Things are coming apart

What’s New Today 

Story #1 tells of a former CBS producer who is fed up trying to defend the liberal bias in the MSM.  #2 relates how frustrated the MSM is trying to trick Romney into going off message and not staying on the economy.  The economy is the loser for Obama so they don’t want Romney talking about it.  #3 has Jimmy Carter back in the news showing us all he wasn’t just a horrible president, but he’s also a horrible ex-president.  #4 is all about Obamanomics and how it’s fared.  #5 gives you a dictionary of what the Democrats actually mean when they say certain words.  

Today’s Thoughts

“We can be outspent and still win — but we can’t be outspent 10 to 1 and still win.”  Barack Obama in an urgent fund raising letter.  Love the exaggeration.

“They all pretend like they’re part of the 99 percent, but they’re not; they’re part of the 1 percent,” Adam Corolla said of Hollywood’s liberal elites. “They’re all incorporated, they all have tax attorneys, believe me.” 

1.  Liberal Media Bias

For former CBS producer Greg Kandra, the selective editing of a segment that was shown on Andrea Mitchell’s show on MSNBC of Mitt Romney’s remarks after going to a Wawa convenience store for the first time was the last straw. He is now “done” defending his former colleagues and denying the existence of liberal media bias.

Kandra, who is also a Catholic Deacon, took issue with Mitchell on his Deacons Bench blog to express his outrage:

I’m tired.  Truly. I’ve grown weary of trying to defend the indefensible and explain the inexplicable. For years, people have stomped their feet and pounded their fists and snorted “Liberal media bias!” and I’ve always tut-tutted and shooshed them and said, “No, no.  Calm down.  They meant well.  It was just a misunderstanding.  A mistake.  These things happen.”  I spent over 25 years working in the oft-reviled Mainstream Media and I saw up close and personal how the sausage was made. I knew the people who wielded the knives and wore the aprons, and could vouch (most of the time, anyway) for their good intentions.

But now?

Forget it. I’m done. You deserve what they’re saying about you. It’s earned. You have worked long and hard to merit the suspicion, acrimony, mistrust and revulsion that the media-buying public increasingly heaps upon you. You have successfully eroded any confidence, dispelled any trust, and driven your audience into the arms of the Internet and the blogosphere, where biases are affirmed and like-minded people can tell each other what they hold to be true, since nobody believes in objective reality any more. You have done a superlative job of diminishing what was once a great profession and undermining one of the vital underpinnings of democracy, a free press.

Good job.

I just have one question:

What the hell is wrong with you guys?

http://www.aim.org/don-irvine-blog/former-tv-network-producer-upset-with-andrea-mitchell-says-im-done-denying-liberal-media-bias/

The press has earned the disdain and mistrust of the general public.  This is again a horrible reality for the Democratic Party.  They had the press in their back pocket, but now almost everyone knows it and they don’t believe them anymore. 

2.  MSM trying to trap Mitt Romney

…It's a trap. 

The media currently coordinating with the White House knows it's a trap. 

Thank God, though, Mitt Romney knows it's a trap and refuses to play.

 

As a result, the media's narrative focus has now laughably turned away from immigration policy and towards Romney refusing to talk about anything but the economy. 

This is a media narrative borne of desperation for two reasons:

1. Polls show that the last ten days have done nothing to move the needle in Obama's direction.

2. If the focus stays on the economy, Obama loses. 

Time's Michael Crowley bared all of the corrupt media's backside this morning with a high-profile feature titled: "One-Note Mitt: Is Romney Too Focused on the Economy?"…

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2012/06/26/Time-Romney-Economy

Did the author mention it’s a trap?  Somehow I’m reminded of Uncle Remus and Baer Rabbit asking not to be thrown in the Briar Patch. 


3.  Jimmy Carter accuses Obama of Human Rights violations

A former U.S. president is accusing the current president of sanctioning the "widespread abuse of human rights" by authorizing drone strikes to kill suspected terrorists.

Jimmy Carter, America's 39 th president, denounced the Obama administration for "clearly violating" 10 of the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, writing in a NY Times op-ed on Monday that the "United States is abandoning its role as the global champion of human rights."

"Instead of making the world safer, America's violation of international human rights abets our enemies and alienates our friends," Carter wrote.

While the total number of attacks from unmanned aircraft, or drones, and the resulting casualties are murky, the New America Foundation estimates that in Pakistan alone 265 drone strikes have been executed since January 2009 . Those strikes have killed at least 1,488 people, at least 1,343 of them considered militants, the foundation estimates based on news reports and other sources.

In addition to the drone strikes, Carter criticized the current president for keeping the Guantanamo Bay detention center open, where prisoners "have been tortured by waterboarding more than 100 times or intimidated with semiautomatic weapons, power drills or threats to sexually assault their mothers."…

http://news.yahoo.com/jimmy-carter-accuses-u-widespread-abuse-human-rights-154057442--abc-news-politics.html

Jimmy Carter was a horrible president and an even worse ex-president.  The man is a complete fool.

4.  Obamanomics:  the verdict

One of the consequences of all the stimulus and subsequent QE is that long time traders of our markets know they are screwed up. Consistent printing of money and 0% interest rates world wide have created their own economic imbalances. As the saying goes, there is no free lunch.

Economists such as Taylor, Cochrane, Zingales, Rajan and Murphy have said as much over the past four years. Turns out, they were right and the Keynesians are wrong.
 
The government stimulus had a multiplier effect of 0. It did nothing for job growth or GDP growth in the US. Combine the inefficiency of US fiscal policy with the continued implosion of Europe, and you have a world wide malaise. In China, because of macro economic effects, wages are rising, costs to produce are increasing. Companies are also wary of both the poor property rights system and the lengthened supply chain. China is slowing down.
 
The economies of the world aren’t going to contract because of government spending decreasing. They are going to contract because the continued machinations of the world’s central bankers have screwed up the costs of capital normally paid by the markets. The money that they have printed hasn’t gone into the productive marketplace. Instead, it went to shore up balance sheets and sits.
Money isn’t turning over. There is no velocity….

http://pointsandfigures.com/2012/06/26/watch-out-for-more-deflation/

There’s a lot in this article that needs to be understood.  Keynesian economics doesn’t work and it never has.   

5.  Political Dictionary 

Since this is an election year, we can expect to hear a lot of words -- and the meaning of those words is not always clear. So it may be helpful to have a glossary of political terms.

One of the most versatile terms in the political vocabulary is "fairness." It has been used over a vast range of issues, from "fair trade" laws to the Fair Labor Standards Act. And recently we have heard that the rich don't pay their "fair share" of taxes.

Some of us may want to see a definition of what is "fair." But a concrete definition would destroy the versatility of the word, which is what makes it so useful politically.

If you said, for example, that 46.7 percent of their income -- or any other number -- is the "fair share" of their income that the rich should have to pay in taxes, then once they paid that amount, there would be no basis for politicians to come back to them for more -- and "more" is what "fair share" means in practice.

Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.

"Racism" is another term we can expect to hear a lot this election year, especially if the public opinion polls are going against President Barack Obama.

Former big-time TV journalist Sam Donaldson and current fledgling CNN host Don Lemon have already proclaimed racism to be the reason for criticisms of Obama, and we can expect more and more other talking heads to say the same thing as the election campaign goes on. The word "racism" is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything -- and demanding evidence makes you a "racist."…

http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2012/06/26/a_political_glossary

A good op-ed piece showing how the left likes to use and abuse language. 

Don't look behind the curtain

What’s new Today 

Story #1 tells of Obama’s campaign strategy.  #2 looks at the Democrats war on stay at home moms.  #3 looks at the question would Reagan have supported Obama’s Buffet Rule?  #4 is Obamacare “fair”?  #5 tells us of George Lucas vs the environmental fanatics.  #6 looks at how the rest of the world looks at oil and how we do. 

Today’s thoughts

Was the indictment of George Zimmerman for the Second Degree Murder of Treyvon Martin a careful judgment of the Special Prosecutor or was it a bone thrown to the angry mob?

It appears Obama is now going after Romney’s wife for staying at home to raise her family, deal with her MS and beat cancer.  So who is really got a war on women going?  And why are leftists so mean spirited? 

Mitt Romney was not my first choice for the Republican nomination, but he is miles ahead in the presidential race. 

The left’s hatred of Fox News isn’t due to bias in their reporting.  It due to them covering issues the left wing media wouldn’t if it weren’t for Fox.  Reporting bias shows up as sins of omission.

1.  Obama’s 2012 Campaign

In 2008, a mostly unknown Barack Obama ran for president on an inclusive agenda of "hope and change." That upbeat message was supposed to translate into millions of green jobs, fiscal sobriety, universal health care, a resetting of Bush foreign policy, and racial unity.

Four years later, none of those promises will be themes of his 2012 re-election campaign. Gas has more than doubled in price. Billions of dollars have been wasted in insider and subsidized wind and solar projects that have produced little green energy.

Unemployment rates above 8 percent appear the new norm, when 5 percent in the past was dubbed a "jobless recovery."

From the Middle East to the Korean peninsula, the world seems on the brink. Modern racial relations are at a new low.

If borrowing $4 trillion in eight years was "unpatriotic," as Obama once labeled George W. Bush, no one quite knows how to term the addition of $5 trillion in new debt in less than four years. ObamaCare is unpopular with the public. Its constitutionality now rests with the Supreme Court.

After four years, the claims of "Bush did it" and "It might have been worse" grow stale. So re-election will rest not on a new agenda, or an explanation of what happened, but on a divide-and-conquer strategy. Translated, that means Obama will find fissures in the voting public over fairness, expand them, and then cobble together various angry partisans in hopes of achieving a bare majority. Such an us/them strategy is not new in American history…

http://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2012/04/12/enemies_of_the_people

It will be nasty, but that only works for a limited time.  Obama is starting already and his charges will begin to seem trite by the conventions and will be recognized as nonsense by the election. 

2.  The Democrat’s woman misstep

…By last Friday, it was already apparent that the only thing stopping Mitt Romney from becoming the GOP presidential nominee were mere formalities, and talk had already begun among Obama's media allies that Ann Romney, the wife of our likely nominee, was going to be a huge asset for the Republican ticket. Attractive, charismatic, warm, well-spoken, intelligent, and likable on sight, she would do much to not only soften her husband's edges but also to help shore up the so-called gender gap.

As we've all seen since President Obama stabbed the Catholic Church in the back a couple of months ago, Obama is cynically plotting a path to re-election through a phony "war on women." Because he can't run on a failed record, the White House and the media are hoping this divisive tactic will scare enough women into voting against Romney.

When that's your sinister plot, a woman like Ann Romney is a serious problem.

So last night on CNN, Hilary Rosen attacked Ms. Romney. But almost immediately afterwards, the Obama campaign assured us Rosen doesn’t speak for them.

Baloney.

Obama might suck as a president but when it comes to campaigning and message discipline, this White House knows what it's doing (it doesn’t hurt to have the MSM carrying your water, either). Speaking of his wife Michelle just a few days prior to Rosen's attack, President Obama launched a little theme that should sound familiar after last night's fireworks:

"And once Michelle and I had our girls, she gave it her all to balance raising a family and pursuing a career--and something that could be very difficult on her, because I was gone a lot….

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/04/12/Obama-Started-Attack-On-Ann-Romney

I’m surprised it took as long as it did for Hilary Rosen to apologize.  It was a stupid mistake and when she doubled down it was even worse. 

3.   Would Reagan have support Obama’s “Buffet Rule?”

The world has gone topsy-turvy when a Democratic president approvingly cites Ronald Reagan on tax policy — and even suggests naming his legislative proposal after the Republican icon, since, as Obama put it, he “traveled across the country pushing for the same concept.”

Obama is talking about the so-called “Buffett Rule,” which seeks to raise the taxes of the super wealthy so they don’t pay less than middle-class Americans…

… YouTube clips of Reagan complaining about corporate executives paying less than secretaries or bus drivers have circulated on the Internet for a while. But are Reagan and Obama really talking about the same thing when they used similar anecdotes? As always, context is important…

… Why did Reagan give those speeches? Contrary to Obama’s suggestion that he was specifically arguing for a new tax provision aimed at the superwealthy, Reagan was barnstorming the country in an effort to reduce taxes for all Americans, mainly by cutting rates, simplifying the tax system and eliminating tax shelters that allowed some people to avoid paying any taxes at all.

In other words, Reagan was pushing for a tax cut for everyone, not just an increase on a few. (The highest tax bracket at the time was 50 percent.) He even wanted to cut the tax rate on capital gains from 20 percent to 17.5 percent…

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/president-obama-quoting-reagan-out-of-context/2012/04/11/gIQAaOsZBT_blog.html

 Once again we see that truth and our current  President are strangers to one another. 

4.  Obamacare and Young Adults

…Among the flaws that I identified with this purportedly narrow defense of the mandate is that it is factually inaccurate: Obamacare does not simply make people buy catastrophic coverage that would cover their own unaffordable risks at a price that reflects their actuarial risk; instead, as several of the Justices recognized, it makes them buy comprehensive policies for a wide range of services they don’t need in order to subsidize the law’s other costly requirements, at a price in excess of the actuarial risk that they pose to the system. Rather than being a scheme to insure against the risk posed by younger persons, the Affordable Care Act creates a system of a government-mandated privately-administered redistribution of wealth from the young and healthy to older baby boomers.

An AP reporter, however, recently suggested otherwise, cobbling together several comments from “insurance experts” under the provocative headline “Supreme Court misunderstanding on health overhaul?”  According to the story, whereas the Justices “seemed to be under the impression that the law does not allow most consumers to buy low-cost, stripped-down insurance to satisfy its controversial coverage requirement[,]” “[i]n fact, the law provides for a cheaper ‘bronze’ plan that is broadly similar to today’s so-called catastrophic coverage policies for individuals.”

This story might be used by those desperately seeking a limiting principle for the mandate, but the story’s key factual contention is flatly false. As Chief Justice Roberts and Mike Carvin both correctly pointed out during oral argument, even a “bronze” plan must cover a wide array of costly “essential health benefits”—including contraceptives, maternity and newborn care, counseling, physical therapy, preventive services and pediatric oral and vision care—that drastically exceed the types of unpredictable and unaffordable costs covered by normal catastrophic plans (and which might potentially result in cost-shifting). As the article admits:

The health care law does impose a minimum set of “essential health benefits” for most insurance plans. Those benefits have yet to be specified, but are expected to reflect what a typical small-business plan now offers, with added preventive, mental health and other services.

That is precisely why premiums for bronze plans would cost between $4,500 and $5,000 per year under the Act (as estimated by the CBO), whereas true catastrophic plans are currently available for around $420 per year (as quoted online for a policy that covers a thirty-year-old nonsmoker, doesn’t cover preventative and other non-essential services, and carries a $10,000 deductible)….

http://volokh.com/2012/04/12/the-myth-that-the-individual-mandate-addresses-cost-shifting-by-the-uninsured-part-2-bronze-plans-are-not-the-same-as-catastrophic-coverage/

The reason the mandate is so important is because it is a shift of cost from older bigger users of healthcare to younger nonusers.  And the reason it will balloon costs is that these young people will use the services more because they have to pay for them whether they use them or not.   

5.  Dealing with Fanatics

George Lucas is the newest victim of the green religion to recognize that there is no reasoning with religious fanatics intent on saving the world (and you), no matter what you want. The film maker has been trying to build a new movie making facility in Marin County for 25 years, bending over backward to be a good neighbor, dedicating enormous amounts of money to satisfy every demand.

But the green fanatics would have none of it, and have endlessly stymied the development, which would be invisible from the highway, and would provide many high paying jobs and substantial tax revenue. Just last week, they convinced the Marin Country Board of Supervisors to delay the project once again for even more studies…

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/04/myth-spinning_greenies_alienate_the_greatest_myth-maker_of_our_time.html#ixzz1row1eNPS

The green Luddites strike again.

6.   Obama and energy suicide

Energy Policy: A Chinese oil company is now the world's top producer. While we sleep and watch pump prices rise, China, India and even Cuba seek supplies the world over, including drilling off the Florida coast.

Global demand for oil is rising, as is its global price, as energy-hungry economies such as China, India and Brazil scour the earth for oil they know will be the energy of the present for some time to come.

Even those lacking their own technology are asking others to help them get more. For them, there is no such thing as "peak oil."

The U.S., however, stands alone as the only major country not actively seeking new supplies…

http://news.investors.com/article/607461/201204111839/china-seeks-canadian-cuban-oil.htm

I’m not sure if it is ideology or stupidity that is driving the left in this country when it comes to energy.  Their green initiatives don’t seem to be working very well.