in the program. When we learned that, that happened, we fixed it. There you go.

LAUER: I mentioned in one of the teases for your segment, Kamala, that, that you have been called by some a female Barack Obama. Well, you dip your head there, and I'm wondering if that isn't a bit of a double-edged sword, because Barack Obama, for as popular as he was and continues to be, if you look at the polling we've done recently, it says they still give him, a lot of people still give him high marks on style and inspiration, but not such high marks when it comes to accomplishment, getting the job done. So are you worried about that comparison?

HARRIS: Well, I'll tell you, you now, as now second term as district attorney of San Francisco and as a career prosecutor, I know the power that I have as a prosecutor, and it is immense. And when we're in positions of leadership, I think we should do what, I mean, my prayer every night is that I will be judged based on a body of work and not the popularity of any one decision. And I applaud our president for taking on very difficult issues and not taking on these issues in pursuit of popularity, but actually thinking about what is in the best interests of our country.

LAUER: I mentioned you're running for attorney general. Do you have ambitions for national office?

HARRIS: No, you know, it's one step at a time, and I'm a career prosecutor. I really believe that California has the ability, as that old adage says, "So goes California, so goes the rest of the country," to do what I think is really necessary in terms of reform of our criminal justice system so that we're reducing crime in our communities and increasing public resources, and that's why I wrote the book Smart On Crime.

LAUER: You got it in there in the last sentence. Well done, Kamala Harris. Nice to see you. It's good to have you here.

HARRIS: Thank you, thank you.

LAUER: You can read an excerpt of from book that she just plugged shamelessly. It's called Smart On Crime, and it's on our Web site, TodayShow.com.

Give Mike Pence credit for turning a phrase. [...] Read the rest »

This is quite amazing:

Now financier George Soros is announcing a $50 million effort to speed things along. This week Soros is gathering some of the leading practitioners of the market-skeptic school, who were marginalized during the era of "free-market fundamentalism," among them Nobelists Joseph Stiglitz, George Akerlof, Michael Spence, and Sir James Mirrlees.

The basic idea behind the effort is that economists and their free-market zeal have dominated not only the past 20 years but are also dominating the current debate over the response to the financial crisis and the health-care debate.

As government spending grows even faster than it did the last eight years, and as the United States becomes more and more like Europe, I wish free-market economists were winning this fight.

Unfortunately, we see the exact opposite. Free-market economists continue to lose, as they have in the past. None of the proper lessons from the crisis have been learned. For instance, the unhealthy marriages between government and the financial industry and government and the housing industry are as strong as ever, and the government is taking over a major part of the economy. The idea that deregulation is responsible for this crisis is a myth, but it's an enduring one.

A better use of those billions would be research showing how the government's intervention in everything is the source of the problem. I think Soros's fortune would be better used trying to get the government out of the market.

For a wonderful plea to get the "crony" out of "crony capitalism," I suggest you read the testimony Russ Roberts gave yesterday before Congress on executive compensation here.

Remember the Cash for Clunkers (CARS) program the network media liked so much? Well, according to analysis from Edmunds.com the government spent $24,000 per car when you subtract cars that would have been sold even without the program.

CNNMoney.com reported Oct. 29 that only 125,000 vehicles sold under the program (out of 690,000) "would not have been sold anyway," according to Edmunds.

The government allotted $3 billion for the CARS program, but Edmunds' said that more than 80 percent of those cars would have been purchased anyway.

Jeremy Anwyl, Edmunds' CEO, wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal Aug. 3 pointed out that in any month there are 60,000 to 70,000 "clunker-like" sales. "We have crammed three to four months of normal activity into just a few days," Anwyl concluded.

Despite misgivings from Anwyl and others, the network news media embraced the government giveaway. All three networks described it as a "victim of its own success" AFTER it ran out of taxpayer funding in its first week.

Katie Couric heaped praise on CARS saying Aug. 3, "[S]ales reports out today show the Cash for Clunkers program gave U.S. automakers a much-needed jumpstart." While CNBC's Jim Cramer called it "money well-spent" during the "Today" show.

In clunker stories citing experts, proponents of CARS outnumbered critics nearly three times as often (between July 4 and Aug. 3).

Occasionally a downside was mentioned, such as the "five hours of paper for each car" reported by ABC's Sharyn Alfonsi.

If you live in Minnesota, as I do, this story has a depressingly familiar ring: "Democrats Ask New Jersey Secretary of State to Ignore Mismatched Signatures on Absentee Ballot Requests."

The state received about 150,000 absentee ballot applications this year. On about 2,300 of those applications so far, the signature on the request form did not match the signature on the voter's registration forms with the state.

In a development that is depressingly predictable, the New Jersey Democratic Party is asking the state to provide provisional ballots for all these voters. Those ballots, could, presumably, be used to overcome any narrow lead by Republican Chris Christie over Democrat Jon Corzine on Election Day.

A mass distribution of provisional ballots, at the request of a political party, would represent a significant change from established law.

It's a sad reality of our contemporary politics: If an election is close enough, the Democratic Party will steal it.

This morning up on the Hill, the RAND Center for Middle East Public Policy held a conference on Afghanistan. I stopped by to hear remarks by former ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad. To be candid, he said nothing noteworthy. A smart and genial man, he chose to be diplomatic -- saying things that were entirely unobjectionable, but neither helpful nor provocative.

So I stayed on to hear Sen. Carl Levin. He argued that in Afghanistan a “change in strategy is essential and more important than force levels.” His implication: We can have a change in strategy without increasing force levels.

The new strategy we’re talking about is COIN -- counterinsurgency. It is a strategy that Senator Levin opposed in Iraq, a point he neglected to mention.

Anyone who knows anything about COIN knows it’s labor-intensive. The reason why was explained to me in simple fashion almost exactly a year ago by a senior U.S. officer in Zabul, a city in southeastern Afghanistan. He showed me a map and pointed to our position. He moved his finger to indicate where there was a large Taliban force not far away.

“We could eliminate them tomorrow,” he said. “It would not be difficult. The problem: What would I do the day after? I don’t have troops I can leave there for the long term. And I don’t have Afghan troops trained well enough to hold the area on their own. So those locals who cooperated with us -- and local cooperation is always very useful -- would probably get their heads cuts off before long.”

The fundamentals of COIN are clear, hold, and build. Clear out the bad guys, hold the territory, and build on that success by creating basic governing institutions, a little economic development, and adequate self-defense. For Levin to suggest this mission can be accomplished with fewer troops than the president’s commanders in the field believe they need has to be seen as ignorant, disingenuous, irresponsible -- or some combination thereof.

When the senator finished speaking, the first to come to the microphone to ask a question was Medea Benjamin of Code Pink asking why Senator Levin was not calling for an immediate withdrawal. I did not stay.

Also, while I was in Afghanistan a year ago, New York Times correspondent David Rohde was kidnapped by the Taliban. My NRO column on what he learned -- and what we can learn -- from his experience is here.

The NRSC has a spooky ad just in time for this week’s big event. [...] Read the rest »

There’s a new website dedicated to exposing White House senior adviser/Chicago consigliere/real estate mogul Valerie Jarrett. [...] Read the rest »

Over the past few weeks, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow has had a serious fascination with the grassroots advocacy group Americans For Prosperity (AFP) and how a "news organization" should be defined when it comes to press policy at the Obama White House.

But Maddow, on her Oct. 28 show, was able to merge the two topics in an attack on Fox Business Channel's John Stossel. Stossel recently came from ABC as a host of "20/20" to host a weekly opinion show on the Fox's business channel. But in Maddow's infinite wisdom, Stossel's participation in AFP activities somehow taints him.

"But first, one more thing about health reform and its politics," Maddow said. "Last week, we reported that Fox News contributor and soon-to-be Fox Business Channel [sic] host John Stossel will be headlining protest rallies against health reform staged by Americans for Prosperity, the lobbying group which refuses to disclose donors while rabble-rousing about the dangers of government-forced health care."

Maddow cited an article in the Oct. 28 New York Times by Brian Stelter that suggested Stossel was violating "traditional journalism standards" and noted he was actively campaigning against the Obama administration's brand of health care reform.

"Fox's John Stossel is Americans for Prosperity's featured speaker at three different anti-health reform rallies in Arkansas on Thursday," she said. "Today, Brian Stelter at The New York Times also reports that in between talking about the dangers of government-forced health reform at these forums, Mr. Stossel will also be the featured guest on a conference call for anti-health reform organizers, during which AFP says, he will, quote, ‘tell us more about his new role at Fox News.'"

As Maddow continued on, she suggested Stossel would be reporting on health care reform while at the time actively campaigning against it. But she completely neglected to tell her audience the format of Stossel's show would involve opinion journalism, something he had been doing at ABC for decade prior to coming to Fox Business.

"And after his speeches at the anti-health reform rallies that are being paid for by a donor that Americans for Prosperity will not disclose, and after updating anti-reform activists and all the new goings-on at Fox, Mr. Stossel will then ... help Fox cover the news about health reform? No, of course, not. But he will help them in organizing political events and protests against health reform. It's not illegal. There's nothing wrong with it. It's just not what's called news in this country."

But if Maddow's definition of "what's called news in this country" was applied to MSNBC as well, her show, a dedicated opinion show, and by association MSNBC, wouldn't be "news" Both Maddow and her MSNBC colleague, "Countdown" host Keith Olbermann, have engaged in this type of advocacy.

Earlier this month, they went into their own AstroTurf mode by encouraging free health care clinics to be held in the states of six Democratic senators that are not in lockstep with the left-wing agenda on health care reform as a ploy to turn up the heat on those senators to support a so-called public health care option (emphasis added):

"[Keith Olbermann's] specifically talking about a technique that would increase political pressure on six Senate Democrats who are key to allowing a vote on health reform," Maddow said on her Oct. 7 broadcast. "The proposal, as Keith said, is to hold massive free health clinics weekly in the capital cities of the states represented by these key six Democratic senators. Sens. Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada.

A gunman shot and wounded two men in the parking garage of a North Hollywood synagogue early Thursday and Jewish schools and temples were put on alert in case it was not an isolated attack.

There was no immediate word on a motive, but investigators were trying to determine whether the shootings were a hate crime.

Two men in their 40s were shot in the legs near the Adat Yeshurun Valley Sephardic Orthodox synagogue in the San Fernando Valley, Deputy Police Chief Michel Moore said. The men, both members of the synagogue, had arrived in separate cars for the morning service shortly before 6:30 a.m. when the gunman approached one and, without speaking, shot him and the other man, Moore said. The men were hospitalized in good condition.

Paul wrote a little while ago about the current jobless recovery and mentioned the role of the "stimulus" bill in that phenomenon. In my view, by any objective measure the stimulus package has been a miserable failure. The spending was not targeted in ways that could genuinely have helped the economy (e.g., infrastructure), it has gone disproportionately to supplement the budgets of state and local governments, most of the money still hasn't been spent, and the results, as measured by the unemployment rate, are the opposite of what the Obama administration predicted.

In order to shore up their claims of success for the stimulus bill, Democrats have tried to count jobs "saved or created" by the legislation and have trumpeted the resulting numbers. The Associated Press did a little investigating, however, and found that the claims of job creation were wildly overstated if not deliberately misleading:

A Colorado company said it created 4,231 jobs with the help of President Barack Obama's economic recovery plan. The real number: fewer than 1,000.

A child care center in Florida said it saved 129 jobs with the help of stimulus money. Instead, it gave pay raises to its existing employees.

Elsewhere in the U.S., some jobs credited to the stimulus program were counted two, three, four or even more times. ...

The discrepancy raises questions about the reliability of a key benchmark the administration uses to gauge the success of the stimulus. The errors could be magnified Friday when a much larger round of reports is released. It is expected to show hundreds of thousands of jobs repairing public housing, building schools, repaving highways and keeping teachers on local payrolls.

No doubt tomorrow's report will be equally misleading, only on a larger scale. Here are some examples of misreporting found by the AP:

In one major miscount found by the AP review, Colorado-based Teletech Government Solutions had worked with the Federal Communications Commission to come up with a job count for its $28.3 million contract for call centers fielding consumer questions about conversion of televisions to receive digital signals. The company reported creating 4,231 jobs--the highest number listed in the first stimulus accounting--even though 3,000 of those workers received a paycheck for five weeks or less.

"We all felt it was an appropriate way to represent the data at the time," company president Mariano Tan said.

Now the job count is being adjusted to less than 1,000, Tan said, to meet the requirement that a job reported is equal to a full-time, 40-hour-a-week position held for one year.

The Toledo, Ohio-based Koring Group also received two FCC contracts to help people make the switch to digital television. The company reported hiring 26 people for each of the two contracts, bringing its total jobs to 54 on the government's official count.

But the company cited the same 26 workers for both contracts, meaning the same jobs were counted twice. The job count was further inflated because each job lasted only about two months, so each worker should have counted as one-sixth of a full-time job.

The FCC spotted the problem and called company owner Steve Holland, who now says the actual job count is closer to five, not 54.

Basically, you can't trust any statements of fact that come out of the Obama administration. For the administration, politics is everything, and "data" means whatever can be ginned up to support the administration's failing policies.

PAUL adds: I agree, both with John's concluding statement and with his view that the stimulus legislation has been a failure. In my view, it will have a net positive impact on employment, but that impact will be woefully insufficient to justify the cost. Both inaction and other interventionist approaches to stimulating the economy would have been preferable.

A new report on the state of the newspaper industry in Argentina has found that federal appropriations for newspapers have resulted in less coverage of government corruption. This study goes to the heart of the 'newspaper bailout' debate in this country, and demonstrates the danger of supporting the news media with government funds (h/t Mark Tapscott).

Many liberal media commentators have called for direct federal subsidies for ailing newspapers, arguing that federally-supported news media are essential to democracy. The most prominent group in this camp is Free Press, founded by liberal media guru--and avowed socialist--Robert McChesney (incidentally, McChesney has avidly defended Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's crackdown on opposition media outlets in the country).

In Free Press's most prominent call for a federally-funded media industry, entitled Toward a National Journalism Strategy, the organization contends that we must

develop new means for subsidizing the press through new private revenue models or public interventions to restructure or supplement market forces. And it is difficult to imagine how this can occur without government getting involved in some capacity.

But, one might ask, wouldn't government involvement in the news industry necessarily result in the overt politicization of the news? Well, the answer is yes, as Free Press readily admits. The organization advocates government involvement in the news media to promote causes deemed (by the government) politically favorable.

Newspaper owners might be more inclined to sell to socially motivated parties if the government offered certain subsidies or other incentives to facilitate the transactions.

Free Press also sees government involvement in the news business as a means to promote the agendas of "underrepresented" groups. Such involvement would "greatly increase minority and female ownership of news media outlets, which currently stand at an appallingly low number," states the report.

Free Press tries to quell some of the "commonly held fears about subsidized media" by stating that

recent academic research shows that news organizations receiving government subsidies are no less critical of government than those that aren’t subsidized, and the former tend to present a wider range of voices and viewpoints.

These claims are contradicted, however, by a new study by Harvard University’s Rafael Di Tella and Northwestern University’s Ignacio Franceschelli. This study found "a strong correlation between [newspapers'] willingness to cover government scandal and the amount of money they received from government coffers."

According to Joshua Benton at the Nieman Journalism Lab,

Their analysis found a “huge correlation” between, in any given month, how much money went to a newspaper and how much corruption coverage appeared on its front page. For example, if the government ad revenue in a month increased by one standard deviation — around $70,000 U.S. — corruption coverage would decrease by roughly half of a front page.

...in periods where newspapers were getting more money from the government, they produced fewer corruption scoops of their own and covered fewer of the scoops produced by other newspapers. (It should be noted here that the study only looked at the front pages of newspapers — so it’s possible rival papers were writing about the scandals uncovered by their peers. But if so, they were doing it on inside pages.)

In direct contradiction to Free Press's claims that the free market cannot be trusted to ensure a viable and robust news media, the report also found, in Benton's words,

very real rewards for corruption coverage among the newspapers’ audiences. One extra full front-page worth of corruption coverage a month was associated with a nearly 8 percent increase in circulation. So cutting back on corruption stories seems to lead to less circulation revenue — even if it’s associated with extra government money coming in.

The left may attempt to increase government control over the news media through bailouts for major newspapers. This study shows the detrimental effects that such a policy would have on the Fourth Estate.

A newspaper bailout would mean for that industry what the Chrysler/GM bailouts meant for the auto industry. As stated in a report from the Business and Media Institute,

As soon as Obama bailed out Detroit, he forced out GM Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner. The White House also gave majority ownership in Chrysler (55 percent) to the UAW. Wall Street bailouts resulted in overnight government regulation – even salary controls. Government intervention in media gives Obama the same opportunity to control the news. Seven major newspaper chains have gone into bankruptcy. If he uses the same strategies he used for Detroit, that would let Obama control major media outlets across the nation and he could dictate the news.

The administration demonstrated the level of control it exerts over compaines that take government funds when it unveiled plans this week to dictate compensation for employees of companies that took federal bailout money. An unelected and unconfirmed federal official--Pay Czar Kenneth Feinberg--retains the power to dictate the payment of employees of private companes, all because those companies accepted federal funds. This level of control is completely antithetical to a free press.

It should come as no surprise that the discretionary allocation of federal funds will always breed a say in or control over content--or at least discourage content that could jeopardize a paper's federal lifeline. This precise statistical study of the real life consequences of such a policy should dissuade Americans from supporting any financial backing from the federal government for the nation's leading news outlets.

Penning the lead story for the “Yes He Can (But He Sure Hasn't Yet)” Newsweek cover, “A Liberal's Survival Guide,” Anna Quindlen defended President Obama from liberal complaints he's not enacting liberal policies fast enough as she explained that he's “saddled” by the “incremental” constitutional structure, but she fretted: “Universal health care is the area in which the gap between what's needed and what's likely is most glaring, and the limitations of the president's power most apparent.” Not hesitating to share her opinion, Quindlen despaired:

It is dispiriting to watch the cheerleaders of American exceptionalism pound their chests and insist that our citizens do not need the kind of system that virtually every other developed nation finds workable....

As elected officials posture and temporize, families are bankrupted by health-care costs and forgo treatment they can't afford. Statistical measures of the national health, from life expectancy to infant mortality, continue to be substandard. And because we have that system of checks and balances, in which movement usually happens slowly and sporadically, a great need for sweeping reform may be met with a jury-rigged bill neither sufficiently deep nor broad, which perhaps someday will give way to a better one, and then eventually a truly good one.

Framing her piece in the November 2 edition of the magazine, “Hope Springs Eternal: Assessing a Young Presidency,” Quindlen proposed:

This is a country that often has transformational ambitions but is saddled with an incremental system, a nation built on revolution, then engineered so the revolutionary can rarely take hold.

Checks and balances: that's how we learn about it in social-studies class, and in theory it is meant to guard against a despotic executive, a wild-eyed legislature, an overweening judiciary. And it's also meant to safeguard the rights of the individual...But what our system has meant during the poisonous partisan civil war that has paralyzed Washington in recent years is that very little of the big stuff gets done. It simply can't.

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October is the month we relish the highpoint of our national pastime, especially when one of our own New York teams is in the World Series!
 
Sadly, America has another national pastime, this one not pleasant at all: anti-catholicism. 
          
It is not hyperbole to call prejudice against the Catholic Church a national pastime. Scholars such as Arthur Schlesinger Sr. referred to it as “the deepest bias in the history of the American people,” while John Higham described it as “the most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history.” “The anti-semitism of the left,” is how Paul Viereck reads it, and Professor Philip Jenkins sub-titles his book on the topic “the last acceptable prejudice.”

If you want recent evidence of this unfairness against the Catholic Church, look no further than a few of these following examples of occurrences over the last couple weeks ...

Earlier today, the Joe Scarborough radio show, with Mika Brzezinski, aired a wide-ranging interview with this NewsBuster. 

Highlights:

• Mika justified her nanny-state proposal of a tax on fatty foods by saying eating habits are not a matter of personal choice because others must bear the health care cost.  Finkelstein's response: kill two birds with one stone by getting government out of the health care business.
• Regarding the White House war on Fox News, Finkelstein observed that the White House should know its strategy has backfired when the likes of Helen Thomas and Dan Rather have defended Fox.
• Mark complimented Mika on exposing the 99 44/100ths liberal environment she experienced at CBS, but chided her for denying that the network has an agenda.  A discussion of the MSM media bubble ensues.

Listen to audio here.

Mark also described how his home town of Ithaca, NY is really an upstate extension of the NYC liberal bubble, so much so that a far-left Dem actually defeated Hillary here in a Dem senatorial primary that the vast majority of voters probably didn't even know was taking place!

All in all, a good time.  Mika in particular was a good sport despite having once upon a time been dubbed Bubbles Brzezinski by this NewsBuster.

As a way of repudiating past U.S. policies toward Pakistan, Clinton told the students "there is a huge difference" between the Obama administration's approach and that of former President George W. Bush. "I spent my entire eight years in the Senate opposing him," she said to a burst of applause from the audience of several hundred students. "So to me, it's like daylight and dark."

Today, on the Ed Morrissey Show (3 pm ET), Kerry Picket of the Washington Times returns to cover all the news inside the Beltway. [...] Read the rest »

View the video »

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Barack Obama is just as much a woman-hater as the late conservative North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms in the wild eyes of radical abortion-mongering feminist and PBS "To the Contrary" host Bonnie Erbe.

And just why is Ms. Erbe so steamed at President Obama? Because, and I kid you not, the commander-in-chief doesn't shoot hoops with women.

Erbe -- who has still not gotten over Obama losing to her favored Democrat Hillary Clinton -- explained in her October 27 Jefferson Street blog entry in U.S. News & World Report:

President Obama drew heat last week for a story that surfaced outing his private White House male-only b-ball games. The story was that even though two female members of his cabinet were members of their college basketball teams, they were excluded, as were all women, from this most private of male-only clubs. The story became a metaphor for how the president views women generally and threatened to reveal some inconvenient truths about the man.

Now we see reports that gender-insensitivity charges have resonated with the Obama White House. According to Politics Daily, the president dragged chief domestic policy adviser Melody Barnes to the golf course on Sunday, and she became the first female to join his golf foursome since he took office. The event produced a photo op of global proportions.

President Obama could invite Chamique Holdsclaw to the private White House basketball court and Billie Jean King to play tennis with him. I still wouldn't believe he's any more comfortable dealing with women or concerned about "women's" issues than the dearly departed former Sen. Jesse Helms. President Obama talks the talk a lot better and a lot louder than Helms. But Jesse Helms was so rooted in his atavist traditions, he chose to remain true to his misogyny rather than pose for cameras with faux female golfing partners. President Obama must hide the side of his personality that is clearly uncomfortable with women because he needs their votes much more than Helms ever did.

For the full NewsBusters archive on Erbe's nuttiness, click here.

Addressing the undemocratic nature of various lawmaking practices in his short book, A Matter of Interpretation, Justice Scalia recalled "the trick the emperor Nero was said to engage in: posting edicts high up on the pillars so that they could not easily be read." Such practices lend themselves to all sorts of arbitrary enforcement, confiscation, and abuse. We're there.

CNN’s Campbell Brown was quick to point out the apparent biases of competitors MSNBC and Fox News during her program on Wednesday, but ignored that of her own network as she tried to portray it as unbiased: “Some of us, like my colleagues here at CNN, are still trying to do journalism....I’m not critical of what my friends at Fox News and MSNBC do, but it is apples and oranges when compared to what we at CNN do.”

Brown concluded the 8 pm Eastern hour with remarks initially directed against the Obama administration for its campaign against Fox News. The CNN anchor thought it was “silly” for the White House to go after the 24-hour news network: “I mean, really, the White House is only just now figuring out Fox in prime-time has a conservative bias? Really? I think our friends at Fox News have been pretty up-front about it, and frankly, pretty unapologetic, for that matter. What confuses me is that if the White House is really so concerned about bias in the media, then why are they only targeting Fox?”

After playing an extended clip from her recent interview with Valerie Jarrett, where the Obama adviser refused to acknowledge MSNBC’s left-wing bias, Brown continued her criticism of the administration’s anti-Fox campaign: “Jarrett seems loath to admit that MSNBC has a bias, and that is where I think the White House loses all credibility on this issue. Just as Fox News leans to the right with their opinionated hosts in prime time, MSNBC leans left....Look, if the White House wants to lead us in a conversation about bias in the media and how we define journalism today, I would love that....It would be great to talk honestly about how we draw important distinctions between the various media outlets.”

Brown then took the opportunity to hold up CNN as apparently different from its competitors

BROWN: Some of us, like my colleagues here at CNN, are still trying to do journalism. I believe that journalists do have a crucial role to play in challenging our leaders no matter what their political persuasion, and in holding them accountable. Opinionated cable news hosts have a valid, but very different role. They either cheerlead or criticize, and in doing so, they connect with those who agree with them....They provoke one another; they fight with one another, and, yes, they entertain us, and in a polarized country, that gets big ratings.

I’m not critical of what my friends at Fox News and MSNBC do, but it is apples and oranges when compared to what we at CNN do, and we should all just acknowledge that. And if the White House wants to leap into this debate, as they have, and talk about bias in the media, then great. But White House officials should elevate the conversation and talk about bias on the right and on the left. Because when you just target one side, you reveal your own bias, that you are only critical of those who are critical of you.

Really, Campbell? Apples and oranges? If you want to stick with the fruit comparisons, CNN and MSNBC are like two apples that are different shades of red. Your colleague Rick Sanchez, who sometimes fills in for you, is a prime example of someone who has a clear bias towards the left on many issues. How about the Palin Derangement Syndrome of Jack Cafferty? Did you forget about the Susan Roesgen’s foaming at the mouth against Tea Party protesters? How about your left-leaning political analysts Jeffrey Toobin and Roland Martin?

CNN has plenty of liberal bias, Ms. Brown, and pointing at your competitors’ reputations isn’t going to distract us from that truth.

A friend e-mails:

2009 Pelosi Health care bill - 1990 pages

 

1994 Clinton Health care bill - 1342 pages.

 

So it's 648 pages longer than even that bureaucratic monstrosity.

 

UPDATE:

E-mail:

 

A 2,000-page health care bill that costs a trillion dollars means that every page costs the American people a HALF-BILLION DOLLARS.