May 22, 2012
FSM HOT TOPICS
Exclusive: Saturday, August 16
by PRESIDENTIAL WATCH August 16, 2008
Jerome Corsi discusses "Obama Nation" on Fox - VIEW VIDEO HERE.
Rush Limbaugh Cites Kincaid Article on AP Story - CLICK HERE TO LISTEN.
We Are All Georgians
John McCain, Online WSJ.com
For anyone who thought that stark international aggression was a thing of the past, the last week must have come as a startling wake-up call. After clashes in the Georgian region of South Ossetia, Russia invaded its neighbor, launching attacks that threaten its very existence. Some Americans may wonder why events in this part of the world are any concern of ours. After all, Georgia is a small, remote and obscure place. But history is often made in remote, obscure places.
As Russian tanks and troops moved through the Roki Tunnel and across the internationally recognized border into Georgia, the Russian government stated that it was acting only to protect Ossetians. Yet regime change in Georgia appears to be the true Russian objective.
Two years ago, I traveled to South Ossetia. As soon as we arrived at its self-proclaimed capital -- now occupied by Russian troops -- I saw an enormous billboard that read, "Vladimir Putin, Our President." This was on sovereign Georgian territory.
Russian claims of humanitarian motives were further belied by a bombing campaign that encompassed the whole of Georgia, destroying military bases, apartment buildings and other infrastructure, and leaving innocent civilians wounded and killed. Read article.
Beware the 'down time' of August
John Feehery, Politico.com
August can often be the cruelest of months. Just read Barbara Tuchman’s “The Guns of August” to get a sense of the series of misplays, miscalculations and miscommunications that sparked the first World War all in the merry month of August.
Work is not on the top of the agenda in our nation’s capital during the dog days of August. Play usually is.
But that “vacation” mindset can be slow to respond in a crisis. That became all too clear in 2005 as the Bush administration responded slowly and inadequately to Hurricane Katrina. The A-team was not on their A-game, and the result was a public relations disaster for the Bush team and for Republicans in general.
Barack Obama may have learned that lesson the hard way. Vacationing in Hawaii might seem like a good idea in the middle of August, but it comes at a price when you are running for president. Nothing like a Russian invasion of Georgia to ruin your golf game.
It is a natural response for Washington insiders to want to hold on to their vacation plans at all costs.
The draw of the family, the desires of the spouse and the desperate need for downtime all contribute to a sense of entitlement. But as we are all learning again this year, beware the false promise of a slow August. This is an unusually good month for a crisis, be it a sex scandal, an unexpected war or a bad weather event. Just ask Barbara Tuchman. Or Barack Obama. Read article.
Obama’s Impending Pearl Harbor
Larry Johnson, No Quarter USA.net
After a very productive time (working, not playing) in Hawaii, I believe that the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor is an apt metaphor for what awaits Barack Obama if he becomes the Democrat’s official nominee. Michelle’s “whitey” tape and the controversy over his birth certificate are the least of his concerns. Opponents of Obama and some proponents of McCain have acquired information that will rapidly erase any memory of the audacity and perfidy of John Edwards.
The “surprise” attack by the Japanese should not have caught the US fleet at Pearl Harbor unawares. There were advanced warnings that people in key positions ignored or shrugged off as unimportant. Well, guess what boys and girls? Similar warnings are now in the hands of the Democratic leadership and they are choosing to ignore the flashing red lights that signal danger ahead.
Courtesy of the Rocky Mountain News, we confirmed that Barack aka Barry Soetoro Obama was a citizen of Kenya since 1963. Barack has yet to stipulate when he renounced or relinquished that citizenship. That will be a distracting issue in the upcoming campaign. Americans don’t want to elect a Kenyan as President. It is that simple.
But then there is the Indonesian problem and his Hawaiian birth certificate. Republican operatives are loaded for bear and you are going to meet a Barack Obama that was hidden and disguised during the Democratic primary. And when the introduction is over the Obama supporters will wish the only thing they had to worry about was a video with Michelle saying disparaging things about caucasians. Read article.
The joke is finally on Barack Obama
Tim Shipman, Telegraph.co.uk
Have you heard the one about the presidential candidate who was once so popular that comedians were frightened to make jokes about him?
The punchline is this: the more seriously he took himself, the more Barack Obama has become a laughing matter.
Only a month ago American comedians and satirists were complaining that they found it hard to get people to laugh at the first black presidential nominee. A New Yorker cover cartoon showing him as a Muslim extremist was roundly denounced.
But growing Obama fatigue among voters after his pseudo-presidential visit to Europe and the Middle East has unleashed a wave of satirical fire, mocking Mr Obama for his apparent belief that he has the election in the bag.
Last month Jon Stewart, host of the satirical news programme The Daily Show, had to tell his audience that they were allowed to laugh at Mr Obama after a joke fell flat.
Voters are tiring of the wall to wall coverage of his grand pronouncements. Read article.
Too Dumb To Be True
Bradley R. Gitz, NW Arkansas News.com
Everyone has things that irritate because they don’t make a bit of sense and make us wonder about the intelligence of our fellow man. Among the more baffling for this observer are: That so many people are so mesmerized by Barack Obama speeches that are filled with nothing but meaningless platitudes and slogans. I haven’t been able to find anyone yet, not even the most fanatical Obamaniac, who can tell me what “We are the ones we have been waiting for” actually means.
That the United States, a supposed bastion of free-market capitalism, has the world’s second highest corporate tax rate; for that matter, that we even have a corporate tax at all. Most countries don’t. Only people pay taxes. Corporations simply pass down the cost of taxation to consumers in the form of higher prices for products and services.
That so many Americans are baffled by our growing dependence upon expensive foreign oil when they have for decades endorsed or at least meekly accepted policies that have made it virtually impossible to explore and drill for oil here at home. There is no country in the world with richer or more varied energy resources than the United States. Alas, there also is no country with more rigid and senseless environmental restrictions that prevent us from utilizing those resources. Read article.
Obama's Preemptive Indignation
Nicholas Wapshott, Right Side News.com
For a postracial candidate, Barack Obama sure takes offense easily.
What does the recent brouhaha about race in the presidential election tell us about Barack Obama? On the one hand, the scuffle has revealed him as more ruthless and cynical than he might like to appear to his young, idealistic supporters, which may not be a bad thing.
That he is not as nice as he looks is good news if he is to counter the world's tyrants. But his campaign has also revealed a less flattering side: a willingness to silence political opponents by airing imaginary grievances. Obama apparently considers false indignation a legitimate weapon in his political arsenal.
This cheap tactic is every bit as reprehensible as the ad hominem attacks and negative campaigning that he affects to deplore.
Obama has a right to resist being typecast, and he's correct to bemoan "the assumption that African-Americans can't support the white candidate, whites can't support the African-American candidate," as he put it in his victory speech in South Carolina earlier this year. But if he is truly the postracial candidate that he claims to be, voters might expect something more elevated than preemptive accusations of racial insensitivity.
If Obama makes it to the White House, can we realistically expect him to abandon this bullying but effective ruse? Read article.
Generation Obama - First Time Voters Young, Color-blind
John Zogby, NY Post.com
Bill Bennett has half a point when he laments that relentless sensitivity training and political correctness have robbed students of their critical faculties and inquisitive spirits, instilling instead a kind of "we're–all-equal" liberalism. I remember particularly a 2002 news release put out by Bennett and the conservative pollster Frank Luntz, citing their survey of college students that found a large majority of students did not consider American values superior to those of other nations and cultures. I've done my own polling on the subject with similar results. In our June 2007 Zogby Interactive poll, for example, we asked respondents to agree or disagree with the following statement: "I don't support the concept of my country right or wrong."
Although my numbers echo those of Bennett and Luntz, I don't read them the same way. To be sure, the youngest American adults are less inclined than their elders to defer to American values. But the question is why? What's the underlying dynamic? I think the answer can be found in the high "unsure" percentage among the young. My belief is that it traces back to confusion over precisely what "my country" means in this day and age. More so than any other generation of Americans in history, they see themselves as citizens of the planet, not of any nation in particular. Read article.
Where the Candidates Stand on Trade
Bruce Stokes, National Journal.com
Opinion polls show weakening public support for free trade. Democrats are making tough-sounding promises to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement. Trade frictions with China persist. The long-running Doha Round of multilateral negotiations is limping along. Action is pending in Congress on the bilateral Colombia and South Korea free-trade agreements. And GOP candidates are painting Democrats as head-in-the-sand protectionists.
Conditions seem to be ripe for putting trade front and center in the fall presidential campaign. Most experts say, however, that trade is likely to generate more smoke than fire, even though John McCain and Barack Obama have significant differences on the subject.
The consensus assumption in the Washington trade-policy community is that McCain would continue the Bush administration's initiatives.
An Obama administration is more likely to attempt to shift the focus of the Washington trade debate in a less confrontational direction, by trying to allay Americans' anxiety about job security with domestic improvements in health care, education, job retraining, and the social safety net. Read article.
Exxon's Candidate
Online WSJ.com
Democrats think they can gain some extra political mileage -- tires properly inflated, of course -- by linking John McCain to the oil-and-gas industry. This week, the Democratic National Committee debuted an advertising campaign that floats Exxon as the GOP running mate. Har, har.
Barack Obama, meanwhile, is up with television spots that accuse Mr. McCain of being "in the pocket of Big Oil" before touting a plan for a windfall profits tax.
But wait. According to FEC data examined by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics in a new report released this past week, Exxon executives and employees have broken in favor of Mr. Obama over Mr. McCain this election cycle -- by $41,100 to $35,166. Chevron's and BP's contribution margins also favor the Democrat -- by about $6,600 and $4,500, respectively. Guess those Democratic commercials now could use a footnote or two. Read article.
How to Produce Real Change
Ken Connor, Townhall.com
Change!
It's the mantra of the political season. But what kind of change—from what to what?
Will taxes go up or down? Will we stay in Iraq or get out? Will marriage be protected or abandoned? Will we get restrained judges or judicial activists? Will our children have fewer or more educational choices? Will we go nuclear or stay with coal and oil? Will our foreign policy be interventionist or isolationist? The list of questions goes on and on, and voters should demand concrete answers.
"Change" can't be evaluated in a vacuum. Before voters can make an assessment of the wisdom of change, they have to know what's on the table. What are they giving up and what can they expect to get in its place?
And let's face it—it's easier to talk about change than produce it. There are lots people who talk the talk, but only a few who have walked the walk. Read article.
Michelle Obama talks to CJP
Citizen Jane Politics.com
We went to Carroll, Iowa to see Mrs. Obama speak to a capacity-plus crowd at Coffee World coffee shop. If you’ve never been to Carroll, it’s about two hours west of Des Moines on the way to, well, nowhere in particular.
In her speech to the crowd, she said she thought the American people want what her dad had when she was growing up- a good-enough job, the chance to send their kids to college, the security of a dignified retirement and the knowledge that if somebody in the family got sick, they would not be in danger of declaring bankruptcy. It’s not a lot, she said, but the security of a life like that is slipping away from too many people.
She didn’t take questions from the crowd, but she did speak with CJP about how she thinks women’s lives would be different in an Obama administration. SEE VIDEO INTERVIEW HERE.
MSOBAMA - The network of Democratic campaign record.
Peter Wehner, EPPC.org
Keith Olbermann was apparently irate about a column by Milbank last week that created difficulty for Barack Obama, and therefore banned Milbank from his program. Olbermann alleges that Milbank took a comment by Obama out of context (readers can decide for themselves whether that is in fact a fair charge) and would not explain himself.
And so Dana Milbank, who after four years of playing up to Olbermann deigned to write a single critical column on The Great Obama, was quickly censured. Such are the exacting journalistic standards of Olbermann, and, apparently, the network for which he works.
One wonders if the journalists who appear on Olbermann's program understand that they are simply props for a man who has become the go-to guy for the MoveOn.org, Daily Kos, and The Huffington Post crowd. And do they appreciate just how much their credibility is damaged by frequently appearing with, and showing their obvious sympathy and agreement with, a man who has become a ranting, cartoonish character?
It's an open secret that MSNBC, when turning its lonely eyes to Obama, feels (to invoke the unfortunate and slightly too revealing phrase used by one of its hosts, Chris Matthews) "a thrill going up my leg." Read article.
Reaching Out to Cheney
The Prowler, Spectator.org
Word out of the White House on Thursday was that an embarrassed McCain '08 campaign has reached out to Vice President Dick Cheney's office about inviting him to the Republican Convention in St. Paul. Source inside Cheney's office would not confirm whether discussions about a Cheney appearance had taken place. "There won't be official word," said one vice presidential aide.
McCain insiders claimed that the Cheney story was blown far out of proportion. "It's not that we don't want him, it's that we aren't organized around who will be attending, what their role will be or what we're going to do there," says one McCain adviser. Which may very well be true.
But other McCain aides say that it was made clear that while an appearance by President Bush was something that had to be handled with care and as a priority, a Cheney appearance was not a priority or an event campaign staff should focus on.
"Perhaps they thought by ignoring it that it would just go away, but you can't blow off a national party leader, no matter what you may think of him," says another McCain adviser, who said the team is decidedly split on having both the President and Vice President appear in St. Paul.
The antipathy toward Cheney, some McCain insiders say, is more about the long-standing relationship between the two men. Read article.
Fool me twice: The power of words to deceive
Frank Miele, Daily Interlake.com
Forget the fact that Hitler himself spoke under the shadow of the Victory Column when he delivered his address in front of the Reichstag after being named chancellor. That’s just a pungent irony. Let’s just consider the words of Barack Obama as he himself spoke them.
“This is the moment when we must come together to save the planet,” he said without a hint of humility. “This is the moment to give our children back their future.”
And as if the words themselves didn’t adequately prove the hubris of Obama, he made a blatant comparison of his speech to one made at the battlefield in Gettysburg, Pa., when Abraham Lincoln famously (and incorrectly) said, “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here.” Obama gave himself a bigger vote of confidence when he said, “Now the world will watch and remember what we do here — what we do with this moment.”
The very nature of his message, his invocation of a “noble struggle to bring justice and peace to our world,” makes it hard for his followers to broach any criticism of the great man.
Like Obama, both Castro and Hitler at the start of their careers spoke passionately of the need for peace and justice. It should be evident to anyone who thinks about the recent past that the German people were not applauding Adolf Hitler when he was appointed chancellor because they knew he was going to kill 6 million Jews, cause the deaths of more than 60 million other people, and bring Germany to ruin.
So it behooves us to ask, not idly but intently, what the German people should have done better in 1933 to spot the wolf in sheep’s clothing. And to ask ourselves why we think we do not have the same responsibility to posterity that we so assiduously ascribe to the poor German schnooks who didn’t protect us from Hitler. Read article.
A Last Chance to Reform Debate Format
Barry Casselman & Newt Gingrich, RCP.com
Two years ago, we put forward a reform proposal for the presidential debates in the 2008 campaign.
Rather than just offer an abstract plan, we decided to present a real format by scheduling a dialogue that included Speaker Gingrich and former New York Governor Mario Cuomo at the Cooper Union in New York City with the late Tim Russert as the moderator. We chose Cooper Union because it had been the site of Abraham Lincoln's great speech that probably made him president, as well as the site of many important speeches and debates since it was built in 1858, and continues to be so to the present day.
There is no doubt that the American public and voters are very interested in this year's presidential and national elections. A number of haphazard debates were held during the extended primary season which concluded in early June. These debates,without a cogent and effective format, were mostly unsatisfactory, even as they were tuned in by large number of voters eager to learn about the candidates and their positions on the critical issues of our day. But the result, surveying the published and other public assessment of these debates, was that the public who tuned in were mostly turned off. Read article.
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Ky. primary has Barack Obama doing battle with a phantom; Let the mockage begin!
May 22, 2012 07:50 PM
Vote-counting for the Kentucky primary is underway, and Obama is leading among preferred Democratic presidential candidates. But ah, ah, ah … not so fast there, Barack. Looks like not everything’s comin’ up roses in the Bluegrass State. ONE FOR UNDECIDED: Bath County, Kentucky Democrats take "Undecided" over President Obama by 725-715 votes— Jamie Dupree (@jamiedupree) [...]
May 22, 2012 04:29 PM
The South Carolina AFL-CIO president is on video beating an effigy of Governor Nikki Haley with a bat. War on women, indeed, and it comes from the Left as always. To Leftist thugs and union goons, she was asking for it, you see. That "uppity" woman won't keep her mouth shut and all. Scratch a Leftist and you will find not only a misogynist, but a racist.
Media still covering for no Biden access for press, blame Romney
May 22, 2012 03:39 PM
Media bias alert! RT @zekejmiller: Worth noting, given Romney flap last week, press not given rope-line access to Biden event here in NH— Sarah Huisenga (@SarahH_CBSNJ) May 22, 2012 Um. After the “Romney flap?” You mean the “flap” that the media breathlessly and endlessly reported all while ignoring the fact that reporters were shooed off [...]
May 22, 2012 03:08 PM
I'll see your Cory Booker and raise you a Joe Biden.— David Freddoso (@freddoso) May 22, 2012 Rut roh! Shall we add him to “hostage watch?“ Biden: When Bain companies failed, it cost taxpayers money in unemployment insurance, pension costs.— Mike Memoli (@mikememoli) May 22, 2012 Uh. When they are “too big to fail” and [...]
Dan Savage: Marriage is make-believe just like BDSM
May 22, 2012 02:46 PM
That oh-so-deep thought on marriage was a followup to Savage’s 140 character thoughts on BDSM: Some BDSMers take BDSM very, very seriously, of course, and strive to make it as real as possible. But it's still make-believe.— Dan Savage (@fakedansavage) May 22, 2012 And I respect BDSMers who take it seriously. They're fucking hot. xo— [...]
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