Lickety-Split Links (011910, Morning)
From Althouse:
While we’re invoking the memory of Ted Kennedy, here’s an item that should not be forgotten about the late Senator’s sense of “humor.”
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Good: The Associated Press’s Jim Kuhnhenn, despite the administration’s wishes, is referring to Obama’s $90 billion, 10-year “Bank Responsibility Fee” as a “tax.” Because it is.
Not-so-good: Kuhnhenn claims that the administration’s thinly disguised plunder of others’ financial resources is “populism straight out of Frank Capra’s ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’” I missed the part in that movie where Jimmy Stewart ran to the government to get it to extract money from Potter’s bank.
Update: Also see this related NewsBusters entry.
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Marcia — er, Martha — Coakley has called in John Kerry to help salvage her campaign. Because Mr. Teresa Heinz is so in touch with average voters’ concerns.
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Mark Steyn (“The Scott Heard ‘Round the World”; internal link in original):
On Sunday, the President veered between dull and really, really lousy. He did what he did with his Olympics pitch in Copenhagen – he took the extraordinary step of flying in to save the day, and then when he got there thought he could wing it. He, or at any rate his minders, should know by now that his rhetoric is seriously underperforming – “incoherent without his teleprompter and a bore with it“. Yet his staff allow him to stagger around as the last believer in his own magic. What sort of functioning pol would be so careless as to say “Everybody can own a truck”?
The answer to Steyn’s question: “The same guy who almost blows an election by making fun of a plumber.”
Continuing with Steyn:
Very foolishly, Obama both underlined the regal hauteur of the Massachusetts machine – and simultaneously nationalized the election by portraying it as a referendum on the Hopeychange. If Martha now loses, he can’t plead it’s nothing to do with him.
Now it’s ALL about Him (Obama), Them (Pelosi, Reid, and the Democrat-controlled Congress), and this:
The funny thing is that there *were* teleprompters in front of Obama during his awful pitch for Coakley; they are visible on YouTube footage as he wandered around the stage soaking up the welcoming applause. So you can’t blame the awful-ness on the lack of a teleprompter.
Waited in traffic to cast my vote for Scott Brown this morning. If signs could vote (and I know they can’t), he’s a shoo-in. Nonetheless, the energy in certain parts of MA is amazing this morning. (Except in the People’s Republic of Cambridge, where I work.)
Comment by RetiredMidn — January 19, 2010 @ 11:23 am