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Shooting The Messenger

Unbelievable: Maryland may prosecute O’Keefe for shooting ACORN video

No word on whether they’ll be prosecuting any ACORN people for conspiring to cover up sex slavery. They’ve got bigger fish to fry, I guess. Like … the people who exposed the people who conspired to cover up sex slavery.

This is what you get for doing the media’s job for them.

Note: Most of the “inquiries” they received from citizens — although perhaps not from reporters — surely were demands that ACORN be prosecuted. So they looked at the tape … and decided to go after O’Keefe instead. The news story at the link reminds us that they went after Linda Tripp for wiretapping too, coincidentally another person who made life uncomfortable for a Democratic president. Here’s the statute. You’ll find exception after exception provided for law enforcement to shield them from liability when they tape criminals surreptitiously to serve the public interest. Kind of like how O’Keefe did here.


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Didn’t Know It Was A Disease

Obama science czar: Redistributionism as the cure for American exceptionalism

With more focus getting applied to Barack Obama’s czars, the first to receive scrutiny should be John Holdren, Obama’s science czar. Michelle has outlined Holdren’s odd views from the past, including statements in books published in the 1970s that suggested forced sterilizations and social pressure for abortions, among other things. The College Politico finds something a little more recent in this interview in 2007, conducted in the virtual-reality environment of Second Life, in which Holdren discusses his views on science and economics

First, Holdren doesn’t know what “American exceptionalism” means. He can’t even get the term right. American exceptionalism has nothing to do with our size or our technological prowess, except in tertiary terms. Exceptionalism springs from the unique nature of our nation’s birth, the historical leadership in personal freedom that America has shown (with very notable failures, such as slavery and post-Civil War Jim Crow), and especially the role America inherited in the 20th century as the guarantor of Western security and international shipping.

This is no philosophical quibble, either. Part of the reason America consumes more relative to other nations on a per-capita basis is because we produce more for the consumption of others, and out of necessity for our role as global cop.  That is a large part of the reason that our defense spending outstrips those of other Western nations, as they do not contribute nearly as much to that role.  Seeing as how Holdren can’t figure out what he opposes, it comes as no surprise that he doesn’t see the connection between that role and consumption of resources, either.

One can oppose America’s role on the world stage from either the Right or the Left, and challenge the notion of American exceptionalism itself — but it helps to start off by knowing what it is.  Holdren should get bounced for his ignorance as well as opposed for his radical, redistributionist views.  This interview strongly suggests that Obama’s science czar got picked not for his dedication to science but for his redistributionist views under the cloak of climate change.



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Even Franklin Raines, Who Left In 2004

Why are we paying legal bills for Fannie Mae execs?

American taxpayers have already bailed out Fannie Mae to the tune of at least $45 billion, thanks to the congressionally-mandated purchase of sub-prime loans and conversion to mortgage-backed securities that poisoned the global financial markets and caused the current economic crisis.  Now American taxpayers will get to bail out the executives who created the crisis by paying their legal bills.  That includes at least one executive who hasn’t worked for Fannie for five years and left under a cloud of suspicion for fraud and corruption

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They Didn’t Learn The First Time

The media strikes (out) again on Jones resignation

If people relied on the mainstream media, especially print media, to keep up to date on the government, then they must have quite a shock this morning with the resignation of Van Jones.  For instance, the New York Times makes its first mention of the Jones controversy this morning — by reporting his resignation

Did the Times report it on Friday?  On Saturday?  No.  Their first print report of any controversy at all over Van Jones came today, in reporting his resignation. The Times does a credible job laying out the more substantial accusations against Jones, but there is a problem here as well

When did the 9/11 Truther connection come to light?  Jim Hoft reported it Thursday, and it flew through the blogosphere.  Even more Truther connections came out the next day.  When did the New York Times — and to be fair, most other newspapers in the country — get around to reporting in print that a paranoid conspiracy theorist had a job as a White House czar?  Today, after he quit.


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Painful

Obama theme: incompetence?

How has this theme surfaced?  It would be impossible to count them all, but we can get them into broad themes:

  • Personnel - Barack Obama’s appointments have been a continuing source of embarrassment.  His Treasury Secretary blamed Turbo-Tax for his tax evasion, but several more appointments also had tax problems.  Obama nominated Bill Richardson to Commerce knowing full well of the pay-for-play probe in New Mexico that forced Richardson to withdraw his name a few weeks later.  Van Jones, the Green Jobs Czar, is just the latest example of fumbled vetting that has plagued this White House since the transition.
  • Economics - Remember when Obama told the nation that a $787 billion stimulus package would keep unemployment from getting above 8%?  Remember when Obama told the nation that his administration had shaved $2 trillion off of the projected ten-year deficit?  Remember when Obama promised that he would speed up stimulus spending this summer?  None of those came to pass, which is why Obama hopes you’ve forgotten all of that.
  • Politics - One might have thought Obama would have learned from the debacle of the stimulus package that he needed to lead, rather than follow Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.  Instead, he passed the buck on health-care reform and wound up losing control of the health-care debate.  Indeed, Obama made it worse by cheering on Pelosi and Reid, demanding that Congress bend to their wills and vote on an overhaul of 1/6th of the American economy with just a handful of days for debate.  This week, seven months after his inauguration, Obama’s press flacks announced with great fanfare that Obama would finally draft a proposal himself — as if he were President, or something!

Who could have warned us that a man who served seven years in the state legislature and three years in the Senate would not have been prepared for the toughest executive position in the Free World?  We did.  Repeatedly.  So did John McCain, and for that matter, so did Hillary Clinton.


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Gonzales Denies Supporting CIA Probe

Alberto Gonzales: On second thought, I don’t support Holder’s CIA probe

Former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said Thursday that his previous assertion that it was "legitimate to question and examine" charges of CIA abuses of terrorism suspects did not mean he endorsed such an investigation.

"Contrary to press reporting and based on the information that's available to me," Mr. Gonzales said during an interview Thursday with The Washington Times, "I don't support the investigation by the department because this is a matter that has already been reviewed thoroughly and because I believe that another investigation is going to harm our intelligence gathering capabilities and that's a concern that's shared by career intelligence officials, and so for those reasons I respectfully disagree with the decision."


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Gephardt Called Bush's Speech To Students 'Paid Political Advertising'

Flashback: Gephardt warned against Bush school speech in 1991

As Barack Obama prepares a nationwide broadcast to America's students next Tuesday, it has been revealed that Democrats complained in 1991 when then President George H. W. Bush broadcast a speech from a Northwest Washington junior high school.

In fact, the House Majority leader at the time, Gephardt (D-Mo.), said "The Department of Education should not be producing paid political advertising for the president, it should be helping us to produce smarter students."

Video: Michelle rips Obama over school speech

Vodkapundit: Keep your kid home from school for Obama’s speech

WH deletes line about schoolkids helping Obama from speech prep materials

We must resist Obama’s school speech



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The Real Answer Is Left Unspoken

Durbin: Mandate? What mandates?

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Republican Voters Say GOP Reps In Congress Still Out Of Touch

Seventy-four percent (74%) of Republican voters say their party’s representatives in Congress have lost touch with GOP voters nationwide over the past several years. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 18% of GOP voters believe their elected officials have done a good job representing the base.

Most Republican voters (55%) say that the average Republican in Congress is more liberal than the average Republican voter. Twenty-four percent (24%) say the average Republican in Congress holds views about the same as the average Republican voter while just 17% think the Congressional Republicans are more conservative than GOP voters.

Republican voters overwhelmingly believe it is more important for the party to stand for what it believes in rather than trying to work with President Barack Obama. Eighty-four percent (84%) of Republicans hold that view while just 14% favor more co-operation with the President.



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Turnaround

Ridge backpedals on “pressure” claims

Less than two weeks ago, Tom Ridge launched his memoirs with the explosive allegation that Bush administration officials had pressured him to change terror-threat levels in order to boost George Bush’s re-election chances in the final days of the 2004 election.  A day later, the New York Times pointed out that the book not only didn’t have any supporting evidence for that claim, it also had Ridge insisting that he hadn’t seen any political pressure on threat levels.  Now Ridge himself has begun to backpedal from his publicity-seeking allegations

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Kennedy's Free Pass With Women

“I didn’t know about Chappaquiddick and the rape case until yesterday”

But how is it that so many women unabashedly revere Kennedy today? The particulars of Chappaquiddick are especially gory; his behavior after the accident approaches the amoral. Once he broke free and swam to the surface, Kennedy said that he dove back down seven or eight times to rescue Kopechne. Failing, he swam back to shore and checked back into his hotel, and a short time later lodged a noise complaint with the desk clerk. The people in the room next to his were partying and it was interfering with his sleep. Then he asked the desk clerk for the time

Perhaps, along with the hagiographic Kennedy myth, we can bury this outdated tradition of excusing the reprehensible treatment of women by the same male legislators who otherwise advocate for our rights politically. It's degrading. It's like making excuses for the husband who beats you up but pays the bills on time. It may be 2009, but the bulk of the talking heads who covered this funeral were older white males, and among the few women -- eminent historian Doris Kearns Goodwin among them -- it's still shocking to hear them, nearly to a one, reduce Kennedy's bad behavior to rakish abandon or poor judgement. Why shouldn't we hold our elected male officials -- especially those who so assiduously court the female vote -- to a standard of personal decency in their treatment of women? Why do we still assume that this is an either/or proposition?

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