Eric Holder: Voting Rights Act Can't Be Called Unnecessary Yet

"We saw in stark relief the rank hatred, discrimination and violence that still existed in large parts of the nation," the vice president said Sunday, recalling news coverage of the beatings.



The buffoon Biden could have said that these 'parts of the nation' still exist today in at least two 'parts of the nation' that I have lived in. In Chicago, the rank hatred, etc., is largely between the black and Hispanic parts of the city, with the South Side a seething cauldron of violence. In DC, Anacostia and NE/SE are equal to some parts of Chicago, although the homicide rate is nowhere near the Windy City's...



So Joltin' Joe can blow it out of his most productive orifice one more time and be marked as a complete fool. A walking, talking example of Obama's 'Leading from Behind.'
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Truth Is Out: Obama Is a Liar

Obama consciously lied about the sequester during the debates last fall. Romney didn't call him on it, nor did Obama's lapdogs/stenographers in the Lamestream Media.

Everyone on the Dimocrap side of the aisle says they Bush lied about WMD. But THAT is a lie, because EVERY intelligence source on the planet said Saddam had WMD [which he moved to Syria, where it might be used against Syrian citizens---to protect their socialist government, which is what the Ba'ath Party is.]

R.I.P. Nicholas Prasinos [1921-2013]

My father-in-law Nicholas Prasinos, born in Chicago on March 3rd 1921, passed away early today, March 3rd 2013, on his ninety-second birthday. Nick is survived by his beloved spouse Bessie, who just celebrated her ninety-first birthday. Also survived by his daughters Marilyn Mangan, nee Prasinos and Laraine Lippincott.

Nick went to MIT and was one of the first B-29 pilots who flew over Japan, including over the battleship Missouri at the Surrender of Japan on VJ-Day.

He was Honeywell's chief lawyer who argued the case for the proprietary nature of software in front of the SCOTUS in 1979, a landmark case which is today still cited as precedent in legal cases.

Nick and Bess lived in Concord, MA before moving to Florida about five years ago.

During his retirement, Nick published several books of poetry and won a national prize for his poems.

Nick also painted portraits and landscapes and won a prize on Cape Cod for one of his paintings.

Nick was the most generous and loving of parents and in-laws one could wish for.

Nick was one of the founding fathers of the Greek Orthodox Church in Lexington and is well-known in the Greek community in the Boston area and will rest in peace in God's Arms.

He was truly a wonderful representative of America's Greatest Generation.

Noonan Lambastes Obama & Idiot Maxine Waters

This WSJ should be read for much more than the following:

The sequester's impact may be bad. Rep. Maxine Waters of California, a 22-year House veteran and ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee, this week warned of "over 170 million jobs that could be lost." That's actually more jobs than America has, and it's little comfort to say, "But she's a famous idiot," because Washington is full of famous idiots who are making serious decisions about how the sequester cuts are to be applied.

Noonan is on her game as she deconstructs the FOOL in the WH.

First Fraud Demonstrates Bvllshitting Stunts re Sequester

The WSJ has a great article on Obama's slow sinking into the slough of despond he himself created.

'Just to make the final point about the sequester," said President Obama at his press conference Friday, "we will get through this. This is not going to be an apocalypse, I think, as some people have said." That's a relief, but it is also a major walk-back, since the "some people" who have been predicting apocalypse are the President and senior members of his Administration.

Normal Americans awoke Friday to find that the veneer of civilization had not fallen away. If the federal government does end up spending $44.8 trillion over the next decade instead of $46 trillion, they may not notice at all. This may explain Mr. Obama's morning-after concession that "what's important to understand is that not everyone will feel the pain of these cuts right away," and that the gruesome cuts that the President had been invoking are now merely "a slow grind that will intensify with each passing day."

The First Buffoon then kept digging his hole deeper with the usual staccato cadence:

One reason the grind may intensify is that Mr. Obama spurned GOP offers Friday morning to grant him even more executive discretion than he already has to prioritize federal spending. Or as his own Simpson-Bowles commission put it, he could always choose among the "patchwork of thousands of duplicative programs, nearly impossible to track and even harder to evaluate for effective outcomes." This he does not want to do.

What he is trying to do instead is implement the sequester as rudely as possible so that he can extract another tax increase. As the President put it, the problem is that Republicans have adopted "an iron-clad rule that we will not accept an extra dime's worth of revenue."

The Fvck-Up-in-Chief continued his lying Bvllshit:

But not so iron clad that the GOP didn't reluctantly consent to 6.2 trillion dimes in tax increases only this January in return for zero dimes of spending restraint. Mr. Obama wants Republicans to commit political harikiri by doing it again. Asking the other party to commit suicide is not typically a good basis for bipartisan accord.

Mr. Obama pitches his tax increase as "tax reform" and merely cutting "tax loopholes" and "tax breaks for the well off and well connected." He also said he doesn't want to "raise tax rates." But the Senate Democratic bill he endorsed on Thursday included the "Buffett rule" that is effectively a minimum tax of 30%, which means another increase in the tax rate on capital gains and dividends. Real tax reform means reducing rates in return for closing loopholes. Mr. Obama wants to raise rates instead.

The President also stuck to his line that the sequester cuts will hurt the economy, even suggesting that any slowdown in growth in the months ahead is all the sequester's fault: "As long as the sequester's in place we'll know that that economic news could have been better if Congress had not failed to act."

Investors seemed to take a different view. Stock prices rose on Friday.

On to the next windmill for the Boy of Chicago/Hawaii/Kenya/MANCHURIA

Hit and Run: Obama Regime Most 'Thin-skinned!'

REASON Magazine has a nice piece outlining the neo-fascist operational style of the Obamanation African Dictator Chic:

- There was the time the White House banned a San Francisco Chronicle reporter from the White House press pool for filming an anti-Obama protest at a fundraiser. The White House initially claimed it banned the reporter for using a camera when she was only allowed to write what she saw. Then the White House claimed it hadn't banned her at all. All very confusing and weird.

- There was the time the White House prohibited local journalists from covering a Silicon Valley fundraiser, presumably for fear that they'd be better equipped than D.C.-based pool reporters to recognize major players in the California tech scene.

- There was the time the White House denied the Boston Herald a spot in the press pool because it ran a front-page op-ed from Mitt Romney. While the White House later claimed the Boston Globe got the pool spot because it submitted its request first, that explanation doesn't jibe with this email from a White House staffer: "I tend to consider the degree to which papers have demonstrated to covering the White House regularly and fairly in determining local pool reporters." Loyalty has its rewards!

- There was the time an Orlando Sentinel reporter was made to sit in a closet at a fundraiser for Joe Biden.

- There was the time Obama agreed to sit down with the editor and publisher of the Des Moines Register, so long as the paper agreed not to quote him or even reveal the topics of conversation.

- My favorite overreaction to a media outlet, however, was one I first wrote about a few years ago after a small-town newspaper editor emailed me to say that the White House had asked her to remove a sentence that "reflected poorly" on First Lady Michelle Obama. The story was titled "Inside Marine One, President Obama's Helicopter," and according to the editor, it contained a single line that suggested Obama was somewhat aloof toward the chopper pilots. “Basically," the editor said in her email, "the reporter said that the First Lady didn’t speak to the pilots but acknowledged them by making eye contact." Shortly after the story went online, the editor received a call from the White House asking her to remove the sentence (she did). Shortly after my story went online, the White House called me, too (I added a denial from the First Lady's office to my story, but didn't remove or retract anything we'd already published).

Those are just a handful of media anecdotes (inside-the-Beltway reporters have many, many more stories about the Obama administration flipping its lid over reporters not following their instructions). But the Obama machine's obsession with image management isn't limited to haranguing and punishing journalists--just ask Desiree Rogers, Carlos Pascual, Hillary Clinton, or Stanley McChrystal.

For more on Obama's promise to lead the "most open and transparent administration in history," see this piece.

"This piece" refers to an hilarious story on a slavishly-deferential cadre of do=gooders lining up to give His Opaqueness [or is it 'Opaquitude?'] an award for transparency. The award presentation was off Oblunderer's schedule and closed to the press. No press pool was allowed after the newsies got wind of the award and no transcripts issued afterwards.

The piece linked immediately above also recounts a whistleblower at FOIA going to Cong. Darrell Issa, Chairman of the House Oversight Cte. She alleges that when she complained about illegal redactions in the materials sought under the Freedom of Information Act on several occasions, she was basically threatened by one of Nazi Lesbian Bitch Napolitano's Brownshirts. Even the DHS Inspector General reprimanded UeberHauptmann Napolitano's behavior after he studied the case.

“Obama’s been co-opted by the national security community,” Drake said. “People hoped he would take them on, but he became enamored by all the secret stuff. He’s getting all these cool briefings. It goes to his head. I can send drones anywhere! It’s very powerful stuff. It becomes pathological.”

Yet the LIAR-in-Chief continues to prate constantly about the transparency of his serfs, and the parrots in his cages repeat it constantly. Not even Solyndra, Fast and Furious and Benghazi have made a dent in this Generalissimo's facade.

Govt Regs, Taxes Crush Small Business Creation

Subway Founder & CEO Fred DeLuca says that Subway could not exist if it were founded in today's welter of laws, regs, and taxes. Read the link...

UNIVISION Bests NBC in February Sweeps

UNIVISION is a Spanish language network that bested NBC whose procedurals with Law & Order and Jay Leno Show are the only watchable shows on that left-wing outpost.

Cowardly Craven Loser Egyptian Pilot Jumps Airship Without Turning Off Gas Valve

The Egyptian Pilot of the air balloon where 19 of 21 passengers perished yesterday deserted his charges in the TYPICAL cowardly loser Egyptian fashion:

The pilot of a hot-air balloon that caught fire in mid-air and crashed, killing 19 foreign tourists, jumped from the gondola before shutting off the gas valve, Egypt’s Civil Aviation Minister Wael El-Maadawi said. A Briton also managed to escape from the balloon by leaping to safety before it soared into the sky and exploded in a fireball that left many of the corpses charred in a tragic end to an early-morning tour over the famed pharaonic sites in the southern Egyptian city of Luxor early yesterday, El-Maadawi said, according to the state-run Ahram Gate website.

As a frequent visitor to Egypt, I can only attest that this case of irresponsibility and cowardice is typical. The inbred freaks that are Egyptians in general do not deserve attention nor vacation visits.

Why Michelle-Bangs Had US Military At The Oscars

Jennifer Rubin spells it out for illiterate lefties to know.

She declared of the Best Picture nominees, “They reminded us that we can overcome any obstacle if we dig deep enough and fight hard enough and find the courage within ourselves.” Alas, none of the films nor her aides reminded her to mention the military, not those personnel behind her nor those serving overseas, an odd omission for the White House that nevertheless was pleased to have them arrayed behind her like, well, set decoration.

The Eternal Campaign Couple have to fill their emptiness inside with all the glam/glitter BS that lefties [for the same reasons] always do.

She did have time to give a crumb to the gay community, applauding the movies that inspire us ”no matter who we are or what we look like or who we love,” adding that “they are especially important for our young people.” (Except when they contain gruesome violence, traffic in stereotypes or use gratuitous profanity, I guess.) Real heroes, such as our servicemen and servicewomen, inspire us, too, I would think.

I can remember when the First BJClinton went to Deutschland and had the Kanzler Schroeder give him a box of cigars, everyone in Europe and most Republicans laughed at him... Only those comedians on the left didn't get it. But, like Clinton...

President Obama pops up at every sporting event in the nation. Now the first lady feels entitled, with military personnel as props, to intrude on other forms of entertaining (this time for the benefit of the Hollywood glitterati who so lavishly paid for her husband’s election). I’m sure the left will holler that once again conservatives are being grouchy and have it in for the Obamas. Seriously, if they really had their president’s interests at heart, they’d steer away from encouraging these celebrity appearances. It makes both the president and the first lady seem small and grasping. In this case, it was just downright weird.

The White House has been overrun by something worse than rats or cockroaches---an infestation of overthinking and corrupt "sophisticates" who know nothing of what the USA is about. Jenny says it better:

No one, it seems, gets within a mile of the White House with any sense of restraint. No one there would dare suggest nearly half the country didn’t vote for him and doesn’t much like him and might want to be left to their small daily pleasures. (Greta Garbo said it best.) And no one there is apt to explain that the White House, the military and the first lady (not this one in particular) are institutions bigger than the Obamas and their e-mail list.

And Rubin gets the last parting shot at these sleazy pretentious pretenders.

Still, it would have been grand if the lefty-maligned “Zero Dark Thirty” (which showed the nasty interrogation techniques her husband deplored) had won Best Picture. Unfortunately, that sort of perfect karma happens only in the movies.

Amen and Roger That.

Is the Euro About to Collapse?

Bernard Connolly was head of Europe's Monetary Commission 17 years ago and predicted back then that the Euro was not feasible. Read this piece & you might realize he was right:

Seventeen years ago, Bernard Connolly foretold the misery that awaited the European Union. Given that he was an instrumental figure in the EU bureaucracy and publicly expressed his doubts in a book called "The Rotten Heart of Europe," he was promptly fired. Mr. Connolly takes no pleasure now in having seen his prediction come true. And he takes no comfort in the view, prevalent in many quarters, that the EU has passed through the worst of its crisis and is on the cusp of revival.

As far as Mr. Connolly is concerned, Europe's heart is still rotting away.

The European political class, he says, believes that the crisis "hit its high point" last summer, "because that was when there was an imminent danger, from their point of view, that their wonderful dream would disappear." But from the perspective "of real live people, and families and firms and economies," he says, the situation "is just getting worse and worse." Last week, the EU reported that the euro-zone economy shrank by 0.9% in the fourth quarter of 2012. For the full year, gross domestic product fell 0.5% in the euro zone.

Two immediate solutions present themselves, Mr. Connolly says, neither appetizing. Either Germany pays "something like 10% of German GDP a year, every year, forever" to the crisis-hit countries to keep them in the euro. Or the economy gets so bad in Greece or Spain or elsewhere that voters finally say, " 'Well, we'll chuck the whole lot of you out.' Now, that's not a very pleasant prospect." He's thinking specifically, in the chuck-'em-out scenario, about the rise of neo-fascists like the Golden Dawn faction in Greece.

Mr. Connolly isn't just any Cassandra. When he predicted disaster, he was running the European Commission's Monetary Affairs Committee, the Brussels bureaucracy charged with ushering the euro into being. His public confession of fear that the monetary union would inevitably produce an economic crisis not only cost him his job, he says, it also cost him his pension, and he was barred from his office even before his dismissal was official. In the introduction to the paperback edition of "The Rotten Heart of Europe," Mr. Connolly describes how his photograph was posted at entrances to the commission's offices, as if he were a wanted criminal.

Mr. Connolly went on to a career as a private economist. His research notes while at American International Group's AIG +3.14% trading division showed the same flair for bold prognostication. In 2003, as then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan cut interest rates to an unprecedented 1%, Mr. Connolly described the U.S. economy as a debt-driven Ponzi scheme and predicted that interest rates would have to fall even further in the next cycle to keep the scheme going.

Today Mr. Connolly provides his research notes to clients who presumably pay a great deal for his thoughts. He generally doesn't talk to the press. And he doesn't make public pronouncements or market calls, lest he "agitate" his clients.

But with his book back in print, Mr. Connolly agreed to sit down in his publisher's office to explain why the euro went wrong, why nothing has been fixed, and what he expects to happen next.

Superficially, there is some basis for the official view that the worst of the crisis is over: Interest-rate spreads, current-account deficits and budget deficits are down. Greece's departure from the single currency no longer seems imminent.

Yet unemployment is close to 27% in Spain and Greece. The euro-zone economy shrank ever-faster throughout 2012. And—most important in Mr. Connolly's view—the economic fundamentals in France are getting worse. This week France announced it would miss its deficit-reduction target for the year because of dimming growth prospects.

It's one thing to bail out Greece or Ireland, Mr. Connolly says, but "if the Germans at some point think, 'We're going to have to bail out France, and on an ongoing, perpetual basis,' will they do it? I don't know. But that's the question that has to be answered."

The official view is that the bailouts of Greece, Ireland and Portugal—and maybe soon Spain—are aberrations, and that once those countries get their budgets on track, their economies will follow and the bad patch will be a memory. Mr. Connolly calls this "propaganda."

And here we get to the heart of Mr. Connolly's rotten-heart argument against the single currency: The cause of the crisis, according to the "propaganda," he says, was "fiscal indiscipline in countries like Greece and financial-sector indiscipline in countries like Ireland." As a consequence, "the response is focused on budgetary rules, budgetary bailouts and rules for the financial sector, with the prospect, perhaps, of financial bailouts through the banking union, although that remains unclear."

But even if the Greeks were undisciplined, he says, "both the sovereign-debt crisis and the banking crisis are symptoms, not causes. And the underlying problem has been that there was a massive bubble generated in the world as a whole by monetary policy—but particularly in the euro zone" by European Central Bank policy.

The bubble formed like this: When countries such as Ireland, Greece and Spain joined the euro, their interest rates immediately dropped to near-German levels, in some cases from double-digit territory. "The optimism created by these countries' suddenly finding that they could have low interest rates without their currencies collapsing, which had been their previous experience, led people to think that there was a genuine rate-of-return revolution going on," he says.

There had been an increase in the rates of return in Ireland "and to some extent in Spain" in the run-up to euro membership, thanks to structural reforms in those countries in the pre-euro period. But by the time the euro rolled around, money was flowing into these countries out of all proportion to the opportunities available.

"And what kept the stuff flowing in," Mr. Connolly says, "was essentially the belief, 'Well, yes, there is a high rate of return in construction.' " That in turn depended on "ongoing expectations" about house appreciation "that were in some ways not dissimilar to what was happening to the United States in the middle of the last decade. But it was much bigger."

How much bigger? "If you scale housing starts by population, then the housing boom in Spain and Ireland was something like three or four times as intense as the peak of the boom in the U.S. That's mind boggling."

That torrent of money drove up wages far faster than productivity improved, while cheap borrowing led to major deficit spending. After the 2008 financial panic, the bubble inevitably burst.

So what's needed now is not simply a fiscal retrenchment, or even a retrenchment along with banking reform. Wages and prices have to adjust to something like their pre-bubble trends, Mr. Connolly says, to make these economies competitive again. One way to accomplish that would be a massive depreciation of the euro—"really massive."

If that's not feasible, he says, Europe can try to "recreate the bubble" by bringing back the conditions that allowed Spain to borrow so cheaply. That is "essentially what [Mario] Draghi"—the European Central Bank president—"appears to be trying to do: to recreate a bubble." Mr. Draghi, by threatening to intervene in the sovereign debt markets, has driven interest rates in Spain down substantially. But because the banking system is distressed, and because house prices continue to fall, even these lower rates are not driving investment into the country the way they did before. And even if Mr. Draghi were to succeed, Mr. Connolly says, the ECB president would merely be "recreating exactly the dangerous, unsustainable situation that we had in the middle of the last decade."

Which leaves Europe with the last option: Germany pays. As Mr. Connolly puts its: "You can say to a country like Spain: 'No need to adjust your competitiveness, you don't need to have full-employment trade balance. You can still have full-employment current-account balance because we will give you transfers instead.' And by definition, if the point of that is to avoid adjustment, you have to do it this year, the next year, the year after, and every year, forever."

That is not how Brussels and Frankfurt see it. In their view, a little help now will simply ease the transition back to a stable future, when the transfers will cease. Of all the countries that have been bailed out so far, Ireland comes closest to realizing this goal. But Ireland, Mr. Connolly notes, "is a much more flexible and much more open economy than Spain, Greece, Portugal, France, Italy." The less flexible economies have been slower to adjust, with the consequence that wages, instead of dropping to a sustainable post-bubble level, remain high—resulting in mass unemployment.

Which brings us back to the politics of the euro crisis. At some point, the people in the affected countries presumably will call a halt to the pain and sweep in a government willing to think the impossible—leaving the euro, for example.

To avoid that, Germany could well agree to pay for a transfer union, either believing that the transfers needn't be permanent, or hoping they'd be less expensive than a euro break up. But, Mr. Connolly warns, once a mechanism is in place to transfer money from Germany to the current-account deficit countries, it's only a matter of time before Germany is faced with the question of adding France to its list of dependents—something even Berlin may not be willing or able to afford.

German reunification has cost the former West Germany about 5% of GDP a year, with no end in sight. The expense has proved politically tolerable, Mr. Connolly says, because there was a strong sense that "they were reuniting their country." But such solidarity does not exist within Europe.

"There is no European demos, and you're not going to create a demos by setting up a system in which you say, 'We will give you money, you will follow these rules,' " says Mr. Connolly. "It simply will not work."

And there is no such thing as a free lunch, unless it's on Germany's tab, so it seems.

Woodward Calls Obama and Lew LIARS

Here is a Washington Post article that puts the lie to Obama's claim that Congress initiated the sequester idea when in fact, it was the lying POTUS and his Treasury & WH Staff henchmen who did.

At the Feb. 13 Senate Finance Committee hearing on Lew’s nomination to become Treasury secretary, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) asked Lew about the account in my book: “Woodward credits you with originating the plan for sequestration. Was he right or wrong?”

It’s a little more complicated than that,” Lew responded, “and even in his account, it was a little more complicated than that. We were in a negotiation where the failure would have meant the default of the government of the United States.”

“Did you make the suggestion?” Burr asked.

“Well, what I did was said that with all other options closed, we needed to look for an option where we could agree on how to resolve our differences. And we went back to the 1984 plan that Senator [Phil] Gramm and Senator [Warren] Rudman worked on and said that that would be a basis for having a consequence that would be so unacceptable to everyone that we would be able to get action.”

In other words, yes.

But then Burr asked about the president’s statement during the presidential debate, that the Republicans originated it.

Lew, being a good lawyer and a loyal presidential adviser, then shifted to denial mode: “Senator, the demand for an enforcement mechanism was not something that the administration was pushing at that moment.”

That statement was not accurate.

On Tuesday, Obama appeared at the White House with a group of police officers and firefighters to denounce the sequester as a “meat-cleaver approach” that would jeopardize military readiness and investments in education, energy and readiness. He also said it would cost jobs. But, the president said, the substitute would have to include new revenue through tax reform.

At noon that same day, White House press secretary Jay Carney shifted position and accepted sequester paternity.

“The sequester was something that was discussed,” Carney said. Walking back the earlier statements, he added carefully, “and as has been reported, it was an idea that the White House put forward.”

This was an acknowledgment that the president and Lew had been wrong.

Why does this matter?

First, months of White House dissembling further eroded any semblance of trust between Obama and congressional Republicans. (The Republicans are by no means blameless and have had their own episodes of denial and bald-faced message management.)

Second, Lew testified during his confirmation hearing that the Republicans would not go along with new revenue in the portion of the deficit-reduction plan that became the sequester. Reinforcing Lew’s point, a senior White House official said Friday, “The sequester was an option we were forced to take because the Republicans would not do tax increases.”

In fact, the final deal reached between Vice President Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in 2011 included an agreement that there would be no tax increases in the sequester in exchange for what the president was insisting on: an agreement that the nation’s debt ceiling would be increased for 18 months, so Obama would not have to go through another such negotiation in 2012, when he was running for reelection.

So when the president asks that a substitute for the sequester include not just spending cuts but also new revenue, he is moving the goal posts. His call for a balanced approach is reasonable, and he makes a strong case that those in the top income brackets could and should pay more. But that was not the deal he made.

Once again, The First Fool lies, cheats and steals his way to tax increases while Boehner neglects to stand up like a man.

Commander-in-Criminality Originated Sequester

Bob Woodward exposes the FIRST LIAR do his POS strut on the GOP coming up with the idea of the sequester thus:

On July 26, 2011, Jack Lew, then the White House budget director, went to Harry Reid’s office for a budget strategy session. According to Bob Woodward’s book, “The Price of Politics,” Lew told the Senate majority leader that they had come up with a trigger idea to force a budget deal.

“What’s the idea?” Reid asked.

“Sequestration,” Lew responded.

Reid folded himself over with his head between his knees, as if he were going to throw up. Then he came upright and gaped at the ceiling. “A couple of weeks ago,” he exclaimed, “my staff said to me there is one more possible” enforcement method: sequestration. Reid said he had told his staff at the time, “Get the hell out of here. That’s insane. The White House surely will come up with a plan that will save the day. And you come to me with sequestration?”

Sequestration may have seemed insane back then. But politicians in both parties are secretly discovering that they love sequestration now. It allows them to do the dance moves they enjoy the most.

Democrats get to do the P.C. Shimmy. Traditional presidents go through a normal set of motions: They identify a problem. They come up with a proposal to address the problem. They try to convince the country that their proposal is the best approach.

Under the Permanent Campaign Shimmy, the president identifies a problem. Then he declines to come up with a proposal to address the problem. Then he comes up with a vague-but-politically-convenient concept that doesn’t address the problem (let’s raise taxes on the rich). Then he goes around the country blasting the opposition for not having as politically popular a concept. Then he returns to Washington and congratulates himself for being the only serious and substantive person in town.

Sequestration allows the White House to do this all over again. The president hasn’t actually come up with a proposal to avert sequestration, let alone one that is politically plausible.

He does have a vague and politically convenient concept. (Tax increases on the rich!) He does have a chance to lead the country into a budget showdown with furloughed workers and general mayhem, for which people will primarily blame Republicans. And he does have the chance to achieve the same thing he has achieved so frequently over the past two years, political success and legislative mediocrity.

Republicans also secretly love the sequester. It allows them to do their favorite dance move, the Suicide Stage Dive. It was pioneered by Newt Gingrich in 1995 and has been repeated constantly since.

In this dance, the Republicans mount the stage and roar that they are about to courageously cut spending. In this anthem they carefully emphasize cuts to programs the country sympathizes with, such as special education, while sparing programs that actually created the debt problem, like Medicare.

Then, when they have worked themselves up into a frenzy of self-admiration, they sprint across the stage and leap into what they imagine is the loving arms of their adoring fans. When they are 4 feet off the ground, they realize the voters have left the building in disgust and they land with a thud on the floor.

Sequestration allows the Republicans to do the Suicide Stage Dive to perfection. Voters disdain the G.O.P. because they think Republicans are mindless antigovernment fanatics who can’t distinguish good government programs from bad ones. Sequestration is a fanatically mindless piece of legislation that can’t distinguish good government programs from bad ones. Sequestration carefully spares programs like Medicare and Social Security that actually contribute to the debt problem. Sequestration will cause maximum political disgust for a trivial amount of budget savings.

The Permanent Campaigner is a LIAR without peer. The GOP is led by a pious chain-smoking ex-bartender mumbler.

With a pair of losers in the top two jobs in the land, a sequester makes perfect sense.

And for the Dimocrats to lie about who suggested it at first is not surprising due to it being led by The Father Of Lies.

Data versus Intuition

David Brooks has a nice little philosophical/pragmatic excursion through the enigmas of data versus intuition versus "trust equals reciprocity coated with emotion."

....the strengths and limitations of data analysis. The big novelty of this historic moment is that our lives are now mediated through data-collecting computers. In this world, data can be used to make sense of mind-bogglingly complex situations. Data can help compensate for our overconfidence in our own intuitions and can help reduce the extent to which our desires distort our perceptions.

An interesting piece to check out.

Obama Golfed With Oil Men As Climate Protesters Descended On White House

Ha ha ha. Obama does a round of golf with Carroll & Crane, two directors of a company with links to Anadarko, one of the largest oil & gas firms in the USA. Just like Gore sells his unwatched Current TV to AlJezira for a $100mm personal payback, Obama preaches fighting climate change at the SOTU and then golfs with those frackin' folks to figure out how Carroll & Crane can help him as gasoline prices rocket past $4/gal. Hypocrisy, thy name is Democrat...
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Marco Rubio: The Electable Conservative?

Nate Silver has an NYT article that is mildly praiseworthy of Marco Rubio's chances to win the 2016 GOP nomination for POTUS. [Yes, the handicapping has already begun now that The Emperor Jones has been constitutionally ruled out of a third term.]

Some commentators have expressed surprise upon learning about the very conservative voting record of Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who delivered the Republican response to the State of the Union address last week.

Since winning his Senate seat, Mr. Rubio has generally sided with other Republicans as part of a party that has steadily grown more conservative over the last three decades. (Mr. Rubio’s recent support for immigration reform is more of an exception than his usual rule of sticking to the party line.)

Being reliably conservative, however, is hardly a liability for someone who might hope to win the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. Indeed, one reason to watch Mr. Rubio carefully is that, among the candidates who will be deemed reliably conservative by Republican voters and insiders, he may stand the best chance of maintaining a reasonably good image with general election voters.

But how does Senator Rubio hold up among the other notables in the Senate? Believe it or not, Rubio sits between Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz, with five major GOP standouts more conservative than himself.

Silver concludes:

...in 1980 the average Republican member of Congress had a score of 30, the average Republican in the most recent Congress had a score of 48, very close to Mr. Rubio’s. Thus, my contention that Mr. Rubio is a good representative of the Republican Party as it stands today.

This is a potentially advantageous position for a Republican competing in the presidential primaries. In both parties, nominees have usually come from the center of their parties, rather than from the moderate or the “extreme” wings. There are exceptions: Mr. Reagan, although he would fit right into the Republican Party today, was much more conservative than most of his contemporaries in 1980. But in general, Mr. Rubio is pretty close to the sweet spot of where a presidential nominee might want to be.

There are some viable candidates to Mr. Rubio’s right. The 2012 Republican vice-presidential nominee, Representative Paul D. Ryan, rates a score of 55, slightly more conservative than Mr. Rubio. Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, rates a 57.

But the most important thing about Rubio's chances is his popularity.

Silver thinks that this likeability and Hispanic background are crucial.

Mr. Rubio's most persuasive pitch to GOP insiders may be that he is more popular than other, ideologically similar candidates. Some of those candiidates, like Mr. Ryan, can probably offer a richer intellectual defense of conservatism, or can claim to have been better vetted. Several others, like Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, have more executive experience. Mr. Rubio’s relatively favorable public image represents his comparative advantage. (There are also the facts that Mr. Rubio is Hispanic and is from Florida, but these advantages boil down to electability as well: the possibility that he might help Republicans make gains with Latinos, and that he could give them a lift in an especially important swing state.)

What makes matters tricky for Mr. Rubio is that, at the same time he is hoping to persuade Republican party insiders that he deserves their support, he will also need to maintain a reasonably good image with the broader electorate lest his electability argument be undermined. This may lead to some strange positions, such as when Mr. Rubio recently critiqued President Obama’s immigration proposal despite its many similarities to his own.

When the wider electorate learns that Mr. Rubio’s positions are in fact hard to differentiate from those of other conservative Republicans, will his favorability ratings turn mediocre, as Mr. Ryan’s now are?

This is not meant as a rhetorical question. One measure of political talent, and something that characterized both Mr. Reagan and Mr. Obama, is the ability to sell ideas to voters across a wide range of the political spectrum. Perhaps Mr. Rubio will prove to be such a talent. Otherwise, if Mr. Rubio holds a fairly ordinary (and conservative) set of Republican positions, his popularity ratings may wind up being ordinary as well.

And I think that an article by Silver this early in the game is a dog whistle to those salivating foaming at the mouth far-left sites like Media Matters and TalkProgress and dozens of other mindlessly mentally-disturbed commissars to burrow into everything Rubio and elevate anything like Marco's 'Watergate' into a tempest in a teacup.

Supreme Court Takes Campaign Finance Case, Will Rule On Contribution Limits

Our Emperor Jones is sitting in his digs on Pennsylvania Ave. plotting how many ways he can overthrow the Constitution and you complain about a few rich guys who make bigger contributions than most? Guess it takes all kinds.
About Campaign Finance
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Supreme Court Takes Campaign Finance Case, Will Rule On Contribution Limits

This case is a logical and entirely sensible extension of Citizens United. It seems that Roberts is donning sackcloth and ashes to demonstrate to the conservative Justices that he has not entirely gone squishy soft after he called The Affordable Care Act a legal tax. Steve Wynn and Sheldon Adelson are going to be two happy and huge donors if the SCOTUS rules to diminish campaign finance regs... Soros just pulled off another arbitrage coup and might want to spread his largesse to the Dems, so everybody [including Apple's Tim Cook] might be happy with that.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Mike Allen puts a New Gambit in His Playbook: Useful Morons Reply

POLITICO has removed its nose from Obama's nethermost orifice [note reference to tiny Schwannstueke] and sent their masterminds to decry the terrible treatment this White House is giving them---and after all they've done for HIM! His Most High Solipsist has benefited from the Band of Brothers/Sisters who avoided Solyndra, Fast and Furious, Benghazi [during the election, no less] and [and many other gaffes too numerous to name] not even the NYT can get access to a one-on-ONE with His Most High Narcissist. Of course, sniveling sycophants like Brian Williams, Scott Pelley, Diane Sawyer and the House Poodle from 60 Minutes, Steve Kroft, all get their face time with The Emperor Jones.

"The balance of power used to bemore in favor of the mainstream press,” said Mike McCurry, who was press secretary to President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Nowadays, he said, “The White House gets away with stuff I would never have dreamed of doing. When I talk to White House reporters now, they say it’s really tough to do business with people who don’t see the need to be cooperative.”

McCurry and his colleagues in the Clinton White House were hardly above putting their boss in front of gentle questions: Clinton and Vice President Al Gore often preferred the safety of “Larry King Live” to the rhetorical combat of the briefing room. But Obama and his aides have raised it to an art form: The president has shut down interviews with many of the White House reporters who know the most and ask the toughest questions. Instead, he spends way more time talking directly to voters via friendly shows and media personalities. Why bother with The New York Times beat reporter when Obama can go on “The View”?

Piers Morgan has adequately replaced Larry King, but his reputation as a fugitive from a British newsie scandal would tarnish the shining armor of the Commander of the Faithful,[Rais al-Mu'mineen to his Arab confreres whom he bows and kowtows to as much as it isn't seen as dreadfully impolitic]. The usually compliant Ann Compton bleats thusly:

“The way the president’s availability to the press has shrunk in the last two years is a disgrace,” said ABC News White House reporter Ann Compton, who has covered every president back to Gerald R. Ford. “The president’s day-to-day policy development — on immigration, on guns — is almost totally opaque to the reporters trying to do a responsible job of covering it. There are no readouts from big meetings he has with people from the outside, and many of them aren’t even on his schedule. This is different from every president I covered. This White House goes to extreme lengths to keep the press away.”

No more interviews of nominees when there might be a chance to slip up and ask a real query:

When Obama nominated Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court, she gave one interview — to White House TV, produced by Obama aides.

The GREAT ONE or is it WON still has a choir of clowns like the alcoholic whore Charles H. Pierce over at the unread broadshit called Esquire roars that POLITICO has always been unreliable. The WaPo's in-house sod hole Greg Mitchell calls Vandehei and Allen "Crybabies" when he himself is a victim of perpetual buggery and submission by the White House, the DNC, and the far-left conclave of covert communists like little Ezra Klein. But there's more:

“They use every technique anyone has ever thought of, and some no one ever had,” New York Times White House reporter Peter Baker told us. “They can be very responsive and very helpful at pulling back the curtain at times while keeping you at bay at others. And they’re not at all shy about making clear when they don’t like your stories, which is quite often.”

Peter is actually the very best foreign reporter in the NYT stable. In the past, the "newspaper of record" was given special treatment. But now Twitter, Facebook, Google+, legacy lefty TV broadcasters like NBC, CBS, ABC and especially 60 Minutes along with many other communication outlets are employed by this White House to undermine the GOP and ignore the traditional media. Some of Obama's techniques are:

* There’s the classic weekend document dump to avoid negative coverage. By our count, the White House has done this nearly two dozen times, and almost always to minimize attention to embarrassing or messy facts. “What you guys call a document dump, we call transparency,” the White House’s Earnest shot back. If that’s the case, the White House was exceptionally transparent during the Solyndra controversy, releasing details three times on a Friday.

* There is the iron-fisted control of access to White House information and officials. Top officials recently discouraged Cabinet secretaries from talking about sequestration. And even top officials privately gripe about the muzzle put on them by the White House.

* They are also masters of scrutiny avoidance. The president has not granted an interview to print reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, POLITICO and others in years. These are the reporters who are often most likely to ask tough, unpredictable questions.Kumar, who works out of the White House press room and tallies every question a journalist asks the president, has found that in his first term Obama held brief press availabilities after photos ops or announcements one-third as often as George W. Bush did in his first term — 107 to Bush’s 355.

* While White House officials deny it is intentional, this administration —like its predecessors — does some good old-fashioned bullying of reporters: making clear there will be no interviews, or even questions at press conferences, if aides are displeased with their coverage.

And the press had a good time with an old pic of Obama shooting a skeet shotgun, but got slapped on the wrist by Carney and Plouffe, demonstrating the essential silliness of the sandbox toddlers in the West Wing when someone criticizes their toys.

A number of these techniques were on vivid display two weekends ago, when the White House released a six-month-old photo of the president shooting skeet, buttressing his claim in a New Republic interview that he fires at clay pigeons “all the time” at Camp David.

Obama and his team, especially newly promoted senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer, often bemoan the media’s endless chase of superficial and distracting storylines. So how did the president’s inner circle handle the silly dust-up about whether the president really did shoot skeet?

Pfeiffer and White House press secretary Jay Carney tweeted a link to the photo, with Pfeiffer writing that it was “[f]or all the skeeters” (doubters, or “skeet birthers”). Longtime adviser David Plouffe then taunted critics on Twitter: “Attn skeet birthers. Make our day - let the photoshop conspiracies begin!” Plouffe soon followed up with: “Day made. The skeet birthers are out in full force in response to POTUS pic. Makes for most excellent, delusional reading.”

The controversy started with an interview co-conducted by Chris Hughes, a former Obama supporter and now publisher of The New Republic. The government created the content (the photo), released it on its terms (Twitter) and then used Twitter again to stoke stories about conservatives who didn’t believe Obama ever shot a gun in the first place.

Methinks that David is delusional.

And I'm sorry Neil Monroe of the Daily Caller wasn't mentioned when he supposedly "heckled" THE MOST HIGH during a sheeple only exposition in the Rose Garden.

The brave White House reporters literally and figuratively chased him out of their cozy coterie. Look where that got the herd of suck-ups....

Is Chuck Hagel a Terminal Dud & Why does BHO Like Chuck So Much?

Jennifer Rubin wonders why Sens. McCain & Graham are starting to get cold feet on filibustering the Hagel nomination:

Republicans are in this fix because Democrats won’t act responsibly. Recall what happened when President George W. Bush nominated the hapless Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. The opposition party was pushing for her, figuring she’d be a dim pushover. But following in-person meetings on Capitol Hill, it was Republicans, unlike Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and his Democratic friends, who came out not to vouch for her but to say they were concerned and unsatisfied. Republican senators and a grass-roots conservative movement organized against their own president. (We can do better. This is an insult to the institution. She’s in over her head.) And sure enough the White House found a graceful way to end the nomination, saying it couldn’t provide documents needed for confirmation because of executive privilege.

Now, however, it is Democrats who cheer for an inept nominee. According to Bob Woodward, some Democrats have called the White House to see if Hagel is withdrawing. And yet none will publicly admit their qualms; none have hinted that they will vote against Hagel. There is no graceful exit from the White House because President Obama doesn’t give a darn whether Hagel is an incompetent fool. He’s not backing down. He’s going to stick it to the pro-Israel community and to Israel. He’s going to stick it to the Republicans.

There is no other way to read his determination to go forward with such a flawed nominee. And Democrats, unlike their Republican counterparts in the Miers nomination, don’t have the nerve or the concern for the institution in which the nominee would serve to force the president’s hand.

Let’s recap. The president doesn’t care about an inept nominee. The Democrats don’t care about an inept nominee. But Republicans are supposed to defer to the White House’s judgment? This is, frankly, nuts.

Hagel's tenure on the Hill showed that behind that crusty and idiosyncratic persona was and administrative nightmare---according to former staffers. Obscenities and nasty insults were hurled at terrified staffers.

Hagel accused the State Department of being "an adjunct to the Israeli Foreign Ministry. During my tenure as an Arabist FSO working in NEA, the Near East Asia Bureau, the support of the State Dept. was only on the Seventh Floor and that because of political reasons. A solid phalanx of FSO's on the fifth floor in NEA and our Ambassadors in the 22 Arab countries were neutral or very much opposed to Israel's policies.

I would have agreed with Hagel during Kissinger's tenure, but Cyrus Vance and Jim Baker were instructed by the White House to moderate policies towards Israel.

The inside skinny on the entire American/Israeli/Arab saber dance is that the Democrats supported Israel's left-wing Labor Party until in 1978, Likud ousted them from power. The Dems abruptly changed their attitude and policies toward Israel when the right-wing Likud kept Begin, Shamir, Rabin in power until Rabin's assassination by a far-right settler.

The Dems hate Netanyahu and Hagel is Barry Soetero's pet anti-Israeli thumb-in-their-eye. Iran, Syria, Egypt would all be boosted if Hagel were confirmed.

Obama is angry that the GOP is not bowing to his narcissistic sense of self-entitlement.

I'm hoping some less controversial nominee oversees the painful cutbacks the imbecile in the White House is gleefully overseeing as he continues to geld America through economic and political incompetence and dishonesty across the board.