Talking Points Memo on Obama's Media Enablers

My Talking Points Memo on Obama's Media Enablers  by Laura

Talking Points Memo for Tuesday August 21st.

Why the President‘s Impoverished Brother Is ’Ashamed‘ of the Name ’Obama’

D’souza: Why the President‘s Impoverished Brother Is ’Ashamed‘ of the Name ’Obama’

 by Benny Johnson

(Source: CNN.com)
 

In an exclusive interview with the Blaze, author Dinesh D’souza (”Obama’s America: Unmaking The American Dream”) spoke about the shame felt by The President’s impoverished relatives and how hypocritical the tense situation is for the left.

D‘souza made national attention this summer for bringing the plight of the president’s brother to light. George Obama lives in a tiny shack in a Nairobi slum and gets by on just a few dollars a month. The author, who has recently paid George’s hospital bills, talked to TheBlaze about the experience.

(Source: "2016 "movie)

George Obama, Middle, In the slum neighborhood he lives in

(Source: salfordian.com)

D’souza juxtaposes the abject poverty and condition of a number of Obama’s direct relatives, including his aunt that sells coal on the street in Kenya, with Obama’s life. And it’s humiliating.
In fact, George “does not even use the name Obama,” the author alarmingly notes. George said to him, “I’m ashamed, because the moment people find out my name they want to know ‘Well aren’t you related to Barrack Obama? How come you are living in the slum?’ And of course there is no answer.”

George Obama had to watch his half-brother become the most powerful man in the world from a rusty seat in a slum shanty bar. The contrast D’souza emphasizes, is very hypocritical. The author notes that Obama continually presses “fair share” as policy and regularly campaigns with the line, “I am my brother’s keeper.”

“There is something wrong with this picture,” D’souza insists. Why? Because “it exposes the fundamental disingenuousness and hypocrisy of Obama’s platform.”

Still, D’souza is quick to point out that George is not “innocent.” He notes the president’s brother is “shifty” and “cunning,“ adding that George is ”all about the money.” But he also calls him a “smart kid” that’s “a little bit of a conservative.”

According to ABC News, D’souzas film 2016, which is the first film to feature George Obama, is on pace to be one of the highest-grossing political documentaries in history.

How Ryan Recasts the Race

Fred Barnes: How Ryan Recasts the Race

With his big ideas, the GOP's vice presidential candidate makes the incumbent president seem smaller.

By FRED BARNES

After naming Paul Ryan as his running mate this month, Mitt Romney gave better speeches, especially when Rep. Ryan was at his side. Gov. Romney's poll numbers ticked up in Ohio and Virginia, both swing states. His online fundraising shot up like a geyser (68% of it coming from new donors). The Romney Facebook page added 510,000 friends in five days.

Those are the most tangible signs of the Ryan Effect on the presidential campaign. Yet they are not the most important. Once Mr. Ryan entered the race, everything changed: the issues, the substance of the candidates' speeches, perceptions of Mr. Romney and President Obama, the role of a running mate.

Editorial page editor Paul Gigot on Paul Ryan's first week on the trail and how Republicans are handling the Mediscare attacks. Photo: Associated Press

Never before has a vice presidential candidate become a central figure in a presidential race. There was no Gore Effect in 1992 or Cheney Effect in 2000. And never have a running mate's ideas become leading issues overnight, likely to dominate the campaign through election day.

The Ryan Effect turned the race upside down. The thrust of Mr. Obama's bid for re-election had been maligning Mr. Romney and pandering to Democratic interest groups. Mr. Romney was concentrating on attacking Mr. Obama for the subpar economic recovery and weak job growth.

The economy remains a central issue, as do Mr. Obama's overall record and Mr. Romney's past one. But now the looming fiscal crisis, Medicare, and the size and role of government are front and center of the campaign. The presidential contest has been elevated into a clash of big ideas and fundamental differences. Neither presidential candidate, but especially Mr. Obama, could have imagined this. Credit Mr. Ryan.

This shift has been damaging to the president and helpful to Mr. Romney. The slogan of Mr. Obama's campaign is "Forward," but he's become the status-quo candidate. Mr. Romney, having adopted slightly revised versions of Mr. Ryan's bold plans for reducing spending and reforming Medicare, is now the candidate of change. This might have happened to some extent without Mr. Ryan in the race, but it certainly wasn't inevitable.

With his ambitious agenda for tackling debt and spurring growth, Mr. Ryan makes Mr. Obama seem smaller. With no plan of his own, Mr. Obama has made a fetish of ignoring the fiscal emergency. That stance no longer looks tenable.

By the same token, the fact that Mr. Ryan's plan is politically risky makes the normally cautious Mr. Romney seem larger for having picked him. He's not like the hapless 1948 Republican presidential contender Tom Dewey, without the mustache. He recognized that his criticisms of Mr. Obama had failed to create a sense of urgency about the nation's faltering economy. Mr. Ryan is adept at describing, with facts and figures, the peril America faces and the urgency of facing up to it.

For the president, the unavoidable presence of Mr. Ryan is bound to be unsettling. "Ryan psychs Obama out," Harvard's Niall Ferguson writes in this week's Newsweek. It would seem so. In three face-to-face encounters, Mr. Obama has conspicuously shied away from engaging with Mr. Ryan.
According to the White House, the president has reached out to Mr. Ryan in the past but gotten nowhere. This isn't true. Mr. Obama spoke to Mr. Ryan in January 2010 at a Republican retreat, said he'd read the "Roadmap" that presaged Mr. Ryan's budget, and noted that he agreed with "some ideas in there" and disagreed with others. "We should have a healthy debate," the president added.

Instead he unleashed an assault. Mr. Obama's allies, including budget director Peter Orzsag and Democrats in Congress, quickly pounced on Mr. Ryan and his proposed policies. Then, at a White House health-care summit a month later, Mr. Ryan delivered a withering critique of the president's overhaul of the health-care system. Mr. Obama responded briefly, then called on another speaker.

It was at their third meeting in April 2011 that Mr. Obama took on Mr. Ryan, seated directly in front of him. His attack was brutal. He suggested the budget drafted by Mr. Ryan as chairman of the House Budget Committee would jeopardize food safety and care for children with autism or Down syndrome. Mr. Ryan was not asked to reply, much less debate those issues.

Enlarge Image

Associated Press/Jason E. Miczek

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan at the Nascar Technical Institute in Mooresville, N.C., Aug. 12.
 

Mr. Ferguson believes the reason Mr. Ryan "psychs" the president out is that "unlike Obama, Ryan has a plan—as opposed to a narrative—for this country." Mr. Obama may be sensitive for another reason as well. He's been called the smartest president ever. But Mr. Ryan is not only more knowledgeable than Mr. Obama about fiscal and economic issues, he's more adept at debating them.
Mr. Ryan frustrates his detractors. Like his mentor, the late Jack Kemp, he is upbeat and friendly and eager to seek out converts. He is willing to compromise to bring them on board, too, as he did in welcoming Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon as co-sponsor of his Medicare reform initiative.

In frisking Mr. Ryan, politically speaking, Democrats and the media have been unable to decide where he is most vulnerable. Over the weekend, the New York Times referred to him as a libertarian, while the Washington Post questioned whether he's even a deficit hawk.

What particularly upsets opponents is Mr. Ryan's image. "The disarming thing is his sense of mission is greater than his sense of ambition," says Ryan adviser David Smick, a Washington economic consultant. "This is disconcerting to his critics."

They would like to do to him what they did to Sarah Palin when she was John McCain's running mate in 2008. Mrs. Palin's biography raised questions about her qualifications to be vice president, but after 14 years in Congress Mr. Ryan's qualifications are sterling. Critics are left with the option of attacking him as an extremist or a phony. But the evidence from his career in Washington indicates that he is neither.

There's one more fruit of the Ryan Effect, noted by my Weekly Standard colleague William Kristol. The Republican campaign, he writes, has turned into a movement. A "mere electoral effort" has become a cause. Only Mr. Ryan could have produced this phenomenon.

For the moment, Mr. Ryan has upstaged Mr. Romney. That won't last. The top of the ticket always dominates. But Mr. Ryan has given the Romney campaign what it lacked: the ideas and the energy that provide a clear path to the White House.

Mr. Barnes is executive editor of the Weekly Standard and a Fox News commentator.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443989204577601254048147454.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Obama presidency turns government up to 11--Spinal tap-like

Examiner Sunday Reflections by Glenn Harlan Reynolds: Obama presidency turns government up to 11

 

Glenn Harlan Reynolds

The Washington Examiner

President Obama's term so far has been compared to many fictional and non-fictional characters: Chauncey Gardener of "Being There" is frequently invoked, along with the self-invented charmer Don Draper from "Mad Men," and of course there are the usual tiresome comparisons with Hitler that most presidents face these days.
        

But I have a different character in mind. The more I watch this administration at work, the more I think we're seeing the first Nigel Tufnel presidency.
 

Nigel Tufnel, many will remember, was the fictitious heavy metal guitarist in the fictional "rockumentary" "This Is Spinal Tap." In a classic scene, he displays his guitar collection and his special amplifier that -- unlike all other amplifiers in existence -- has knobs that go all the way up to 11, instead of just 10.
 

And that's what Obama has done: In his first two years as president, he's taken us to 11 in so many ways.
 

Under Bush and the Republican Congress from 2000-2006 federal spending was bad, and many people groused. But Obama has turned it up to 11, running up trillion-dollar-plus deficits that dwarf the worst we saw under Bush and the congressional Republicans, and producing open revolt from Tea Partiers and others.
 

Under Bush, and previous presidents, government regulation was creeping up steadily, year by year. But under Obama, the regulatory knobs have been turned to 11: New health care laws, a new financial regulation bill, proposals for carbon taxes and new Environmental Protection Agency regulation of carbon dioxide -- the list seems endless, made even worse by the near-body-cavity-searching now being done by the Transportation Security Administration. (Tufnel's grand opus, a bondage-themed album titled "Smell the Glove," sounds all too close to air-travel reality now. . . .)
 

Under Bush, the left complained about the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan, which candidate Obama characterized as "just air-raiding villages and killing civilians." But under Obama, air raids and drone attacks have drastically increased, not only in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere. Obama has turned the air-raid knob up to 11.
 

Under Bush and previous presidents, political friends were rewarded with government money. But under Obama, the cronyism has been turned up to 11, with General Motors and Chrysler bondholders stiffed to reward union members, with massive federal grants (later rescinded) to a voter-fraud ridden ACORN, and with numerous other special carve-outs for Obama-supporting special interests.
 

Under Bush and previous presidents, the Justice Department was sometimes politicized, but under Obama, the politicization has been turned up to 11, with blatant favoritism in the refusal to pursue voter-intimidation charges against the New Black Panther Party, and with repeated complaints from insiders about the corruption of the Civil Rights Division.
 

For Nigel Tufnel, turning the knobs to 11 was a way to excite the crowd, and Obama's approach has certainly done that, if not quite in the way that Obama intended. While many Americans were uneasy about big government before, Obama's shock-and-awe approach got them downright upset.
 

Al Gore used to tell the story of a frog in a pot of slowly heating water, left insensible to the fact that it was being boiled by slow degrees. Obama turned the knob on the stove to 11, and now the frog has decided to jump.
 

Obama's advisers thought that the sudden introduction of numerous big-government programs would produce a sort of shock-and-awe effect, paralyzing opposition and getting the public used to the idea of European style government involvement in American life. But instead of shock and awe, Obama's approach has produced shock and action, with the Tea Party movement and other anti-big-government protests sweeping the nation like wildfire, and producing the biggest Democratic midterm defeat in generations.
 

And, like the beleaguered band Spinal Tap, Obama is seeing his appeal shrink rapidly despite the increased volume -- though his advisers, like Spinal Tap's manager Ian Faith, protest that his appeal isn't shrinking, just becoming "more selective." In fact, as it flounders before the Wikileaks scandal and the TSA brouhaha, the entire Obama presidency seems to be shrinking, much like the 18-foot model of Stonehenge that, through a slip of Tufnel's pen, became an 18-inch model of Stonehenge that left audiences unimpressed.
 

But here's where the analogy fails. In the movie, Tufnel's career was ultimately, saved by a surge of popularity in Japan. Obama, on the other hand, has pursued policies that seem to make America likely to suffer Japan's fate, a decade or more of economic stagnation coupled with massive growth in government debt.
 

For Spinal Tap, luck produced a happy ending to a humorous story of ineptitude and decline. Can Obama expect similar luck? Sadly, such happy endings are far easier for Hollywood than for Washington.
 

Examiner Sunday Reflections Contributor Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a University of Tennessee law professor and author of the Instapundit blog.

 

http://washingtonexaminer.com/examiner-sunday-reflections-by-glenn-harlan-reynolds-obama-presidency-turns-government-up-to-11/article/38162#.UDGYfUTgK3U

Obama praised Supreme Court affirmative action ruling in 2003, applauded racial ‘set aside plans’   

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In a June 25, 2003 interview with the Chicago Defender, an urban newspaper serving the city’s African-American community, President Barack Obama praised the U.S. Supreme Court for preserving the practice of affirmative action in U.S. university admissions.

Nine years later, Obama’s Department of Justice filed an amicus curiae brief with the Supreme Court on Aug. 13, arguing in favor of racial preferences in the admissions department of the University of Texas.

Speaking at Columbia University on Feb. 23, Attorney General Eric Holder said affirmative action may never become obsolete. “The question,” Holder said, “is not when does it end, but when does it begin. … When do people of color truly get the benefits to which they are entitled?” (RELATED: In Harvard essay, young Michelle Obama argued for race-based faculty hiring)

Obama, a state senator and a candidate for U.S. Senate in 2003, praised the late Maynard Jackson in the Defender interview. Jackson, an African-American mayor of Atlanta, died on the day the high court ruled race could be a factor in college admissions. Mayor Jackson, Obama said, was “the architect among big city mayors of effective affirmative action and set aside plans.”

“He structured it in ways that other mayors across the country ended up emulating,” said Obama. “His passing is enormous to all of us, but, it is fitting that on the same day he passed we had a Supreme Court that narrowly did the right thing by affirming the basic principle of affirmative action.”

While mayor of Atlanta, Jackson signed a law requiring that 25 percent of Atlanta’s projects be set aside for minority-owned companies. He later held up a $400 million airport expansion until a percentage of the contracts went to minority- and women-owned contractors.

“Affirmative action and set asides” were important to Obama, too, as he plotted his early political career in Chicago. The Defender reported on January 29, 1998 that the state senator from Chicago backed John Schmidt, Mayor Richard Daley’s former campaign manger, in the Democratic gubernatorial primary.

Obama named Schmidt’s support for “affirmative action and set asides” among his reasons for endorsing Schmidt over Roland Burris, who would 11 years later hold Obama’s U.S. Senate seat after he became president.

In May 1999, Obama moved to short-circuit a state senate resolution asking Illinois’ nine public universities to collect statistics about the admissions, enrollment and test scores of minority students. The Washington, D.C.-based Center for Equal Opportunity had requested the data.

That group, Obama complained, was “systematically attempting to dismantle affirmative action at public universities all over the country.”

Walter Dudycz, the state senator who had proposed the measure, ultimately withdrew it — but not before telling the Chicago Daily Herald that he resented being called a racist by some African-American state senators.

Obama favored race-based data collection, however, when he believed it would tip the scales in the direction of his minority constituents.

“The state must compile traffic stop data and find out if law officers are singling out minority motorists,” he said during a 2000 press conference announcing his “End Racial Profiling Act” at the Illinois Statehouse. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund backed the legislative measure.

In another 1999 episode, Obama pushed for an African-American appointee to the Illinois Commerce Commission. “Obama,” the Defender wrote, “said racial diversity on the utility commission would better protect consumers across Chicago and Illinois.”

The Daily Caller has seen archival copies of the Defender interviews described in this report.
Obama decried the lack of “minority decision-making power” on the regulatory board, which governs phone companies, utilities and railroads throughout the state.

Center for Equal Opportunity president Roger Clegg wrote in January that the Obama administration’s preference for racial set asides include support for “university and even K-12 race-based policies, contracting preferences by the federal government, racial gerrymandering, federal workforce “diversity” efforts; and legislative provisions in Obamacare and Dodd-Frank.”

The administration, Clegg added, was committed to “aggressively pushing the ‘disparate impact’ approach to civil-rights enforcement,” through which “the federal government insists that the numbers come out right, even if it means that policemen and firefighters cannot be tested, that companies should hire criminals, that loans must be made to the uncreditworthy, and that — I kid you not — whether pollution is acceptable depends on whether dangerous chemicals are spread about in a racially balanced way.”

http://dailycaller.com/2012/08/20/obama-praised-supreme-court-affirmative-action-ruling-in-2003-applauded-racial-set-aside-plans/?print=1

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/08/20/obama-praised-supreme-court-affirmative-action-ruling-in-2003-applauded-racial-set-aside-plans/#ixzz24ixm1wck

My dream speech for Romney

My Dream Speech for Romney

By Dennis Prager

My fellow Americans, my fellow Republicans:
 

The 2012 election is not a contest between two men, but between two entirely different visions of America. President Obama and I are simply the standard-bearers of opposing and, may I add, irreconcilable visions of what America is and should be.

The Republican party and I represent American values as they have been understood since the founding of our country. The Democratic party and President Obama represent different values. This does not make any Democrat, let alone President Obama, less American or less patriotic than any one of us here. But millions of Americans who love our country hold values that emanate from elsewhere.
How could it be otherwise?

Given the influence of academia, Hollywood, and the news media, of course many Americans have embraced more of the French Revolution’s values than those of the American Revolution.

And, to make things worse, too many Americans of the last few generations have never learned what American values are. Schools stopped teaching them. And many parents did as well.

Let me be specific: American values are not a matter of any individual’s, or newspaper’s, or professor’s opinion. We can surely have different opinions about how to realize those values, or how to apply them in any given situation. But American values exist beyond personal opinion. They have been enshrined for nearly all of American history on our coinage and our bills, not to mention in our hearts and in our minds, and emblazoned on the walls of Congress.

They are: Liberty, In God We Trust, and E Pluribus Unum (From Many, One).

The Democratic party seeks to replace liberty with equality. Not equality before the law — that we all believe in. Not the equality of human worth — all Americans believe that all men are created equal. But the Democratic party and this president believe in material and social equality — and for them this equality is a greater value than liberty. That is why they seek to control more and more of Americans’ lives — in other words, take away more and more of our liberty — for the sake of some utopian ideal of equality.

The basic liberty to keep the money you have earned is the most obvious example. For most of American history, when some of our fellow Americans honorably earned more than others, they were not resented, they were emulated. But in the eyes of today’s Democratic party and in the eyes of our president, such Americans are to be resented — and as much of their money as possible must be taken from them — in the name of equality (sometimes referred to as “fairness”).

Our opponents do not value prosperity as much as they value equality.

And instead of a society rooted in God-based values, the Democratic party seeks a society as devoid of reference to God as possible. God can barely be mentioned in our nation’s classrooms. I do not think it is a coincidence that in a little more than one generation we have gone from students asking a blessing for their teachers to too many students abusing, sometimes even cursing, their teachers.

In the moral confusion that inevitably flows from devaluing God, many Americans have replaced the sanctity of the unborn human with the sanctity of rodents and fish.

And this president and his party have also rejected the third great American value, E Pluribus Unum, which has created the uniquely successful American experiment in rendering blood, race, ethnicity, and national origins insignificant — by replacing all of them with one unifying American identity.

They seek to replace “From many, one” with so-called multiculturalism, with a cult of “diversity,” and with the hyphenation of all Americans.

That is why, my fellow Americans, the upcoming election is not merely an election. It is a referendum on whether America retains its unique value system or not.

Big and bigger government is not an American value. Because the bigger the government, the smaller the citizen.

Handing our children and grandchildren unprecedented debt is not an American value. Because selfishness and irresponsibility are not American values.

Dividing Americans by race and class is not an American value. Because race and class are not American values.

And a weakened America is not an American value either. Indeed, given the unique role America’s military strength has played in spreading liberty, a weakened America is not a moral value either. No peace movement on earth, and no peace-studies program in the world, has done for peace what the American military has done for peace.

A vote for Paul Ryan and me is a vote to return America to its values, the values that are the reason this country became the greatest nation on earth. Unlike our opponents, we are proud to say — here and abroad — that America is exceptional.

My fellow Americans, few elections in our history have offered Americans such a clear choice.
And the clearer Americans are about these differences, the larger will be our margin of victory.

— Dennis Prager, a nationally syndicated columnist and radio talk-show host, is the author of Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph. He may be contacted through his website, dennisprager.com.

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/315123

 

Obama's relentless negativity--unable to run on his own record, keeps attacking Romney

Obama's relentless negativity

President, unable to run on his own record, keeps attacking Romney

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

 

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Susan Walsh/AP

President Obama has waged a negative campaign against Mitt Romney.

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There is a saying that “politics ain’t beanbag,” referring to the hostile nature that is often encountered in the throes of campaigns and elections. And though we’ve seen fierce battles in past, most recently between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in 2008’s Democratic primaries, the fight between those two opponents pales in comparison to the mudslinging we’ve seen in 2012.

It’s also mostly been one-sided.

While the more meek Mitt Romney has stuck to challenging the President on the issues of the day, like Obama’s feeble economic record, Obama’s campaign has spent weeks attacking Romney on everything but the issues.

Thus far, we’ve heard Obama disingenuously charge that Romney is anti-education and accuse him of not wanting to invest in the future — while also ridiculing Romney’s personal wealth. We’ve heard Obama aide Stephanie Cutter make unsubstantiated and off-the-wall claims that Romney could be a felon for allegedly not paying his taxes. Vice President Joe Biden has tried to convince voters that Romney wants to return to the days of slavery, and a pro-Obama Super PAC, Priorities USA, released an ad that accused Romney of causing a women’s death by shutting down a steel plant. Plus, there’s the whole spurious “war on women.”

They have gone too far. Negative advertising and targeted attacks on the stump can do damage. But they also run the risk of backfiring.

Polls do show that Obama's smear campaign against Romney has worked to a degree. But not without harm to himself: While there has been an uptick in Romney’s negatives, both candidates have suffered. Surprisingly, the negative tone of the campaign has taken a greater toll on Obama, the man responsible (if indirectly) for most of the vitriol. According to an NBC/WSJ poll conducted in late July, “very negative” views of both are now at a record high, with 32% holding a “very negative” view of Obama, and 24% of Romney.

Those numbers represent unusually high dissatisfaction this early into the race. They’re also tough to turn around this late in the game.

First, voters aren’t stupid. They understand when a line has been crossed and attacks get so vicious and detached from reality that the negative attack triggers the opposite of the intended result. The electorate tends to side with an underdog when lines are crossed by his opponent. So when CBS News ran a damaging piece on George W. Bush’s military service in 2004 that turned out to be largely untrue, many voters sympathized with Bush.

Secondly, when the primary issue for voters is the economy, harping about tax returns and charging that your opponent hates women and children makes Obama look out of touch. Never underestimate how savvy the electorate is when it comes to the economy. If people are hurting like they are now, they want answers about the doom-and-gloom employment situation, not personal jabs.

John McCain made this mistake in 2008: Rather than talk about the financial collapse as people’s retirement plans dissipated before their very eyes, he focused on Bill Ayers and Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, much to his campaign’s detriment.

There is also risk that voters will become so disgusted with this race that they will choose not to vote altogether. Currently, the enthusiasm is firmly with Republicans and the Romney-Ryan ticket, not Obama’s base, much of which has been left disillusioned with his record. If Obama lowers the bar any further, he runs the risk of alienating swing voters and independents who are so disgusted with the entire process they simply choose to stay home.

Romney may have taken heat for playing too nice — but it could pay off in the end. By sticking to solutions and staying above board, he can be the positive, inclusive alternative to the negative and nasty Obama of 2012. In other words, the kind of candidate Obama claimed to be in 2008.

andrea@andreatantaros.com

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/obama-relentless-negativity-article-1.1143143#ixzz24hfLlUy3

Who Racializes Welfare Reform? All racial, all the time from the Democrats and MSM

Who Racializes Welfare Reform?
All racial, all the time from the Democrats and MSM (redundant, I know).

BY THE EDITORS

The Romney campaign criticizes the Obama administration for gutting welfare reform, and the Democratic chorus sings the familiar refrain: “Racist!” Leading the choir is tingly countertenor Chris Matthews of MSNBC: “When you start talking about work requirements,” he thundered at Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus, “you know what game you’re playing, and everybody knows what game you’re playing: It’s a race card.” This judgment was immediately confirmed by Thomas Edsall of the New York Times and Timothy Noah of The New Republic, among others.

There is racial politics at work here, and, as usual, it is a Democratic initiative.
 

Before proceeding to the question of Democratic race-baiting, it is worth paying a moment’s attention to the substantive policy question here. As Mr. Noah disingenuously puts it, the Obama administration says it has the authority to give waivers to states “allowing them to experiment with alternative ways to meet the work requirement” imposed by the Clinton-Gingrich welfare reforms.


One of the ways in which states could be allowed to “meet the work requirement” is by not meeting the work requirement, i.e., by sending out welfare checks without requiring that nearly half the recipients perform 30 hours of work-related activities (which is not a particularly burdensome standard to begin with). This is important because, as Jim Manzi and others have shown, work requirements are one of the only policy innovations that have been shown in real-world trials to be effective in moving people from welfare to work. Undermine the work requirement and you undermine welfare reform in toto.
 

The Left never accepted the legitimacy of welfare reform, even though it came with Bill Clinton’s signature on it, and always regarded the initiative as being tainted by racism. Erasing welfare reform now is the Left’s opportunity to scrub away what it wrongly believes to be a blight on the record of the Democratic party rather than the key achievement of the Clinton administration.
 

Mr. Matthews’s accusations were, as is his style, presented without evidence or argument, and indeed without anything that might even charitably be called intellectual content. That he immediately connects welfare in his mind with race is of course telling: The majority of American welfare recipients are white. Blacks are disproportionately represented on the welfare rolls, it is true. That is not the only place in which black Americans are overrepresented: As conservatives have been shouting from the rooftops for a couple of years now, the black unemployment rate is a national scandal — reason enough to fire Barack Obama on its own. But the majority of unemployed people, like the majority of welfare recipients — and the majority of the country, of course — are white.


Reducing the welfare rolls, like reducing the unemployment rate (and the two are not unrelated), is necessary to rebuilding the economic and human strength of the country for Americans of all races. Mr. Matthews here exhibits a crude, zero-sum view of politics and the economy, and then takes the extra step of attributing that crude, zero-sum view to his opponents. This is startling in its simplemindedness.
 

Mr. Noah takes a depressingly similar tack, arguing that the alleged Republican racism is (inevitably) “subtle” and encompasses attacks on the health-care law, inasmuch as such attacks consist in accusing “Obama of taking money away from (mainly white recipients of) Medicare to fund (majority non-white recipients of) Obamacare.” But it’s far from clear that the beneficiaries of Obamacare will be mostly non-white; the vast majority of those Americans who do not receive insurance through their employers will be eligible for either subsidized premiums or Medicaid. This is a childish shell game: If Romney wants to repeal Obamacare to support Medicare, he’s a racist; if he wants to reform Medicare, he hates old people.
 

Democrats’ proprietary attitude toward African-Americans is a disgrace, one that nine in ten black voters unfortunately reinforce at every electoral opportunity. Welfare reform is not about limiting the transfer of money from white taxpayers to non-white welfare recipients, but about ensuring that programs intended to help the poor and ease their transition into the productive economy do not in the end damage the poor, corrupt public institutions, and constrain the economy. The Democrats know that a voter dependent on the government — whether a welfare recipient or an EPA employee — is a Democratic voter, and they actively cultivate that dependency. President Obama’s economy is driving more Americans onto President Obama’s swelling welfare rolls. Republicans seek to reverse both of those trends, which would be self-evidently good for all Americans. The best the Democrats can do in such a situation is to shout “Racist!” and so they will.
 

 

More from Goldberg, Fund, Trinko, and Geraghty on NRO.

 

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Romney on the rise

By JOHN PODHORETZ

 

Hurricane permitting, the GOP convention kicks off Monday, and with it, the preliminaries are over and the general election begins in earnest. How stands the race?

At first glance, and even second and third glances, every indication is that we’re in for a nail-biter.

 The RealClearPolitics average, which aggregates all public polls, now has Barack Obama ahead nationally by a mere point.

The two tracking polls, which survey voters every day and collect data over each three-day period, have the race tied.

There’s reason to think Mitt Romney is in better condition than the national polls show.

First, one has to consider the effect on Romney of the Obama campaign’s unprecedented barrage against him. Chicago spent an astounding $120 million over the summer, much of it on negative ads targeting Romney personally, and almost all of it in 12 battleground states. To give you a sense of how much spending that is, the McCain campaign in 2008 spent a mere $75 million in the general election against Obama in all 50 states.

Though Romney has certainly been bloodied a bit — we all know how he won’t release a lot of his tax returns — the polling from those states and nationally suggests he’s suffered mere flesh wounds. We won’t really know if the Obama campaign managed to cut deeply enough to cause a lingering infection until the general election campaign is in full swing.

But if the infection doesn’t materialize, that will mean the Obama campaign spent tens and tens of millions for nothing. On June 23, Obama was up in the RCP average by 2.4 points. Yesterday, two months later, 1 point. All that spending, and Romney’s position actually improved.

Nobody could argue that Romney has run a dazzling campaign. Indeed, he didn’t even try. Boston spent the summer husbanding its resources and accreting a massive amount of money to spend once he is formally the candidate of the GOP.

September will begin with Romney holding a gigantic financial advantage — and he will be using it closer to the election, when (assuming it’s well-conceived and useful) such spending will be far more effective than summer ads. Even more important for Romney was his vice-presidential pick. The selection of Paul Ryan has proved to be a spectacular success, and spectacular in unexpected ways.

First, and unpredictably, the pick strengthened Romney’s support among seniors. It was thought Ryan’s budgetary plans for Medicare would frighten seniors, but Romney spent a week hammering home that under his plan Medicare would not change for anyone over 55 — whereas Obama had already stripped $716 billion from Medicare to pay for other aspects of ObamaCare.

In Florida, to take the most potent example, Romney’s support among the elderly has boomed.
Then there’s the effect of the pick on Ryan’s home state of Wisconsin. There has been a surge toward Romney since the Ryan pick, and the state is now generally considered a toss-up. On June 11, Obama was up by 4.4 points in the RCP average; as of today, that’s 1.4 points.

In a very close race, Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes — votes that electoral-college fanatics playing with all kinds of scenarios to get Romney to the 270 he needs to win have consistently assigned to Obama — could be decisive.

Even more telling is what Wisconsin polls suggest about Obama’s standing nationwide. If things go badly for him in the fall, Wisconsin will have been the great harbinger, beginning in 2010.

Obama won the state by 14 points in 2008. In the midterm elections of 2010, Wisconsin was part of the great shellacking delivered to Obama and Democrats, as reformer Scott Walker took the governorship by 6 points.

When Walker sought to limit the power of the state’s unions, they ginned up a recall effort this year that cost Democrats months of effort and tens of millions of dollars — and lost when Walker got almost exactly the same percentage of votes he had in 2010.

Of course, Obama can change the momentum of the race, which seems to be moving in Romney’s favor with a brilliant performance from here on in and better economic data to buttress it.

But he hasn’t shown any political brilliance in a long time, and there’s not much evidence the economy is going to do him favors. (And if Democrats think one repugnant Senate candidate in Missouri is going to turn this around, they’re delusional.)

For his part, Romney can halt his own momentum. He’s done it before; he did it several times during the GOP primaries.

He is also poised for takeoff.
jpodhoretz@gmail.com

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/romney_on_the_rise_8eNu33gii9jjQzDQ5s65AJ#ixzz24VsV5O31

Is The Media Coordinating On Race Baiting? Ask John Harris and Politico

By: Erick Erickson
 

We should not forget that John Harris of the Politico, who asked the stupidest and most irrelevant questions of any moderator during the GOP Primary debates, is married to the former head of NARAL in Virginia.

We should not forget that Jonathan Allen of the Politico once worked for Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
We should not forget that Andy Barr of the Politico left the Politico to go work for the Democratic National Committee.

We should not forget any of this because I do not believe it is any accident that today the Politico has a big story from John Harris about race in the 2012 election.

The welfare attacks came up suddenly from the Romney campaign, which said little about the issue when Obama’s administration changed policy to let states seek waivers on the work requirements. The Romney welfare ads, which have been on heavily in battleground states, prominently feature Bill Clinton signing the welfare reform bill into law. The first ad in the series said that Obama moved “quietly” to “gut” the Clinton reforms so that now, “They just send you your welfare check. … Welfare-to-work goes back to being plain old welfare.”

The welfare ads — regardless of their racial intent — seemed designed to help Romney gain ground on Obama since many independent voters in key demographics, such as swing-state Catholics, tend to view government aid to the poor with suspicion, according to polling data.

Why not an accident that this story appears today?

It comes on the same day the Los Angeles Times runs a story that the GOP is trying to make an all white party look brown, NBC would not show any of the speeches from minorities at the RNC Convention on their website, BS-NBC ditched all minorities during their live coverage of the convention, and Chuck Todd, whose wife used to work for the Democratic Party, says the GOP is pushing a diversity card.

I wonder if any of these people have noticed that the Republican Party has more elected hispanic Congressmen and Governors than the Democrats?

It is not an accident that the media, immediately after the Democrats started pushing out the War on Women, began running stories about the GOP’s hostility to women. It is now not an accident that the media, led by NBC and the Politico (which also partnered on that pathetic GOP primary debate), would peddle out the GOP and race stories.

It is far too much to be a coincidence that the Politico and NBC have ties, sometimes in the same bed, to Democrat and leftwing activists and then hop out of bed on the same page as the Democrats’ talking points.

http://www.redstate.com/2012/08/29/is-the-media-coordinating-on-race-baiting-ask-john-harris-and-politico/

Four years after he was swept to victory, how Obama's election campaign is a joyless slog

Low blows, lower turnouts and low expectations: Four years after he was swept to victory, how Obama's election campaign is a joyless slog

By Toby Harnden

Barack Obama was swept to the White House in 2008 by a wave of idealism and inspirational campaigning in which he encapsulated the mood of the nation with his slogans of ‘Hope’, ‘Change’ and ‘Yes we can’.

Then, his message was a fundamentally positive one. Americans wanted an end to the Bush era but that almost went without saying. Obama pointed to his own vision of the country; a post-partisan, post-racial America in which gridlock in Washington was ended and common-sense centrist solutions were adopted.

What a difference four years makes. Obama is campaigning ferociously for a second term – and he is a candidate who would have probably have been disdained by the Obama of 2008.

Four more years? President Obama, pictured left in March 2008, and right, at an event in Las Vegas earlier this week; the Commander-in-Chief is waging a relentlessly negative campaign for the White House

Drawing crowds: While many came to hear Obama speak Wednesday at Canyon Springs High School in Las Vegas, it's nowhere near the numbers he was reaching in 2008

Obama is waging a relentlessly negative campaign of changing the subject from the one that, overwhelmingly, most Americans care about – the economy. Every week there is a new issue his campaign seizes on, preferring to talk about something, anything other than jobs and 8.3 per cent unemployment.

While Obama is still drawing sizable crowds, they are nothing like the size of those who flocked to see him in 2008. In Las Vegas, Obama held a rally in a high school before more than 2,000 people but there was space for plenty more.

On the outskirts of Manchester, New Hampshire on Monday morning, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan attracted more than 3,000 people who patiently queued in lines across a field to be searched by the Secret Service.

More...

• Bad news Barack: Electoral College computer model that's correctly predicted presidential elections since 1980 shows big WIN for Romney

Crowd size is not everything – as Obama himself could attest after losing in the 2008 New Hampshire primary to Hillary Clinton even though he had attracted unprecedented numbers to his events, eclipsing the former First Lady by two or three to one.

But the difference between the numbers Obama is attracting now compared to four years ago should be a cause of deep concern to his campaign.

More significantly, the mood of the crowds is different. There is a sullenness, even resentment, that was not present in 2008. Ask an Obama supporter about their man and as often as not you will get a few words about him and then a demeaning attack on Romney or Ryan.

Bright eyes: Then-senator Obama is pictured speaking during a town hall meeting in San Antonio, Texas in March of 2008

Popularity: The president's likability surged during his speech at the Victory Column in Berlin in 2008

They are taking their cue from the candidate himself. Obama used not to mention Romney by name. In Las Vegas, he did so nine times.
And while he was careful to call him ‘Governor Romney’ and not stoop to the kind of attacks he has left to his campaign and its allies (such as accusing him of being a felon or linking him to the death of a woman from cancer), the contempt he has for his opponent was almost visceral.

Significantly, the mood of the crowds is different. There is a sullenness, even resentment, that was not present in 2008. Ask an Obama supporter about their man and as often as not you will get a few words about him and then a demeaning attack on Romney or Ryan.

 

The crowd sensed it. When Obama mentioned ‘Republicans in Congress’, they began to boo loudly. Obama attempted to quiet them: ‘No, no, no, no, no, don’t boo – vote,’ he said. ‘That’s right. Vote.’
But the crowd had taken their cue from Obama – the booing reflected the tone he had adopted. It was clever politics – whip up the crowd, then make a high-minded appeal for civility while at the same time trying to turn their anger into action.

Obama has taken on Ryan by name – presidential candidates, never mind incumbent presidents, don’t normally stoop to mentioning the bottom half of the opposing ticket.

In 2008, the Obama campaign was full of endless possibilities and expectations of a bright new horizon. This time, it’s a joyless slog. And there’s something else: Obama now tends to look emptily past rather than at his audiences. It’s as if the light in his eyes has gone out.

Obama has seized on the bone-headed 'legitimate rape' remarks of Todd Akin, a previously obscure figure running for the US Senate in Missouri, to try to make them central to his campaign.
At a New York fundraiser on Wednesday, Obama joked about referred 'the Senator of Missouri, Mr Akin' (he's a congressman) who 'sits on the House Committee on Science and Technology but somehow missed science class'.
The Obama campaign appears intent on turning the Democratic convention into one long gloat about Akin's comments in the hope of driving women voters away from Romney. Obama advisers are even talking of Akin being "on the ticket" with Romney and Ryan.

In Las Vegas, a campaign event and a stridently partisan one at that, Obama’s lectern was decorated with the presidential seal. Back in 2010, Obama’s then press secretary Robert Gibbs said that ‘at strictly political events we would not use’ the seal, which is a symbol of the office of the presidency not of a political candidate.

Another remarkable thing is that many of those at Obama’s events – like many people across the country - are not listening to him. In Reno on Tuesday evening, it was at times hard to follow what Obama was saying because of the chatter.

Knowing smile: Then-presidential hopeful Obama attends a rally at the Community College of Beaver County in Pennsylvania in 2008

A number of those attending seemed only to want to get a picture of themselves with Obama speaking in the background. In 2008, audiences would be rapt, almost mesmerised, when Obama spoke. At Romney and Ryan events there is near silence and many an intent, furrowed brow as the case for change is made.

In Las Vegas, the crowd chanted ‘Yes We Can’ before Obama appeared but it sounded like a dirge rather than the perky, upbeat chant of 2008. It was so different that one local reporter even walked over to me to ask what they were chanting.

Behind Obama was emblazoned the word ‘Forward’, a slogan once used by Josef Stalin. But at the core of Obama’s case is the notion that President George W. Bush’s policies are responsible for the mess America is in. Listening to him at times it is as if the last four years never happened.

Obama’s campaign schedule reveals a lot about how he seeks victory in November. Last week, he spend three days in Iowa and held nine events. Iowa has six electoral college votes of the 270 Obama needs to win.

Easy does it: President Obama gestures as he is interrupted by a protester as he speaks at a campaign event at Canyon Springs High School in Nevada earlier this week

50 shades of grey: The president shows signs of wear and hair with white and grey strands

On Saturday, Obama held two events in New Hampshire, which has four Electoral College votes and on Tuesday and Wednesday he was in Nevada, which has six. Obama, moreover, won Nevada by more than 12 percentage points in 2008.

What does this tell is? That Obama is on the defensive and knows the only way he can win re-election is by the narrowest of margins, by ‘slicing and dicing’ – his own pejorative term – and eking out a 51 to 49 per cent victory, crawling across the line to 270 electoral college votes.

Perhaps the most striking thing of all is Obama’s demeanour. He has visibly greyed over the past four years but that happens to most world leaders. What is more noteworthy is his lugubrious expression and the fact that he grimaces much more often than he smiles.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2192704/Toby-Harnden-Barack-Obamas-joyless-slog-election.html#ixzz24hcjYRQS

NBC News and the rest of Obama's media minions are desperate to push the line that the GOP is dangerously close to a whites-only club

The narrative NBC News and the rest of Obama's Media Minions are desperate to push is that the GOP is dangerously close to a whites-only club, you know, kind of like NBC News and the rest of the media.

by John Nolte

Early on during the convention coverage last night, NBC's Chief White House Correspondent, Chuck Todd and his goatee, roamed the floor of the convention hall to reassure MSNBC viewers that the only reason people of color were showing up on their television screens was due to the fact that the GOP strategically placed non-white convention-goers for maximum camera advantage.

In other words, Todd and his goatee told the audience that non-white convention-goers were nothing more than tokens.

Chuck Todd is nothing if not a helluva race-baiting shill for Obama.

Then NBC did something truly amazing….

No, really; it was truly amazing….

Not one speech by a person of color was broadcast on MSNBC.

Not a single one.

Not even Artur Davis, and his speech was a very big deal.

Some media apologists are claiming Fox News also didn’t air these speeches, but Fox did air Davis's speech.

And that's a distinction with a big difference. There is no excuse for not airing the Davis speech -- only a desperate political agenda.

Yep, when it comes to airing GOP convention speeches, the NBC policy is "Whites Only."

Some call that racism.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2012/08/29/NBC-Whites-Only-Speech-Policy

Perhaps the most perfect rant--precisely why the economy sucks and why O must go (libs would have nothing but mindless crap to say in response, but they are lefties)

This

Perhaps the most perfect rant, from commenter Voluble in Andy's earlier Preference Cascade post. Me and a few other morons talked about it some today.
Presented without additional commentary, because it needs none.

129 As a small business owner all I can say is that I think the current sentiment in the small business community is that we didn't sign up for this shit. Y'all can vote for whatever the hell you want but we are not going to be a part of it.

I have seen more owners get out of the business or retire in the past couple of years than ever before and with the ACA on the horizon the jobs these businesses produced will not be replaced. The economics no longer work. This is why unemployment is always so high in socialist countries. What you have to go through to have employees is just brutal.

But here's the thing about what Obama said --- he has it exactly backwards. The government didn't build any of that shit he is talking about --- we built it. We are the ones who paid for it. Not only did we build our businesses we built the schools and the roads and everything else he thinks was generated out of thin air. If you want to get technical about it the businesses and taxpayers that came along before we did built it all and now we are building what comes next.

And not only that, but we did it with the albatross of a predatory, corrupt and overbearing government hanging around our necks at every juncture.

And now we have had enough.

I haven't made more than $50k from my business but one or two years of the past 15. But now that it is time to cash out after providing literally hundreds of jobs I get the stink eye and get castigated for being a member of the 1%. Even though I can remember sitting on the edge of the bed and holding my head in my hands wondering what I had done risking everything I had to create a business and wondering how it would all work out when I had just finished working several days in a row with no sleep... I am the enemy. Even though I didn't take a paycheck for the first year of the business and later skipped other paychecks to meet payroll or to pay taxes I am somehow at fault for the fact that all of these people sitting on their asses or working their cushy government jobs with the large pensions funded by armies of tax collectors and regulators may have to go without.

Well, I already went without so they can bloody well shut the fuck up and take their turn in the barrel! If they want to risk everything they have or work their asses off with no guarantee of success only to be told at the end that they were not responsible for their own success and don't deserve their rewards then they are welcome to go down that path and see what it is like. But the number of people who will pursue the American dream and build the economy from the roots up will be greatly decreased in the current atmosphere and all of these self-entitled idiots will sit around wondering why the government is still going broke and why no one is hiring.

No country can survive socialism. It just doesn't happen. Sooner or later the bill comes due. But before it does you always get demagogic idiots like Obama, or Chavez who try to blame their failures on the only people who are keeping everything afloat. It is not enough they sank the damn ship... they have to come after the people in the life boats too.

That is the sort of mentality we are dealing with.
 by: Voluble
 

 http://ace.mu.nu/archives/332047.php

The Really Destructive Hurricane

by John Hinderaker in 2012 Presidential Election, Economy, Obama administration

Michael Ramirez is in Tampa, attending the convention. He took time out to draw this cartoon, which contrasts Hurricane Isaac with the force that has really brought destruction to America: Barack Obama’s left-wing, crony-socialist policies: