WASHINGTON POST: As U.S. suspends deep-water oil drilling, other nations move ahead.
Archive for 2010
July 22, 2010
WELL, THERE YOU GO THEN: Dem Plan to Cut Deficit Will Pay for Failed Stimulus … by 2130.
MEGAN MCARDLE: Tenure: An Idea Whose Time Has Gone. Some pushback in the comments, but with a higher education bubble set to burst I think we’ll hear more along these lines. Gulp.
TO SAUCE OR NOT TO SAUCE? The Great Grilling Question.
INSTAVISION: I talk with Indiana Senate Candidate Dan Coats, about the election, the future and more. Plus, he says he’d support federal civil rights legislation to protect Second Amendment rights against interference from places like Chicago. (Bumped, because . . . it’s my show!)
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HEH: What I Learned From the Shirley Sherrod Case. One bit: “Why Can’t Media Matters Read? Well, its not just Media Matters but almost every liberal pundit and member of the mainstream media. Who knew that Big Government was like Playboy Magazine. Everyone was so quick to watch the original video posted on Big Government that no one took the time to read the article that Andrew Breitbart wrote. While the article was critical of Ms Sherrod, that was not the focus of the article.”
Plus this: “Damn, those lefty ‘reporters’ really hate Andrew Breitbart. They couldn’t wait to pounce on him for this story despite the fact that they couldn’t have read his post that well. Do they hate him for his politics or because he does their job much better than they do? I pick both.”
THE TOP TEN racist incidents of the week.
CHRIS STIREWALT: “It should embarrass Republicans to be debating whether to tell voters why they should be elected this fall.”
DAN RIEHL: In defense of Andrew Breitbart. Does Breitbart need defending?
Plus this: “I’d add, the Left has actually manufactured completely false evidence of racism at Tea Party events out here. I have yet to see any outrage over that. So, pardon me if I don’t play useful idiot and place a kick me, again, I’m stupid sign on my back as I’ve seen too many of the usual hand wringers on the Right already do in this matter.”
Yes, when the JournoList crowd was fomenting deliberate lies about the tea parties, the Frum-types were happy to join in the pile-on. A lot of us noticed. Don’t expect us to be impressed by your self-proclaimed ethical standards now. . . .
JOURNOLIST UPDATE: A Note to All the Non-JList Reporters. “To all you non-JournoLister reporters out there, please be aware that your credibility has just taken a big hit, because we, your faithful readers, don’t actually know who is or who isn’t. You can thank JournoList for that, you can thank Ezra Klein, and you can thank the Washington Post, which has done its outstanding professionals absolutely no favors in any of this. . . . Peter Finn, I have long admired your reporting, and I admit it was an unfair gut check that made me wonder, are you JList and will it affect this story. I apologize for the unworthy thought, and I am entirely serious in saying so. But I am equally serious in saying that the JList compadres have made it (for you and everyone else, since I have no idea who was on the list) an uncheckable reflex just the same.”
UPDATE: Reader Brian Torrez writes: “What I would like to know is how much did the J-List folks officially and unofficially coordinate with Obama’s campaign?”
RAND SIMBERG: Will Congress Hand the Keys to Space to Russia? “Thursday, the House Science Committee is due to mark up a bill that would slash the $6 billion Barack Obama had planned for the commercial crew initiative (investing in companies to develop a space taxi service for taking astronauts into orbit) by about 96 percent, to $250 million. At the same time, the committee seems determined to resurrect the flawed Ares/Orion program. If this plan were to become law, it could leave the U.S. reliant on Russian rockets to get to the space station indefinitely. . . . If this bill becomes law, the Russians will be getting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in the coming years for a service that could have been provided by private American companies.”
Obama’s NASA-restructuring plan is a good one, and if Congress screws it up it will be very bad for the country. But what do they care about the country, as long as there’s pork. . . . ?
SETTING THE TABLE for fiscal restraint.
INSPECTOR GENERAL: RACE/GENDER MOTIVATED CAR DEALER CLOSURES. “The Obama administration, already under fire for unprecedented allegations of racial bias, faces a new bias claim from a most unlikely source: one of the administration’s own inspectors general. Decisions on which car dealerships to close as part of the auto industry bailout — closures the Obama administration forced on General Motors and Chrysler — were based in part on race and gender, according to a report by Troubled Asset Relief Program Special Inspector General Neal M. Barofsky.”
SHIRLEY SHERROD: Obama Doesn’t Understand The Black Experience. ““He is not someone who has experienced what I have experienced through life, being a person of color.”
PASSIVE RESISTANCE: Non-Compliance Topples Arizona Traffic-Cam Program. “The citizens simply ignored the tickets that arrived in the mail. The state of Arizona doesn’t have the money nor the resources to follow up on the unpaid tickets. To top that all off, a group of activists went around vandalizing the traffic cams — icing on the cake.”
CREDIBILITY! Thomas Spaulding emails: “When did Andrew Breitbart go from fabulist ACORN video hoaxer to face value, no corroboration required, unimpeachable source for the NAACP and the White House? Their extremely swift response is telling.” Good point!
POLITICO: Obama, Cable Chatter, and Liberal Fury.
President Barack Obama has made a mantra out of insisting he and his White House won’t get caught up in “cable chatter,” with aides proudly insisting they don’t let 24-hour news outlets drive decision-making.
But this week’s forced resignation of a previously obscure Agriculture Department employee is just the latest example of Obama officials reacting to a cable news-driven obsession of the right.
It not only infuriates Obama’s liberal base, which feels like the episodes just reinforce the power of the right to push a damaging story into the mainstream press. But as this week shows, the White House’s touchiness even threatens Obama’s ability to keep control of his own public persona, or steer the national conversation in a way that’s conducive to promoting his message and his agenda.
When all you’ve got is your image, you don’t even have that.
JOURNOLIST UPDATE: When McCain picked Palin, liberal journalists coordinated the best line of attack. I like the way they referred to themselves as the “non-official” Obama campaign. . . .
Plus, Jim Lindgren looks at the coordinated attacks and observes: “I wonder whether JournoList was behind several brief, but intense, herd political attacks on CNBC personnel that at different times seemed to come out of the blue (on Jim Cramer, Erin Burnett, and Rick Santelli). They each struck me as odd at the time, especially because I suspect that Cramer and Burnett were only a few months past voting for Obama.”
UPDATE: Reader C.J. Burch writes: “If there are emails following Palin’s speech at the convention this is going to be incredible. Were I Charlie Gibson I’d start trying to get out in front of this now.”
And is this another “coordinated attack?”
CONGRESSIONAL APPROVAL at historic low.
WISHING LIMBAUGH DEAD? A non-apology apology. “I think she shouldn’t have bothered. She apologizes to anyone I may have offended? When she was spewing out her bile, she had no trouble aiming it quite directly at Rush. But now that she’s been found out and feels the need — for entirely self-serving reasons — to say she’s sorry, she can’t bring herself to apologize directly to Rush.”
THE WHITE HOUSE ACTED STUPIDLY: Video: Gibbs apologizes to Sherrod.
THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, speaking out against government would be dangerous. And they were right!