Sunday, November 09, 2008

A love story for the ages: the press and Barack Obama


Even foreign journalists were stunned by the love affair between the press and Obama:

The late Jerome Holtzman, a sports writing institution in Chicago, wrote a book 35 years ago called No Cheering in the Press Box...

I was in the press tent in Chicago on election night, with some hundred other journalists whose news organizations had ponied up large for a tabled seat at Grant Park. These were all veteran reporters, including the "travelling media" posse – embeds – who had accompanied Barack Obama throughout the campaign.

At 10 p.m. on Tuesday, Wolf Blitzer appeared on the giant television screen to announce Obama had won the U.S. presidency, as projected by CNN, which was hardly a risky declaration with several big swing states already in the bag.

Huge cheers erupted, squeals of delight, and some reporters high-fived.

I was stunned. Not at the victory, of course, but that top-drawer journalists would so lose their arm's-length professional detachment from events...

Only a day or two late, the Washington Post helpfully admitted it was in the tank for Barack all along. Today Post Ombudsman Deborah Howell issued a half-hearted apology.

...readers have been consistently critical of the lack of probing issues coverage and what they saw as a tilt toward Democrat Barack Obama. My surveys, which ended on Election Day, show that they are right on both counts...

...Obama deserved tougher scrutiny than he got, especially of his undergraduate years, his start in Chicago and his relationship with Antoin "Tony" Rezko, who was convicted this year of influence-peddling in Chicago. The Post did nothing on Obama's acknowledged drug use as a teenager.

...[another] gaping hole in coverage involved Joe Biden, Obama's running mate. When Gov. Sarah Palin was nominated for vice president, reporters were booking the next flight to Alaska. Some readers thought The Post went over Palin with a fine-tooth comb and neglected Biden. They are right; it was a serious omission.

Timely reporting from the mainstream media, as usual.

At least the Post 'fessed up. Blithering idiot Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily Birdcage-liner says that media bias just saved America.

In the weeks immediately following the Republican National Convention, the McCain campaign made a conscious decision to declare war on the media and to use that “media war” as an excuse to run several ads that were misleading or egregiously false. It was a do-or-die moment, and there were enough reporters in 2008 who were willing to shed the cloak of contrived objectivity – to acknowledge the once unprintable fact that one side was lying more than other.

And it may well have been a turning point in the election...

[Ed: the Fannie Mae-inspired meltdown of the financial system, of course, had absolutely nothing to do with it.]

...for eight years now, there’s been an out-of-control fire raging outside... a fire that was built upon the USA Patriot Act and Guantanamo and rendition and torture and signing statements and 16 words in a State of the Union Address. Ultimately, saving the last fabric of democracy is more important than worrying about what contrived commandments of journalism were stepped on while the blaze was finally extinguished.

I myself would call it truth-telling, and honest journalism, but now we have some who want to call it “media bias.” That’s fine with me, but understand this.

“Media bias” may have just saved America .

Buffoonery has a new name and its name is "Will Bunch". This feverishly partisan leftist, who presumably is paid in Starbucks gift certificates for his literary excretions, has unwittingly written an epitaph for his own profession. Mission Accomplished!

Cartoon: Chuck Asay. Hat tips: YWL and Larwyn. Linked by: Gateway Pundit. Thanks!

Obama vs. Pelosi? Yes, we hope.


John Fund says the President-Elect's choice of Rahm Emmanuel signals a centrist agenda.

Pollster Doug Schoen, who helped Bill Clinton win re-election in 1996 over overwhelming odds after the 1994 Democratic debacle, recently warned in a Journal op-ed: "If the Democrats govern as if there is no Republican Party, they are likely headed to the kind of reaction that Bill Clinton faced when he made the same misjudgment after the 1992 election victory." Mr. Schoen cites specifically a meeting in Little Rock after the election with Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell and House Speaker Tom Foley, when Mr. Clinton agreed to defer to Congress on key elements of his legislative agenda. The subsequent lurch to the left did incalculable damage to his presidency.

That may be one reason why Mr. Obama has chosen Rahm Emanuel, a respected member of the Congressional leadership, to become his new White House Chief of Staff. Mr. Emanuel has a reputation as a tough partisan, but he has also exhibited impatience with left-wing members of his party who have overly ambitious ideological agendas. A likely first assignment for Mr. Emanuel will be reminding House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that, after only two years of Democratic control, Congress already has a lower approval rating than even President Bush's.

Mr. Fund's a bright guy, but I'll believe that the P-E has abandoned the hard left agenda when I see it.

Related: Memeorandum has more.

Is Uganda's Allan Tacca the Mark Steyn of Africa?


Clear-headed and cutting, The Ugandan Monitor's Allan Tacca may indeed be Africa's version of Mark Steyn ("I feel very sorry for the next US president"):

Exactly 100 days away from his inauguration as President in January 2009, Obama will be subjected to a wave of scrutiny in the media that verges on sadism. So pervasive and so harsh are the effects of the American financial crisis that it would be much easier to disappoint than impress the nation. There will be angry Americans in New York, Detroit and Silicon Valley asking Obama for the beef, after the rhetoric.

...In the Middle East, with the Arab-Israeli conflict probably as intractable in April as ever, Obama, previously welcomed by many in the “Arab Street” as (at least) a half-Muslim, may now rapidly evolve into a fully fledged apostate.

Then we come to Africa, that puzzling 21st century anomaly, with its emaciated peasants and fat despots. How can Obama help you? George. W. Bush threw billions of dollars at the continent. You did a bit of good with some of it; and you stole the rest. Do you want Obama to come and stage your revolutions?

...In the longer term, America’s military machine will always respond to the definition of threats to her interests. Those threats are largely defined by bureaucratic behemoths the President cannot directly control, and these will sometimes make serious mistakes. Because initially he was so loved, Obama’s fall could be quite spectacular.

Well done, Mr. Tacca. I see now that pragmatists haven't been quarantined to just our tiny corner of the world.

Linked by: The excellent DogFightAtBanksTown. Thanks!

U.S. Secret Service more visible than ever with the new President-Elect


The United States Secret Service appears to be taking a more aggressive security posture with the new President-Elect.

The London Daily Mail says that this was one of the trucks in the convoy that took P-E Obama to the gym a couple of days ago.

Update: Commenter Jay.Mac observes:

And look -- they're armed with the type of weapons that Obama wants to permanently ban for the rest of America because "such weapons belong on foreign battlefields and not on our streets".

There goes the entire 25% snark allotment for this post.

Saturday, November 08, 2008

Photo o' the day: a good heart


President George W. Bush embraces an employee of the Executive Office of the President Thursday, Nov. 6, 2008, after delivering remarks to his staff on the upcoming transition. Said the President, "...Over the next 75 days, all of us must ensure that the next President and his team can hit the ground running.'

Photo credit: White House -- Eric Draper.

Iran's Racists: "Only change in Obama is color, not policy"


Iran's cadre of leaders includes some hard-core crackers.

Tehran - Iran Slams U.S.: The Only Change In Obama Is Color, Not Policy

Tehran - Iran's parliament speaker Ali Larijani slammed US president-elect Barack Obama on Saturday for saying Tehran's pursuit of nuclear weapons was "unacceptable," the official IRNA news agency reported.

"This signifies a pursuit of the same erroneous policy as in the past," Larijani said when asked about Obama's comment on Friday... "If the United States wants to change its standing in the region it should send good signals," he said. "Obama understands that change does not only mean a change of colour and superficial differences, change must also have a strategic basis," the agency quoted Larijani as saying...

Kayhan headlined "Obama's [pro-Israeli] men," in reference to his appointment of Rahm Emanuel, a Jew, as White House chief of staff. It called him "a member of a terrorist Zionist group."

Jomhuri Islami's headline read: "Obama gives green light to the Zionist regime."

Everyone knows that the Mullahs are a bunch of suicidal mystics with nukes; turns out they're rednecks too.

NatGeo: Unknown "Structures" Tugging at Universe


Wild.

On the outskirts of creation, unknown, unseen "structures" are tugging on our universe like cosmic magnets, a controversial new study says.

Everything in the known universe is said to be racing toward the massive clumps of matter at more than 2 million miles (3.2 million kilometers) an hour — a movement the researchers have dubbed dark flow.

The presence of the extra-universal matter suggests that our universe is part of something bigger — a multiverse — and that whatever is out there is very different from the universe we know, according to study leader Alexander Kashlinsky, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

The theory could rewrite the laws of physics. Current models say the known, or visible, universe — which extends as far as light could have traveled since the big bang—is essentially the same as the rest of space-time (the three dimensions of space plus time).

...The newfound flow cannot be explained by, and is not directly related to, the expansion of the universe... Kashlinsky says to picture yourself floating in the middle of a vast ocean. As far as the eye can see, the ocean is smooth and the same in every direction, just as most astronomers believe the universe is. You would think that beyond the horizon, therefore, nothing is different.

"But then you discover a faint but coherent flow in your ocean," Kashlinsky said. "You would deduce that the entire cosmos is not exactly like what you can see within your own horizon."

There must be an out-of-sight mountain river or ravine pushing or pulling the water. Or in the cosmological case, Kashlinsky speculates that "this motion is caused by structures well beyond the current cosmological horizon, which is more than 14 billion light-years away."

They simply wanted to confirm the longstanding notion that the farther away galaxies are, the slower their motion should appear... Instead, Kashlinsky said, "We found a great surprise."

The clusters were all moving at the same speed — nearly 2 million miles (3.2 million kilometers) an hour — and in a single direction... To explain the unexplainable flow, the team turned to the longstanding theory that rapid inflation just after the big bang had pushed chunks of matter beyond the known universe...

Via: LGF Quick Links. Linked by: Vanderleun. Thanks!

Surveillance video: Al Franken "finds" another 1,000 votes


Is it just me, or does Al Franken appear to be stealing a Minnesota Senate seat from Norm Coleman? Eh, it's not just me.

Powerline's three-part series (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3) is a must-read.

Richard Baehr adds:

Al Franken and a highly partisan Secertary of State are collaborating to steal the Senate race in Minnesota. Though an official recount has not yet begun, in the days since the election, new Franken votes have appeared in a few counties, and Norm Coleman votes have disappeared. Much like landslide Lyndon Johnson's victory in the 1948 Senate race in Texas, some of the incremental vote tallies provided by Democratic leaning counties are 100% for Franken. Remarkable. Maybe as with Johnson, the voters signed in to vote in alphabetical order. Minnesota is not like Washington State, where the Governor's race was stolen in 2004, or Illinois, stolen by Mayor Daley for JFK in 1960. Maybe the good citizens will be upset by what is going on. And maybe not. In the meantime, you can help Norm Coleman attempt to insure an honest recount by contributing through the site linked below. It would be hard to imagine a greater mismatch in experience, judgment and character than Coleman versus Franken. Franken is a bad guy, and I know no better way to put it.

Contribute by clicking here.

Exclusive photo: Robert Byrd resigns Appropriations Committee Chairmanship


Porkmeister-in-chief Robert Byrd has "decided" to resign his all-powerful Appropriations Committee chairmanship.

Here's a photo of Byrd announcing the stepdown yesterday.

Creepy Obama iconography still showing up post-election


During this marathon of an election season, the mainstream media occasionally observed that the cult-like atmosphere permeating Barack Obama's campaign was "creepy".

TIME magazine's Joe Klein saying that there was "something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism" of Obama's speech on Super Tuesday. ABC's Jake Tapper took up the joke, blogging: "The Holy Season of Lent is upon us...

Can Obama worshippers try to give up their Helter-Skelter cult-ish qualities for a few weeks?" New York Times columnist Paul Krugman claimed last week that "the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality."

...Citing the star-studded "Yes We Can" music video as evidence of this cult worship, another Times columnist, David Brooks, quipped recently that the "escalating states of righteousness and ecstasy" in the clip would soon translate to "selling flowers at airports and arranging mass weddings."

I was hoping that the ubiquitous Obama "evil eye" logo would make a hasty exit after the president-elect's victory.

No such luck. MorOn.org (I think that's the name they prefer) is hawking bizarre stickers that look like a cross between a faux Kashmirian rug and a 1968 pack of rolling papers.

But that's probably the look they're going for.

I'm gonna get a really, really bad feeling in the pit of my stomach if the Obama "eye" logo starts appearing on armbands.

Linked by: Brutally Honest. Thanks!

Souvenir Postcard collection celebrates President-elect Obama's past successes


This is number six in an exclusive souvenir collection available only from Rezmar!


Click the picture for all of the fabulous details regarding this once-in-a-lifetime offer for the middle class!

Friday, November 07, 2008

The $899/mo. BMW lease payments of the Mediacrats


Many observers believe that the mainstream media could have blown Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign to bits over a single long weekend. A couple of hit pieces featuring Rashid Khalidi, Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Edward Said, Franklin Raines, Jim Johnson, the lost years at Columbia, ... well, you get the picture. Any of the big outlets could've put a stake in the heart of Obama's campaign with a single 20-minute segment of John Stossel presents: Barack Obama's Whackjob Friends.

So why didn't our world-class U.S. journalists explore Barack's background? In fact, the world wonders how our media could be so biased, so in the bag, so incredibly tilted that even the Saturday morning cartoons are mocking 'em. The answer is right in front of our noses.

• Senior Obama adviser Susan Rice (a former Clinton administration official) is married to Ian Cameron, the Canadian-born executive producer of ABC News’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”


• NBC's David Gregory is married to Beth Wilkinson, a partner at Latham & Watkins in Washington and a former official in the Justice Department during the Clinton administration.



• ABC's George Stephanopoulos hosts a show bearing his name and earlier served as a senior advisor to the Clinton administration.



• Chris Matthews hosts MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews and served as a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter.



• David Gergen is a political analyst for CNN and served as a special adviser to President Clinton.




• Paul Begala is a CNN commentator ("[President Bush is] a high-functioning moron") and a former senior adviser to President Clinton.



• Bill Moyers is a journalist employed by PBS and was a press secretary for President Lyndon Baines Johnson. His son is a producer for CNN.




Put simply, there appears to be only a turnstile between a Democratic administration and a cushy media job. Perhaps that explains the disconnect. After all, career and spousal advancement come before integrity. Hey, they've got two BMWs to pay for! And private school tuition, b***hes!

Update: An incestuous exclamation point: CNN is selling Obama victory T-shirts.



Linked by: Instapundit, Patterico and Fausta. Thanks!

'Age of Plenty' Stock Chart


Do you think the policies announced by the president-elect (raising the capital gains taxes, hammering corporations with additional taxes, socking it to "the rich", etc., etc.) are having an effect on the stock market?

Wake me up when it's over.

Update: Gateway Pundit calls the president-elect "ObamaMcStockMarketCrashieBurton."

Poopy diaper may pin the lovechild on John Edwards


The ultra-reliable TMZ ("John Edwards in Deep DNA Doo-Doo") points us to a stunning New York Daily News report.

Nov. 4 was supposed to be his day. Instead, Tuesday found former presidential candidate John Edwards lying low - with the stench of his extramarital affair still clinging to him.

Even though he admitted cheating with campaign staffer Rielle Hunter (top), The National Enquirer wants to prove he's the father of Hunter's baby. How? We hear that, on the night they caught Edwards visiting Hunter and child at a Beverly Hills hotel, Enquirer reporters grabbed one of the baby's poopy diapers.

Now, say sources, intrepid Enquirer editor David Perel hopes to compare the infant's stinky DNA with that of Edwards, who has denied paternity. "All they need is a cup he drank from," an insider tells us.

"I will neither confirm nor deny possession of a dirty diaper," Perel said dryly. "But I would like to do a DNA test."

The new Enquirer reports that Hunter "is writing a tell-all book now that the man who has been funneling cash to her has died." Before his death last month, Edwards' former national finance chairman, Fred Baron, confirmed he had been sending money to Hunter - reportedly as much as $15,000 a month. Now that Baron is gone, Hunter is worried that the "hush money" will dry up, according The Enquirer.

Hunter and Edwards couldn't be reached for comment. But The Enquirer quotes an insider as saying, "Rielle views the book as her personal insurance policy."

Meanwhile, though cancer-stricken Elizabeth Edwards has not been wearing her wedding ring, sources say she has not decided to divorce her husband.

The most deranged soap-opera writer on Earth couldn't make this s*** up.

Thursday, November 06, 2008

Line o' the day: Dammit Jim, I'm a Doctor, not an Economist!


Ace wins for the second day in a row, which earns him the bonus prize: a lifetime supply of waffle irons from Dave's Discount Waffle Irons of Youngstown, Ohio.

Headline: The Age of Plenty, Day 2: Worst Two-Day Plummet Since 1987

He's a Lightworker, for crying out loud, not an economics guru.

Don Surber says it's a classic Obama Rally.

All of this crap courtesy of Larwyn.

The Cabinet of Doom


Today the Chicago Tribune listed a couple of strong contenders for the position of Attorney General:

Names include Eric Holder, a former D.C. federal judge and deputy attorney general; Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano; Jamie Gorelick, former deputy attorney general; James Comey, former deputy attorney general and Lockheed Martin general counsel; Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick; Patrick Fitzgerald, U.S. attorney in Chicago.

Jamie Gorelick? Jamie Gorelick? Jamie Gorelick?

It's not often that one person plays key roles in two -- count 'em, two -- trillion-dollar disasters. Sit down, my friends, and listen to the tale of a well-connected Democrat named Jamie Gorelick.

In 2004, observers were "astonished" to discover that a key member of the 9/11 Commission had a fatal conflict-of-interest. Jamie Gorelick had served as a Deputy Attorney General under Bill Clinton from 1994 to 1997.

It was later revealed that Gorelick had established a pre-Patriot Act "wall" that prevented the foreign intelligence and criminal investigative communities from collaborating.

Her 1995 memo, entitled "Instructions on Separation of Certain Foreign Counterintelligence and Criminal Investigations", stated explicitly that they would "go beyond what is legally required, [to] prevent any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance that FISA is being used to avoid procedural safeguards which would apply in a criminal investigation."

The result: shortly before 9/11, Gorelick's wall "specifically impeded the investigation into Zacarias Moussaoui", the so-called "20th hijacker."

At the time, an enraged FBI investigator wrote a memo to headquarters which included the sentence, 'Whatever has happened to this -- someday someone will die -- and wall or not -- the public will not understand why we were not more effective..."

The 2004 disclosure that Gorelick's service as a 9/11 Commissioner was the archetypical conflict-of-interest should have triggered a cacophony of complaints and demands for a new investigation. Instead, the mainstream media turned deaf and dumb and the controversy faded into the background.

Gorelick's "wall" wrapped a blindfold around America just when it needed its vision to stop the attacks that killed thousands and which sucked a half a trillion dollars out of the economy.

Where did Gorelick turn up next?

Though she had no training or experience in finance, Gorelick was appointed the Vice Chairman of Fannie Mae and served in the role from 1997 to 2003. During that six-year period, she earned over $26 million.

During Gorelick's tenure, FNMA suffered a $10 billion accounting scandal, an ominous harbinger of the firm's looming troubles. One of the falsified transactions helped FNMA hit earnings targets for 1998, which triggered bonuses for top executives including nearly $800,000 to Gorelick.

Put simply "Jamie Gorelick was one of the Fannie executives who benefited from inflated bonuses based on Enron-style accounting."

In 2002 Business Week interviewed Gorelick concerning the health of FNMA. She responded, "We believe we are managed safely. We are very pleased that Moody's gave us an A-minus in the area of bank financial strength -- without a reference to the government in any way. Fannie Mae is among the handful of top-quality institutions."

Less than a year later regulators "accused Fannie Mae of improper accounting to the tune of $9 billion in unrecorded losses."

Today, of course, FNMA is on taxpayer-funded life support, currently trading at 61 cents a share. And because it was thought to have been "managed safely" (Gorelick's words), many top-flight financial services companies held its stock.

Last week it was revealed that top insurer AIG was teetering on the precipice of disaster because, in part, it held $600 million in Fannie and Freddie. Roughly $4 billion in those stocks are held by insurers, according to rating agency A.M. Best.

Put simply, FNMA's collapse helped touch off the current swath of instability in the financial system.

It's not often that one person plays such a key role in two unmitigated disasters.

Democrat Jamie Gorelick is just such a person; that is why she has earned her nom de guerre "The Mistress of Disaster".

What do you call someone with a Midas Touch, only instead of gold everything they touch turns to s***? That's what Gorelick's got.

If I was one of her associates at the law firm of WilmerHale, I'd keep my head on a frickin' swivel.

And she would be our Attorney General? Why not just nominate the Captain of the Hindenberg?

I'm not sayin', but I'm just sayin'...


Ben B. sent this one in.

Didja check out the Illinois state lottery on Wednesday?

November 5th... 666

Check it out for yourselves on Illinois' state lottery website.

http://www.illinoislottery.com/numbers.asp

This could explain why those four hooded dudes on horses are riding through my subdivision carrying sickles.

Wednesday, November 05, 2008

The most fuel-efficient cars on the horizon


In October, C&D spotlighted high tech cars that get great gas mileage. From the Volt, to the Insight, to the Clarity, a lot of cutting-edge technology is described.

With Democrats in power, I'm guessing we'll need them. Pelosi and Reid will try to keep the 'No Zone' off limits to oil exploration, for example.


What the hell, it only represents 120+ billion barrels of oil, an economic resurgence and potential independence from Middle East energy.

Bumpersticker o' the day


Top Reagan Quotes

Ripped off from: Denny.

Larwyn's Link Kerplosion: Post-Mortem


WSJ: Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, a former Kerry staffer, argues that the treatment of George W. Bush has been a disgrace. I couldn't agree more

The Real Revo: An Open Letter To My Israeli Friends (caution: language warning).

STACLU: The media won: "They created Obama. They could have destroyed him in a minute if they had wanted to. Instead they promoted him, covered for him and used anything they could to discredit his opponents..."

Page Six: Crisis at 30 Rock as Keith Olbermann awards himself the "Worst Person in the World" for 2008.

The Corner: John Derbyshire is a sour loser.

Newsbusters: Funny, I didn't see this on Al Gore's website: "Green initiatives get slaughtered in California."

Michelle Malkin advises conservatives to gird their loins:
  • Oppose the Democrats’ next stimulus boondoggle.
  • Oppose Obama’s windfall profits tax proposal
  • Oppose new bailouts for states deep in debt
  • Oppose new foreclosure prevention measures that will simply provide perverse incentives for borrowers to walk away and delay a needed market correction
  • No more federal loan guarantees for corporations (especially in light of this.
Victor Davis Hanson offers the post-mortem.

EIB thanks Barack Obama for putting the Clinton Machine out of its misery: "Without Senator Obama, we would still be dealing with the specter of Hillary Clinton lurking around the Democrat Party seeking the White House. So I want to congratulate and thank Senator Obama for dispatching the Clintons, at least until he screws up enough to give them an opening to get back in."