Wait, who's in office now?

Hypocrisy busts are too easy, but this one is so devoid of principle I cannot resist (hat tip @jamestaranto):

* "This theory of presidential power argues, in essence, that when the President acts in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief, he may make his own rules and cannot be bound by Congressional laws to the contrary. This is a theory of presidential dictatorship. These views are outrageous and inconsistent with basic principles of the Constitution as well as with two centuries of legal precedents. Yet they were the basic assumptions of key players in the Bush Administration in the days following 9/11."--Jack Balkin, Yale Law School, March 3, 2009

* " 'At the point at which the economy is melting down, who cares what the Supreme Court is going to say?' Professor Balkin said. 'It's the president's duty to save the Republic.' "--New York Times, July 25, 2011

He was against dictatorship before he was for it!

Jew baiting in The Guardian

James Taranto catches a hilarious correction in London's Guardian:

A quote by Tzipi Livni, Israel's former foreign minister, within a panel that formed part of the Palestine papers, was cut in a way that may have given a misleading impression. The quote appeared as: "The Israel policy is to take more and more land day after day and that at the end of the day we'll say that it is impossible, we already have the land and cannot create the state." To clarify, the full quote is: "I understand the sentiments of the Palestinians when they see the settlements being built. The meaning from the Palestinian perspective is that Israel takes more land, that the Palestinian state will be impossible, the Israel policy is to take more and more land day after day and that at the end of the day we'll say that it is impossible, we already have the land and cannot create the state." (What they said ... 24 January, page 4.)

See, the actual quote is a Livni describing Palestinian propaganda, but the paper edited it to present the Palestinian propaganda itself! Hilarious (in a macabre sort of way) example of the fundamental anti-Semitism that is so matter of fact on the European left.

Busted

James Taranto does a great job of exposing media hypocrisy, usually (but not always, as today) under the heading of "Two ___ in One!" Today he caught the execrable Cynthia Tucker describing herself as taking the "Rovian low road":

* "McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin, have themselves followed the Rovian low road by questioning Obama's patriotism."--Cynthia Tucker, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Oct. 26, 2008

* "There is simply no modern precedent for the behavior of Republicans in the U.S. Senate. They are not only hyper-partisan, but they are also petty, petulant and unpatriotic."--Cynthia Tucker, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Dec. 20, 2010

Legal only in the sense of not being against the law

Here is a hilarious passage from a typical regurgitation of DNC talking points by the New York Times wing of the party, in this case on Tom DeLay:

Mr. DeLay, the Texas Republican who had been the House majority leader, crowed that he had been "found innocent." But many of Mr. DeLay's actions remain legal only because lawmakers have chosen not to criminalize them.

Well, the Times editorial board certainly nailed this one.

I had grilled chicken breast for dinner. It is only legal for me to eat grilled chicken breast because lawmakers have chosen not to criminalize eating grilled chicken breast. Indeed, you might as well say that I am guilty of a crime, when you really think about it. For me to claim to be "innocent" would not really be honest, now would it?

Not to the editors of the Times, anyway.

Much ado about nothing?

Andrew Enum in the NYT:

“Anyone who has spent the past two days reading through the 92,000 military field reports and other documents made public by the whistle-blower site WikiLeaks may be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about. I’m a researcher who studies Afghanistan and have no regular access to classified information, yet I have seen nothing in the documents that has either surprised me or told me anything of significance. I suspect that’s the case even for someone who reads only a third of the articles on Afghanistan in his local newspaper.”

I don't even pretend to have looked through the paper mountain that WL dumped, but I was already familiar with the things Enum cites in this piece, so maybe there really is no "there" there.

Not that it would excuse the extreme lack of ethics and general sleaze of the whole exercise, mind you.

Quick hits

Some political quickies:

I’m sorry, I just fail to see how the exposure of a group of major media figures coordinating efforts to suppress news damaging to the Obama campaign and to propagandize in an attempt to get him elected is news. Are people seriously surprised to hear that this was happening? Could anybody have thought it was not?

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Looks like one Obamacare lie has been exposed pretty quickly:

The Obama Administration will give Pennsylvania $160 million to set up a new "high-risk" insurance program under a provision of the federal health care legislation enacted in March.

It has quietly approved a plan submitted by an appointee of pro-abortion Governor Edward Rendell under which the new program will cover any abortion that is legal in Pennsylvania.

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How perfect is it that the president of a former civil rights organization which, having become obsolete, devolved into a garden variety hate and grievance group is named…Ben Jealous? It’s downright eponymous.

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Tom Sowell echoes my feelings on said organization: “[T]hat an organization like the NAACP, after years of fighting against genuine racism, should now be playing the game of race-card fraud is especially painful to see.”

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More Sowell: “[Voting for Obama thinking that he would be a post-racial president] was an honest mistake of the kind that decent people have often made when dealing with people whose agendas are not constrained by decency, but only by what they think they can get away with.”

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Jack Kelly on Obama’s curious decision to object to al Qaeda because, of all things, racism:

Objecting to al Qaida mainly because its leaders may harbor racial prejudices is kind of like objecting to Hitler mainly because he gave preference to tall blondes with blue eyes.

Al Qaida is objectionable because of the many murders it commits in pursuit of its Islamo-fascist ideology, which is objectionable enough in itself. The president's comments -- and more so those of his aide -- give the impression he'd think better of these terrorists if they had a diversity officer and an affirmative action program.

Barack Obama pledged to be America's first "post-racial" president. But in office, he's been more obsessed with race than any president since Woodrow Wilson, who imposed segregation on the federal government.

TASS West

This goes beyond even the New York Times editorial page (but probably not MSNBC):

“On February 23, ABC TV Channel 7, WTRF News (Wheeling, West Virginia/ Steubenville, Ohio), posted on its website what was originally credited as a story ‘written by’ reporter Bob Westfall. Unfortunately, though, this posting was nothing but a word-for-word re-posting of Democrat Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown’s latest press release. There was little to no difference between Brown’s press release and the ’story’ as posted on the ABC 7 news site.”

Line of the week

It's only Monday, but this from John Stossel will be hard to beat:

"How many times does History need to bash the New York Times over the head with the failures of central planning before they understand?"

It fascinates me how many people continue to believe in collectivist fairy tales.

Quick hits 12/19

More links and tweets that have caught my eye, with a bit of commentary:

Telling sentence: “The majorities opposing Obama on the Guantanamo issue are even larger than those that oppose him on national health care.”

Some encouraging medical news.

The green mind at work: Prince Charles used up seven months’ worth of the average British person’s “carbon footprint” yesterday flying to Copenhagen on an executive jet to make a speech on climate change.

Oklahoma City’s Wednesday night shoes

John Stossel: “Someone will ration health care. In America, insurance companies usually do it. In most of the rest of the world, governments do. Costs skyrocket under both systems. Its time we tried the third option: let individuals use their own money to buy health care.”

John Hinderaker: “Don't fall for the pretense that the international ‘green’ movement is about anything other than anti-free enterprise and anti-American ideology.”

Robert Heinlein: “Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.”

How many people remember that Obama, during his campaign, promised a net spending cut?

There are still 14 days left, but I’m declaring this the photo caption of the year.

And this the bookstore display of the year.

When the directions say “Roll it on over the head” this is NOT what it means.

Climate change: nature’s way.

Tiger and PC in domestic violence

Why does an attempt to transfer the right to make medical decisions from the people to government surprise anybody? Did you expect a Chicago machine politician to show an enthusiasm for civil liberties?

Foreign Object Damage asks: “Does it concern anyone else that anger is the only emotion that President Obama has displayed in public over the last month?” What, did you think he wasn’t really part of the Angry Left?

Thogocracy update: Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla) wants to imprison a local critic. This idiot exemplifies the police-state mindset.

John Stossel on the matter: “Bullies like Congressman Grayson illustrate the danger of government power; government is the only entity that can legally use force. That makes government a fearsome master. It can use force to take our money, and homes, and our freedom.”

From @Jeff_Jacoby: Ex-soldier finds a gun, turns it into the police, & is promptly arrested for possessing a firearm. Beyond Orwellian.

Happiest state ranking, Texas a disappointing 16th (Austin must be dragging us down).

Ridiculous photo caption editorializing.

Tweets from the wild Mavs-Rockets game I attended:
From STEIN_LINE_HQ: Brace yourself: Mavs found pieces from two Landry teeth embedded in gash in Dirk's right elbow
From STEIN_LINE_HQ: Landry taken straight to hospital. Mavs needed 30 minutes to clean up Dirk's elbow just to get ready for X-rays.
From @kpelton: This Houston-Dallas game will not go down as a monument to quality NBA officiating.
From @MFollowill: Hearing stories the process of picking the teeth of dirk's elbow was quite gruesome. Didn't know if it was his bone or Landry's teeth. Wow!

Some quick hits

A lot of the short quotes or links I used to post here now go to my Twitter feed, since it takes so much less effort.

James Taranto: “Why did Obama win the Nobel Peace Prize? Because he pandered to the prejudices of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.”

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JammieWearingFool on the terrorist plot against a GOP congressman: “I blame MSNBC, CNN, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and the leftwing blogosphere for fostering this climate of hate against Republicans.”

Consistent standards… no fair!

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Why didn’t Pinch Sulzberger get a cabinet position?

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Jules Crittenden: "It's a sad state of affairs when a Frenchman mocks an American president and you have to go with the Frog."

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Durable goods orders, housing sales dropped in August. Direct result of Cash for Clunkers diverting money from one kind of purchase to another? Probably, every time government incentivizes one kind of behavior it’s at the expense of another.

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“I can recall no other major American speech in which the narcissism of a leader has been quite so pronounced.” In the Washington Post, mind you, on Obama's UN debacle.

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The Empire State Building was illuminated red and yellow for a week, celebrating China's 60 years of communist rule. Really? What a disgusting gesture, celebrating that soul crushing death cult.

Presidential hate

Jay Nordlinger takes on the (frankly absurd) notion that hate directed against the president is on the rise in this administration:

Let me make a couple of predictions: I predict that the chairman of the Republican National Committee will never say, “I hate the Democrats and everything they stand for. This [politics, basically] is a struggle of good and evil. And we’re the good.”

Howard Dean said that about the GOP: “I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for. . . .”

I predict that an editor of a conservative magazine will never write a piece called “The Case for Obama Hatred,” beginning, “I hate President Barack Obama.”

A New Republic editor did this, about Bush.

And there is increasing worry about assassination: that someone will take a shot, not just at the president, but at the first black president, which would be extra-catastrophic for the country. A few protesters have carried signs urging violence against Obama, or smacking of violence. Let me make some more predictions:

I predict that a network talk-show host will not show a video of President Obama giving a speech and put the following words on the screen: “SNIPERS WANTED.”

Craig Kilborn of CBS did that to George W. Bush.

I predict that U.S. senators will not joke about killing Obama.

In 2006, Bill Maher had a conversation with John Kerry. He asked Kerry what he’d gotten his wife for her birthday. Kerry said he had treated her to a vacation in Vermont. Maher said, “You could have went to New Hampshire and killed two birds with one stone.” Kerry replied, “Or I could have gone to 1600 Pennsylvania and killed the real bird with one stone.” [...]

I predict that a New York official will not tell a graduating class about assassinating President Obama.

Also in 2006, comptroller Alan Hevesi said to students at Queens College that Sen. Charles Schumer, his fellow Democrat, would “put a bullet between the president’s eyes if he could get away with it.”

I predict that no columnist for a leading European newspaper, and leading world newspaper, will write, “John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. — where are you now that we need you?”

Charlie Brooker of the Guardian did that to George W. Bush.

I predict that no major writer will write a novel debating the morality of killing President Obama.

Nicholson Baker did that to Bush, with Checkpoint.

I predict that no filmmaker will make a “fictional documentary” that fantasizes — and I’m afraid that is the word — about murdering President Obama.

Some Brits did that to President Bush with Death of a President.

Dear readers, I have made very, very safe predictions. If a CBS talk-show host pictured President Obama and said “SNIPERS WANTED,” he would lose his job, of course. He would never work in the media again. I wonder what else would happen to him.

I could go on, but you’ve heard enough. [...]

Regular readers may be sick of hearing this story — I think I’ve told it twice — but let me tell it again. I tell the story, not because the person featured in it is evil, but for the opposite reason: She is basically wonderful. She just had a fever, that hate-Bush, kill-Bush fever.

I was at an Upper East Side dinner party, and talk turned to 9/11. I mentioned that the “Pennsylvania plane” was apparently destined for the Capitol or the White House. My hostess said, “I wish President Bush had been killed that day.”

Quote of the day

From Mike Gonzalez of the Heritage Foundation (via Don Surber) on the ACORN child prostitution aid scandal: “It should have been ‘60 Minutes’ doing this stuff — not two people whose combined ages are 45.”

Surber notes that Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward were 28 and 29, respectively, on the night of the Watergate break-in.

Providing cover

Byron York did a little experiment yesterday morning:

From a Nexis search a few moments ago:

Total words about the Van Jones controversy in the New York Times: 0.
Total words about the Van Jones controversy in the Washington Post: 0.
Total words about the Van Jones controversy on NBC Nightly News: 0.
Total words about the Van Jones controversy on ABC World News: 0.
Total words about the Van Jones controversy on CBS Evening News: 0.

The New York Times, CBS and NBC are apparently still enforcing the Jones news blackout as of the time of this post.

It's good to be a Democrat, getting free PR and political cover from all of the largest media outlets. Sure, that only hides things like the despicable Jones from the uninformed segment of the population, but that is a core Democrat constituency, and keeping them uninformed is vital to their ability to win elections.

UPDATE 9/6/09
Mickey Kaus gets his wish: “I’ve been waiting for the day when a prominent pol resigns and for print MSM readers it appears to be out-of-the-blue, though everyone on the Web knows the whole story.”

This story truly is symbolic of the death of the mainstream media as a serious news source.

Editors on strike?

How did this make it past the NYT's intrepid editorial staff?!?

Although the investigation began and largely ended during the Bush administration, top Obama administration officials held a news conference on Wednesday to celebrate the settlement, thank each other for resolving it and promise more crackdowns on health fraud.

Somebody's gonna get fired!

Quick hits

Some short notes, probably mostly dated due to my week plus on the shelf with the flu.

Mickey Kaus: “If you don’t want people to think that subsidized, voluntary end-of-of-life counseling sessions are the camel’s nose of an attempt to cut costs by limiting end-of-life care, then don’t put them in a bill the overarching, stated purpose of which is to cut health care costs!

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Flashback: Wal-Mart vs FEMA, private sector vs government…guess who prepared for and responded to Katrina better?

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It was nice of White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs to give the Iranian regime a PR boost by referring to Aquavelvajad (love that Dennis Miller nickname) as the “elected” president of Iran, a quote that was hyped endlessly in the Iranian state TV and press. Every regime needs their useful idiots.

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Things you would see if the left ran the world: government tracking your movement via GPS in order to tax you.

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Certainly a grain of truth in this from Moe Lane, which is actually imitating the style of anti-Bush attacks: “[T]he antiwar movement is run by racists who only like brown people when they can be used as clubs with which to beat anybody to the antiwar movement’s Right. Well, anyone to their Right, and Jews.”

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Little Green Footballs: “This [Israel pounding Hamas in Operation Cast Lead] is one of those ludicrous media memes that refuses to die: fighting against evil only makes evil stronger. You’ll see it in articles about every conflict; it’s a kind of nihilistic philosophical tic that is nearly universal, a counterintuitive observation that’s supposed to impress you with its depth.”

Appeasers are not the most creative sorts, I’ll agree.

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Your congress in action: “Just last week Washington announced it would cut $100 million from the federal administrative budgets and acted like that was some big achievement. Now this week we learn that about the same time those cuts were made public, the House OK’d the purchase of the private jets. The taxpayer money the House plans to spend is to be used to buy three Gulfstream G550s at roughly $65 million each. These are long-range business jets with large, palatial interiors and three temperature zones.”

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Government in action: The guidelines in the House-passed bill state that large SUVs and trucks, typically considered gas guzzlers in everyday conversation, qualify for the $3,500 credit, and in some cases the $4,500 credit, depending on the trade-ins that come through the door for them. New Category 2 trucks -- like the Hummer H-3, Ford Explorer, Chevy Silverado, and Toyota Tundra -- qualify if they get at least 15 MPG combined, and get at least one mile per gallon more than the car or truck being traded in.

Quickies

More quick notes, offered with little or no commentary:

Of all of Obama’s broken campaign promises, does this one now look silliest? "The biggest problems that we're facing right now have to do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all. And that's what I intend to reverse when I'm president of the United States."

Obama’s power grab is unmatched since at least FDR.

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Eric Cantor on the same subject: “The president has embarked on an end-run around the legislative branch of historic proportions. To be sure, the appointment of a few special officers to play a constructive role in a given administration is nothing new. What is new is the elevation of so many czars, with so much authority on endless policy fronts. Vesting such broad authority in the hands of people not subjected to Senate confirmation and congressional oversight poses a grave threat to our system of checks and balances.”

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Rep. John Conyers (D-MI): "I love these members that get up and say, 'Read the bill!' Well, what good is reading the bill if it's a thousand pages and you don't have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you've read the bill?"

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Thoroughly unshocking stat: Tax burden of top 1% now exceeds that of bottom 95%.

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Other unshocking news: Organic food is no healthier.

Jeff Stier of the American Council on Science and Health: “It’s like playing a game of whack-a-mole. It was already proven that people aren’t getting sick from pesticides on food, so the organic crowd claimed their food was more nutritious. Now that that has been disproved, they’re going back to the pesticides thing.”

I’ll remind you that bullshit is organic.

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Politicizing justice: Obama Political Appointees Reportedly Overruled Career Justice Officials In Dropping Charges Against New Black Panther Party for Voter Intimidation

Protecting voter intimidation…change we can believe in!

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Dan Rather: not a fan of a free and independent press.

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Our “47 million uninsured” at a glance

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John Hinderaker: “[I]f a bill is too vast for a Congressman to read and understand, it is too big to pass.”

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Condescension runs in the family.

Gates’s daughter gets catty about Crowley’s daughter: “she was wearing an appropriately heavy and charmingly untrained amount of green eyeliner.”

But they’re enlightened haters!

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Did they paint each other’s toenails afterwards? Obama Hosting Senate Dems for Pep Rally, Cake?

This is not good

A dozen male-focused Web sites including AOL's men's lifestyle/humor site Asylum.com — as well as Ask Men, Just a Guy Thing and Double Viking — have sanctioned Aug. 4 as a Megan Fox media blackout day.

Why the diss? All the editors feel the starlet has become a bit too overexposed — and they're not just talking about her fashion sense. Fox has appeared on the covers of Esquire, Empire, Maxim, GQ UK, Entertainment Weekly and Elle this year alone, plus she did heavy press for her role as Mikaela Banes in "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen."

"You can have too much of a good thing," says AskMen.com's Editor-in-Chief James Bassil, who tells us, "We're joining in the media blackout and giving our readers a one-day reprieve from the woman we've been drowning in all summer."

I have to disagree; you can never have too much Megan.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flatery

From an AP report:

EU Justice and Home Affairs Commissioner Jacques Barrot said the 27-nation bloc wants to give anti-terror investigators at the U.S. Treasury access to European operation centers run by the bank transfer consortium SWIFT, expanding an existing 2007 anti-terror banking data sharing deal with Washington. To do so, it needs to negotiate under what conditions U.S. officials would have expanded access to such sensitive banking information. ...

The U.S. Treasury already has access to SWIFT's American database, but the banking consortium is setting up a new European office in Switzerland, which would focus on European clients. American investigators now want access to this new database as well.

SWIFT's other two database centers, in the U.S. state of Virginia and in the Netherlands, handle all the consortium's transfer orders, including those of European citizens.

"It would be extremely dangerous at this stage to stop the surveillance and the monitoring of information flows," Barrot said, adding that the current pact, which only covers U.S. operations of SWIFT have been "an important and effective tool to fight terrorism financing and to prevent terrorist attacks."

Powerline's reaction: "It's one more instance of the Obama administration not only adopting but expanding the once-secret anti-terror tools that were developed by the Bush administration. Somehow, though, I don't think this time around the SWIFT expansion will be the occasion for exposes or critical editorials."

As for me, I wonder if President Bush (43) has a sore shoulder from repeated pointing at the scoreboard.

Honor the Jackson Five

I love this from Move America Forward via PowerLine, a call to honor five Jacksons who really deserve it.

The road to state-run media

There's not much that shocks me anymore when it comes to big media's support for Democrats and liberalism in general and the president in particular, but even my jaded sensibilities are rocked by ABC's decision to turn over its news organization to the Obama administration today for a day so that it can serve as a propaganda arm of the government.

Every news show, from Good Morning America to World News Tonight to a prime time puff special to Nightline, have been turned over to the administration for them to use to try to drum up support for the government takeover of roughly 1/6 of our economy.

You must understand the distinction here between mere advocacy, of the type that every television network does to one degree or another (Fox for Republicans; MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN and PBS for Democrats), and the outright ceding of editorial control to the government. This is not the difference between an adversarial press and advocacy, this is the difference between an independent press and one that is an arm of the government. To call it a dangerous precedent is a massive understatement.

Since socialized medicine is a purely partisan political issue, you might think that ABC would give some time to a dissenting voice. But you would be disappointed; ABC is not allowing even the purchase of time to present an alternate point of view. Sorry, no dissent will be tolerated today!

What's in it for ABC is pretty obvious: the quid pro quo of being allowed more access to the White House than other outlets. Whether that's worth abdicating their objectivity and their responsibilities to the public as a journalistic organization is fodder for journalism schools, I suppose. Clearly ABC has decided that a transformation from news organization to propaganda tool is worth it if they can gain a few scoops in the bargain.

The implications for the broader media are more ominous. It's no secret that the newspaper industry is in trouble; most periodicals and television news divisions are not exactly printing money either.

With the expectation that the newspaper industry is gearing up to ask for a bailout of their own, we may be closer than you think to the nationalization of major newspapers, or at least conditional infusions of cash. And given that bank bailouts have come at the price of congressional micromanaging, and that the GM nationalization has come with administration strong-arming to force them to start making unprofitable vehicles the public does not want, does anybody really believe that media bailouts or nationalizations would be offered without some level of editorial control?

If you find press freedom to be a core principle of a free society, ABC's day of Utopian socialized medicine propaganda certainly must give you pause.

Addendum for any locals: there will be a protest of ABC's action outside the Channel 8 studios in Victory Park beginning at 5:30. Yes, it will be 100+ degrees today, but hope to see you there anyway.