The Peoples' Choice

At least you know he wouldn't make any campaign gaffes:

The Misfortune Cookie

The Linsanity continues:

Ben & Jerry’s tweeted an apology to anyone who was offended by its new limited-edition Taste the Lin-Sanity frozen yogurt flavor.

The company tweeted, “On behalf of Ben & Jerry’s Boston Scoop Shops, we offer a heartfelt apology if anyone was offended by our handmade Linsanity flavor that we offered at our Harvard Square location. We are proud and honored to have Jeremy Lin hail from one of our fine, local universities, and we are huge sports fans. We were swept up in the nationwide Linsanity momentum. Our intention was to create a flavor to honor Jeremy Lin’s accomplishments and his meteoric rise in the NBA, and recognize that he was a local Harvard graduate. We try to demonstrate our commitment as a Boston-based, valued-led business and if we failed in this instance, we offer our sincere apologies.”

If I were them, I'd apologize for making yogurt instead of ice cream in the first place...

What's Fair Is Fair

So much for class warfare. Most Americans apparently don't want to punish the rich:

Precisely 75 percent said the right level for top earners was 30 percent or below.

The current rate for top earners is 35 percent. Only 4 percent thought it was appropriate to take 40 percent, which is approximately the level that President Obama is seeking from January 2013 onward.

The Hill poll also found that 73 percent of likely voters believe corporations should pay a lower rate than the current 35 percent, as both the White House and Republicans push plans to lower rates.

The new data seem to run counter to several polls that have found support for raising taxes on high-income earners. In an Associated Press-GfK poll released Friday, 65 percent said they favored President Obama’s “Buffett Rule” that millionaires should pay at least 30 percent of their income. And a Pew poll conducted in June found 66 percent of adults favored raising taxes on those making more than $250,000 as a way to tackle the deficit.

You'd think those other polls were skewed, or something...

Silence At The Top

They told me that if Republicans ran, we'd have a President who used the law to silence his critics, and they were right!

In case after case, the Espionage Act has been deployed as a kind of ad hoc Official Secrets Act, which is not a law that has ever found traction in America, a place where the people’s right to know is viewed as superseding the government’s right to hide its business.

In the most recent case, John Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. officer who became a Democratic staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was charged under the Espionage Act with leaking information to journalists about other C.I.A. officers, some of whom were involved in the agency’s interrogation program, which included waterboarding.

For those of you keeping score, none of the individuals who engaged in or authorized the waterboarding of terror suspects have been prosecuted, but Mr. Kiriakou is in federal cross hairs, accused of talking to journalists and news organizations, including The New York Times.

First, they came for the whistleblowers...

Reaping The Rewards

They say that history is written by the winners, and they can get rewarded for it, as well:

Consider the case of Aurora Health Care, a Wisconsin organization, like Epic. Judy Murphy, formerly a vice president of information services at Aurora, now the deputy national coordinator for programs and policy at HHS’s Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT—and like Faulkner, a member of the Health IT Policy Committee—also wanted to delay the implementation of Stage 2 criteria. Aurora was working to attest to Stage 1 criteria with another vendor, but providers must use certified electronic health records (EHR) technology for a full year before applying for Stage 2 stimulus fund payments. Curiously enough, in October of 2010, Aurora announced that it was going to switch to Epic as a vendor, but that the switch would take place over a three-year period, at least.

If it takes three years from Aurora’s announcement that it will switch to Epic, then the switch won’t be completed until 2013. Once the switch takes place, Aurora will have Epic as a vendor for one year until 2014, when the delayed implementation of Stage 2 criteria is now supposed to occur . . . at Faulkner’s recommendation. This means that Aurora will qualify for stimulus fund payments, while Epic gets to have a new customer. Both companies get rich.

Of course, according to the Obama administration, this would be an economic success story...

Wide Asleep

Just a reminder of what listening to endless monotony is like:

“Americans are tired of being tired,” Joe Biden said. “It’s clear that the American people have decided it’s time to get up. They’re tired of being told that we’re in a long, slow drift.”

The Other John Hinckley

Don't you realize, he's an artist:

The man who tried to kill President Ronald Reagan more than 30 years ago said he would like to be known as something other than a would-be assassin.

John Hinckley made the statement to a doctor who interviewed him in the past year at a Washington mental hospital. The statement and other pieces of information about Hinckley’s life are part of hundreds of pages of documents prepared for court hearings in Hinckley’s case.
....

A doctor who testified for the government noted in his 80-page report that Hinckley regrets not being able to show or sell the paintings he does, most of them landscapes.

“I would like to be known as something other than the would-be assassin,” Hinckley said.

Another doctor reported that around the time Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in January 2011, Hinckley commented: “Wow. Is that how people see me?” Then he vented frustration about being unable to change the public’s perception.

“I don’t have a microphone in my hand. I don’t have the video camera. So no one can hear my music. No one can see my art. I have these other aspects of my life that no one knows about. I’m an artist. I’m a musician. Nobody knows that. They just see me as the guy who tried to kill Reagan,” he said.

Yes, it's terrible to be known for being totally insane, isn't it?

Hooray For Holly-Old

The Oscars literally showed their age:

The whole night looked like an AARP pep rally, starting with an introduction by Morgan Freeman, who was followed by Billy Crystal, returning to host his ninth Oscar ceremony. And age was his theme of the night. He did his usual comic medley of movie moments, including a sketch with George Clooney in “The Descendants,” urging Mr. Crystal to host the show. He promised “the youngest, hippest writers in town” and the camera panned to a group of drooping, old white men from the film “Moneyball.”
....

Similarly, Christopher Plummer, 82, won for the supporting actor award for playing an gay father in “Beginners.” That character, too, is shown through the prism of a straight leading man, Ewan McGregor. The industry congratulates itself on its big, progressive heart but it’s the progressivism of a 62-year-old white man — the median age of Academy voters, according to a study by The Los Angeles Times.

Even “The Artist,” which seems so fresh, works as a fantasy for older Hollywood men — a star facing decline finds new vigor from the love of a younger, trophy wife.

Hollywood does seem increasingly haunted by its past these days.

Growth Patterns

How the beast gets fed:

As the following animation from the NYT so vividly shows, government benefits across the US have nearly tripled from a modest 7.8% of all personal income in 1969 to a 'European' 17.6% in 2009. And this before Obama went to town (as a reminder total debt has risen by over $4 trillion under Obama - a significant portion of that has gone to fund social welfare). Thus, we are confident that as of this writing, the government accounts for at least 20% and possibly as high as a quarter of all personal income. One can use any word to describe that transition depending on one's personal political preferences, except for one: "sustainable."

Short-term thinking eventually leads to long-term disaster...

Cash Cutoff

G20 to Europe: You're on your own:

A communique agreed by G20 finance ministers in Mexico City last night said a decision by eurozone leaders to boost their own firewall was "essential" before any more external resources were allocated via the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

"Euro area countries will reassess the strength of their support facilities in March. This will provide an essential input in our ongoing consideration to mobilise resources to the IMF," the official said, quoting from the draft.

George Osborne, the Chancellor, said: "The rest of the world will only consider extra resources for the IMF once the eurozone themselves contribute more to supporting their own currency. We have to see the colour of the eurozone's money first – and, quite frankly, that hasn't happened. Until it does, there's no question of extra IMF money from Britain or probably anyone else."

G20 finance ministers did agree that any extra IMF funding would come via bi-lateral loans. Christine Lagarde, managing director of the IMF, added: "G20 countries must now strengthen resilience to further shocks that could result from still fragile financial systems, high public and private debt, and higher world oil prices."

Don't tell the Spaniards, they're already mad.

Flat Broke

Well, this is good news:

In a stark warning ahead of next month’s Budget, the Chancellor said there was little the Coalition could do to stimulate the economy.

Mr Osborne made it clear that due to the parlous state of the public finances the best hope for economic growth was to encourage businesses to flourish and hire more workers.

“The British Government has run out of money because all the money was spent in the good years,” the Chancellor said. “The money and the investment and the jobs need to come from the private sector.”

Mr Osborne’s bleak assessment echoes that of Liam Byrne, the former chief secretary to the Treasury, who bluntly joked that Labour had left Britain broke when he exited the Government in 2010.

Over here, our liberals seem intent on doing the same thing...

Ashes To Ashes

Ryan Seacrest meets Sacha Baron Cohen on the red carpet:

Drinking Games

Utah has come up with a unique solution to a sticky situation:

In a state where drinking is a discouraged pastime, one lawmaker is pushing a bill that would require the Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission to include at least two drinking members.

The proposal by Democratic state Rep. Brian Doughty doesn't specify how frequently or heavily one would have to imbibe to qualify. The bill states the resident drinkers must "for at least one year before being appointed and during their term, be consumers" of alcohol.

And they'll have to sign an affidavit attesting to that.

The sponsor isn't looking for alcoholics. He testified that he just wants consumers of the product to have "representation" on the commission.

"This just ensures that we have a voice from those that we are regulating," Doughty said.

Who says governments don't listen?

Reviewing The Reviewers

This is why lawyers get a bad reputation:

A Florida lawyer unhappy with poor reviews posted in an online attorney review site is threatening legal action to shutter the LawyerRatingz.com site.

In response to the threatened legal action, the Electronic Frontier Foundation asked a federal judge Thursday to declare the website immune from any threatened legal action on the matter. The EFF contends that, even if third-party comments about attorneys are defamatory, federal law immunizes the Sunnyvale-based website from being sued for the speech of its users. . . . The EFF, in a complaint filed in San Francisco federal court, said LawyerRatingz.com is protected by the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which says “interactive computer services” cannot be “treated as the publisher or speaker of any information” provided by a third party.

In other words, get over yourself, sir.

Meet Your Constituents

What happened when one Congresscritter did:

Even though Hochul's town hall meeting was open to any topic, the large crowd focused on the contraception coverage issue.

When Hochul spoke in support of the President, the crowd booed. Many in the audience carried signs, including one that read: "Kathy why have you betrayed our Catholic institutions?" One woman in the crowd told Hochul: "This President has lied to us repeatedly when he proclaims support for conscience protection in his infamous speech at Notre Dame as well as in the executive order he signed following passage of the health care law. He is not worthy of your support in this matter." Another man shouted "It's an insult to the Catholics in this country to even listen to that gibberish. It is an absolute insult and Catholics deserve better. We were taking care of this country's sick long before the government got involved in it."

People are still upset about this, it seems.

A Passage To Protest

Imperialism, environmentalist style:

The Indian prime minister has blamed US non-governmental organisations for the delay in commissioning the Koodankulam nuclear plant in Tamil Nadu state.

Manmohan Singh told the prestigious Science journal that these groups did not appreciate India's growing energy requirements.

The plant has been stalled by protests from local people over safety concerns.

Mr Singh also blamed US and Scandinavian groups for opposing genetically modified crops in India.
....

Referring to a 2010 government decision to defer the commercial cultivation of the genetically modified vegetable BT brinjal, Mr Singh said biotechnology had enormous potential and India must make use of it to increase agricultural produce.

"But there are controversies. There are NGOs, often funded from the United States and the Scandinavian countries, which are not fully appreciative of the development challenges that our country faces."

The new imperialists appreciate them. They just don't want you to solve them except on their terms.

Volunteers

In tough times, the volunteer spirit isthriving:

According to a Volunteering in America study, last year 63 million Americans volunteered more than eight billion hours. When you calculate average wages and benefits for city employees, local governments saved $173 billion.

In many places churches are leading the way. “We’re at a time when, as citizens we need to be giving ourselves away freely to serve our communities,” says Dave Edler, pastor at Yakima’s Foursquare Church which held a park cleanup with several hundred volunteers recently.

But not everyone is thrilled about the civic spirit. Some unions are pushing back, fearing volunteers are cutting into their territory. “They’re eroding the number of hours for our people,” says Ian Gordon of Laborer’s Union 1239 in Seattle. “It’s of great concern that they might be doing further work that we would normally do.”

Gordon’s union represent 900 city employees, nearly half of them maintenance workers in the Parks Department, which cut staff by 14 percent. He’s met with city officials over the volunteer issue and insisted on a significant roadblock. Volunteers are not allowed to drive work trucks or use power equipment of any kind. No lawnmowers, no weed whackers, no leaf blowers.

Len Gilroy of the Reason Institute says it’s about protecting their turf. “Unions see a threat to jobs and lavish benefits that they’ve secured for their employees,” says Gilroy.

They're only doing the jobs that unionized workers sometimes won't do unless they get extra money...

DOMA For The Defense

Never mind the economy or Iran, the Republicans have a real issue to deal with:

House GOP leaders are appealing a federal court’s decision on Thursday that found a section of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) to be unconstitutional.

The action by the House Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group, which moved on behalf of GOP leaders, will send the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which earlier this month ruled against a ban on gay marriage in California.

Democrats are not supporting the appeal. “The Democratic leader and the Democratic whip decline to support the filing of this notice of appeal,” the notice read.

George W. Bush appointee Judge Jeffrey White found the DOMA unconstitutional in the Golinski v. Office of Personnel Management decision. He wrote that it was unconstitutional to offer healthcare benefits to heterosexual couples while denying the same benefits to same-sex couples.

Regardless of the merits of their argument, do Boehner and company really think this will go anywhere in the 9th Circuit, of all places?

Unshared Sacrifice

Share as I say, not as I don't:

First Lady Michelle Obama delivered a vigorous defense of her husband’s administration to about 300 supporters at a fundraising at a downtown Cincinnati hotel Thursday afternoon, saying President Obama’s work “is not done.”

“If any family in this country is struggling, we can not be satisfied with our own families’ good fortune," said the First Lady, who spoke before an audience at the Westin Hotel who had paid anywhere from $250 to $10,000 for the mid-day event.

Mrs. Obama spoke for nearly half an hour to the people in the ballroom. Before that, she appeared at a private reception with big donors where attendees had an opportunity to have their picture taken with the First Lady.

Mr. Obama, dressed in a sleeveless black dress, was introduced by Cincinnati Mayor Mark Mallory, who called her “a woman of poise, a woman of elegance, a woman of grace, and, I would say, a woman of intelligence.”

Her speech was largely devoted to reciting the accomplishments of the Obama administration and telling the crowd that her husband – raised by a single parent, with the help of his grandmother – understands the problems of struggling families “because he has lived them.”

“Who do we want to be?,’’ Mrs. Obama asked. “Will we be a country where success is limited to a few at the top? This country is strongest when we are all better off.”

Well, the people in her audience would certainly know what she was talking about, wouldn't they?

Naked Aggression

Jake Tapper shows how tough journalism is supposed to work:

TAPPER: The White House keeps praising these journalists who are — who’ve been killed –

CARNEY: I don’t know about “keep” — I think -

TAPPER: You’ve done it, Vice President Biden did it in a statement. How does that square with the fact that this administration has been so aggressively trying to stop aggressive journalism in the United States by using the Espionage Act to take whistleblowers to court?

You’re — currently I think that you’ve invoked it the sixth time, and before the Obama administration, it had only been used three times in history. You’re — this is the sixth time you’re suing a CIA officer for allegedly providing information in 2009 about CIA torture. Certainly that’s something that’s in the public interest of the United States. The administration is taking this person to court. There just seems to be disconnect here. You want aggressive journalism abroad; you just don’t want it in the United States.

As they say, you should watch the video-but for an administration used to softball questions from the media, this must have been an attention-getter.

In The Village

How well are all those cameras working out for Britain? Apparently not so good:

Privacy activists are worried that Britain will become the bleak totalitarian society George Orwell painted in his classic novel “1984,” where citizens were spied on and personal freedom sacrificed for the benefit of an all-powerful state.

“We are sleepwalking into a surveillance society where we’re watched from control rooms by anonymous people, says Emma Carr of the BBW. “The worrying thing is that we don’t actually know how many CCTV cameras there are out there."
....

The civil rights group Liberty estimates that the average Londoner is captured on camera around 300 times a day while BBW claims Britain has 20 percent of the world’s CCTV cameras and only 1 percent of the world’s population.

There is a perception that the cameras reduce the crime rate, but there is no evidence for that, say activists. “The Met police have said that in 2008, only one crime was solved for every 1,000 CCTV cameras,” says Carr.

Of course, some are fine with this:

“I’ve never really thought about them,” says Jane Taylor who commutes this route to work. “They’re not particularly obtrusive and I think it’s a good thing especially at night to think someone is keeping an eye on things.”

Nadine Shah, a bank worker, agrees. “If you’re not doing anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to worry about have you? If they deter crime and help the police I don’t see that being a problem. People say it’s like ‘1984’ but it’s a long way from that.”

Until it happens to you, that is...

Guitar Men

So, what happened with that infamous Gibson guitar raid?

The Christie Rule

Chris Christie tells Warren Buffett to pay up or shut up:

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who called for the nation’s wealthiest people to pay more taxes, should “just write a check and shut up.”

“I’m tired of hearing about it,” Christie told CNN’s Piers Morgan in an interview that aired last night. “If he wants to give the government more money, he’s got the ability to write a check. Go ahead and write it.”

Christie, a 49-year-old first-term Republican known for a blunt and caustic style, has proposed a 10 percent income-tax cut for every New Jersey resident. Democrats who control the Legislature say his plan would favor the rich. A family with a $50,000 annual income would pay $80 less under his plan, while someone earning $1 million would save $7,200, Democrats say.

Democrats “want you to be angry because your neighbor makes more than you do,” Christie said today at a town-hall meeting in Palisades Park. “That’s not the New Jersey I know, and it’s not the America that I know.”

The required video:

Mountain Man

Via PowerLine, this:

I don’t think most Americans understand how much federal spending and debt have risen during the Obama administration (and even before it, when Democrats took control of Congress in 2007) and are projected to rise in the future under Obama’s budget proposal. These two charts, from the Senate Budget Committee, tell the story in a very simple way. This one shows the federal debt per household from 2000 through 2022; the numbers are actual to the present and thereafter represent the projections in Obama’s FY 2013 budget. Those projections are taken at face value, rosy assumptions and all. Still, the picture is staggering:

Afghan Hound

Wow. I guess he really has turned into Bush after all:

"Afghan demonstrators parade an effigy representing US President Barack Obama as they shout anti-US slogans during a protest against Koran desecration in Jalalabad. At least nine demonstrators were shot dead and dozens wounded in violent protests across Afghanistan over the burning of the Koran at a US-run military base, officials said."

Dependency By Numbers

What the official unemployment rate really means:

At the end of 2007, Heritage conservatively estimates there were 59.4 million Americans significantly dependent on the government.

By the end of 2010, this number had risen to 67.3 million, an increase of nearly 8 million. It is likely that another two or three million were added in 2011, for a net increase of 10 million to 11 million over the past four years.

It is not a coincidence that the number of people participating in the labor force has comparably declined over the same period.

At the end of 2007, participation in the labor force was 66% of the available working age population, with a labor force of 146.2 million.

By the end of 2011, it was 64%, with a decrease of 5.4 million workers to 140.8 million. The official number of unemployed people rose from 7.7 million at the end of 2007 to 13.1 million at the end of 2011, without any accounting for those who were "too discouraged to look for work."

Nevertheless, as the government has included fewer and fewer people in the category of searching for work, the official unemployment rate continues to fall because both the numerator and the denominator used to make that calculation are losing equal amounts.

According to officialdom, if everybody were out of work and dependent on the government, then the unemployment rate would be zero. Wouldn't that be great?

Course Correction

Remember, it's not propaganda:

Montgomery College is revising plans to offer a summer class on the Occupy Wall Street movement -- geared toward high school students -- after residents complained that the class is promoting the Occupy movement's agenda to students.

The course in question, part of a summer program for students in grades 9 through 12, is called "Occupy MoCo!" (which, coincidentally, is also the Twitter handle of what appears to be a branch of the Occupy movement based in Montgomery County).

The course description asks students if they're "ready to join the movement for justice" and adds that "young people have the power to change their community, their schools, their future."

The Maryland school is the latest to bring Occupy into the classroom. Columbia, Brown and New York universities have similar offerings. But Montgomery College say the course isn't designed to teach teenagers to pick up a placard and pitch tents in a park. Rather, it's a critical look at grassroots social movements through the lens of Occupy, they said.

"It wasn't advocating or taking any stance on the Occupy movement," said Montgomery College spokeswoman Elizabeth Homan. "It's taking a current events subject that all the students have either read about or heard on the news and using it as a pivot point to talk about what's happening historically."

That's funny; I don't seem to recall similar courses about the Tea Party movement being offered...

Son Of Malaise

Welcome to the Change:

Only 22 percent of Americans say they are satisfied with the way things are going. Voters haven't been this unhappy with the country since George H.W. Bush's presidency, when only 21 percent of Americans reported being happy with the country's direction. And before that, the lowest approval rating was 19 percent during Jimmy Carter's first term.

What do the two presidencies have in common? Neither of them won re-election. And, if the trends holds true, Obama looks to be in an equally precarious situation.

The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research released its 2012 campaign outlook, and it's clear Obama's sitting in the same position George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter were in during the February before their election losses—voters don't feel good about the country.

Since liberals are all about feelings, shouldn't Team Obama be worried about this?