It's all bumps, no road in Obamaville
June 10, 2011|
By MARK STEYN
"There are always going to be bumps on the road to recovery,'' President Obama said at a Jeep plant in Toledo the other day. "We're going to pass through some rough terrain that even a Wrangler would have a tough time with.'' His audience booed. They're un-fire-able union members with lavish benefits, and even they weary of the glib lines from his 12-year-old speechwriters.
We're not on the road to recovery. You can't get there from here, as they say. Obama was in Toledo to "celebrate" the sale of the government's remaining stake in Chrysler to Fiat. That's "Fiat" as in the Italian car manufacturer rather than "an authoritative or arbitrary decree (from the Latin 'let it be done')," which would be almost too perfect a name for an Obamafied automobile. The Treasury crowed that Fiat had agreed to pay a whopping $560 million for the government's Chrysler shares.
Wow! 560 million smackeroos! If you laid them out end to end, they're equivalent to what the federal government borrows every three hours. That's some windfall! In the time it takes to fly Obama to Toledo to boast about it, he'd already blown through the Italians' check. But who knows? If every business in the U.S. were to be nationalized and sold to foreigners to cover another three hours' worth of debt, this summer's "Recovery Summer" would be going even more gangbusters. I'd ask one of Obama's egghead economists to explain it to you simpletons, but unfortunately they've all resigned and returned to cozy sinecures in academia. The latest is chief economic advisor Austan Goolsbee, the genius who in 2007, just before the subprime hit the fan, wrote in The New York Times that this exciting new form of home "ownership" was an "innovation" that had "opened doors to the excluded" and was part of an "incredible flowering of new types of home loans."
Where have all the flowers gone? Not to worry. By now, some organization of which you're a member has already booked Professor Goolsbee to give an after-dinner speech at your annual meeting where you'll be privileged to get a glimpse of his boundless expertise for a mere six-figure speaking fee.
"I'm not concerned about a double-dip recession," Obama said last week. Nor would I be if I had government housing, a car and driver, and a social secretary for the missus. But I wonder if it's such a smart idea to let one's breezy insouciance out of the bag when you're giving a press conference. In May, the U.S. economy added just 54,000 jobs. For the purposes of comparison, that same month over 100,000 new immigrants arrived in America.
So what kind of jobs were those 54,000? Economics professorships at the University of Berkeley? Non-executive directorships at Goldman Sachs? That sort of thing? No, according to an analysis by Morgan Stanley, half the new jobs created were at McDonald's. That's amazing. Not the Mickey D supersized hiring spree, but the fact that there's fellows at Morgan Stanley making a bazillion dollars a year analyzing fluctuations in minimal-skill fast-food service-job hiring trends. What a great country! For as long as it lasts. Which is probably until some new regulatory agency starts enforcing Michelle Obama's dietary admonitions.
Until then, relax. That bump in the road is just a quarter-pounder with cheese that fell off the counter on the drive-thru lane to recovery. Like every other blessing, we owe the Big MacConomy to the wisdom of Good King Barack. "This plant indirectly supports hundreds of other jobs right here in Toledo," Obama told the workers at Chrysler. "After all, without you, who'd eat at Chet's or Inky's or Rudy's? Manufacturers from Michigan to Massachusetts are looking for new engineers to build advanced batteries for American-made electric cars. And obviously, Chet's and Inky's and Zinger's, they'll all have your business for some time to come."
A couple of days later, Chet's announced it was closing after nine decades. "It was the economy and the smoking ban that hurt us more than anything," said the owner. But maybe he can retrain and re-open it as a community-organizer grantwriting-application center. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the median period of unemployment is now nine months – the longest it's been since they've been tracking the numbers. Long-term unemployment is worse than in the Depression. Life goes slowly waiting for a fast-food job to open up.
This is Main Street, Obamaville: All bumps, no road. But shimmering on the distant horizon, beyond the shuttered diner and the foreclosed homes, is a state-of-the-art electric car, the new Fiat Mirage, that should be wheeling into town in a half-decade or so provided it can find somewhere to charge. "We will be able to look back and tell our children," declared King Barack the Modest of his own candidacy in 2008, "this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow." Great news for the oceans! Meanwhile, back on dry land, a quarter of American mortgages are "underwater" – that's to say, the home "owners" owe more than the joint is worth. In Harry Reid's Nevada, it's 63 per cent. Perhaps Obama's Aquatic Bodies Water-Level Regulatory Authority, no doubt headed by Jamie Gorelick or Franklin Raines or some other Democrat worthy, could have its jurisdiction extended to the Nevada desert.
"Hope"? "Change"? These are the good times. What "change" are you "hoping" for in Obama's second term? The loss of America's triple-A credit-rating? The end of the dollar as global currency? Or just a slight upward tick in the same-old-same-old multi-trillion dollar binge-spending?
On what?
Random example from the headlines: The paramilitarization of the education bureaucracy. The federal Department of Education doesn't employ a single teacher but it does have a SWAT team: They kicked down a front door in Stockton, California last week and handcuffed Kenneth Wright (erroneously) in connection with a student-loan "investigation." "We can confirm that we executed a search warrant," said Department of Education spokesperson Gina Burress.
The Department of Education issues search warrants? Who knew? The Brokest Nation in History is the only country in the developed world whose education secretary has his own Delta Force. And, in a land with over a trillion dollars in college debt, I'll bet it's got no plans to downsize.
Nor has the TSA. A 24-year old woman has been awarded compensation of $2,350 after TSA agents exposed her breasts to all and sundry at the Corpus Christi Airport security line and provided Weineresque play-by-play commentary. "We regret that the passenger had an unpleasant experience," said a TSA spokesgroper, also very Weinerly. But hey, those are a couple of cute bumps on the road, lady!
The American Dream, 2011: You pay four bucks a gallon to commute between your McJob and your underwater housing to prop up a spendaholic, grabafeelic, paramilitarized bureaucracy-without-end bankrupting your future at the rate of a fifth of a billion dollars every hour.
In a sane world, Americans would be outraged at the government waste that confronts them everywhere you turn: The abolition of the federal Education Department and the TSA is the very least they should be demanding. Instead, our elites worry about sea levels.
The oceans will do just fine. It's America that's drowning.
©MARK STEYN
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
MAKING AN IDEOLOGICAL UNSOUND JOKE MIGHT END YOUR CAREER
YES, IT IS TRUE: MAKING AN IDEOLOGICAL UNSOUND JOKE MIGHT END YOUR CAREER!
Mark Steyn explains:
I read The Joke, Milan Kundera’s first novel, when I was a schoolboy. Bit above my level, but, even as a teenager, I liked the premise. Ludvik is a young man in post-war, newly Communist Czechoslovakia. He’s a smart, witty guy, a loyal Party member with a great future ahead of him. His girlfriend, though, is a bit serious. So when she writes to him from her two-week Party training course enthusing about the early-morning calisthenics and the “healthy atmosphere,” he scribbles off a droll postcard:
“Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!”
Ludvik.
A few weeks later, he’s called before a committee of the District Party Secretariat. He tries to explain he was making a joke. Immediately they remove him from his position at the Students Union; then they expel him from the Party, and the university; and shortly thereafter he’s sent to work in the mines.
As a waggish adolescent, I liked the absurdity of the situation in which Ludvik finds himself. Later, I came to appreciate that Kundera had skewered the touchiness of totalitarianism, and the consequential loss of any sense of proportion.
It was the book I read on the flight to Vancouver, when Maclean’s magazine and I were hauled before the British Columbia “Human Rights” Tribunal for the crime of “flagrant Islamophobia.” In the course of a week-long trial, the best part of a day was devoted to examining, with the aid of “expert witnesses,” the “tone” of my jokes.
Like Ludvik at the District Party Secretariat, I faced a troika of judges. Unfortunately, none of them had read Milan Kundera, or apparently heard of him. So immediately after my trial they ensnared a minor stand-up comic, Guy Earle, who had committed the crime of putting down two drunken hecklers. Alas for him, they were of the lesbian persuasion. Last month, he was convicted of putting down hecklers homophobically and fined $15,000.
Mr. Earle did not testify at his trial, nor attend it. He lives on the other side of the country, and could afford neither flight nor accommodation. Rather touchingly, he offered to pay for his trip by performing at various comedy clubs while in town, before he eventually realized that no Vancouver impresario was going to return his calls ever again.
Ludvik would have recognized that, too. Comrade Zemanek, the chairman of the plenary meeting that decides his fate, participated with him in earlier jests with the same girl, but he makes a brilliant speech explaining why Ludvik has to be punished, and everyone else agrees:
“No one spoke on my behalf, and finally everyone present (and there were about a hundred of them, including my teachers and my closest friends), yes, every last one of them raised his hand to approve my expulsion.”
And so it went for Guy Earle, hung out to dry by his comrades at the plenary session of the Canadian Collective of Edgy Transgressive Comedians. I speak metaphorically. But, if you’d like something more literal, let’s move south of the border.
Recently, Surgery News, the official journal of the American College of Surgeons, published a piece by its editor-in-chief, Lazar Greenfield, examining research into the benefits to women of . . . well, let Dr. Greenfield explain it:
“They found ingredients in semen that include mood enhancers like estrone, cortisol, prolactin, oxytocin, and serotonin; a sleep enhancer, melatonin; and, of course, sperm, which makes up only 1%-5%. Delivering these compounds into the richly vascularized vagina also turns out to have major salutary effects for the recipient.” As this was the Valentine’s issue, Dr. Greenfield concluded on a “light-hearted” note: “Now we know there’s a better gift for that day than chocolates.”
Oh, my. When the complaints started rolling in from lady doctors, Surgery News withdrew the entire issue. All of it. Gone. Then Dr. Greenfield apologized. Then he resigned as editor. Then he apologized some more. Then he resigned as president-elect of the American College of Surgeons. The New York Times solemnly reported that Dr. Barbara Bass, chairwoman of the department of surgery at Methodist Hospital in Houston, declared she was “glad Dr. Greenfield had resigned.” But Dr. Colleen Brophy, professor of surgery at Vanderbilt University, said “the resignation would not end the controversy.”
Dr. Greenfield is one of the most eminent men — whoops, persons — in his profession, and, when it comes to vascularized vaginas, he would appear to have the facts on his side. But, like Ludvik, he made an ideologically unsound joke, and so his career must be ended. An apology won’t cut it, so the thought police were obliged to act: To modify the old line, the operation was a complete success, and the surgeon died.
Years later, Ludvik reflects on the friends and colleagues who voted to destroy him. I wonder if, in the ruins of his reputation, Dr. Greenfield will come to feel as Kundera’s protagonist (Ludvik)does:
“Since then, whenever I make new acquaintances, men or women with the potential of becoming friends or lovers, I project them back into that time, that hall, and ask myself whether they would have raised their hands; no one has ever passed the test.”
Who would have thought all the old absurdist gags of Eastern Europe circa 1948 would transplant themselves to the heart of the West so effortlessly? Indeed, a latter-day Kundera would surely reject as far too obvious a scenario in which lesbians and feminists lean on eunuch males to destroy a man for disrespecting the vascularized vagina by suggesting that semen might have restorative properties. “Give it to me straight, doc. I can take it”? Not anymore. Kundera’s Joke is now on us.
..................................................................
CRIMINAL COMEDY
by Mark Steyn
The Happy Warrior
The National Review
June 6, 2011
Mark Steyn explains:
I read The Joke, Milan Kundera’s first novel, when I was a schoolboy. Bit above my level, but, even as a teenager, I liked the premise. Ludvik is a young man in post-war, newly Communist Czechoslovakia. He’s a smart, witty guy, a loyal Party member with a great future ahead of him. His girlfriend, though, is a bit serious. So when she writes to him from her two-week Party training course enthusing about the early-morning calisthenics and the “healthy atmosphere,” he scribbles off a droll postcard:
“Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!”
Ludvik.
A few weeks later, he’s called before a committee of the District Party Secretariat. He tries to explain he was making a joke. Immediately they remove him from his position at the Students Union; then they expel him from the Party, and the university; and shortly thereafter he’s sent to work in the mines.
As a waggish adolescent, I liked the absurdity of the situation in which Ludvik finds himself. Later, I came to appreciate that Kundera had skewered the touchiness of totalitarianism, and the consequential loss of any sense of proportion.
It was the book I read on the flight to Vancouver, when Maclean’s magazine and I were hauled before the British Columbia “Human Rights” Tribunal for the crime of “flagrant Islamophobia.” In the course of a week-long trial, the best part of a day was devoted to examining, with the aid of “expert witnesses,” the “tone” of my jokes.
Like Ludvik at the District Party Secretariat, I faced a troika of judges. Unfortunately, none of them had read Milan Kundera, or apparently heard of him. So immediately after my trial they ensnared a minor stand-up comic, Guy Earle, who had committed the crime of putting down two drunken hecklers. Alas for him, they were of the lesbian persuasion. Last month, he was convicted of putting down hecklers homophobically and fined $15,000.
Mr. Earle did not testify at his trial, nor attend it. He lives on the other side of the country, and could afford neither flight nor accommodation. Rather touchingly, he offered to pay for his trip by performing at various comedy clubs while in town, before he eventually realized that no Vancouver impresario was going to return his calls ever again.
Ludvik would have recognized that, too. Comrade Zemanek, the chairman of the plenary meeting that decides his fate, participated with him in earlier jests with the same girl, but he makes a brilliant speech explaining why Ludvik has to be punished, and everyone else agrees:
“No one spoke on my behalf, and finally everyone present (and there were about a hundred of them, including my teachers and my closest friends), yes, every last one of them raised his hand to approve my expulsion.”
And so it went for Guy Earle, hung out to dry by his comrades at the plenary session of the Canadian Collective of Edgy Transgressive Comedians. I speak metaphorically. But, if you’d like something more literal, let’s move south of the border.
Recently, Surgery News, the official journal of the American College of Surgeons, published a piece by its editor-in-chief, Lazar Greenfield, examining research into the benefits to women of . . . well, let Dr. Greenfield explain it:
“They found ingredients in semen that include mood enhancers like estrone, cortisol, prolactin, oxytocin, and serotonin; a sleep enhancer, melatonin; and, of course, sperm, which makes up only 1%-5%. Delivering these compounds into the richly vascularized vagina also turns out to have major salutary effects for the recipient.” As this was the Valentine’s issue, Dr. Greenfield concluded on a “light-hearted” note: “Now we know there’s a better gift for that day than chocolates.”
Oh, my. When the complaints started rolling in from lady doctors, Surgery News withdrew the entire issue. All of it. Gone. Then Dr. Greenfield apologized. Then he resigned as editor. Then he apologized some more. Then he resigned as president-elect of the American College of Surgeons. The New York Times solemnly reported that Dr. Barbara Bass, chairwoman of the department of surgery at Methodist Hospital in Houston, declared she was “glad Dr. Greenfield had resigned.” But Dr. Colleen Brophy, professor of surgery at Vanderbilt University, said “the resignation would not end the controversy.”
Dr. Greenfield is one of the most eminent men — whoops, persons — in his profession, and, when it comes to vascularized vaginas, he would appear to have the facts on his side. But, like Ludvik, he made an ideologically unsound joke, and so his career must be ended. An apology won’t cut it, so the thought police were obliged to act: To modify the old line, the operation was a complete success, and the surgeon died.
Years later, Ludvik reflects on the friends and colleagues who voted to destroy him. I wonder if, in the ruins of his reputation, Dr. Greenfield will come to feel as Kundera’s protagonist (Ludvik)does:
“Since then, whenever I make new acquaintances, men or women with the potential of becoming friends or lovers, I project them back into that time, that hall, and ask myself whether they would have raised their hands; no one has ever passed the test.”
Who would have thought all the old absurdist gags of Eastern Europe circa 1948 would transplant themselves to the heart of the West so effortlessly? Indeed, a latter-day Kundera would surely reject as far too obvious a scenario in which lesbians and feminists lean on eunuch males to destroy a man for disrespecting the vascularized vagina by suggesting that semen might have restorative properties. “Give it to me straight, doc. I can take it”? Not anymore. Kundera’s Joke is now on us.
..................................................................
CRIMINAL COMEDY
by Mark Steyn
The Happy Warrior
The National Review
June 6, 2011
Saturday, June 4, 2011
POLITICS IS SHOW BUSINESS FOR UGLY PEOPLE WHILE AMERICA IS TURNED INTO THE BROKEST NATION IN THE HISTORY OF THE PLANET
After the tumult of the First World War, noted Winston Churchill, only the intractability of the Irish Question had emerged unscathed:
"Great Empires have been overturned. The whole map of Europe has been changed," he told the House of Commons. "But as the deluge subsides and the waters fall short, we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again."
And so it goes after another tumultuous week in American politics. Nearly a third of homeowners are "underwater" – that's to say, they owe more on their mortgages than the property is worth. Private-sector job growth has all but vanished. The House of Representatives voted not to raise the debt ceiling.
But as the debt ceiling subsides – or, at any rate, stays put – we see the dreary steeple of Anthony Weiner emerging from his Twitpic crotch shot.
For the benefit of the few remaining American coeds Rep. Weiner isn't following on Twitter, the congressman's initial position when his groin Tweet went viral was that his Twitter had been hacked. Could happen to anyone. From last Thursday's edition of The Daily Telegraph:
"British intelligence has hacked into an al-Qaida online magazine and replaced bomb making instructions with a recipe for cupcakes."
True. If MI6 can break into a Yemeni website run by Anwar al-Awlaki and infect it with home-baking favorites from "The Ellen DeGeneres Show," I don't doubt that the same spooks could easily hack into Anthony Weiner's computer and Tweet his cupcake to that poor college girl in Seattle.
But Congressman Weiner then retreated from the sinister hacking line, and protested that all this fuss about a mere "prank" involving a "randy photo" (his words) was an "unfortunate distraction" from real issues like raising the debt ceiling. Like Bill Clinton in the Nineties, Rep. Weiner needs to "get back to work for the American people."
It's the political class doing all this relentless "work for the American people" that's turned this country into the brokest nation in the history of the planet, killed the American Dream and left the American people headed for a future poised somewhere between the Weimar Republic and Mad Max. So, if it's a choice between politicians getting back to work for the American people or Tweeting their privates round the planet, I say, Tweet on, MacDuff. Tough on our young college ladies. But, as Queen Victoria advised her daughter on her wedding night, lie back and think of England. Download and think of America.
Congressman Weiner's next move was to tell NBC News that he "can't say with certitude" whether the Tweeted crotch is his. "I don't know what photographs are out there in the world of me," he told CNN. He seems to be saying that this could be one of his, but, until an appraiser from Sotheby's can establish the provenance, it might just be a doppelganger. Saddam Hussein had a lot of lookalikes on the payroll to confuse his enemies, and it wouldn't be a surprise to discover our Congressional princelings were trending in the same direction.
So we're drifting from outrageous cybercrime to "prank" to "Hey, who doesn't have snaps of his genitalia out there in the world?" To revive another Clintonian line: Everybody does it. "Everyone lies about Twitter-flirting," wrote the blogger Little Miss Attila, "and everyone knows that everyone lies about Twitter-flirting." "Flirting"? Why, yes: I'm assured by correspondents more au courant in "social media" that there's nothing unusual about Tweeting your nether regions to people you've never met in distant time zones. Get with the beat, daddy-o, it's a widely accepted courtship ritual of the 21st century: the flower of American maidenhood wants to see a prospective swain straining his BVDs at what I believe the lads at the TSA call Code Orange alert before they'll agree to meet him for a chocolate malt at the soda fountain.
To each her own. In my day it was "A White Sport Coat And A Pink Carnation," as Marty Robbins sang (Billboard Country & Western Number One, 1957). But apparently these days that leaves the ladies cold, and the pink carnation can prompt titters, unless it's artistically positioned across one's crown jewels, and you'd probably need to get in a professional photographer and some double-sided Scotch tape.
According to Christopher Hitchens, politics is show business for ugly people. If Anthony Weiner is anything to go by, it seems more like high school for ugly people. As the story evolves, the logic seems to favor the blogger Ann Althouse's explanation – that Weiner's cavalcade of daily Tweets are too droll to be written by him. He favors cute hashtags: For the Republican presidential field, "#TargetRichEnvironment"; for Newt Gingrich, upon entering the race, "#TallestPygymy." "So terribly clever and edgy," writes Professor Althouse. "Why does a Congressman have time for that?" Her conclusion is that Weiner has a ghost-Tweeter, and the ghost-Tweeter uploaded the crotch shot, but that, because the "terribly clever and edgy" Tweets are essential to Weiner's sense of his own indispensability, he cannot admit that he's lip-synching. It would be like Charlie Sheen confessing that it was a body-double under the bevy of hookers and suitcase of coke.
Between Occam's Razor (it's Weiner's junk, and he Tweeted it) and Occam's Lip-Syncher (the ghost-Tweeter did it) lies a third possibility – that the Tweets aren't by Weiner but the Twitpic crotch shot to the cute co-ed is. The republic's "citizen-legislators" do hardly anything for themselves these days, starting with reading the thousand-page legislation they cheerily pass, but if they can't even perform their own sex scandals there really is no point to them. For the last quarter of 2010, Weiner listed 19 staffers, a few with highly specific job descriptions ("Deputy Director of Immigration Affairs") but most with the kind of blandly nebulous titles ("Staff Assistant") that could cover almost anything, including in-house ghost-Tweeting. For the sake of argument, let us take it as read that American men are emailing their genitals across the fruited plain all day long, and that in the nature of these things one or two attachments go awry and wind up in the in-box of the elderly spinster who runs the quilting bee and you have to make a rather sheepish apology. Congressmen are among the few in this land who, in such a situation, can breezily say, as Weiner did to CNN's Dana Bash, "You have statements that my office has put out... ." Herein lies the full horror of American politics in the death throes of the republic: A Congressman has nothing better to do of an evening than Tweet his crotch to coeds, but he requires an "office" with "staffers" to "put out" "statements" on the subject.
When Weiners have staffers, it's very difficult to have limited government: You cannot have a small state run by big Weiners. If you require an "office" to issue "statements" about your Tweets, it's hardly surprising you're indifferent to statist bloat elsewhere.
In the end, the Congressman was not so "distracted" that he wasn't able to vote to raise the debt limit. Confronted by his Twitpic, one is tempted to channel Mae West: Is that a debt-ceiling increase in your Fruit of the Looms or are you just pleased to see me? Alas for America, it's both.
Mark Steyn: Weiner helping junk the country
Syndicated columnist
©MARK STEYN
Saturday, May 28, 2011
THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION JUST GOT SERIOIUS ABOUT REFORM: THEY DEREGULATED DAIRY COWS
Top Regulator To Wipe Away Tears Shed Over Spilled Milk
Cass Sunstein is head of something called the "Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs." I've seen enough conspiracy thrillers to know that when someone has so obvious a blandly amorphous federal job description as that, it means he's running some deeply sinister wet-work operation of illegal targeted assassinations in unfriendly nations that the government spooks want to keep off the books and far from prying eyes.Oh, no, wait. Actually, Covert Operative Sunstein passes his day doing more or less what the sign on the door says: He collects information about regulatory affairs. More specifically, he is charged by the president with "an unprecedented government-wide review of regulations" in order to "improve or remove those that are out-of-date, unnecessary, excessively burdensome or in conflict with other rules."
How many has he got "removed" so far?
Well, last week he took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to crow that dairy farmers will henceforth be exempted from the burdens of a 1970s EPA-era directive classifying milk as an "oil" and subjecting it, as Professor Sunstein typed with a straight face, "to costly rules designed to prevent oil spills."
But Ol' MacDonald and his crack team of Red Adair-trained milkmaids can henceforth relax, because now, writes Sunstein, Washington is "giving new meaning to the phrase, 'Don't cry over spilled milk.' "
That's a federally licensed joke from Sunstein's colleagues at the Agency of Guffaw and Titter Regulation, so feel free to laugh.
Did you know milk was an oil? It is to the federal government, and, if a Holstein blows in the Gulf of Mexico and beaches from Florida to Louisiana are suddenly threatened by a tide of full-fat crude, they want to know you've got the federally mandated equipment to deal with it.
With hindsight, the president's remark in the early days of the BP oil spill that he was meeting with experts "so I know whose ass to kick" was not just a bit of vulgar braggadocio but the fault of early Department of Energy findings that the spillage was caused by asses' milk from BP (Burros & Poitous, a member of the Big Ass cartel).
"Your ass is on the line!" as the president told BP's Tony Hayward after his donkey was found wandering down the first $38 billion stretch of the federally funded high-speed rail track.
Whoops, sorry, I made the mistake of hiring Cass Sunstein's federally accredited "spilled milk" gag writer. Where was I?
Oh, yeah, federal regulation. So this EPA directive requiring milk to be treated the same as petroleum for the purposes of storage and transportation has been around since the Seventies, and it's only taken the best part of four decades to get it partially suspended even though it's udderly insane? Hallelujah!
At that rate of regulatory reform, we'll be ... well, let Sunstein explain it. Aside from his crowing over spilled milk, he cites other triumphs: The Departments of Commerce and State are "pursuing reforms"; the Department of Health and Human Services "will be reconsidering burdensome regulatory requirements"; and the Department of the Interior will be "reviewing cumbersome, outdated regulations."
Wow! "Pursuing," "reconsidering" and "reviewing"? Meanwhile, back at the Department of Bureaus and Agencies, they're pursuing a review of their reconsideration of reforms. That's great news, isn't it?
I'll take a wild guess and bet that the upshot of this frenzied "pursuit" will be a ton of new regulations about streamlining regulatory oversight and improving regulatory harmonization: The big growth area in America's postmodern Republic of Paperwork is regulations about regulating regulations.
For example, in New York City, applying for the "right" to open a restaurant requires dealing with the conflicting demands of at least 11 municipal agencies, plus submitting to 23 city inspections and applying for 30 different permits and certificates. Not including the state liquor license.
Recognizing that this could all get very complicated, the city set up a new bureaucratic body to help you negotiate your way through all the other bureaucratic bodies.
And, for every little victory, there are a zillion crankings of the government vise elsewhere. Plucked at random from the ObamaCare bill: "The Secretary shall develop oral healthcare components that shall include tooth-level surveillance."
"Tooth-level surveillance"? Has that phrase ever been used before in the entirety of human history? Say what you like about George III, but the redcoats never attempted surveillance of Gen. Washington's dentures. Why not just call it "gum control"?
The hyper-regulatory state is unrepublican. It strikes at one of the most basic pillars of free society: equality before the law. When you replace "law" with "regulation," equality before it is one of the first casualties. In such a world, there is no law, only a hierarchy of privilege more suited to a sultan's court than a self-governing republic.
If you don't want to be subject to "tooth-level surveillance," you'd better know whom to call in Washington. Teamsters Local 522 did, and the United Federation of Teachers, and the Chicago Plastering Institute. And as a result they've all been "granted" ObamaCare "waivers."
Rule, Obama! Obama, waive the rules! If only for his cronies. Americans are being transferred remorselessly from the rule of law to rule by an unaccountable bureaucracy of micro-regulatory preferences, subsidies, entitlements and incentives that determine which of the multiple categories of Unequal-Before-The-Law Second-Class (or Third-Class, or Fourth-Class) Citizenship you happen to fall into.
And yet Americans put up with it. According to the Small Business Administration, the cost to the economy of government regulation is about $1.75 trillion per annum. You and your fellow citizens pay for that — and it's about twice as much as you pay in income tax.
Or, put another way, the regulatory state sucks up about a quarter-trillion dollars more than India's entire GDP. As fast as India's growing its economy, we're growing our regulations faster.
Oh well, you shrug, it would be unreasonable to expect the bloated, somnolent hyperpower to match those wiry little fellows back at the call center in Bangalore. Okay. It's also about a quarter-trillion dollars more than the GDP of Canada. Every year we're dumping the equivalent of a G-7 economy into ever more ludicrous and wasteful regulation.
As my fellow columnists Charles Krauthammer and Victor Davis Hanson like to point out, decline is not inevitable; it is a choice. The voters of New York's 26th District chose it just the other day, presumably on the basis that it will be relatively pleasant, as it has been in certain parts of Continental Europe.
But genteel Franco-Italian decline is not on the menu. As those numbers suggest, the scale of American decay is entirely different: $1.75 trillion in regulatory costs, $1 trillion in college debt, $4.5 billion spent by Washington every single day that we don't have, 70% of which the U.S. government "borrows" from itself because nobody else wants to lend it to us — and a governing party whose Senate leader boasts about not passing a budget and whose Medicare plan is not to have a plan at all and whose crusading regulatory reformer's greatest triumph is getting Daisy the cow moved out of the same federal classification as the Exxon Valdez.
Stand well back, that Holstein's about to blow.
By MARK STEYN Posted 05/27/2011 05:41 PM ET
© Mark Steyn, 2011
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
FRIDAY, 28 MAY 11
Friday, May 27, 2011
COME ON NEWT, LEARN THE LESSONS OF YOUR PERSONAL HISTORY
NEWT GINGRICH IS A HISTORY PROFESSOR.
One of the best known axioms of historical analysis is that those who do not learn the lessons of history are bound to repeat history.
The irony is that Newt, who lost his Speakership of the House of Representatives
because of questions raised about his ethics is now embroiled in a questionable
relationship with the jeweler Tiffany's.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Glittering Gingriches Duck Queries
But now it turns out that while Ms. Gingrich enjoyed the extraordinary credit arrangement she was also employed as the chief clerk of the House Agriculture Committee, which has jurisdiction over mining issues. During this time, Tiffany's was spending several hundred thousand dollars a year to influence mining policy in Congress and at federal agencies over which the committee had jurisdiction.
In addition, Christy Evans, a former top staffer for Mr. Gingrich has been a registered lobbyist for Tiffany's since 2000.
Mr. Gingrich has told reporters that he had a "standard, no-interest account" at Tiffany's as part of its "normal way of doing business." But that doesn't seem to check out. The Gingriches were in effect the beneficiary of a minimum $250,000 line of credit at Tiffany's -- essentially an interest-free loan. Tiffany's normally charges customers 21% interest on outstanding balances.
Mr. Gingrich is referring all questions about the arrangement to Tiffany & Company, which isn't providing any answers.
BY JOHN FUND
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL POLITICAL DIARY ONLINE
FRIDAY, 27 MAY 11
Thursday, May 26, 2011
WE CAN REPEAL ENTITLEMENTS; REPEALING THE SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT IS THE TRICKY PART
ILIKE to think that upon arrival in this great republic I assimilated pretty quickly. Within four or five months, I was saying “zee” and driving on the right more often than not. But it took me longer to get the hang of the word“entitlement.”
You don’t hear it in political discussions in most of the rest of the West, even in Canada. There’s talk of “social programs” and “benefits” and “welfare,” but not of “entitlements.” I knew the term only in its psychological use—“sense of entitlement”—in discussions of narcissistic personality disorder and whatnot.
Once I’d been apprised of its political definition, I liked it even less. “Entitlements” are unrepublican: They are contemptuous of the most basic principle of responsible govern- ment—that a parliament cannot bind its successor. Which is what entitlements do, to catastrophic effect. Recently, in the London Telegraph, Liam Halligan bemoaned the way com- mentators focus on America’s $14 trillion of debt—i.e., the “debt ceiling” debt—without factoring in the entitlement liabilities of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. That makes America’s real debt some $75 trillion, or five times GDP. Our own Kevin D. Williamson puts the FDR/LBJ entitlement liabilities a little north of $100 trillion. Once you add in state and municipal debt, you need to add a zero to that reassuringly familiar $14 trillion hole. The real hole goes ten times deeper: $140 trillion—or about twice as much as America’s total “worth.
Million, billion, trillion . . . and now we’re going to need a word for the unit that comes after “trillion”? Oh, wait, how about “abyss”? I was struck by reader Dolores Proctor’s observation that, until spendaholic government showed up, 140,000,000,000,000 was the kind of number one would find only in a book about astronomy, and even then it would be pretty cosmic. In other words, our spending has literally burst the bounds of the planet. Ms. Proctor says that if you take $140 trillion and spend a thousand bucks every second from right now going backwards through time, you’ll run out of money in 2400 B.C., just in time for the invention of the abacus, which as a bankrupt time-traveler you happily won’t require. In other other words, we have outspent human history.
It’s certainly true that, if a company were to attempt to keep the bulk of its liabilities off the books the way the United States government does, some showboating jackass prosecutor would have its key execs behind bars in nothing flat, and they’d be legislating another round of Sarbanes- Oxley in Washington. Against that argument is the reassurance that that $75–100 trillion isn’t a “liability” in the sense that your car lease or mortgage is. “Entitlement commit- ments are not debts,” wrote John Hinderaker of the blog Powerline. “Congress can wipe them out simply by repealing Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid.”
That’s technically true in the same sense that it’s technically true Congress can wipe out a lot of our debts—or at any rate our debtors—by nuking Beijing. But is either likely to happen under any scenario this side of total societal meltdown?
In- deed, I find it easier to imagine economic collapse, secession, civil war, Mad Max on I-95, cannibal gangs of the undocumented preying on gated communities of upscale gays, etc., than any combination of House, Senate, and president “repealing Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid.”
Which is where we came in. Whether or not government “entitlements” are debts, they very quickly become a psychological disorder—and a “sense of entitlement” is harder to dis- lodge than almost anything else. Government entitlement breeds psychological entitlement breeds a utopia of myopia. I don’t mean merely in the sense that polls show an overwhelming majority of Americans still feel entitled to their entitlements, but in a more profound way.
I was interested to discover recently that Nathan DeWall of the University of Kentucky has conducted a survey of “linguistic markers of psychological traits and emotions” in popular music from 1980 to 2007, and concluded that we are in (to use the book title of two of his co- authors) a narcissism epidemic. Once upon a time, love songs were about other people: “Me, Myself, and I (Are All in Love with You)”—Billie Holiday, 1937. Seventy-odd years later, Fergie sings in unconscious echo that she needs more time to be with herself; Beyonce sings about how hot she looks when she’s dancing; and, on the increasingly rare occasions when a vocalist directs her attention to an object of her affection other than herself, it sounds more like self-esteem boosterism than a love ballad. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Pink’s current blockbuster hit, “F**kin’ Perfect”:
Is that really a big problem? Au contraire, large numbers of utter mediocrities seem to regard themselves as f**kin’ perfect—or, at any rate, f**kin’ entitled. Other scolds will deplore the profanity and cheerless hypersexualization of today’s pop ditties, but for me what alarms is the palpable complacency—the indestructible assumption from Pink, Kesha, et al. that, simply by virtue of being born in America, this is how life is, and always will be. “Entitlement” is an ingenious word, a brilliant coinage for both a pampering state’s generosity and the debilitating consequences thereof. The president, a man of whom it can be confidently said that he’s never never felt like he’s less than f**kin’ perfect, and whose response to record-busting debt levels is to assure high-rolling donors never to forget the thrill of electing “a guy named Barack Hussein Obama,” is the ideal sovereign for a State of Entitlement.
John Hinderaker is right. We can, in theory, repeal the entitlements. Repealing the sense of entitlement is the tricky part.
BY MARK STEYN
Happy Warrior/Entitlement Sense
National Review
May 16, 2011
You don’t hear it in political discussions in most of the rest of the West, even in Canada. There’s talk of “social programs” and “benefits” and “welfare,” but not of “entitlements.” I knew the term only in its psychological use—“sense of entitlement”—in discussions of narcissistic personality disorder and whatnot.
Once I’d been apprised of its political definition, I liked it even less. “Entitlements” are unrepublican: They are contemptuous of the most basic principle of responsible govern- ment—that a parliament cannot bind its successor. Which is what entitlements do, to catastrophic effect. Recently, in the London Telegraph, Liam Halligan bemoaned the way com- mentators focus on America’s $14 trillion of debt—i.e., the “debt ceiling” debt—without factoring in the entitlement liabilities of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. That makes America’s real debt some $75 trillion, or five times GDP. Our own Kevin D. Williamson puts the FDR/LBJ entitlement liabilities a little north of $100 trillion. Once you add in state and municipal debt, you need to add a zero to that reassuringly familiar $14 trillion hole. The real hole goes ten times deeper: $140 trillion—or about twice as much as America’s total “worth.
Million, billion, trillion . . . and now we’re going to need a word for the unit that comes after “trillion”? Oh, wait, how about “abyss”? I was struck by reader Dolores Proctor’s observation that, until spendaholic government showed up, 140,000,000,000,000 was the kind of number one would find only in a book about astronomy, and even then it would be pretty cosmic. In other words, our spending has literally burst the bounds of the planet. Ms. Proctor says that if you take $140 trillion and spend a thousand bucks every second from right now going backwards through time, you’ll run out of money in 2400 B.C., just in time for the invention of the abacus, which as a bankrupt time-traveler you happily won’t require. In other other words, we have outspent human history.
It’s certainly true that, if a company were to attempt to keep the bulk of its liabilities off the books the way the United States government does, some showboating jackass prosecutor would have its key execs behind bars in nothing flat, and they’d be legislating another round of Sarbanes- Oxley in Washington. Against that argument is the reassurance that that $75–100 trillion isn’t a “liability” in the sense that your car lease or mortgage is. “Entitlement commit- ments are not debts,” wrote John Hinderaker of the blog Powerline. “Congress can wipe them out simply by repealing Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid.”
That’s technically true in the same sense that it’s technically true Congress can wipe out a lot of our debts—or at any rate our debtors—by nuking Beijing. But is either likely to happen under any scenario this side of total societal meltdown?
In- deed, I find it easier to imagine economic collapse, secession, civil war, Mad Max on I-95, cannibal gangs of the undocumented preying on gated communities of upscale gays, etc., than any combination of House, Senate, and president “repealing Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid.”
Which is where we came in. Whether or not government “entitlements” are debts, they very quickly become a psychological disorder—and a “sense of entitlement” is harder to dis- lodge than almost anything else. Government entitlement breeds psychological entitlement breeds a utopia of myopia. I don’t mean merely in the sense that polls show an overwhelming majority of Americans still feel entitled to their entitlements, but in a more profound way.
I was interested to discover recently that Nathan DeWall of the University of Kentucky has conducted a survey of “linguistic markers of psychological traits and emotions” in popular music from 1980 to 2007, and concluded that we are in (to use the book title of two of his co- authors) a narcissism epidemic. Once upon a time, love songs were about other people: “Me, Myself, and I (Are All in Love with You)”—Billie Holiday, 1937. Seventy-odd years later, Fergie sings in unconscious echo that she needs more time to be with herself; Beyonce sings about how hot she looks when she’s dancing; and, on the increasingly rare occasions when a vocalist directs her attention to an object of her affection other than herself, it sounds more like self-esteem boosterism than a love ballad. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Pink’s current blockbuster hit, “F**kin’ Perfect”:
Pretty, pretty please Don’t you ever, ever feel Like you’re less than F**kin’ Perfect.
Is that really a big problem? Au contraire, large numbers of utter mediocrities seem to regard themselves as f**kin’ perfect—or, at any rate, f**kin’ entitled. Other scolds will deplore the profanity and cheerless hypersexualization of today’s pop ditties, but for me what alarms is the palpable complacency—the indestructible assumption from Pink, Kesha, et al. that, simply by virtue of being born in America, this is how life is, and always will be. “Entitlement” is an ingenious word, a brilliant coinage for both a pampering state’s generosity and the debilitating consequences thereof. The president, a man of whom it can be confidently said that he’s never never felt like he’s less than f**kin’ perfect, and whose response to record-busting debt levels is to assure high-rolling donors never to forget the thrill of electing “a guy named Barack Hussein Obama,” is the ideal sovereign for a State of Entitlement.
John Hinderaker is right. We can, in theory, repeal the entitlements. Repealing the sense of entitlement is the tricky part.
BY MARK STEYN
Happy Warrior/Entitlement Sense
National Review
May 16, 2011
ARE AMERICANS WILLING TO GROW UP - AND FAST ?
‘IT’s Back!” so goes Walmart’s new slogan. What they
mean is the old Walmart is back—“Everyday
low prices!”—and their disastrous attempt to evolve into Goremart—“Every quarter higher losses!”—is over. Five years ago, Walmart hired an Al Gore adviser as PR chief, stripped the stores of déclassé products such as fishing tackle, and filled it up with a lot of stuff that was “green-friendly.” The sierra Club and The New Yorker said nice things about them, and Mr. and Mrs. America stayed away. As former exec Jimmy Wright told the Wall Street Journal, “The basic Walmart customer didn’t leave Walmart. What happened is that Walmart left the cus- tomer.”
Walmart went green into the red, and then realized that they couldn’t afford the Al Gore retail model. There’s a lot of that around. Before the big Gulf spill, BP had spent a decade kissing up to Democrats and eco-progressives. Once upon a time, their initials stood for “British Petroleum,” but some Madison Avenue type thought it would look better to adopt the slogan “Beyond Petroleum” and replace their old logo with a flower. Pansy? Not yet. Just a sunflower. My colleague Jonah Goldberg suggested that, after the Demo-mediacracy effortlessly turned Tony Hayward into an oleaginous snidely Whip- lash, BP ought to own their rep and call themselves “Badass Petroleum.” Exactly: “We love to drill—and it shows!”
Corporations pretending to be social workers is bad enough. But, even in the decadent phase of capitalism, the market still functions well enough to bring Walmart to its senses in a mere half decade. Alas, for Big Government, there are no such corrective mechanisms. The government of the United states is currently borrowing about $4 billion a day. The Republicans recently secured an alleged land- mark victory over Democrats that cut 38-point-something billion dollars from the budget. How many weeks of clenched-teeth high-stakes brinkmanship did it take to negotiate ten days’ worth of cuts?
Did I say ten days’ worth? Oh, wait. That was on Friday night. By the following Tuesday afternoon, over half of the $38.5 billion had been exposed as various meaningless sleights of hand of which government, unlike Walmart, can avail itself very easily—for example, counting money in the Justice Department’s crime victims’ reserve fund that was never scheduled to be spent this year as a “savings” of $4.9 billion. Real savings—that’s to say, the kind that would pass muster according to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles—were around $14 billion—or, in other words, less than the U.s. government borrowed in the four days between the announcing of the “historic cuts” and their exposure as utterly fraudulent.
If it takes four days to agree on two and a half days’ worth of “cuts,” how much time and energy and political capital would the Republicans have to expend to negotiate a budget reduction of, say, $300 billion? Whoa, steady on, man. That’s big bucks, a third of a trillion: We’d be tagged as “extremists.” Whereas borrowing $300 billion isn’t in the least bit “extreme”: It takes two and a half months, and it’s business as usual.
But somehow cutting it is beyond the bounds of politi- cal reality. And so as the ship fills up with water we con- gratulate ourselves on agreeing to pass out the thimbles.
The sheer variety of ingenious accounting wheezes used to dream up that $38.5 billion illustrates what we’re up against. I quote from National Journal:
Do you know what that means? Hey, don’t bother: The “top line” is growing, while the baseline is also up. As they say in the small ads in the alternative weekly, are you a top or a base? Neither of the above? Don’t worry, I’m sure somewhere in between there’s a mid-line (the waterline?) where various “extremist” “cuts” are being enacted.
The first developed nation to get clobbered by the down- turn was Iceland. It has 300,000 people. America has 300 million. If you have big government in a nation of 300,000 or even 10 million (Portugal), it’s relatively easy to figure out how much money you’re spending and on what. But, as that mythical $38.5 billion “cut” illustrates, in an ever more centralized, de-federalized nation of 300 mil- lion, meaningful oversight is all but impossible.
Meanwhile, USA Today reports that even a third of Republican voters say “the government should not try to control the costs of Medicare.”
Oh. Okay.
Where do this third of Republican voters live? Iowa? New Hampshire? And if you were a second-tier candidate trying to break out from the rest of the also-rans, mightn’t you be tempted to position yourself as their champion?
What happens if the government follows the advice of that third of Republicans and declines to “control the costs of Medicare”? The dollar dies as global currency, followed by inflation, the wiping out of your savings, widespread social unrest, huge increases in crime and violence, Mad Max on I-95 . . .
The question is whether enough Americans are willing to grow up—and fast: That’s to say, will they mature before the debt does? Forget the top line and the baseline: The bottom line is that it’s the end of the line.
BY MARK STEYN
Happy Warrior / Line Items
The National Review
May 2, 2011
mean is the old Walmart is back—“Everyday
low prices!”—and their disastrous attempt to evolve into Goremart—“Every quarter higher losses!”—is over. Five years ago, Walmart hired an Al Gore adviser as PR chief, stripped the stores of déclassé products such as fishing tackle, and filled it up with a lot of stuff that was “green-friendly.” The sierra Club and The New Yorker said nice things about them, and Mr. and Mrs. America stayed away. As former exec Jimmy Wright told the Wall Street Journal, “The basic Walmart customer didn’t leave Walmart. What happened is that Walmart left the cus- tomer.”
Walmart went green into the red, and then realized that they couldn’t afford the Al Gore retail model. There’s a lot of that around. Before the big Gulf spill, BP had spent a decade kissing up to Democrats and eco-progressives. Once upon a time, their initials stood for “British Petroleum,” but some Madison Avenue type thought it would look better to adopt the slogan “Beyond Petroleum” and replace their old logo with a flower. Pansy? Not yet. Just a sunflower. My colleague Jonah Goldberg suggested that, after the Demo-mediacracy effortlessly turned Tony Hayward into an oleaginous snidely Whip- lash, BP ought to own their rep and call themselves “Badass Petroleum.” Exactly: “We love to drill—and it shows!”
Corporations pretending to be social workers is bad enough. But, even in the decadent phase of capitalism, the market still functions well enough to bring Walmart to its senses in a mere half decade. Alas, for Big Government, there are no such corrective mechanisms. The government of the United states is currently borrowing about $4 billion a day. The Republicans recently secured an alleged land- mark victory over Democrats that cut 38-point-something billion dollars from the budget. How many weeks of clenched-teeth high-stakes brinkmanship did it take to negotiate ten days’ worth of cuts?
Did I say ten days’ worth? Oh, wait. That was on Friday night. By the following Tuesday afternoon, over half of the $38.5 billion had been exposed as various meaningless sleights of hand of which government, unlike Walmart, can avail itself very easily—for example, counting money in the Justice Department’s crime victims’ reserve fund that was never scheduled to be spent this year as a “savings” of $4.9 billion. Real savings—that’s to say, the kind that would pass muster according to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles—were around $14 billion—or, in other words, less than the U.s. government borrowed in the four days between the announcing of the “historic cuts” and their exposure as utterly fraudulent.
If it takes four days to agree on two and a half days’ worth of “cuts,” how much time and energy and political capital would the Republicans have to expend to negotiate a budget reduction of, say, $300 billion? Whoa, steady on, man. That’s big bucks, a third of a trillion: We’d be tagged as “extremists.” Whereas borrowing $300 billion isn’t in the least bit “extreme”: It takes two and a half months, and it’s business as usual.
But somehow cutting it is beyond the bounds of politi- cal reality. And so as the ship fills up with water we con- gratulate ourselves on agreeing to pass out the thimbles.
The sheer variety of ingenious accounting wheezes used to dream up that $38.5 billion illustrates what we’re up against. I quote from National Journal:
White House officials said throughout the process that the composition of the cuts was more important than the top- line number, and that including mandatory cuts allowed that top line to grow while limiting the immediate impact of the cuts.
(My italics. Also my rolled eyeballs. And my mirthless guffaw.)
Do you know what that means? Hey, don’t bother: The “top line” is growing, while the baseline is also up. As they say in the small ads in the alternative weekly, are you a top or a base? Neither of the above? Don’t worry, I’m sure somewhere in between there’s a mid-line (the waterline?) where various “extremist” “cuts” are being enacted.
The first developed nation to get clobbered by the down- turn was Iceland. It has 300,000 people. America has 300 million. If you have big government in a nation of 300,000 or even 10 million (Portugal), it’s relatively easy to figure out how much money you’re spending and on what. But, as that mythical $38.5 billion “cut” illustrates, in an ever more centralized, de-federalized nation of 300 mil- lion, meaningful oversight is all but impossible.
Meanwhile, USA Today reports that even a third of Republican voters say “the government should not try to control the costs of Medicare.”
Oh. Okay.
Where do this third of Republican voters live? Iowa? New Hampshire? And if you were a second-tier candidate trying to break out from the rest of the also-rans, mightn’t you be tempted to position yourself as their champion?
What happens if the government follows the advice of that third of Republicans and declines to “control the costs of Medicare”? The dollar dies as global currency, followed by inflation, the wiping out of your savings, widespread social unrest, huge increases in crime and violence, Mad Max on I-95 . . .
The question is whether enough Americans are willing to grow up—and fast: That’s to say, will they mature before the debt does? Forget the top line and the baseline: The bottom line is that it’s the end of the line.
BY MARK STEYN
Happy Warrior / Line Items
The National Review
May 2, 2011
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
OF POSSUM PIE AND CHICKENS IN THE FRONT YARD
At a time when many Americans can barely afford Burger King and a movie, Obama boasts of spending a billion dollars on his re-election campaign. Questioned at a recent appearance about the spiraling fuel costs, Obama said, "Get used to it" – and with an insouciant grin and chortle, he told another person at the event, who complained about the effect high fuel prices were having on his family, to "get a more fuel-efficient car."
The Obamas behave as if they were sharecroppers living in a trailer and hit the Powerball, but instead of getting new tires for their trailer and a new pickup truck, they moved to Washington. And instead of making possum pie, with goats and chickens in the front yard, they're spending and living large at taxpayer expense – opulent vacations, gala balls, resplendent dinners and exclusive command performances at the White House, grand date nights, golf, basketball, more golf, exclusive resorts and still more golf.
Expensive, ill-fitting and ill-chosen wigs and fashions hardly befit the first lady of the United States. The Obamas have behaved in every way but presidential – which is why it's so offensive when we hear Obama say, in order "to restore fiscal responsibility, we all need to share in the sacrifice – but we don't have to sacrifice the America we believe in."
The American people have been sacrificing; it is he and his family who are behaving as if they've never had two nickels to rub together – and now, having hit the mother lode, they're going to spend away their feelings of inadequacy at the taxpayers' expense.
Obama continues to exhibit behavior that, at best, can be described as mobocratic and, at worst, reveals a deeply damaged individual. In a February 2010 column, I asked, "Is Obama unraveling?" I wrote that it was beginning to appear the growing mistrust of him and contempt for his policies was beginning to have a destabilizing effect on him.
At that time, I wrote that not having things go one's way can be a bitter pill, but reasonable people don't behave as he was behaving. He had insulted Republicans at their luncheon, where he had been an invited guest. I had speculated that was, in part, what had led him to falsely accuse Supreme Court justices before Congress, the nation and the world, during the 2010 State of the Union address.
It appeared, at that time, as if he were "fraying around the emotional edges." That behavior has not abated – it has become more pronounced. While addressing the nation, after being forced to explain the validity of his unilateral aggression with Libya, America witnessed a petulant individual scowling and scolding the public for daring to insist he explain his actions.
But during an afternoon speech to address the budget/debt, he took his scornful, unstable despotic behavior to depths that should give the nation cause for concern. Displaying a dark psychopathy more representative of an episode of "The Tudors" television series, he invited Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., to sit in the front row during his speech and then proceeded to berate both Ryan and Ryan's budget-cutting plan. Even liberal Democrats were put off by the act. MSNBC's Joe Scarborough questioned the sanity of Obama's actions.
Today, criticism is coming from all sides. A senior Democrat lawmaker said, "I have been very disappointed in [Obama], to the point where I'm embarrassed that I endorsed him. It's so bad that some of us are thinking, is there some way we can replace him? How do you get rid of this guy?" ("Democrats' Disgust with Obama," The Daily Beast, April 15, 2011)
Steve McCann wrote: Obama's speech "was chock full of lies, deceit and crass fear-mongering. It must be said that [he] is the most dishonest, deceitful and mendacious person in a position of power I have ever witnessed" ("The Mendacity of Barack Obama," AmericanThinker.com, April 15, 2011).
McCann continued: "[His] performance was the culmination of four years of outright lies and narcissism that have been largely ignored by the media, including some in the conservative press and political class who are loath to call [him] what he is in the bluntest of terms: a liar and a fraud. That he relies on his skin color to intimidate, either outright or by insinuation [against] those who oppose his radical agenda only add to his audacity. It is apparent that he has gotten away with his character flaws his entire life, aided and abetted by sycophants around him. …"
With these being among the kinder rebukes being directed at Obama, and with people becoming less intimidated by his willingness to use race as a bludgeon, with falling poll numbers in every meaningful category and an increasingly aggressive tea-party opposition – how much longer before he cracks completely?
The coming months of political life are not going to be pleasant for Obama. Possessed by a self-perceived palatine mindset, that in his mind places him above criticism, how long before he cracks in public? Can America risk a man with a documented track record of lying and misrepresenting truth as a basic way of life, who is becoming increasingly more contumelious?
......................................
Mychal Massie is chairman of the National Leadership Network of Black Conservatives-Project 21 – a conservative black think tank located in Washington, D.C. He was recognized as the 2008 Conservative Man of the Year by the Conservative Party of Suffolk County, N.Y. He is a nationally recognized political activist, pundit and columnist. He has appeared on Fox News Channel, CNN, MSNBC, C-SPAN, NBC, Comcast Cable and talk radio programming nationwide. A former self-employed business owner of more than 30 years, Massie can be followed at mychal-massie.com.
When will Obama crack in public?
Posted: April 19, 2011
by Mychal MassieMychal Massie is chairman of the National Leadership Network of Black Conservatives-Project 21 – a conservative black think tank located in Washington, D.C. He was recognized as the 2008 Conservative Man of the Year by the Conservative Party of Suffolk County, N.Y. He is a nationally recognized political activist, pundit and columnist. He has appeared on Fox News Channel, CNN, MSNBC, C-SPAN, NBC, Comcast Cable and talk radio programming nationwide. A former self-employed business owner of more than 30 years, Massie can be followed at mychal-massie.com.
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Thursday, May 19, 2011
RACISM IN REVERSE; OBAMA FLIPS WOODROW WILSON
The Obama Watch
Woodrow Obama: Jon Stewart Gets Played
Just how smart is Jon Stewart?
Really.
His reaction to the Common affair and his startling attack on Fox News is… is… well… first the basics.
Let's start with some relevant political history to put Mr. Stewart's recent attack on Fox News, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and other Fox stars in context. Historical context, in this case.
We begin with the famously progressive President of the United States settling in for an evening in the White House to showcase the work of an American artist.
The artist has strong, controversial views on race, using his art to express those views. He also uses his work to express outrage about interracial relationships. And, oh yes, he celebrated those who killed based on race.
No, this was not President Barack Obama using the White House to honor the work of rapper Common in May of 2011.
This was President Woodrow Wilson on the evening of March 21, 1915, using the White House to celebrate filmmaker D.W. Griffith and his hot film of the day, The Birth of a Nation. The film version of novelist Thomas Dixon's novel and play The Clansman, a celebration of the Ku Klux Klan and racism. As Common campaigned for Obama, novelist Dixon was a longtime supporter and friend of Wilson's.
For those who came in late, The Birth of a Nation was a silent film, 1915 being the pre-talk movie days. It became the highest grossing movie of the day. The story concerned the post-Civil War Reconstruction period, and depicted blacks dominating Southern whites, rapaciously forcing themselves on white women and -- well -- you get the idea. The founding of the Ku Klux Klan was dramatized, with the Klan celebrated as a group of heroic saviors fighting off tyranny. (Here's a poster for the film, a "heroic" Klansman in flowing robes and astride a white horse.)
Blacks in the film, portrayed by white actors in black-face, were depicted as racial monsters. Wilson's friend Dixon, it should be mentioned, is said to have developed his antipathy to interracial relations because his father was said to have had an affair with a black woman resulting in a child who was Dixon's half-brother, with Dixon refusing to associate with the sibling he scornfully referred to as "that darky."
In short, the Griffith film -- and the Dixon novel and play on which it was based -- was as rancid and racist as it was possible to get. Here's a scene from the film in which a white damsel is being forced into a marriage with a mulatto -- as the heroes of the Klan ride to her rescue.
Woodrow Wilson, like Obama today, was promoted by his supporters as a superstar progressive, the all-knowing, all-wise academic (before entering politics as Governor of New Jersey in 1910 and the White House in 1912 Wilson had been both college professor and president of Princeton).
Wilson was also something else.
As with progressives then and now, he was a master at tying together issues of race with issues of big government. It was Wilson's legislative program, ironically called the "New Freedom," that created among other things the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Trade Commission, enacted the Clayton Anti-Trust Act, passed child labor laws and more items on the progressive agenda of the day.
But there was, as always, the usual progressive catch when it came to selling big government. Wilson was in fact an old fashioned Southern racist, born in Staunton, Virginia, and raised in the segregationist -- and progressive run -- South. The devil's bargain with his progressive program, (as it was, in fairness, with Democrats and progressives long before Wilson) was his reliance on appeals to race to both win his election to the presidency and his use of it to push through his progressive legislation that expanded the size and scope of the government. There were no passionate appeals for civil rights from Wilson, not in a party in which racism and the Klan itself had and would continue to play such a key role in everything from platforms to policies. Newly elected it was Wilson who segregated the federal government, and it was Wilson who appointed prominent progressive journalist and staunch racist Josephus Daniels as Secretary of the Navy, Daniels promptly segregating the Navy under Wilson's approving eye. There was more, but you get the point.
Take note of the Daniels appointment. Josephus Daniels was the very symbol of what we call today the "mainstream media" -- which is to say the liberal media -- of the day. The publisher of the Raleigh News and Observer was unabashed about using race to promote both his progressive paper and the progressive Wilson. To compare Daniels to NBC's Meet the Press host David Gregory, who in a Sunday interview with GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich tried to say that raising the issue of 47 million Americans on food stamps in the Obama era was racist, would be unfair to Gregory. But does Gregory as a representative of today's liberal mainstream media have the same gut-reflex when it comes to race that Daniels was famous for? Yes indeed, summoning an astonished Gingrich to remark that the fact Gregory even raised the subject was "bizarre." Actually, former history professor Gingrich was wrong. Gregory was channeling a watered down version of the progressive-race connection Daniels epitomized. But it was on display nonetheless.
Thus the idea of honoring D.W. Griffith's racist film version of Wilson friend Dixon's novel and play was, from the progressive point of view, a political no-brainer. Of course there would be an outcry -- and sure enough the NAACP, at that point in time unlike today genuinely committed to a color-blind society as opposed to a left-wing utopia, expressed outrage. But honoring the film would decidedly gin up the Wilson and progressive political base of progressive, racist whites. The election of 1916 looked to be (and was) close. Wilson would need every vote he could get. So the highly racist Griffith film became the first film ever to be screened at the White House by a President of the United States. And quite publicly so.
YEARS LATER, HISTORIAN Arthur Link, in his glowing biography of Wilson as a progressive president, had longtime Wilson spokesman Joseph Tumulty downplaying the Birth of a Nation incident, implying that Wilson was misrepresented. In fact, Tumulty's own memoirs, appearing in 1921 while Wilson was just out of the presidency and still very much alive, said nothing of the kind. Indeed, published in an era when Wilson's relationship (and that of the progressive movement generally) with white supremacists were thought to be an asset, Tumulty's book ignored all of it completely. Much less did Tumulty apologize for or hint at the slightest regret. There was no mention of the film, of Griffith, or of Dixon in Tumulty's book -- none. Much less was the controversy discussed. For that matter, there was not a single mention of Wilson's segregation of the government or Daniels' segregation of the Navy or anything at all with regard to Wilson and his racial policies or beliefs. A mere three years later, Wilson's own son-in-law and ex-Treasury Secretary, William Gibbs McAdoo, would seek the Democratic presidential nomination -- with Klan support.
Presumably Tumulty would recognize exactly the role of Obama White House spokesman Jay Carney as he waltzed out in front of cameras the other day to enthuse over Obama's support for Common because the rapper is "a Grammy award-winning -- multi Grammy-award winning artist." Indeed, just as President Obama was shown happily embracing Common that night so too was Wilson said to wax ecstatically over Griffith's film, supposedly (in the famous quote Tumulty ignored at the time but years later tried to refute) saying after screening the film:
"It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true."
And just as the Obama White House tried to defend Common by insisting he was in reality a "socially conscious" rapper, with Jon Stewart obediently expressing similar sentiments, so too did Griffith's supporters try and recoup his reputation from Birth of a Nation by talking up a later Griffith film called Intolerance, designed to illustrate mankind's intolerance through the centuries.
In particular the rallying of Jon Stewart to Common's side recalls Hollywood's persistent celebration of Griffith as a filmmaker. Just as Common is defended as a talented musician and poet, so too was the defense of Griffith that he was a fabulous, ground-breaking artist. The legendary -- and leftist -- actor Charlie Chaplin called Griffith "the teacher of us all." While it would be unfair to say all of Hollywood clamored aboard Griffith's bandwagon, among his celebrated defenders was the iconic director and actor Orson Wells of Citizen Kane fame. In 1953 the Directors Guild of America established the "D.W. Griffith Award" -- the Guild's highest honor. The award named after Griffith was given to such prominent directors as Stanley Kubrick, David Lean, John Huston, Woody Allen, Akira Kurosawa, John Ford, Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, and Cecil B. DeMille.
But finally, in 1999 -- that would be a mere 12 years ago -- the Hollywood left began to rethink Griffith and took his name off the award, renaming it the DGA Lifetime Achievement Award. Why? Said a surely sheepish DGA head 84 years after Wilson had honored Birth of a Nation at the White House, the film had "helped foster intolerable racial stereotypes."
No kidding.
As the controversy over the film erupted riots broke out in Boston and Philadelphia. Six cities refused to show it -- and in one city (Lafayette, Indiana) a white mob murdered a black man.
The point then -- as now -- is not the artist's freedom to write or film or sing. The First Amendment can and should provide absolute freedom both for Griffith and Common. The question is whether such racially insensitive work supporting a film lionizing the Ku Klux Klan or rap music celebrating leftist cop killers (insensitive -- now there's an understatement) should be honored by the President of the United States in the White House.
And since this kind of vividly disgraceful work was honored by the President of the United States -- Jon Stewart is apparently clueless to the obvious question: What is the real reason the Wilson and Obama White House chose to do so?
Appearing on The O'Reilly Factor last night, Stewart was absolutely clueless. "Who gives a crap?" he asked at one point. "This is nothing" he sputtered, again clueless that he was being used as just one more cog in the long running, not to mention shameful, race and politics game for which progressives have earned such an enduringly disgraceful reputation. For raising even the possibility that race was afoot in all of this Stewart dismissed Fox News as "the infection machine."
Wow. The guy is an ardent believer in a point of view that has sold its very soul to racial politics and he thinks of Fox as an "infection machine"????
BOTH WOODROW WILSON and Barack Obama, progressive presidents serving almost a century apart, have exhibited the desperate need for progressives to sell their programs by ginning up attention for those who peddle racial animosity. For Wilson it was his self-identification with D.W. Griffith and his infamous film, for Obama it was the choice to identify with Common and his infamous music, Common in essence the D.W. Griffith of rap music.
So if it took the Directors Guild 46 years to recant their defense of D.W. Griffith, will it take Jon Stewart 46 years to get himself out from under his equally appalling stance? Answer: it won't matter, because having now foolishly committed his defense of Obama and Common to video his blunder will live forever in cyberspace.
Stewart's mistake here is to see the honoring of Common at the White House -- coming as it does with an implicit thumbs up not just for Common's rap music baggage but the singer's admiration for Jeremiah Wright and decidedly disturbing views of interracial relationships (views, along with those of singer Jill Scott, that not so coincidentally precisely fit with the progressive views of the same subject as expressed in 1915 and captured on film in the Birth of a Nation scene linked above) -- as some sort of Fox gotcha moment or a vetting mistake at the Obama White House. And while we're at it, Mediaite's Jon Bershad, who wrote the story above, is clearly asleep at the switch as well, obviously taken in by the White House-progressive-race game.)
For whatever reason Stewart is out to lunch historically on the tie between progressive politics and the politics of race that is a now centuries-old historical reality. The politics of race -- whether supporting slavery, segregation, lynching, the Klan or today's racial quotas and illegal immigration -- are a shameful, inflammatory and disgraceful reality of progressive politics -- but a reality none the less. Every tool in the racial playbook has been used to promote the progressive political agenda, and this is as true today as it was in Wilson's day.
Within 24 hours of Common's White House appearance the President had been in Texas, trying to gin up Hispanics on immigration by scorning Republican demands for border security: "Maybe they'll need a moat. Or alligators in the moat."
And it was only weeks ago that Attorney General Eric Holder informed Congress that he resented allegations from longtime Democratic civil rights activist and ex-Robert Kennedy aide Bartle Bull about captured-on-videotape alleged violations of voting rights law because the Black Panthers involved were "my people." Which is to say Holder simply doesn't see a nation of Americans and view them in a colorblind fashion. No, the Holder view -- thoroughly progressive in its historical roots -- is to divide by race. And if race X is "my people" -- that means Holder was engaging in the old if not-so-subtle attempt to gin up "my people" against "you people" -- the latter defined apparently in this context as anyone who isn't black.
And before that, of course, was the Justice Department refusal to support Arizona's attempt to enforce federal border security law. Trying to gin up the Hispanic vote yet again, as even John McCain sarcastically noted.
Taken together -- Common's White House invite, the President's alligators in the moat comment, Attorney General Holder's actions with illegal immigration and voting rights in Philadelphia -- all of it collectively boils down to employing precisely the disgraceful political formula Wilson used at the beginning of the century. Play off race X against race Y. Honor a racist film or racial and cop-killing lyrics at the White House. Segregate the federal government or refuse to enforce border security or voting rights. Do whatever is needed because without playing the race card, progressive politics restricting individual freedom is a hard-sell if not a no-sale altogether.
This is the same type of strategy model at work with raising the debt ceiling level. On the surface the Obama Administration is issuing stark warnings about default. What they are really about is preventing spending cuts -- cuts that would eat away at their political base just as halting their eternal appeals to race would do the same.
LET'S BE CLEAR. No one is suggesting that Jon Stewart leaves his studio every night and goes home, grabs his hood and white robe from the closet and sits down with a cold one. Stewart is Jewish -- and the Klan hated Jews (and Catholics like Hannity and O'Reilly) every bit as much as it hated blacks.
What is being suggested based on Stewart's dreadful defense of Obama on Common -- a defense stunningly ignorant or willfully blind of the episode with Wilson and D.W. Griffith -- is that he, Stewart, is, if not consciously obfuscating and enabling the singularly immoral progressive-race tie is appallingly unaware of the history behind it all. Stewart is clueless over the possibility that -- ohhhhhhhhh nooooooooo!!! -- President Obama used Common and his controversial music and controversial views on interracial marriage just as President Wilson used D.W. Griffith and Thomas Dixon and their filmed and novelized views on race, racial intermarriage, and the heroism of the Klan.
Which is to say: Jon Stewart got played. By the President of the United States. Big time.
To wit: Obama, like Wilson, threw the political hardball so fast Stewart -- like Charlie Chaplin and the Directors Guild of America, Orson Welles, Woody Allen, and a host of other left-wing entertainers before Stewart -- couldn't or wouldn't read the stitches as it flew by. All those involved becoming, as they say, "useful idiots" in continuing one of history's most disgraceful long-running soap operas:
The alliance between progressive politics and the politics of race.
Should Jon Stewart be ashamed of himself?
Yes. Wow. I'll say.
Will he get around to understanding he's been played here?
Doubtful.
Will Jon Stewart apologize to the Fox people -- all of them -- who said not that Common's free speech should be curbed but that his disturbing music and support for cop killers -- not to mention his views on interracial relationships -- shouldn't be honored at the White House? More doubtful.
Will Stewart play on-air Hannity's repeated defense of Common's right to free speech?
No. Of course he won't. Selectively editing Hannity, Stewart has added looking deceptive to the more serious problem of looking uninformed or being played by a hardball-playing progressive president.
An apology from Jon Stewart for this kind of pernicious business? Is that forthcoming? A hint of recognition that he has, snookered or not, turned himself into a bit player in the now three-centuries old race-and-state political game favored by progressives?
Don't wait for it.
So the question recurs.
Just how smart is Jon Stewart?
Really?
Answer? Not as smart as he thinks he is.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
OBAMA AND THE ALLIGATOR: PLAYING TO THE CROWD
A Further Perspective
Obama and the Alligator
Having hit his stride in the polls, Barack Obama seems to clutch the teleprompter less tightly these days. He looked relaxed as he addressed the subject of "immigration reform" on Tuesday and even attempted a semi-cavalier joke at the expense of those concerned about America's porous borders. "Maybe they'll need a moat," he said, dismissing their calls for more border security. "Maybe they want alligators in the moat."
George W. Bush had broached the idea of de facto amnesty shortly before 9/11, then the subject vanished. A joke about alligators in moats wouldn't have been welcome in the days after Osama bin Laden hit the country. But now that he is gone, Obama can make one and try his hand at the issue of illegal immigration.
In his speech in El Paso, he downplayed concerns about border insecurity while insisting that he has responded to them effectively: "the truth is the measures we've put in place are getting results. Over the past two and a half years, we've seized 31 percent more drugs, 75 percent more currency, 64 percent more weapons than ever before. And even as we have stepped up patrols, apprehensions along the border have been cut by nearly 40 percent from two years ago. That means far fewer people are attempting to cross the border illegally."
Would he have done any of this on his own without the political backlash to open borders? No, but he sounds at times as if he did. He followed, not led, on the issue, yet says those who saw a problem on the borders where he didn't are still crying wolf.
The crowd to whom he was appealing with his moat joke found his listing of border security accomplishments beside the point. As he began to say that he had complied with requests to build a fence, an audience member shouted, "Tear it down." As he referenced those calling for more measures, another audience member shouted, "They're racist."
Later in the speech, Obama invited this audience to "add your voices to this debate" and "sign up to help at whitehouse.gov."
Obama presents himself as a forthright leader of "immigration reform" even as he avoids defining reform in open terms. Still having to follow the public a bit, he has to couch his calls for what amounts to selective amnesty between vaguely reassuring lines about the importance of enforcing the law and the "responsibility" that illegal immigrants bear. This sounds like he wants current laws enforced, but he doesn't, at least not consistently. He considers these laws unjust and wants them discarded. That's what is meant by reform.
Another rhetorical sleight of hand in the speech was to mix the issue of illegal immigration into a safer enthusiasm for America as a nation of immigrants. To oppose "reform" that accommodates illegal immigration is not to deny the benefits of legal immigration. But Obama tries to leave that implication.
"[T]he flow of immigrants has helped make this country stronger and more prosperous. We can point to the genius of Einstein, the designs of I.M. Pei, the stories of Isaac Asimov, the entire industries that were forged by Andrew Carnegie," he said, as if to place the flow of illegal immigrants on the same plane.
One would think a speech in El Paso might have honed in on the flow of illegal immigrants from Mexico, but Obama seemed more interested in talking about immigrants in the high-tech industry, as if the issue under discussion was whether or not to let geniuses from India and Asian countries work at Google.
"We should make it easier for the best and the brightest to not only stay here, but also to start businesses and create jobs here. In recent years, a full 25 percent of high-tech startups in the U.S. were founded by immigrants," he said. "That led to 200,000 jobs here in America. I'm glad those jobs are here. I want to see more of them created in this country. We need to provide them the chance."
Opposition to "comprehensive immigration reform" is hardly stuck on that issue, but it is easier for Obama to push on open doors like that one than to talk about the real problems of an open border.
Sunday, May 15, 2011
PROOF THAT OBAMA'S 'BIRTH CERTIFICATE' IS A FRAUD
Citizen Files Complaint ofFraud and TreasonAgainst Barack Obamafor Document ForgeryWITH ACCOMPANYING AFFIDAVIT PRESENTED TO FEDERAL COURT May 12, 2011 
Dear Congressman Rohrabacher, Please find on the following pages an affidavit, presented and accepted as evidence in court, attesting to the forgery of the document Mr. Obama has presented to the American people as his authenticated copy of his birth certificate. Based on the expert qualifications of the person submitting this affidavit, this offers evidence of fraud and treason by Mr. Obama.Using the authority to act as outlined below by Representative Walberg, of Michigan, Dear Mr. Ford, I would appreciate you acting on my behalf and the behalf of the American people in initiating an immediate call for impeachment and any other government officials involved in this criminal act. Respectfully, Arnie Rosner Attachment: Affidavits and accompanying analysis of the image presented by the White House on national television on April 27, 2011 which declare it to be a forgery. Complaints can be sent to Congress electronically here. CLICK ON THIS LINK TO SEE THE PROOF FOR YOURSELF: http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/55240893
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Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
THE OBAMA BIRTH CERTIFICATE IS A FORGERY
thinkwell Says:
April 27, 2011 at 2:35 PM
http://naturalborncitizen.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/bon-appetite-birth-certificate/#comments
April 27, 2011 at 2:35 PM
http://naturalborncitizen.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/bon-appetite-birth-certificate/#comments
So Obama just “released” a purported copy of his long form Hawaiian BC.
Leo (Donofrio), you know from my prior posts how strongly I believe that by Obama’s alien father he could never be nbC (does not pass the “blood & dirt” test), but the document he has posted here is a pathetically obvious forgery:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/birth-certificate-long-form.pdf
This appears to be an official government website so that by approving the release of this clearly digitally forged PDF Obama has inescapably painted himself into a prison cell corner.
One can see that most of the print was layered on top of the scanned document by panning or zooming the view in or out slightly while viewing the document at a high zoom level. The bottom layer (background, most of the witness signatures and some of the form text that is still original) clearly pops up and is displayed as a complete layer in its entirety before any of the forged upper layer(s?) begin to display. Check this out for yourself by viewing the document linked above (and be sure to save a copy before it gets fixed). Also, note that all the original document text, original signatures and other document features exhibit multiple levels of intensity and hue when viewed under high zoom. All of the forged upper layer text appears as an even, single dark intensity level. This clean digital characteristic of the upper layer is completely unnatural, even to my untrained eye.
Now I’m reading that others on the web with advanced graphics editors report that the forger of this document clearly left it in layered format and did not bother to flatten it into a single homogenous layer, thereby eliminating the most damning and amateurish sign of digital forgery. Could they be that stupid or arrogant?
Why would Obama release such an obvious forgery? The evidence is so undeniably incriminating. Why is he not worried about going to prison. Is he laughing our faces? Is he that secure in his usurpation?
Maybe he has just been unbelievably careless because he is running scared in damage control mode due Corsi’s new book and the latest poll numbers are showing that most people are finally beginning to catch on that he is a non/un-American fraud.
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May 4, 2011 at 2:02 AM