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Loading ...If there’s one thing that President Barack Obama has managed to do over the past two years it’s been to bring Democrats and Republicans together—in unanimous opposition to his budget.
A budget resolution based on President Obama’s 2013 budget failed to get any votes in the Senate on Wednesday.
In a 99-0 vote, all of the senators present rejected the president’s blueprint.
It’s the second year in a row the Senate has voted down Obama’s budget.
Obama’s 2012 budget failed 97 to 0 last May after Obama himself last April said he wanted deeper deficit cuts.
The House earlier this year unanimously rejected Obama’s budget.
For the past two years, Obama has failed to get a single Democrat to vote for his budget, let alone a Republican to crossover. The only reason Obama’s budget even got a vote in the Senate was because the rules allow the minority party to bring legislation to the floor. For more than three years, the Senate Democratic leadership has steadfastly refused to pass a budget—in violation of (a toothless) law.
This continuing debacle raises two serious questions.
First, if the Democrats have a plan to deal with our trillion-dollar deficits and looming entitlement insolvency, why have they not laid out that plan as part of the budget process? Maybe they don’t have a plan. Maybe they’re a bunch of sheep without a single thought in their minds on how to deal with this problem. This is unlikely. Much more likely is that they do have a plan and know that the American people won’t like it. They won’t like it because the Democrats’ plan isn’t just to stick it to the rich—everyone knows there aren’t enough of them and they don’t have enough wealth, let alone income—but to the middle class as well. You simply can’t sustain the levels of government spending Democrats are advocating without wholesale tax hikes. Better to spring it on the proles after Obama’s been re-elected and the Democrats have (hopefully) held onto Senate control in 2012 than before and ensure that neither happens.
Second, what does this say about President Obama’s leadership? For two straight years he’s submitted a budget plan that’s so laughable not a single elected representative from either party has voted for it. In the past 4 years he’s passed two signature pieces of legislation: Obamacare and the stimulus. Neither one of these was written by the White House. They were constructed by House and Senate Democratic leadership with Obama smiling in the background. When it comes to actually doing the job of president, it’s hard to imagine someone who has actually done less and posed more than Obama.
(4 votes, average: 4.75 out of 5) Loading ...When I was in high school many eons ago, I went on a kick reading a bunch of books written by science-fiction great Isaac Asimov. Over a period of a few months, I probably read close to two dozen of Asimov’s books. About a month ago, I decided to give some of them a re-read (notably the Lije Bailey detective novels and the Foundation series). As I was reading Foundation and Empire, originally published in 1952, I was struck by this section:
Barr paid a requisite number of iridium coins and appropriated the uppermost member of a pile of newspapers. It was the Trantor Imperial News, official organ of the government. In the back of the newsroom, there was a soft clicking noise of additional editions being printed in long-distance sympathy with the busy machines at the Imperial News offices ten thousand miles away by corridor—six thousand by air-machine—just as ten million sets of copies were being likewise printed at that moment in ten million other newsrooms all over the planet.
Certainly one can easily be forgiven for failing to foresee smartphones, tablet computers, social networking and that have sprung up over the past two decades. But how unimaginable is the death of the printed newspaper? In this day and age, I can see the end from here. As the baby boomer generation reaches its natural end (but likely not before bankrupting Social Security and Medicare), consumers of printed newspapers will dwindle. Asimov, like far too many in the newspaper industry even into the first part of the 21st century, didn’t recognize that the thing that people would continue to need would be the “news” and not the “paper.”
I also suspect Asimov couldn’t have imagined the death of the newspaper, the network news, the mainstream media, as a trusted, unbiased source of information. I too can see that end from here.
In 2008, The New York Times published a hit piece full of innuendo and short on facts accusing GOP presidential nominee Sen. John McCain of an affair with a lobbyist. The article had far less impact on the outcome of the election than it did on the Times‘ credibility.
In 2006, The Washington Post had a little better luck when GOP Sen. George Allen, seeking re-election, stupidly referred to a Democratic Party operative who was filming him at a campaign rally as a “macaca.” It’s still unclear to me six years later what the heck a macaca actually is. It’s probably not a compliment, but there’s a lot of dispute over whether it is a racist term.
Regardless, the Post hammered Allen on the statement on both the news and editorial pages for weeks, likely contributing to Allen’s narrow defeat.
Yesterday, the Post did it again. Seemingly released to coincide with President Barack Obama’s flip-flop-flip on gay marriage, the Post article details presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s prep school days as a prankster who was occasionally cruel.
Mitt Romney returned from a three-week spring break in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School. Back on the handsome campus, studded with Tudor brick buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.
“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenage son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.
A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.
The incident was recalled similarly by five students, who gave their accounts independently of one another. Four of them — Friedemann, now a dentist; Phillip Maxwell, a lawyer; Thomas Buford, a retired prosecutor; and David Seed, a retired principal — spoke on the record. Another former student who witnessed the incident asked not to be identified. The men have differing political affiliations, although they mostly lean Democratic. Buford volunteered for Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008. Seed, a registered independent, has served as a Republican county chairman in Michigan. All of them said that politics in no way colored their recollections.
Breaking news from the Post: teenagers are cruel and do stupid things. If you missed the Post’s hard-hitting, 5,000-word look at teenager Barack Obama’s drug use in 2008, you’re forgiven—it never happened.
And in the hours after the Post published the story, it began to fray at the edges.
However, Matt Lewis of The Daily Caller noted that White told ABC News a different version of the story:
White was not present for the prank, in which Romney is said to have forcefully cut a student’s long hair and was not aware of it until this year when he was contacted by the Washington Post.
After ABC News’s report, the Post had changed its story. It now reads:
“I always enjoyed his pranks,” said Stu White, a popular friend of Romney’s who went on to a career as a public school teacher and said he has been “disturbed” by the Lauber incident since hearing about it several weeks ago, before being contacted by The Washington Post. “But I was not the brunt of any of his pranks.”
Emphasis added. That is a pretty substantive change to the story, yet nowhere does the Post note that a correction/clarification has been made.
That last bit is just the cap to a list of journalistic sins committed by the Post.
And while the Post article seemed to suggest the high school attack on Lauber scarred him for life, his family disputes that and Lauber himself is unavailable to comment because he died in 2004 from liver cancer, but by any measure appeared to live a fulfilling life.
Lauber got a seaman’s license at the University of the Seven Seas, graduated from Vanderbilt University in English, and rode horses with the famous Royal Lipizzaner Stallion riders, and worked as a chef in various places, including cooking for American troops in Iraq. His life choices were his own, and no one can prove that Mitt Romney’s forced haircut had anything to do with his successes or his failures.
It’s highly unlikely that this will sway a single vote and has already exhausted its 5 minutes of being news in this year’s presidential campaign.
What the article has done, however, is further heightened the distrust of the mainstream media by a substantial plurality of the American electorate. Irresponsible journalists doing irresponsible journalism continue to push us in a direction that one of our most impressive futurists could never have imagined.
Journalism. Wound. Self-inflicted.
(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5) Loading ...Here in San Luis Obispo County, plastic grocery bags are soon to become a thing of the past. They’re useful, cheap and convenient, so they must be snuffed out in the name of doing it “for the children.”
It seems Los Angeles may be following suit. I want to highlight two items regarding this isssue.
“We are trying to get out our message that these bans don’t really do much,” Dempsey said. “San Francisco did a survey and found that 0.6 percent of its litter was from plastics. After they had a ban, plastics accounted for 0.64 percent of their litter. It made no difference.
“What we are saying is there is no real benefit.”
So, it doesn’t really have any measurable effect, but we’ll do it anyway.
Item #2:
Councilman Paul Koretz said he expected that Crown Poly would need to eliminate only a small number of positions. And he compared the company to makers of horse-drawn carriages at the start of the 20th century.
Councilman Koretz apparently knows better than the plastic bag manufacturer how his business operates and how many jobs this proposed ban will cost. This is probably based on Koretz’s vast business experience.
Finally, Koretz should probably get a refund for his history degree from UCLA. Horse-drawn carriage manufacturers didn’t go out of business because the government banned the things.
(3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5) Loading ...HHS Secretary and former Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius swore an oath to protect and uphold the Constitution. Since then, it’s apparently been out of sight, out of mind.
Wow, just wow.
It’s the final portion of this exchange that’s the most telling. When deciding to mandate that religious employers and institutions violate their consciences when it comes to contraception and abortifacients, Secretary Sebelius didn’t think to ask any lawyers to weigh in with a formal memo on the legal grounds on which they would defend the mandate. (Is Solicitor General Richard Verrelli a crummy lawyer, or does he have crummy clients? This would suggest the latter.)
Whether it’s incompetence or arrogance, Sebelius hasn’t been doing her job well.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Here’s the Environmental Protection Racket’s Agency’s Region VI Administration Al Armendariz.
EPA’s philosophy
Anyone want to take bets on the next EPA administrator to be “crucified?”
(5 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5) Loading ...Reuters in its job as Democratic National Committee stenographer had a laughably dishonest story on Saturday about how voter ID laws would be disenfranchising young people.
The new laws – many of which include measures requiring voters to show a photo ID at the polls – could carve into Obama’s potential support in Florida, Ohio and a few other politically divided states likely to be crucial in the November 6 election, analysts say.
The analysts note that massive registration drives in 2008 helped put millions of people aged 18 to 29 on voting rolls, and that age group – which makes up roughly one-quarter of the U.S. electorate – helped propel Obama to victory, voting 2-to-1 for him.
Rock the Vote, a nationwide organization that mobilizes young voters, said the new laws would make it more difficult for the group to educate people on how to sign up to vote.
"The types of laws have varied, but state by state they’ve added up to the fact that it’s going to be harder for young people to get registered and vote in this election cycle," said Heather Smith, president of Rock the Vote.
Seriously? Are young people not getting driver’s licenses today?
If I hearken back to my youth, it seemed that most everyone 21 years of age or older had at least one form of picture ID.
People 18-20 typically had two—one showing their true identity and age, the other showing them to be 21.
They seriously expect us to buy this “young people don’t have ID” crap?
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5) Loading ...Back when President Bush was in charge and issuing signing statements the liberal media (but I repeat myself) were in a state of continual shock and dismay at the “lawlessness” of the president’s actions. Sen. Barack Obama as a presidential candidate vowed that he wouldn’t behave as his predecessor had when it came to attempting an “end run” around laws duly passed by Congress.
Both were full of $#!+ up to their eyeballs.
New York Times editorial page editor admitted as much today.
President George W. Bush used his executive power to bypass Congress, almost as a matter of routine. Now President Barack Obama is pulling a similar stunt.
I was appalled, and so was the Times editorial board (and so, in fact was Senator Barack Obama) when a Boston Globe reporter, Charlie Savage, documented Mr. Bush’s use of presidential signing statements and executive orders. But I am not appalled by the way Mr. Obama is relying on those instruments – as detailed in today’s Times by that same enterprising reporter, who now works for us. Context and intent make all the difference.
And this was what it was all about. When Bush was doing it, they made a big deal about the legality of the practice—it’s legal—and pooh-poohed the suggestion that the real reason for their outrage was that they didn’t like Bush or his views.
Like their convenient, shifting positions on the appropriateness of the filibuster based upon which party holds the presidency, their outrage over signing statements is perfectly partisan.
They’re not principled journalists, they’re partisan hacks.
(3 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5) Loading ...I stopped reading The New York Times Public Editor column shortly after then-Public Editor David Okrent confessed that the Times is a liberal paper. I’d known that long before, but half of the fun of it was that they’d never admitted it.
The whole thing was like the wino who tries to convince you that he really needs the dollar to buy coffee as alcohol fumes waft from his breath and clothing.
On Sunday, new Public Editor Arthur Brisbane set a marker for his colleagues at the Times and it’s almost as if he believes that Okrent’s frank assessment never appeared in print.
Now, though, the general election season is on, and The Times needs to offer an aggressive look at the president’s record, policy promises and campaign operation to answer the question: Who is the real Barack Obama?
Is this a real-life “Heaven Can Wait?” Has Brisbane died and Andrew Breitbart’s soul taken up residence?
Let’s ignore for a moment the fact that maybe this should’ve been something the Times could’ve done before donning their cheerleader uniform and pom-poms four years ago.
Brisbane has done his research and assures us that Times reporters and editors are unbiased, non-partisan and professional.
Based on conversations with Times reporters and editors who cover the campaign and Washington, I think they see themselves as aggressive journalists who don’t play favorites.
I see myself as a sex symbol and all-around ladies man. That doesn’t make it reality.
Still, a strong current of skepticism holds that the paper skews left.
The view that the paper skews left is limited to those who still read the paper.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, is a co-author of “The Obama Victory: How Media, Money, and Message Shaped the 2008 Election.” I asked her what she thought The Times should do to wring out bias in its 2012 coverage. Among other things, she said, “Don’t play a sex scandal out when you don’t have any evidence,” a reference to The Times’s controversial 2008 article on John McCain’s relationship with a lobbyist.
Brisbane calls it a “controversial” article. Normal people would call it “false” or “baseless” or “grossly irresponsible.” The Times attempted to backtrack after people looked at the article and its thinly-sourced innuendo of an extramarital affair by suggesting that they didn’t suggest there was an affair. That was Bolshevik Storytelling.
If you’re wondering who the editor who oversaw and defended that travesty of a story was, you’ll be relieved to find out that she’s no longer in that position. Her name is Jill Abramson and she’s now executive editor of the Times.
If you’re expecting fair or balanced coverage this election season from The New York Times and its reporters, then shame on you.
(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5) Loading ...It’s been more than 1,000 days since the Senate passed a budget. This failure is a violation of the law, but since the Senate is the only body that can enforce this particular law on itself—which it doesn’t want to do—there are no legal ramifications.
Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) who is not seeking re-election this year finally let his sense of shame get the best of him last weekend when he announced that the Senate would produce a budget. Conrad is the head of the Senate Finance Committee and had announced that Wednesday that committee would markup a budget bill.
Here is a picture from that meeting.
The empty chairs at that table are reserved for committee Democrats. With the exception of Conrad, no Democrat appeared at the meeting. Between Conrad’s weekend appearances on various Sunday morning talk shows and Wednesday’s meeting, Senate majority leader Harry Reid came down on Conrad like a ton of bricks. There will be no budget. There will be no votes. For the third year in a row.
Democrats aren’t interested in voting on anything—especially if the vote might mean tough questions for senators back home.
The House Republicans have proposed and passed a budget. It isn’t perfect. It’s not necessarily what I would’ve written were I king of the United States. But at least they’re being responsible. At least they’re leading.
Which is more than can be said for Senate Democrats or President Obama.
(3 votes, average: 3.67 out of 5) Loading ...You know, it’s one thing for the average rube to buy into the Barack Obama as messiah complex with the idea that he’ll make their house payments for them and buy them their gas. But you’d think that someone as sophisticated as his Harvard Law-trained wife would be a little more inured to the whole idea. You’d be wrong.
“I am so in,” Michelle Obama said toward the end of her remarks. “I am going to be working so hard. We have an amazing story to tell. This president has brought us out of the dark and into the light.”
I’d be a little creeped out if my wife worshiped me in this manner. It’s almost a cult-like fascination.
Hoystory is syndicated via Newstex
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