op ed review 5/13
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
President Obama flew into Seattle on his private 747 and told guests at
an $18,000/plate fundraiser “’Sometimes I Forget' the Magnitude of the
Recession.“ Mitt Romney's press secretary
responded: "It’s not surprising that a president who forgot to create
jobs, forgot to cut the debt, and forgot to change Washington has now admitted that he’s
forgotten about the recession. In fact, it seems that the President has
forgotten that he’s been in office for the last three-and-a-half years. In
November, the American people won’t forget."
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for
Friday shows Mitt Romney earning 50% of the vote and President Obama attracting
43% support.
In a show of
President Obama's unpopularity in West
Virginia, a federal prison inmate captured 42 percent
of the vote Tuesday in the state's Democratic presidential primary.
President Obama announced that he has “evolved” and now
supports same-sex marriage.
Obama’s reelection website now sells
lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender merchandise.
Just “spreading the
wealth around.” Last year, undocumented workers received over $4 billion in
benefits from the United
States government. It's because of the dependents they're
claiming on their tax returns. “Under the additional child tax credit,
they get an extra $1,000 dollars for every child they claim as a
dependent…..WTHR-TV in Indianapolis, for example, found four illegal immigrants
in one mobile home who claimed 20 dependents. They received nearly $30,000 from
the IRS, but only one child was living in the home.”
Mitt Romney on Wednesday said he unequivocally opposes
"marriage between people of the same gender," drawing a contrast to
President Obama's "evolving" position on the issue.
On May 1, President Obama signed a new executive order which
opens the door for the United
States to give up economic and environmental
sovereignty through the promotion of a single international regulatory system.
Look for more of this from the mainstream media: “Mitt Romney was a bully in high school.”
“If we're going to delve deep into a candidate's past, let's
delve deep into a candidate's past.
Here's Obama in his own words admitting to physically shoving a little
girl named Coretta.”
The Obama Justice Department has filed a civil lawsuit in
federal court accusing Sheriff Joe Arapaio and his office of using
“unconstitutional and unlawful actions” in their handling of illegal
immigrants.
“Clean your own house, Eric Holder, before you come trying
to clean mine,” Arpaio said.
“North Carolina voters on
Tuesday approved a state constitutional amendment that bans same-sex marriage
and civil unions…dealing a blow to efforts across the United States
to expand gay marriage rights. The amendment, which says marriage between a man
and a woman is the only legally recognized domestic union in the state, passed
by 61 percent….”
Apparently if you oppose gay marriage you are a dumb,
ill-informed, brainwashed, knuckle-dragging hick and bigot. At least that’s the
message coming out of liberal circles in America
this week, as supporters of gay marriage look with disgust upon the people of North Carolina for voting
61% in favor of Amendment 1.
“Not only did Tea Party-backed Richard Mourdock just put an
end to Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar's 35-year U.S. Senate career, but it wasn't
even close…..In and of itself, the crushing defeat of such a long-time veteran
of the Senate would be a big story, but the importance of this development will
be felt way beyond Indiana.”
Dane County is the political base of Wisconsin's public sector unions. It is home
to both the state capital, with its thousands of unionized workers, and the University of Wisconsin, with its starry-eyed college
students and aging hippie professors. It is easily the most left-wing county in
the state--think San Francisco
in the heartland. It is exactly the place where Big Labor and its champion,
Kathleen Falk, who served as County
Executive for 14 years,
should have had their best showing in the primary. Instead, she was absolutely
trounced. Falk lost her home county by 31 points--62-31.
The National Network of Abortion Funds (NNAF), who last
month raised over $400,000 for abortions through its Bowl-a-Thon, touted that
it provided money for a 14-year-old’s abortion as part of the group's “real
stories of abortion access
Great moments in socialized medicine: Patients with osteoarthritis in the UK wait
an average of nearly three years to be diagnosed and referred for
treatment…..The charity is concerned that many patients are enduring
‘unbearable’ pain, seeing it as an inevitable part of old age but wrongly
believing nothing can be done
_______________________________________________________________________________
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
The Party of Julia
Ross Douthat 5/5/12
A WEEK ago the Obama re-election campaign unveiled a slogan
for the fall campaign — its answer to Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,”
Bill Clinton’s “bridge to the 21st century,” and other successful re-election
pitches. There were reports that the slogan-writing process had been a struggle
for the White House, and the final product bore those rumors out. “Forward,”
the Obama campaign will be declaiming to Americans, which feels like a
none-too-subtle admission that a look backward at the Obama economic record
might be bad news for the president’s re-election prospects.
But maybe the White House doesn’t need a slogan. After all,
it has a person instead: a composite character who’s been the talk of Washington these last
few days, and whose imaginary life story casts the stakes in this presidential
campaign into unusually sharp relief.
Her name is Julia, and she has the lead role in an Obama
2012 slide show that follows what’s supposed to be an American everywoman from
childhood into retirement, tracking everything the Obama White House’s policies
would do for her and everything the “Romney/Ryan” Republicans would not. The
list of Obama-bestowed benefits includes Head Start when Julia’s a tyke, tax
credits and Pell grants to carry her through college and low-interest loan
repayment afterward, guaranteed birth control when she’s a 20-something and
government-sponsored loans when she wants to start a business, all of it
culminating in a stress-free retirement underwritten by Medicare and Social
Security.
All propaganda invites snark and parody, and the story of
Julia is ripe for it. She’s an everywoman only by the standards of the liberal
upper middle class: She works as a Web designer, has her first child in her
early 30s (the average first-time American mother is in her mid-20s), and
spends her golden years as a “volunteer at a community garden.” (It will not
surprise you to learn that the cartoon Julia looks Caucasian.)
What’s more, she seems to have no meaningful relationships
apart from her bond with the Obama White House: no friends or siblings or
extended family, no husband (“Julia decides to have a child,” is all the slide
show says), a son who disappears once school starts and parents who only matter
because Obamacare grants her the privilege of staying on their health care plan
until she’s 26. This lends the whole production a curiously patriarchal
quality, with Obama as a beneficent Daddy Warbucks and Mitt Romney and Paul
Ryan co-starring as the wicked uncles threatening to steal Julia’s inheritance.
But if the slide show is easy to mock (and conservatives
quickly obliged, tweeting Julia jokes across the Internet), there’s also a
fascinating ideological purity to its attitudes and arguments. Indeed, both in
its policy vision and its philosophical premises, the slide show represents a monument
to certain trends in contemporary liberalism.
On the one hand, its public policy agenda is essentially a
defense of existing arrangements no matter their effectiveness or
sustainability, apparently premised on the assumption that American women can’t
make cost-benefit calculations or indeed do basic math. In addition to ignoring
the taxes that will be required of its businesswoman heroine across her working
life, “The Life of Julia” hails a program (Head Start) that may not work at all,
touts education spending that hasn’t done much for high school test scores or
cut college costs, and never mentions that on the Obama administration’s own
budget trajectory, neither Medicare nor Social Security will be able to make
good on its promises once today’s 20-something Julias retire.
At the same time, the slide show’s vision of the
individual’s relationship to the state seems designed to vindicate every
conservative critique of the Obama-era Democratic Party. The liberalism of “the
Life of Julia” doesn’t envision government spending the way an older liberalism
did — as a backstop for otherwise self-sufficient working families, providing
insurance against job loss, decrepitude and catastrophic illness. It offers a
more sweeping vision of government’s place in society, in which the individual
depends on the state at every stage of life, and no decision — personal,
educational, entrepreneurial, sexual — can be contemplated without the promise
that it will be somehow subsidized by Washington.
The condescension inherent in this vision is apparent in
every step of Julia’s pilgrimage toward a community-gardening retirement. But
in an increasingly atomized society, where communities and families are weaker
than ever before, such a vision may have more appeal — to both genders — than
many of the conservatives mocking the slide show might like to believe.
Apparently someone in the White House thinks so, which makes
the life of Julia the most interesting general-election foray by either
campaign to date. Interesting, and clarifying: in a race that’s likely to be
dominated by purely negative campaigning on both sides, her story is the
clearest statement we’re likely to get of what Obama-era liberalism would take
us “forward” toward.
_____________________________________________________________________________
FROM OTHER COLUMNS
"Barack Obama has a new composite girlfriend, and her
name is Julia. Her story is told in an interactive feature titled 'The Life of
Julia' on the Obama campaign website. ... As a toddler, she's in a head-start
program. Skip ahead to 17, and she's enrolled at a Race to the Top high school.
Her 20s are very active: She gets surgery and free birth control through
ObamaCare regulations, files a lawsuit under the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act,
and pays off her student loans at a low interest rate. We get updates at age
31, 37 and 42 -- and then the narrative skips ahead 23 years when she enrolls
in Medicare. Two years later, she's on Social Security, at which point she can
die at any time. ... [N]othing happens to Julia between 42 and 65. That period
includes the typical peak earning years -- the time at which, assuming Julia is
gainfully employed, she will be paying the biggest price for 'Obama's'
generosity. ... The most shocking bit of the Obama story is that Julia
apparently never marries. She simply 'decides' to have a baby, and Obama uses
other people's money to help her take care of it. ... In 1999 Lionel Tiger
coined the word 'bureaugamy' to refer to the relationship between officially
impoverished mothers of illegitimate children and the government. 'The Life of
Julia' is an insidious attack on the institution of the family, an endorsement
of bureaugamy even for middle-class women."
-James Taranto
"Conservatives should refuse to cede the compassion
argument to the left. There is more to caring than pumping an
ever-increasing share of taxpayer dollars into programs that do virtually
nothing to lift people out of poverty. And there is certainly nothing
compassionate about standing idly on the sidelines while these programs
bankrupt the federal government."
-Morgen Richmond
__________________________________________________________________________
LEFTIST WATCH
After months on the sidelines, major liberal donors
including the financier George Soros are preparing to inject up to $100 million
into independent groups to aid Democrats’ chances this fall.
The SEIU is helping make the Occupy Wall Street movement a
more permanent fixture in the nation's capital, moving Occupy DC into office
space the group can use to organize and grow through the presidential
election…….paying $4,000 a month for three offices the Occupy protesters will
use for at least the next six months to plan future demonstrations, organize
and host workshops.
“Obama senior
campaign advisor David Axelrod…..was mentored by David Canter. David and his
father, Harry, were part of Chicago's
communist orbit. Harry had been secretary of Boston's
Communist Party, and both father and son spent the 1930s in Moscow, where Harry worked for the Soviet
government as a translator of Lenin's writings. Harry was among the small group
that purchased the Chicago Star
from (Obama mentor) Frank Marshall Davis in September 1948…”
“It is impossible to
understand politics in the world today without grasping the fundamental fact
that there exist two different lefts. I propose that the two be referred to by
everyone as the Stupid Left and the Satanic Left. The two are very different,
although they work together. People who are part of the first are simply stupid
people. People who are part of the second may in fact be quite shrewd, but are
evil and nefarious. There is no third type of leftist.”
__________________________________________________________________________
GLOBALONEY
By strangling the U.S. economy, President Obama may
have single-handedly saved the planet. That’s the upshot of a paper recently
published in the scientific journal Environmental Science & Policy by researchers
from the University of Michigan and the University
of Valladolid in Spain.
Congratulations, Mr. President…….Forcing adoption of expensive and inefficient
sources of power only drags down the economy, which is exactly what global
warming’s believers want. In that respect, Mr. Obama’s stimulus policy wasn’t a
colossal failure after all. The massive unemployment and lackluster growth that
followed his $831 billion spending spree were a smashing success, so long as
one is more worried about carbon-dioxide levels than the number of lasting
jobs.
_________________________________________________________________________
BOOKS
“The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American
Culture” by David Mamet. For the past thirty years, David Mamet has
been a controversial and defining force in theater and film, championing the
most cherished liberal values along the way…..But in recent years Mamet has had
a change of heart. He realized that the so- called mainstream media outlets he
relied on were irredeemably biased, peddling a hypocritical and deeply flawed
worldview. In 2008 he wrote a hugely controversial op-ed for The Village
Voice, "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain- Dead Liberal,'" in which he
methodically eviscerated liberal beliefs. Now he goes much deeper, employing
his trademark intellectual force and vigor to take on all the key political and
cultural issues of our times, from religion to political correctness to global
warming.
___________________________________________________________________________
ELECTION
In the competition for the creepiest campaign material of
2012, we may already have a winner. It is “The Life of Julia,” the Obama
reelection team’s cartoon chronicle of a fictional woman who is dependent on
government at every step of her life. …
Politico/GWU poll of likely voters….”The concern that
Romney’s moderate record would hamper party unity hasn’t played out, at least
not according to this poll. Another good sign for Romney: He now leads by nine
points with independent women voters, a significant shift from Obama’s 23-point
advantage in February.”
Rick Santorum urged his supporters to back fellow Republican
Mitt Romney's campaign.
The president seems to think bragging about killing Osama
bin Laden will help get him re-elected. But the question is increasingly
becoming why the president hesitated on such a no-brainer decision. Jack Keane,
the Army vice chief of staff from 1999 to 2003, told Mike Huckabee on Fox News
over the weekend that the U.S. government knew exactly where Osama bin Laden
was nearly a year before President Obama gave the order to send in the Navy
SEALs.
We have been following the Obama campaign’s invitation of
fraudulent and illegal giving through the disabling of basic credit card/debit
card verification devices. We have done so in the hope that it might arouse the
interest of the mainstream media sufficiently to cause them to ask a few
question of the powers-that-be in the Obama campaign. It’s a rerun of a story
that originated in 2008. Love may be lovelier the second time around, but not
fraud. The best that can be said is that it’s more audacious than hope.
___________________________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
Politicians around here keep talking about some kind of
underground, undeclared War on Women. But the only real open warfare going on
is President Obama’s all-out War on Seniors. When it came time for him to find
spending cuts to pay for some fraction of his massive health care overhaul,
where did Mr. Obama go? He raided Medicare. Bipartisan projections predict that
over 10 years, $500 billion will be siphoned out of the seniors’ health-care
program to pay for Mr. Obama’s political boondoggle. As if it is not cruel
enough to strip away trusted doctor care for the elderly, Mr. Obama also seems
to enjoy terrorizing seniors whenever he doesn’t get his way.
The story of Chen Guangcheng, a blind activist who fears for
his life at the hands of China's
government is compelling. His solitary work and his disability make him seem
doubly courageous and vulnerable while standing against the Chinese government.
But in a nearly 1,900 word article about Guangcheng, the Washington Post
reporters never tell readers exactly what Guangcheng protests about the Chinese
state. These articles constantly use terms like "human rights
dissident" or "advocate for the disabled" to describe him. But
that doesn't really tell you anything. The truth is: Guangcheng is an anti-abortion
activist….Basically
he's pro-life.
Rush Limbaugh, never afraid to shy from a political battle,
has launched a new Facebook group: Rush Babes for America. After just a few hours,
the group already has nearly 9,000 likes. The cause of the group: Rush Babes
for America
(a.k.a. The National Organization for Rush Babes) is a Facebook Page dedicated
to the millions of conservative women who know what they believe in: family,
American Values, and not being told by Faux Feminist Groups how to think.
Call 911: Your country
is being mugged
____________________________________________________________________________
NOTEWORTHY WEBSITES
New video by the RNC:
Strange Anomalies in the Famous Situation Room Photo
______________________________________________________________________________
LATE NITE:
Leno: President Obama admitted that a former
girlfriend that he wrote about in his autobiography was made up and not a real
person. So Obama had an imaginary girlfriend. Big deal! He had an imaginary
economic plan. It's all the same………President Obama has come out in
support of gay marriage. He said his position has been evolving for years.
Miraculously, he saw the light just in time for tonight's big Hollywood
fundraiser. What are the odds?.........Researchers at Harvard say red wine can
slow the aging process. They say if you drink red wine, it can help you look
younger. And you can look even younger if you get the other person to drink it.
____________________________________________________________________________
WISE WORDS
"Everything
that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor
in freedom."
-Albert Einstein
"Never blame a
legislative body for not doing something. When they do nothing, they don't hurt
anybody. When they do something is when they become dangerous."
-Will Rogers
posted by gary at
9:00 AM
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