Now that both blackout periods are over, the columns have been back-posted as follows:
News in from Clermont County this evening. Thanks to the letter Rob Portman wrote to the Clermont County Republican Central Committee, RINO extraordinaire, Jon Husted was endorsed last night.
1. RINO Husted did no work to earn that endorsement – didn’t make one call except the night before the meeting.
2. RINO Husted did not mention the Taft tax increase for which he voted.
3. RINO Husted did not mention that he led the charge for the Commercial Activity Tax.
4. RINO Husted did not mention his “little” residency issue.
Jon Husted, ladies and gentleman, elitest, RINO drinking buddy of Kevin DeWine, both of whom would just as soon spit on Clermont County (and have) than reach out.
So thank you, Rob Portman. Thank you for taking advantage of the county who consistently (in hindsight, foolishly) gave you over 70% of the vote. Kevin DeWine & Jon Husted said “Write a letter so we don’t have to lower ourselves to work Clermont County” and you said “OK boss, how gooey do you want it?!”
You played them, Rob. You know it, I know it…and in this Tea Party era, it won’t take the likes of me to help more people figure it out. When the dems get a hold of Husted – and they will – these people are going to say “Hey, why would Rob ask us to endorse a schmuck like this?”
Giving an endorsement to someone who has not earned it may say more about the committee than it says about you, but your role in it, playing them like you did, says about YOU than anyone else. Good luck with that.
Note to Clermont County: Why buy the milk if the calf is free?
Note to the “Establishment:” You should have stayed out of primaries.
Typical.
Once again, instead of submitting to the will of the people, Kevin DeWine and the frat boys at the ORP are tripping…
I know, nothing new. Ya know, I never thought anyone could make Bob Bennett look even remotely competent, but Kevin is getting closer than most.
After boxing out the money people and thumbing their nose at the grassroots favorite Attorney General candidate Dave Yost, NOW the ORP is whispering sweet nothings into his ear to run for the State Auditor’s seat vacated by Mary Taylor.
This of course puts him in a primary with Seth Morgan, who is expected to announce his candidacy for State Auditor today in Columbus.
Bad move all around. If Dave Yost moves to the Auditor’s race, he loses credibility – especially since he will be responsible for giving DeWine the AG primary by default – and seriously lessens his chances of beating Democratic useful idiot David Pepper. A primary between Yost & Morgan lessens both their chances.
Kevin DeWine is doing this to:
1. Clear the AG field for cousin Mike DeWine.
2. Pit two strong conservative candidates against each other in the Auditor primary (Yost & Morgan).
3. Remember, the least amount of conservatives the ORP has to deal with, the better.
Kevin, r-e-a-d, t-h-i-s, v-e-r-y, c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y. I’m typing really slow for you now…
All the money in the world will not help your loser, RINO, anti-Second Amendment, anti-ANWR, anti-traditional marriage, pro-Ted Kennedy legislation cousin, win the general even if you corruptly fix the primary so that he wins by default (do we need anymore fricking nepotism & corruption out of Columbus)? He will lose to Cordray and Cordray will not have to spend a dime, period.
So, we lose the Auditor’s seat and the AG seat. That’s some strategy, Kev.
Act in the best interest of the people for once Kevin. Support Dave Yost for AG, support Seth Morgan for Auditor and tell cousin Mikey that if he wants back in the game, pony-up some cash to genuine conservative candidates and maybe you’ll hire him next year.
And where is “I’m bordering on ego & narcissism” John Kasich? So much for leadership…grabs the Auditor under the guise of “the top of the ticket will drive the other races,” then allows idiots like Husted & DeWine to prevent that from happening? So much for any of them paying attention to what’s happening on the ground.
This year is a no-brainer…strong, conservative candidates and no retreads. That allows the perfect storm that has been brewing over the last 2 years to sweep some serious sense back into every seat that was lost in 2006. And as goes Ohio…
Instead, the “no-brainers” in Columbus have put the entire year in jeopardy.
I for one am tired of paying for Columbus’ derangement.
Update: Matt over @ WMD nails it here and here.
Update 2: Nate over @ From the Rustbelt hits this hard as well.
Update 3: Indications are that this is a done deal. Nothing like taking the wind out of our sails early.
Mitch Stewart from Obama’s Organizing For America, in the opening sentence of an e-mail to members, shows just how unreality-based this crowd is:
Yesterday’s disappointing election results show deep discontent with the pace of change. I know the OFA community and the President share that frustration.
Yeah, Scott Brown’s supporters voted him for him because Team Obama’s developing tyranny isn’t moving fast enough. Pass the Kool-Aid.
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An observation in another e-mail about one establishment media member’s reax to Scott Brown’s win:
Katie Couric wearing black again just as she did when Bush won in 2000 and 2004 check it out..Everytime a republican wins a big race she is in black.
There is some less-than-perfect corroboration here and here of Ms. Perky’s dark-dressed instincts.
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Something that makes you go “Hmm …” — “Chrysler hires former exec to advise Marchionne.”
I don’t see the head of Fiat’s fiefdom as someone who would welcome a minder being imposed on him, which despite the weird description of what new guy Robert Liberatore is going to do (“He is expected to provide advice on Chrysler’s external affairs approach as the automaker tries to reshape itself following a government bailout and bankruptcy last year”) is what Obama’s car czars appear to have done.
It seems to me to be an indication that things are not going well, something the company’s atrocious sales performance has been telling us for months.
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Supporting the notion that few Democrat-controlled national, state, or local seats are safe, here is the red-blue map of Massachusetts in the Brown-Coakley race:
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Howler of the week, actually a week ago:
A big reason why the government is inefficient and ineffective is because Washington has outdated technology, with federal workers having better computers at home than in the office.
This startling admission came Thursday from Peter Orszag, who manages the federal bureaucracy for President Barack Obama.
Quick points:
Let’s do some math.
USA Today told us in December (HT American Thinker) that “nearly one in five federal government employees now earn over $100,000.” There were 2.7 million executive branch civilian federal employees in 2008. Since “nearly one in five” make 100 grand or more, we’ll just work with a nice round 500,000.
USA also says that the average federal worker’s pay is $71,206 vs. $40,331 in the private sector.
Even before considering quantity discounts, a look at this page at Best Buy (see left frame) shows that you can easily purchase a very nice laptop for $1,000. Put the necessary software on it, and you’re surely still at $1,500 or less. Thus, it would take only $4.05 billion (2.7 million x $1,500) to equip every federal employee, including janitors, with a new laptop.
Even after ignoring the oil-driven price bubble during the summer of 2008, inflation has been virtually zero in the past 21 months (December 2009 – 214.537; March 2008 – 214.823; Overall change – minus 0.13%).
There is NO reason why federal employees, especially those making over 100 grand, should have received the 2% across the board raises President Obama put into place with an Executive Order for calendar 2010, especially because, as USAT pointed out, “Most federal workers also get longevity pay hikes — called steps — that average 1.5% per year.”
Foregoing the pay raise would have saved $3.84 billion ($71,206 x 2.7 million employees x 2%).
Further denying step-ups to those making 100 grand or more year would have saved more than $750 million (500,000 x $100,000 x 1.5%, plus 1.5% of salary amounts over $100,000).
Total savings: Over $4.6 billion ($3.84 bil plus $750 mil plus undefined additional amount).
Problem solved.
Moves such as these would have also gained the administration incalculably valuable PR. But Pete Orszag and this administration don’t think this way. They would prefer to expand government employment, wages, and benefits as much as possible while whining about how deprived they are. Spare me.
Note: Moved to the top for the rest of the day.
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“Epic upset.”
Funny, I’m not upset at all. :–>
The PJM column is here.
The column got up when it did because I wrote it in advance, and the folks at PJM turned it around with incredible speed. Intense thanks for the quick review, guys.
I will note the subheadline here, because those who celebrate victory tonight need to understand that Scott Brown may turn out to be a high-maintenance Senator:
Conservatives scored a huge victory in the Bay State, but the battle for liberty has just begun. First job: keep an eye on Scott Brown.
Go to the column for the reasons.
But for now, savor the truth of the column’s opening sentence:
In electing Scott Brown to what the elites believed was Ted Kennedy’s U.S. Senate seat one day shy of the anniversary of Barack Obama’s inauguration, Massachusetts voters have delivered an irrefutable repudiation of the president, his agenda, and the people in Congress who support him.
Happy anniversary, Mr. BOOHOO-OUCH. :–>
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UPDATE: When the blackout period expires, it will carry today’s date and have an alternate title — “Punk President Repudiated.”
UPDATE 2: Here’s one factor I wanted to mention in the column but left on the cutting room floor, as expressed in AP’s coverage –
Coakley’s supporters … (said) … her lead dropped significantly after the Senate passed health care reform shortly before Christmas and after the Christmas Day attempted airliner bombing that Obama himself said showed a failure of his administration.
Interesting that Coakley’s people would bring that up, and that AP would frame it as “a failure of his administration.” I guess the “we blame Bush” for anything and everything isn’t even working for AP reporters any more.
UPDATE 3: I wrapped my Monday column by saying that “a Brown win by a large margin ends any pretense that the country supports the actions and policies of Obama, his government, and Congress.”
I’d say a 4.87% margin in a state that only gave Ronald Reagan a 2.79% victory in 1984 is quite large enough.
Effective today, no one can credibly contend that the country supports the actions and policies of Obama, his government, and Congress. Period.
I heard Rush reading from a newspaper column during his first hour, but missed the first couple of paragraphs. So I didn’t know its origin. Given what I was hearing, I thought that El Rushbo was surely reading the latest from Maureen Dowd at the New York Times.
Nope. It turns out that it was written by the Boston Globe’s Brian McGrory (pictured at right; original is at this link). McGrory wants to tell us that the Bay Staters who voted for Scott Brown over Martha Coakley did so because of the self-importance thrust on them by the national media spotlight and not out of any real conviction.
But his bawdy treatment distracts from his intent, as you will see in the excerpts that follow, which in this case are no substitute for reading — or actually enduring — the whole thing:
Seduced by our new senator
I’m going to need some Advil and a cold compress, please. I’m the Massachusetts Electorate, and I have what is bar none the absolute worst hangover of my entire voting life.
Seriously, I was so drunk on power, so caught up in the moment, so free of any of my usual inhibitions, I can’t remember what’s gone on these last two weeks. Think, Electorate, think. What did I do?
This much I’m starting to remember. Martha and I walked into the party and everything seemed to be going fine. She wasn’t talking much, but she never really does, and she wasn’t exactly pushing me to bare my soul, either. That’s what I’ve always liked about Martha: She’s a low-maintenance politician.
And now I’m vaguely recalling that stranger across the room, the one in the barn jacket who kept smiling at me and seemed to know my name. Martha vanished for a while, and – is it bad that I’m saying this? — I didn’t really care.
Suddenly, that tall, handsome man was standing at my side doing something that Martha rarely did – offering to pay for drinks, chatting me up, curious what was on my mind.
…. We were on the dance floor, Scott and I, moving to the music, his hands all over my body politic. Everyone was watching, and I mean everyone – fellow partygoers, bartenders, passersby staring in the windows. Look at me, the Massachusetts Electorate, the bellwether of America!
I think I took my shirt off. I think I didn’t care. I remember something about Scott in a pair of Calvin Klein jockey shorts, but it may have been a picture he showed me from his wallet.
Out of nowhere, there were video cameras filming us from every angle. Analysts were describing the events. Scott’s important friends were texting and calling my cell. Get this: Curt Schilling, talking to a regular old Electorate like me.
…. I remember catching my breath. I remember pulling a curtain shut. I remember having to make a really important choice.
Globe commenters are mostly not amused. Some examples:
I strong agree with commenter “jimnagle”: “I think I need a shower.”
McGrory has written several books. His author page at Simon & Schuster tells us that “Brian McGrory was a roving national reporter for the Boston Globe, as well as the Globe’s White House correspondent during the Clinton administration.” McGrory’s blind, vindictive partisanship would seem to partially explain why Clinton got the endless supply of free passes for his conduct and behavior from the press when he was in office.
Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.
From “If the economy improves, it won’t be Obama’s doing” file:
Windows Vista was widely shunned by businesses, but there are indications that its successor, Windows 7 will fare better in commercial environments.
Microsoft noted this week, for instance, that numerous businesses are moving from to Windows 7 as they update their client systems.
For several years, many businesses frozen in XP haven’t done the kinds of productivity-improving things they might have done if Vista had been more widely accepted.
If Windows 7, which is getting generally very favorable reviews, really is all it’s cracked up to be, and if enough businesses make the move away from XP, the economy will benefit greatly. Let’s hope these things come to pass.
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Of course, this wasn’t news in 2008 when it happened, and when reporting it would have mattered — “The tension between Barack Obama and Joe Biden was far greater than between the Palin and McCain camps.”
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Remember former UN weapons inspector turned Iraq War opponent Scott Ritter? You won’t believe this. Well, if you remember this, you will.
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From a January 12 Wall Street Journal editorial:
Among the astonishing things about the ObamaCare debate—or lack thereof—is that Washington is inundated with warnings about the destructiveness of this plan, and it doesn’t matter. The agency that runs Medicare rung the latest alarm bell on Friday, and good luck finding any media mention.
Richard Foster, the chief actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, reports that under his analysis national health spending will rise under the bills by $222 billion over the next 10 years. In other words, ObamaCare really does “bend the cost curve”—up.
If there was media attention, I sure missed it — which is why the WSJ’s daily editorial effort has to be a hard-news destination of choice during a Democratic administration.
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Some useful and stunning facts and stats (bolds are mine) on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac:
Fannie, Freddie are frauds
During the period from 2005-07, under the aegis of (Barney) Frank, in particular, these GSEs were buying all the risky business they could lay their paws on. (Risky loans include Alt-A mortgages, which are essentially loans of poor quality, with either insufficient down payment or borrower documentation, and subprime loans, essentially loans to people with poor credit ratings).
By 2008, these Twin Towers of liar loans owed 10 million risky loans, totaling $1.6 trillion. Between the 10 million risky loans, and the other 5.2 million such loans held by other government entities, the federal government owned almost 60 percent of subprime and Alt-A loans in the country. This was moral hazard on steroids – the steroids being the cheap credit supplied by the Federal Reserve. Yes, unscrupulous brokers sold bad loans to imprudent buyers, but it was all enabled by these GSEs. They were the root cause.
As of now, Freddie and Fannie own or guarantee half of the $10 trillion in U.S. mortgages – the really lousy half.
…. The GSEs defrauded the public.
Y’know, I remember telling some folks whose names I will not mention to protect the guilty (just kidding, peeps) sometime in 2007 that I sensed but obviously couldn’t prove (which is why I never blogged it) a deliberate attempt by these two Democrat crony-controlled entities to take down the financial system in time for the 2008 election. The excerpt just quoted moves that instinct into the realm of the plausible.
In electing Scott Brown to what the elites believed was Ted Kennedy’s U.S. Senate seat one day shy of the anniversary of Barack Obama’s inauguration, Massachusetts voters have delivered an irrefutable repudiation of the president, his agenda, and the people in Congress who support him on behalf of themselves and the rest of the nation.
Make no mistake. All the attempted post-election distancing in the world won’t change the fact that this election was all about Dear Leader, who has seemingly done everything he can to earn the “punk” moniker I applied to him and his administration on Election Day in 2008, and a Congress that has rubber-stamped so many of his wishes, so often without even reading the bills his acolytes have presented. Fox’s Charles Krauthammer noted that the Brown campaign succeeded in making the election “a referendum on the Obama agenda and also on single party rule in Washington.” Obama’s last-minute decision to appear in Massachusetts on Sunday in an attempt to stop the bleeding only confirmed the obvious.
Only fourteen months after his Bay State defeat of John McCain by 26%, Barack Washington’s favored U.S. Senate candidate failed by a greater margin than Walter Mondale lost to Ronald Reagan in 1984. That year, Reagan carried Massachusetts by 2.8% on the way to his 49-state reelection landslide.
The 30-point swing from November 2008 and the comparison to Reagan’s win are both important metrics. They demonstrate just how resounding the following rejection notices sent to Barack Obama and Congress by voters in what is still virtually the most reliably liberal state in the union really are:
Voters in the often wayward Cradle of Liberty looked danger in the eye, stood up and said “enough.” Tuesday’s takeaway is this: If Obama & Co. can’t sell their agenda there, it’s an epic fail everywhere.
So now what?
On Monday, I wrote that a Brown victory “may prevent” the forward march of what that now-famous “Massachusetts Miracle” video called a “tyrannical government.” The operative word is “may,” because there are valid concerns about Scott Brown, one of his major backers and his party that cannot and should not be ignored.
While he’ll never pass the Emily’s List litmus test, any experienced pro-lifer can tell from the relevant language on his Issues page that Brown is not a movement supporter. Additionally, as a legislator he voted for the creation of state-run Commonwealth Care. Besides imposing a dreadfully costly, punitive, and potentially care-rationing health care regime on its citizens, Commonwealth Care formally legalized government-subsidized abortions in Massachusetts for the first time.
On marriage, Brown’s Issues page says that states should “make their own laws in this area, so long as they reflect the people’s will as expressed through them directly, or as expressed through their elected representatives.” If he really believes this, he was remarkably silent during the mid-2000s when his own party’s governor unilaterally imposed same-sex marriage on his state without the benefit of either the popular vote or the legislative statute the 2003 Goodridge ruling itself said was required. To this day, same-sex marriage in Massachusetts has not been legalized as its Constitution mandates.
The governor who did this, and who thereby made himself objectively unfit to hold future public office, was Mitt Romney. Romney also championed the aforementioned CommonwealthCare, aka “RomneyCare.” Brown continues to defend RomneyCare, even though it has often and in my opinion fairly been described as the model for ObamaCare, which Brown claims to oppose. As the possibility of statist nationwide health care looms, Brown’s stance raises legitimate concerns about his reliability at ObamaCare crunch time.
The worries about Brown’s vulnerability to selling out only grow when one learns, as Politico reported on Monday, that Brown’s campaign was “filled with staffers who once worked” for Romney. Expect Romney, who I believe is the only potential GOP presidential candidate guaranteed to lose in 2012 if nominated, to take major credit within party circles for Brown’s win in an attempt to revive his flagging viability, and to quietly attempt to minimize the importance of Tea Partiers and others on the ground and throughout the country who did the dirty work. Sadly, top-echelon Republican leaders are still enamored of Romney based on his money and supposed charm. They don’t call it the Stupid Party without reason.
But for all his potential faults, the fact remains that Scott Brown and his campaign made a game-saving tackle on fourth-and-one at the goal line on Tuesday, turning the tide against our Punk President at a most crucial time.
Forget about savoring the win. In true punk fashion, Barack Obama and his apparatchiks appear poised to double down on the very things voters in Massachusetts and elsewhere in this great nation have now proven they so bitterly oppose. To truly appreciate what he’s up against, Scott Brown would be well advised to devour the content of and adopt the principles contained in Mark Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny on his way to Washington.
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:
A vote for Martha Coakley facilitates tyranny’s expansion. A vote for Scott Brown may prevent it. It’s really that simple.
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Note: This column went up at Pajamas Media on January 18 at Pajamas Media and was teased here at BizzyBlog that day.
I published this post at BizzyBlog on January 20 in accordance with PJM’s 48-hour blackout rule, but have moved it back to January 18 to reflect its pre-election timing.
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A video gone viral states in clear, unmistakable language what Tuesday’s U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts is all about:
The run-up to the 2008 presidential election and the first year of Barack Obama’s administration represent a virtual case study in how authoritarian rule begins to take root. History surely will recite a lengthy litany of freedom-restricting and/or government power-enhancing laws, regulations, actions and statements that have come from Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and their swelling ranks of apparatchiks since they assumed one-party control of the U.S. government and Congress early last year. But the Bay State’s beleaguered electorate need only focus on three dangerous developments since 2010 began to understand the overarching importance of their choice on Tuesday.
The first definition of “tyranny” at dictionary.com tells us that it is the “arbitrary or unrestrained exercise of power; despotic abuse of authority.” All three items that follow, and so much else that has occurred in the past year, fit that primary definition to a T.
First, there’s the president’s proposed bank tax — er, “financial responsibility fee.”
This sentence in the White House’s related “Fact Sheet” gives away their game (bold is mine):
It is our responsibility to ensure that the taxpayer dollars that supported these actions are reimbursed by the financial sector so that the deficit is not increased.
Note that the statement does not attempt to identify the specific people or entities in the financial sector who are supposedly responsible for the Troubled Asset Relief Program’s shortfall. No-no-no. That would be hard work; and besides, they wouldn’t like the answers. Instead, Barack Obama considers the resources of an entire industry fair game for plunder, and is playing the so-called responsibility card to whip up ordinary citizens’ emotions against it. This is how tyrants think and act.
And yes, I said “plunder.” The Wall Street Journal described the nature of that plunder perfectly in an editorial last week as it observed that government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are exempt from the tax — even though Fan and Fred spent 15 years misrepresenting the quality of what ultimately amounted to hundreds of billions of dollars in subprime and worse mortgages they foisted on the capital markets (italics is theirs):
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac …. surely did more than any other company to cause the housing boom and bust. The key to understanding their free tax pass is that on Christmas Eve Treasury lifted the $400 billion cap on their potential taxpayer losses expressly so they can rewrite more underwater mortgages at a loss.
…. In other words, the White House wants to tax more capital away from profit-making banks to offset the intentional losses that the politicians have ordered up at Fan and Fred.
That’s plunder — a brazen attempt at government-sponsored looting of the private sector on behalf of bankrupt government-sponsored enterprises. This is what tyrants do.
Also this month, the House and Senate have worked mightily to keep every aspect of their attempts to iron out differences between their respective versions of statist health care hidden from the public, even though Barack Obama the candidate promised no fewer than eight times to have such meetings broadcast on C-SPAN. House Speaker Pelosi still absurdly tells the world that the process is “the most transparent in history.” If the Senate can’t hang on to its fragile 60-vote consensus, Democrats, with the apparent acquiescence of Majority Leader Reid, have said they will use the option of “reconciliation,” which requires only 51 votes, to circumvent the opposition’s ability to filibuster. These are the kinds of things legislators who support tyrants do.
Finally, there’s the ongoing corruption of the voting process. The most recent body blow to its integrity came last week, when the House Judiciary Committee voted 15-14 along strictly party lines to oppose “requir(ing) the Department of Justice to explain to Congress why it dismissed a voter intimidation case involving members of the New Black Panther Party at a polling place in Philadelphia in November 2008.” There is no dispute that such intimidation occurred. Those who were charged didn’t even bother to counter the government’s accusations; yet they will apparently suffer no consequences. The crystal-clear message being sent in advance of Tuesday’s vote is that those who engage in voter intimidation and other voting irregularities have nothing to fear. This is what a corrupt attorney general like Eric Holder and elected representatives all too eager to rig the process to cement a building tyranny do.
The January actions just cited make it seem as if Washington’s self-confident Democratic elites have decided to make the selection of the next U.S. Senator from Massachusetts a referendum on what they have done to this country during their time in power.
Deliberately or not, they’ve gotten their way. Thanks to them, the choice couldn’t be more clear. There is no middle ground. A vote for Martha Coakley is nothing short of a vote for continuing and consolidating the developing tyranny. A vote for Scott Brown is a direct statement rejecting it. A Brown win, or even a narrow loss in this most liberal of states, repudiates it. A Brown win by a large margin ends any pretense that the country supports the actions and policies of Obama, his government, and Congress.
The subheadline:
A vote for Martha Coakley facilitates tyranny’s expansion. A vote for Scott Brown may prevent it. It’s really that simple.
It went up at BizzyBlog on Wednesday, but I backdated it to Monday so that it stays historically time-appropriate.
Intense thanks to David Rusin and Aaron Hanscom at Pajamas Media for their quick response to the column’s submission in what surely must be a time crunch for them.
I’m going to part with precedent and respectfully ask readers to carve out any time they can to read the column, and to pass it on to anyone they know in Massachusetts. I believe this is the most important single non-presidential election in my lifetime.
Note: This item went up at BigJournalism.com on Friday.
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A quote often attributed to Otto Von Bismarck in the 1930s but really belonging to poet John Godfrey Saxe over 60 years earlier tells us that “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.”
“Original Old Media reporting” belongs on Saxe’s list.
In all three cases, the temptation to look away is great. In all three, we must resist. All require strong surveillance to ensure a quality product.
For all of their considerable accomplishments, New Media watchdogs have not done a particularly good job of proactively monitoring wire service and other original-source stories as they move through the assembly line from breaking news to supposedly settled narrative. As a result, as often occurs when legislators and sausage plants aren’t closely watched, product quality is often pathetic, and is sometimes downright dangerous.
Take the coverage of Detroit’s Flight 253. In the hours immediately following the thwarted terrorist attack, both the Associated Press and USA Today told the nation that there was an “Al-Qaida link” involved. The AP’s money paragraphs were these:
One law enforcement source said the man claimed to have been instructed by al-Qaida to detonate the plane over U.S. soil.
“We believe this was an attempted act of terrorism,” a White House official said.
As shown here, by 11:04 p.m., the wire service was already downplaying the AQ link. But in the process, it invoked the dreaded M-word:
From there, the devolution accelerated. As I observed the next morning:
(The Muslim and Nigerian) verbiage remained but went to the second-last paragraph of the 3:07 a.m. version of the report, and disappeared without replacement from the 3:54 a.m. dispatch. The 8:56 a.m. report also has no text discussing circumstances in Nigeria, and has been purged of the M-word.
The wires’ faith in their reporters’ original work continued to dissipate in the days that followed. The supposedly solid AQ connection somehow became tenuous and unproven. It got so absurd that we even began seeing references to how Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab “allegedly boarded a plane.”
All of this culminated on the Tuesday after the attack, when Anne Kornblut of the Washington Post and the rest of the establishment press allowed the President of the United States to inform us, without challenge and as if it was a recent discovery, that — shazam! — the attack might have had something to do with AQ (bold is mine):
President Obama and his top advisers received new information Monday night about the attempted airliner attack in Detroit that has led them to believe there is “some linkage” with al-Qaeda, a senior administration official said Tuesday.
This is a self-evident load of rubbish to anyone who followed the story from its inception. The president and his poseurs played “let’s pretend,” and Old Media’s lapdogs let them skate. “Obama learns the truth, and will act to do something about it” became the dominant takeaway. Alleged journalists’ coverage of this critical story broke faith with the public they claim to serve, and arguably allowed an administration whose commitment to fighting the War on Terror is more than a little questionable to appear duly vigilant.
Sadly, this kind of story decay occurs all too frequently, comes in many varieties, and has been occurring for years. In October of last year, the New York Times’s Jeff Zeleny heavily watered it down another reporter’s story originally critical of Barack Obama’s failed attempt to get the 2016 Summer Olympics for Chicago. The original reporter’s dispatch is gone. Zeleny did it again in covering the president’s late October visit to Dover Air Force Base to review the coffins of returning dead soldiers. In 2006, Reuters began blaming Britain’s support of Israel for the thwarted London multiple plane bomb plot within hours of its discovery. In 2005, a routine report about the economy’s job gains at the Washington Post was transformed into a treatise on why it didn’t matter because George W. Bush’s Iraq War unpopularity was the paramount issue.
Sausage makers have had to learn to live with having outside inspectors in their plants. Similarly, legislators have generally come to accept the fact that groups like Citizens Against Government Waste and the Club for Growth will be on the lookout any time they’re in session — which partially explains why the current Congress’s attempt to prevent that oversight during its assembly of the health care sausage has drawn so much outrage.
It should not surprise anyone that Old Media’s sausage makers aren’t particularly interested in allowing a similar degree of oversight, and that they are in some cases quite hostile to attempts at realtime inspection. The AP, as an example, periodically threatens to go after anyone who might dare to cite a few words from or link to its content, as CEO Tom Curley did in a New York Times interview last year:
The company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it. … He specifically cited references that include a headline and a link to an article, a standard practice of search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, news aggregators, and blogs.
Asked if that stance went further than the AP had gone before, he said, “That’s right.”
While there is clearly a financial motive involved in such a stance, the AP and other wires seem to be at least as interested in making it difficult for others to oversee and record what they do as they’re doing it.
That cannot stand. If bad sausage gets into the market, it can be recalled. If bad legislation becomes law, we can vote out the lawmakers. But once a story’s narrative becomes established, all that remains for those who object is a far less effective reactive response that will reach relatively few.
Especially given Old Media’s obvious, growing, and more aggressive biases, New Media watchdogs must work harder and smarter to ensure that these sultans of slant lose their nearly exclusive control over what will become the first draft of history.
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