op ed review 2/23
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
Obamaville homeless camps spring up, this one in Baltimore.
The marketable debt of the U.S.
government has more than doubled while President Barack Obama has been in
office.
With the 2015 budget request, Obama will call for sharply
increased spending and an end to the “era of austerity.”
President Obama’s stimulus may have boosted the economy when
it passed in 2009, but it’s now beginning to take a toll and will soon begin to
leave the economy worse off than if it had never passed, according to a new
report Friday by the Congressional Budget Office.
“The FCC is planning to send government contractors into the
nation's newsrooms to determine whether journalists are producing information
that meets the public's "critical information needs." Those
"needs" will be defined by the administration, and news outlets that
do not comply with the government's standards could face an uncertain future.”
After outrage, “FCC backs off newsroom study”
Billionaire leftist George Soros has his hands in this,
funding a study to develop criteria for what information is
"critical" for Americans to have.
In a watershed moment and a huge victory over
environmentalists, General Electric has agreed to stop projects that are
designed solely for the purpose of carbon dioxide reductions to please those
who lobby for climate change concessions.
Four United States Senators have a written a letter to FBI
director James Comey about the indictment of author and filmmaker Dinesh
D´Souza. Senators Charles Grassley, ranking member of the Judiciary Committee,
Jeff Sessions, Ted Cruz, and Mike Lee are the four senators, all Republicans,
to have signed the letter. The letter quotes Harvard Law School
professor Alan Dershowitz as saying, "I can´t help but think that
[D´Souza´s] politics have something to do with it. ... It smacks of selective prosecution."
Michelle Obama: “Young People Are Knuckleheads,' Which Is
Why They Need Obamacare”
Obama: Raising the minimum wage…will help those who want to
"work less”.
“Obama’s Celebrity Pal Beyonce Has A Half-Brother On Food
Stamps, Even Though She’s Worth $350
Million”
The new Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon: is a “Democrat Political Asset”
Pandora Knows How You'll Vote, and It's Not Keeping Your
Secret. The online music service is
telling campaigns what music you listen to, which they say gives away your
party affiliation.
Soon coming to Washington State? Feds worry that drug cartels are moving into Colo. An ongoing federal
investigation is raising questions about the Colorado marijuana industry's ties to
Colombian drug cartels using the front of legal marijuana to make money
illegally.
“The United Auto Workers union suffered a crushing defeat,
failing to win a majority of the 1,550 hourly workers at Volkswagen AG ’s plant
in Chattanooga,Tenn….One cannot overemphasize
the magnitude of this loss. What it clearly spells out is the irrelevance of
the old industrial unions in today’s world.”
Kaus: “No wonder they
wanted card check”
Remington Arms Company, Inc., founded in 1816 in upstate New York, announced they will build their new factory in Alabama and not the
Empire state. Since New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D.) signed the SAFE Gun Control
Act, multiple gun companies have left the state.
Kathleen Willey, the former
volunteer aide to Bill Clinton who says she was sexually harassed by the
president in the 1990s, is now sounding the alarm about the potential danger of
Hillary Clinton becoming president. “Hillary Clinton IS the war on women, and that’s what needs to be exposed
here.”
Conservative Breitbart News is launching new news agencies,
"Breitbart London" and "Breitbart Texas"—that are the first steps in a
multi-year expansion effort that will bridge the gap between global and
regional news at a time when the rise of anti-establishment forces in politics
and new media are threatening the old political and media order. James
Delingpole, will lead Breitbart London, which will have a staff of 10 with 100
contributors already lined up to grow the site. Breitbart´s Brandon Darby will
lead Breitbart Texas.
The Department of Homeland Security wants a private company
to provide a national license-plate tracking system that would give the agency
access to vast amounts of information from commercial and law enforcement tag
readers.
In 2012, there were more black babies killed by abortion
(31,328) in New York City
than were born there (24,758), and the black children killed comprised 42.4% of
the total number of abortions in the Big Apple.
“Somewhere, eugenicist Margaret Sanger -- founder of Planned
Parenthood and a staunch proponent of the forced sterilization and abortions of
black and minority children -- is smiling.”
A former Planned Parenthood worker has opened up to a
diocesan newspaper in a gripping tell-all interview, saying she was shocked at
the horrors she witnessed during the two years she worked in Indiana’s largest
abortion facility. “It was a money-grubbing, evil, very sad, sad place to work”
_______________________________________________________________________________
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
Rube Goldberg
Democrats
Dan Henninger, WSJ,
2/19
As American voters
watch ObamaCare continue its Godzilla-like rampage across the national
health-care landscape, it's worth considering the collateral damage this
political monster may be doing to the Democratic brand itself. What if
ObamaCare's problems become a metaphor for the modern Democratic Party? Two
portents emerged the past week.
The United Auto
Workers suffered a humiliating defeat at Volkswagen VOW3.XE -1.54% in Tennessee.
And days before that loss, voters in San
Diego elected Republican Kevin Faulconer mayor after
he teed up his opponent as a captive of the city's public unions. Two big
constituencies sacked in a week.
The Democrats'
problem is that we live in the brutal age of brand maintenance. Ask BlackBerry,
Sony, Target or Lululemon. The horror of falling off the curve is
that, seemingly overnight, enthusiasm for one's brand can evaporate. There is
no reason why a political party should be immune to this new imperative.
Out in the world
beyond what Washington
manufactures and spins, no one would get away with putting out a product as
flawed as ObamaCare. Today's public won't accept that kind of performance. From
the largest consumer-product companies down to the local sandwich shop, you've
got to deliver the goods at a sustained level of competent execution. Not
everyone deserves a gold badge from J.D. Power, but by and large it has become
very difficult to sustain a shoddy product in the marketplace anymore. Except
the government. And the Democratic Party is nothing if not the party whose
identity is bound up with government services and the public unions that
deliver those services.
Good enough for
government work was once just a joke. Some years ago I sat with a roomful of
people in lower Manhattan's
federal Social Security office for a half hour with no discernible forward
movement. The clerks seemed to have disappeared. Suddenly a frustrated lady
shot up and screamed, "This place is worse than the department of motor
vehicles!" To which the guard at the door responded: "Oh no, ma'am.
They're still worse than we are."
For decades, voters
have passed off this mediocrity as the sometimes maddening bureaucratic price
for living in a large, complex country. No longer. With every new reboot of
ObamaCare—glitches to the horizon, the constant revision of the law's rules,
policies canceled and resurrected at higher cost—more of America's workaday
Dilberts are seeing that the Democrats' performance benchmarks would get anyone
else fired. Nowhere else could you get away with arguing a product like this is
at least better than nothing.
And they won't even
apologize! When the first ObamaCare problems erupted, its supporters said: It's
the law, get over it. Even now, the smart alecks in the Obama administration
responsible for ObamaCare, backed by a chorus of left-wing wonks in the media,
make it sound as if you are too dense to comprehend the law's
inevitable benefits.
The Democratic Party
and especially the left have for years been demoting standards of performance
for pretty much everything. Whether it's the work product of the public unions,
the quality of Medicaid's medicine, admission criteria for colleges or even
standards of personal behavior, measuring up has been devalued. It's no
accident that one of the most used words of our time is, "Whatever."
Once public
employees became unionized, the process was never accountable to anything. The
inevitable weaknesses simply metastasized. Work rules and pension obligations
proliferated under politicized collective-bargaining agreements until the
system bogged down into an expensive morass that won't change and won't reform.
But it changed the Democrats into a pure public-sector party. Now even liberal Democrats have begun to
distance themselves from this legacy. Last May in Los Angeles of all places, Democrat Eric
Garcetti defeated Wendy Greuel for mayor by turning her union endorsements into
a liability.
But for decades most
Democrats have been floating through this low-performance public milieu, where
standards of any sort can be diluted, if not wholly ignored. The idea that the
$824 billion stimulus was for "shovel-ready" projects has become a
butt of the government joke circuit. This sloppy mindset outputted ObamaCare,
by acclamation the party's biggest product since Medicare. It looks like a Rube
Goldberg machine.
The Rube Goldberg
Democrats means that whether from laziness or arrogance, the party is now
producing political contraptions that are monuments to inefficiency,
incomprehension and unworkability. Before ObamaCare, it often went unnoticed.
But the health-care law sits out in plain view, letting every voter connect the
dots between political promise and nonperformance. No quick patch is likely for a brand problem
on this scale. Congressional Democrats Ann Kirkpatrick of Arizona
and Joe Garcia in Florida
have produced ads saying they fought the glitches but now want to
"fix" the contraption. Millions will be spent repositioning the
party's image.
The GOP could still
blow their historic opportunity this year. Brands collapse because consumers
have good choices. It may be true that ObamaCare has exposed the Democrats as a
party of bells, whistles and rotating pinwheels. But absent a better product,
it will lumber forward.
________________________________________________________________________
FROM OTHER COLUMNS
“Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would
call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its
"one percent," namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the
American one percent, namely the "rich." From the Occupy movement to
the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local
newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of
the successful one percent. There is outraged public reaction to the Google
buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech
companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices
which these "techno geeks" can pay. We have, for example, libelous
and cruel attacks in the Chronicle on our number-one celebrity, the author
Danielle Steel, alleging that she is a "snob" despite the millions
she has spent on our city's homeless and mentally ill over the past decades.
This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was
unthinkable in 1930; is its descendant "progressive" radicalism
unthinkable now?”
Tom Perkins
(Mr. Perkins is a
founder of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.)
________________________________________________________________________
FILM
“Never before in history have liberal clichés about the
evils and the rapacity of capitalism been combined so ironically as they are in
The Lego Movie……All this in a film in which a character called President
Business (also known as Lord Business) has totalitarian control over the moods
and thoughts of every character and intends to destroy the world in a few days’
time.”
________________________________________________________________________
LEFTIST WATCH
CNN presents "Uncle Joe
Stalin" as a "notorious dictator," but also a loving family man
who did remarkably good things for social justice.
Venezuela:
the Left´s favourite ´socialist
paradise´ is sliding into poverty and
dictatorship
Having successfully demonized Chris Christie over the
closure of traffic lanes on a bridge, the leftist mainstream media are now
targeting Scott Walker, another very promising potential GOP candidate for
president.
The North Korean regime is committing systematic and
widespread human rights abuses, including forcing mothers to drown their
newborn babies and setting up secret prison camps, a United Nations report
released Monday found. “The gravity, scale and nature of these violations
reveal a State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.”
So what is the UN human rights council working on? “…the assistant secretary-general for human
rights at the United Nations, has met with leaders from the Oneida Indian
Nation to discuss their campaign against the Washington Redskins' mascot
choice.”
________________________________________________________________________
GLOBALONEY
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said global warming is as
big a threat as terrorism, in a speech in Indonesia
Meanwhile it cost 12 metric tons of Carbon to send Kerry on
his trip to Indonesia,
so in one week, Kerry generated about two-thirds the carbon output of the
average American in one year.
McNider and Christy: “Why Kerry Is Flat Wrong on Climate
Change” “It was the scientific skeptics
who bucked the 'consensus' and said the Earth was round. “We might forgive these modelers if their
forecasts had not been so consistently and spectacularly wrong……The modelers
insist that they are unlucky because natural temperature variability is masking
the real warming. They might be right, but when a batter goes 0 for 10, he's
better off questioning his swing than blaming the umpire.”
Bill Nye confuses South Pole with North Pole in 'Meet the
Press' Climate Debate
It is a basic principle of psychological warfare that the
side that controls the language of the argument controls the argument. Barack
Obama´s own website is using this PsyWar technique by calling opponents of his
cap and trade agenda "climate change deniers." So here’s our response: global warming alarmists are “climate
parasites”
“The carbon-trading schemes enacted with such fanfare just a
few years ago have effectively ceased to operate amid collapsing prices. The
sustainable-energy craze produced the expensive bankruptcies of solar-panel
maker Solyndra, Fisker Automotive and battery maker A123 Systems, to name a
few. Germany,
which has taken its climate-change fetish further than any other major economy,
is now coming to grips with a comprehensive fiasco of higher energy prices and
higher carbon emissions. Who would have thought that when the sun doesn't shine
or the wind doesn't blow, people might still want to switch on the lights? It
is now the dogma of the left that any hint of doubt when it comes to
predictions of climate doom is evidence of greed, stupidity, moral turpitude or
psychological derangement. "Climate denial" is intended to be the
equivalent of Holocaust denial. And yet the only people who've predicted
anything right so far are those who foresaw that the Kyoto Protocol would fail,
that renewable energies didn't really work, and that climate bureaucrats
accountable to nobody but their own sense of virtue and taste for profit were a
danger to everyone.”
As all the world knows, climate buffoon Michael Mann is
suing Mark Steyn, National Review and others for disagreeing with him about
global warming–not just disagreeing, but doing so in colorful language. Steyn
was unhappy with how the lawsuit was going, so he dismissed the lawyers that
were representing him and National Review and is now pro se. Rather than
engage in further procedural maneuvering, Mark wants to fight out what he sees
as the central issue–free speech–in the court of public opinion. So yesterday
another shoe dropped: Mark served an answer and counterclaim against Mann in
which he requested damages from the discredited scientist. It is entertaining;
it should be, Mark wrote it himself.
EPA Video Contest Teaches Budding Child Activists to Worry
About ´Climate Change´
________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
Sen. Rand Paul from Kentucky
warned his fellow Republicans that without change, the GOP would fail miserably
in the upcoming White House contest — and that goes for the next few decades.
“I think Republicans will not win again in my lifetime for the presidency
unless they become a new GOP, a new Republican Party…And it has to be a
transformation, not a little tweaking at the edges.”
What Happened to the Antiwar Movement? Barack Obama owes his
presidency largely to the Iraq
war. It was Obama’s purity on the war–he opposed it when Hillary Clinton, John
Kerry and others were voting for it–that endeared him to the Democratic Party’s
base. Indeed, one could say that the contemporary American Left owes its vigor,
if not its existence, to the Iraq
war. Those who lived through the years from 2003 to 2008 won’t forget it–the
online hysteria, the demonstrations, the wild charges, the assassination
fantasies, the calls for impeachment…..
Next week the British parliament will vote on the thorny
issue of titles for married gay partners. They will be asked to clear up laws
dating as far back as 700 years. The changes are needed to ensure a gay married
King could not style his husband Queen. Under the previous arrangements of
Civil Partnerships gay partners were not allowed courtesy titles as their
unions were not deemed full marriage. This is the reason Sir Elton John’s
partner David Furnish is not entitled to the dubious honour of being known as
“Lady John”.
___________________________________________________________________________
NOTEWORTHY WEBSITES
“I am a Ukrianian…..We want to be
free…..You can help us…..”
7 Amazing Reagan Quotes that Capture
America´s Current Condition
The War On Men: 10 Ways Masculinity is Under Attack. And why the elite, not women are to blame.
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