So it was interesting in a slow down and get a good look at the media wreck by the side of the highway kind of way – watching the Malia-Obama-Goes-to-Mexico story getting scrubbed off newspaper sites the other day. My daughter was actually surfing the intertubules that afternoon, noticed how the story was there and gone again, in the blink of an eye: ‘Hey, there’s another Obama vay-cay, how many weeks since the last one? Whoops!’ Quite honestly, we had never seen the like; a news story appearing and disappearing like that, and I thought at first that maybe a couple of newspapers had fallen for a fake story and then withdrawn it almost at once. But no … it was was a genuine story, and massively-withdrawn almost as soon as it was posted here, there and almost everywhere.
Obama
Israel, Obama, Propaganda, and Reality
As the election approaches, Obama is turning up the volume on his assertions that he’s been a great friend to Israel.
This video tells a different story, and I think clearly a much truer one.
The video is long…30 minutes…but it is well-done. If you value the safety and survival of Israel…if you are concerned about the threat of terrorism to Americans and others around the world…if you believe it would be a very bad thing for Iran to obtain nuclear weapons…and if you are even remotely considering voting for Barack Obama or sitting out the election, then you owe it to yourself to watch this video.
link via Robert Avrech
Quote of the Day
This election is a contest between a Democrat who wants to make this country more like Tocqueville’s France and Republicans who want to keep it more like Tocqueville’s America. The liberal bloggers are rooting for France.
Quote of the Day
David P. Goldman (“Spengler”), “Memo to Jews: After They Come for the Catholic Church, They Will Come For Us“:
Open the door to “scientific” determination of matters of life and death, and America’s Orthodox Jews — a minority within a minority — will be vulnerable to a new Inquisition. On this issue, there can be no compromise. Agudath Israel is right: Jews should stand by the right of the Catholic Church to determine what is acceptable by its standards, just as we one day will ask the Catholic Church to stand by our right to determine what is acceptable by our standards. To its credit, Britain’s Catholic Church stood by us in 2009 when the English courts shamefully and wrongly ruled that our most basic religious criteria were “racist.” Shamefully and wrongfully, some Jews have failed to stand by the Church under the Obama administration’s persecution. I appeal to these Jews: Don’t be naive. We’re next.
Republican Own Goals
As Gingrich attacks Romney for being successful, and Romney proves too slow on his feet to talk about his admirable business career without apologizing or making gaffes, the Republicans cede the narrative to Obama. Intrade shows Obama’s reelection odds creeping up as Republican candidates, egged on by hostile media, bog down in discussions of fairness and the appropriate cap-gains tax rate for “the rich”. Romney in particular doesn’t seem to understand the political dynamic. He ought to put much more effort into attacking Obama, whose record in office is terrible. In this environment no Republican is going to win the presidency by being a nice guy.
Part of what’s happening is that the economy is recovering, to some degree because the Fed is signaling that it’s going to keep suppressing short rates and buying up long-term govt debt for the foreseeable future. This is an insane policy that funnels money to Obama’s Wall Street cronies while killing low-risk investment opportunities for middle-class retirees. It seems likely to lead eventually to significant inflation. Romney, as the likely Republican nominee, should be hammering the Fed for ineptitude and corruption, for running an unsustainable monetary policy and trying to goose the markets into the election. He should be hammering Obama for trying to reinflate the credit markets to buy votes. (The residential real estate market seems to be picking up, perhaps to some degree in response to Obama’s mortgage-subsidy vote-buying scheme. But it may also be that people see inflation coming and want to exchange cash, especially borrowed cash, for real assets.)
Obama has been very bad for the country. His high tax, high regulation, high cronyism, high uncertainty policies suppress productive investment and throw vast amounts of private capital down politically favored sinkholes. Conservative and moderate/uncommitted voters alike yearn for a Republican candidate who forthrightly defends free enterprise and the opportunity society against Obama’s decadent, stratified socialist ineptocracy. Romney, the great businessman, the man who has been running for president for six or seven years, is tongue tied. My first thought is, This is the best our country can do? My second thought is that maybe Romney will pick up his game as the nomination becomes increasingly certain and he focuses more on November. Hope springs eternal.