Sunday, May 13, 2012

Obama as the dirt starts to fly


What’s New Today

Story #1 tells us what we already know.  Obama is go low in this campaign.  #2 if you doubt story 1, story 2 tells of Obama’s hit list and his public going after private citizens.  Their only crime is they give to Republicans.  #3 tells us of how the Democrats seem to exist in an alternate reality from the rest of us.  #4 W. decides to stay out of the politics coming up.  #5 tells us about Psychopunditry:  The left’s new science.  It seems leftist social scientists have found people on the right are deficient.  #6 tells about how more advanced (in green energy) Germany may face a crisis in the coming winter. 


Today’s Thoughts

Good news.  The world won’t end this December.  Scientist have  found new carvings in Xultún, Guatemala which show the earth will go on for at least 1,000s of years.  Just in time!

With Obama’s recent $15 million fund raiser in California and the reported $16 billion deficit by the state of California, it make you wonder if the money might be better spent in California. 

There is a story in the NY Post of how the Obama team tried to bribe Rev. Wright.  Instead Obama met with the Reverend and told him his problem was that he always had to tell the truth.  Does that mean Obama doesn’t?  And that “Goddamn America” was true? 

 Is the Breast Feeding Time Magazine cover a metaphor for the Democrats and the left?  The model is doing something in public that normally should be done in private.  The child is older than most children are when they are breastfed.  Is this just another part of the fundamental change Obama promised for America?

1.      The face of things to come
The campaign contour is pretty clear: The Obama reelection team will not make the case for the advantages and popularity of Obamacare, for the Chuian advantages of $4-a-gallon gas, for the dynamism of a 1.7 percent GDP growth rate, for the stimulatory effects of adding $5 trillion in new debt, or for why 8 percent unemployment does not qualify under the old rubric of a “jobless recovery.” Instead we are going to see a) mostly the spike-the-football sloganeering about Osama bin Laden and adherence to the Bush-Petraeus timetable in leaving Iraq, b) the supposed racism (Trayvon Martin–style), sexism (“war on women”) and homophobia of the Right, and c) personal attacks on Romney’s past.

But given that of almost all politicians, left and right, on the national scene, Romney is about the most squeaky clean (indeed, perhaps the squeakiest in a generation of candidates), the fare is going to be pretty paltry — mostly Mormon boilerplate and silly stuff like the Washington Post high-school bullying story that already is starting to unwind or fade….


Obama must be so disappointed that Santorum didn’t win.  I’m already hearing lefties say Romney’s 48 year old bullying was “assault.”  The sheer nonsense of the charges they are trying to make insures the people will listen less and less to them.  Chicken little will be coming home to roost in the DNC.  



2.     The President’s hit list
Those are some ugly details that our Kimberley Strassel has been turning up about the effort to smear Mitt Romney’s campaign donors. The dirt-digging exercise reflects the character of President Obama’s re-election campaign, as well as what’s really behind the drive for more “transparency” in political donations.

As Ms. Strassel has reported in recent columns, Idaho businessman Frank VanderSloot has become the target of a smear campaign since it was disclosed earlier this year that he had donated $1 million to a super PAC supporting Mr. Romney. President Obama’s campaign website teed him up in April as one of eight “less than reputable” Romney donors and a “bitter foe of the gay rights movement.” One sin: His wife donated to an anti-gay-marriage campaign, of the kind that have passed in 30 or so states.

Now we learn that little more than a week after that Presidential posting, a former Democratic Senate staffer called the courthouse in Mr. VanderSloot’s home town of Idaho Falls seeking his divorce records. Ms. Strassel traced the operative, Michael Wolf, to a Washington, D.C. outfit called Fusion GPS that says it is “a commercial research firm.”…


Nasty and dirty is what we can expect from the Obama campaign.  How long will it be before Obama personal approval rating dips down to his job approval rating?  



3.     Democrats and their alternate reality
Somewhere in the recent past (say, about the time "Dreams From My Father" was published), liberals decided reality wasn't really their thing. It was too dull. It didn't give closure. Sometimes the endings weren't right. So it turns out that Obama's main squeeze in his young days was a "composite," digitally enhanced for your reading experience.
 
Then, it turned out that even the blond, blue-eyed, whey-faced Elizabeth Warren, running against Scott Brown in Massachusetts for his seat in the Senate, was hired by Harvard as an American Indian, though the proportion of Cherokee in her bloodline was just 1 in 32 parts. Just how pale-faced is Warren? A lot more than George Zimmerman, the brown-skinned son of a Peruvian mother who is accused of murdering Trayvon Martin. He was described by the New York Times as a "white Hispanic," because if you're going to characterize a death as a lynching, the one who commits it had better be white.
In similar news, three broadcast employees have already been fired for "editing" a call made by the same Zimmerman so that it appeared he found Martin suspicious and pursued him because Martin was black. Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit linked headshots of Warren and Zimmerman, with Zimmerman labeled a "cracker," and Warren described as a racial "minority." Nothing is more important than race, and race is defined the way the Left wants it.
 
What could be less real than that? Well, there is one thing -- conjecture about what would have been in an alternative universe, in which much is asserted and nothing proved. These have become mainstays for President Obama, whose case for re-election is based not on what has happened, but what could, would or might have occurred under different conditions, which he is allowed to make up. One is his belief that his stimulus averted a second Depression. A second is to charge that a President Romney would not have made the call to take out Osama bin Laden and then to attack Romney for a "decision" he never had the opportunity to make. The supposed evidence for this claim came from a wide-ranging interview on general strategy that Romney had given five years earlier…


I actually enjoy alternate histories.  It makes you think.  What would history have been like if the South had won the Civil War (emancipation of blacks occurred 20 years later)?  What would the world have been like if Hitler had been admitted to the fine arts academy in Vienna?  Why these are fun to read and imagine, you don’t run for office that way unless you are desperate.  


4.     Bush talks about the upcoming election

There will be a lot of Republican pundits criticizing President Barack Obama from now to November, but his predecessor George W. Bush won’t be one of them.

Speaking at a Christian charity fundraiser Friday night in Billings, the 43rd president spoke with reverence for the institution of the presidency, saying he wouldn’t be joining the partisan chorus this election year. The two-term chief executive has said very little publicly about President Obama since leaving the post in 2008.

He arrived by private jet at Edwards Jet Center on Friday evening.

“Frankly, there are plenty of critics out there and one of them won’t be me,” the former president said, adding that he’s no longer in politics and doesn’t desire to be.

“You’re either in it or you’re out of it. I’m trying to get out of the swamp.”

That said, Bush reaffirmed his position that tax cuts, particularly for those with substantial capital to invest in business development, were the best way to achieve a 4 percent economic growth rate for the U.S….


I wish Jimmy Carter would be as classy an ex-President as W. seems to be.  But he was an awful president and a dud as an ex-President.    


5.     Psychopunditry:  The left’s new science

We are entering the age of the psychopundit (we can thank the science writer Will Saletan for this excellent word). Thomas Edsall, for example, is a veteran political reporter widely admired by people who admire political reporters. He has become very excited by social science, as so many widely admired people have. Studies show—as a psychopundit would say—that Edsall is excited because social science has lately become a tool of Democrats who want to reassure themselves that Republicans are heartless and stupid. In embracing Science, the psychopundit believes he is moving from the spongy world of mere opinion to the firmer footing of fact. It is pleasing to him to discover that the two—his opinion and scientific fact—are identical…

…The studies rely on the principle that has informed the social sciences for more than a generation: If a researcher with a Ph.D. can corral enough undergraduates into a campus classroom and, by giving them a little bit of money or a class credit, get them to do something—fill out a questionnaire, let’s say, or pretend they’re in a specific real-world situation that the researcher has thought up—the young scholars will (unconsciously!) yield general truths about the human animal; scientific truths. The scientific truths revealed in Edsall’s “academic critique of the right” demonstrate that “the rich and powerful” lack compassion, underestimate the suffering of others, have little sympathy for the disadvantaged, and are far more willing to act unethically than the less rich and not so powerful. ..
 
A lack of self-awareness isn’t peculiar to liberals or Democrats, of course, but to judge by the behavior of psychopundits, we can safely say that they are clueless not only about themselves but about their political opposites. A young psychopundit called Chris Mooney has just published a book entitled The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality, which seeks to explain the Republican “assault on reality.” He is a very earnest fellow, and an ambitious one. He glances over an array of conservative political beliefs and sets himself a goal: “to understand how these false claims (and rationalizations) could exist and persist in human minds.” 

His list of false claims is instructive. Along with the usual hillbilly denials of evolution and global warming, they include these, to grab a quick sample: that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2009 will increase the deficit, cut Medicare benefits, and lead to the death panels that Sarah Palin hypothesized; that tax cuts increase revenue and that the president’s stimulus didn’t create jobs; that Congress banned incandescent light bulbs; and that the United States was founded as a “Christian nation.” …


An interesting article on how people on the left look to rationalize why they are superior.  Of course the folks buying the garbage here are the same folks that promoted the internet rumor that the SAT’s show that liberal states are smarter than conservative states.  The problem is that the SAT people don’t collect data by state. 



6.     Germany Faces Crises this coming winter

Last winter, on several occasions, Germany escaped only just large-scale power outages. Next winter the risk of large blackouts is even greater. The culprit for the looming crisis is the single most important instrument of German energy policy: the “Renewable Energy Law.”

The dramatic tone of the report by the Federal Network Agency (FNA) on the near-blackouts last winter is hard to overestimate: although the cold spell was short and mild, the situation in the German electricity network was “very serious” according to the Agency.

Several times, the pre-ordered reserve power plants in Austria and Germany were fully utilized. On several occasions, the network operators were not even able to mobilize additionally needed emergency reserves abroad. The number of short-term emergency interventions in network and power plant operating shot up by more than 30,000 percentage points on some network portions.

“Had a failure of a large power plant taken place in this situation, there would have been hardly any room for maneuver available.” This quote from the FNA report is translation for “We narrowly escaped a catastrophe.”

There is no reason for a sigh of relief, however: Next winter, which will possibly be even more severe, everything could get much worse, officials warn. Because then even less base-load gas- and coal-fired power plants will be available to reliably compensate for wind lulls and the almost complete absence of solar power for months….


The windmills and unicorns of the leftist’s imagination will fail at some point and people will ask why we weren’t prepared.  The answer is that is no preparation if you don’t believe in science that actually works.  And here is a link to a two minute video which helps to summarize the link above.


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