ADVICE: Zip It About The OBL Raid Already.
I noticed that SNL was mocking Obama pretty harshly last night for not being able to shut up about killing bin Laden.
Archive for 2011
May 15, 2011
NEWT GINGRICH isn’t helping.
JEFF JACOBY: Obama’s Inexcusable Indecision On Syria.
A NIGHTMARE SCENARIO FOR HIGHER EDUCATION? “Permission fees are the real purpose here, of course. The goal is to drive more and more money to the Copyright Clearance Center, which is the only source of permission mentioned by name in the draft injunction. The way the injunction would accomplish this would be by entirely eliminating fair use for Georgia State.” It’s time for a massive revision — read: shrinkage — in copyright protection. The only justification for copyright is, as the Constitution says, to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. Protection that goes beyond that should be regarded as unconstitutional. More on that here.
SUMMER READING in mysteries and thrillers.
STACY MCCAIN DEFENDS PRESIDENT OBAMA: “Frankly, I think our current president still has a good way to go before he can merit the claim of being worse than Jimmy Carter, and too many Americans have forgotten exactly how wretched Jimmy was.”
Well, Barack hasn’t killed any cats lately.
IMF HEAD PICKED OUT in police lineup.
THE ECONOMIST ON THAT IMF SEX SCANDAL: It Makes You Want To Join The Tea Party:
Leave aside the details of the allegations against Dominique Strauss Kahn, the head of the IMF (his lawyer indicates he will plead not guilty). Just note that the New York Times states that he was staying in a $3,000 a night suite and was taking a first class flight to Paris. This is the IMF, the body that imposes austerity on indebted countries and is funded by global taxpayers. And this was the likely leading socialist candidate for the French presidency.
Indeed.
CHILDREN DON’T LIE, except when they do. “The girl, angry at Lanigan about something else entirely, had made the whole thing up. But her accusations launched a soul-sapping rollercoaster ride that still hasn’t ended. . . . Lanigan remains in limbo, nearly a year after a jury’s acquittal. The Fairfax School District transferred him from Centre Ridge in a move that ultimately forced his wife to quit her job. School officials are now transferring him again. And the district has refused to pay his $125,000 in legal fees, even though Virginia law allows reimbursement for employees who are cleared of wrongdoing on the job.”
PORN: The Muslim world’s dirty little secret. “Last year, Google ran an analysis of its search queries and concluded Pakistan is the leading nation in sex-related, porn content searches . . . Iran came in third on the overall list, and Egypt was fifth.” Sexual repression, paired with the inevitable hypocrisy, is at the root of most of their troubles, I suspect.
UPDATE: Col. John Tammes emails: “When I was visiting a local Afghan bigshot in 2004, I noticed he had a satellite dish on his roof – when I asked, he said he got over 500 channels and that some of them were – here he hesitated, then laughed. Later on, my interpreter said that half of them were porn related channels and that the Taliban would never retake Afghanistan because too many men would not want to give up their newfound viewing choices…” Heh. Well, possibly.
ALLISON KAPLAN SOMMER reports on those Israeli border incidents. “Israeli politicians and pundits quickly theorized that the infiltration was a Bashar Assad production. Israel was clearly being used in a public relations exercise, they said, deliberately orchestrated by the Assad regime in an effort to take the spotlight off of their brutal suppression of protest movements in Syria and draw attention instead to the border with Israel. . . . If Syria was indeed an active player, it was successful: international headlines emphasized the events on the Israeli border and downplayed a continuing crackdown in a Syrian city on the Lebanese border on the very same day that claimed more Syrian lives than the IDF incident.” It’s easy to distract the media when they want to be distracted.
THE ANSWER, OF COURSE, IS NO: “Have you ever had a thought on the topic of race that isn’t set generations into the past? Have you ever thought about the future?” Because the “progressives” don’t do much actual, you know, progressing.
SALENA ZITO: As Go Jobs, So Goes Ohio:
Joyce McNears peers over her reading glasses and asks a question, expecting no answer: “Why is the president still not talking about jobs?”
Along with her son and grandson, the 66-year-old McNears matriarch is counting stock and rearranging shelves in the family hardware store that has seen good times and bad times in this Ohio River town.
Lately, times have been bad.
Joyce has lived in Belmont County and voted for Democrats all her life. Yet President Barack Obama and U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, both Democrats, won’t get her vote next year.
Belmont went for Obama in 2008 but voted against his policies in 2010, when the Democrat-rich county went for Republican Rob Portman for U.S. Senate.
That’s a problem for Democrats going into 2012 because Ohio has supported the winner in 27 of the last 29 presidential elections. It is perhaps the nation’s most critical swing state.
Read the whole thing.
WHO WILL FOLLOW Herb Kohl?
FRANKENHEARING: Senate GOP Embarrasses Dems Over Boeing.
Harkin was clearly annoyed at the turn that the hearing took. He muttered about his coal mining father and the unfair attacks on unions and the NLRB. But the political danger of the NLRB action was demonstrated by Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), who given his background in suing corporations, is not generally seen as “pro-business.”
Blumenthal went out of his way to be nice to Luttig and Boeing, the biggest American export company with $29 billion in overseas sales in 2009. That might also be due to the fact that Boeing suppliers spend more than a billion dollars in Connecticut.
Al Franken made a late appearance and demonstrated, once again, why Saturday Night Live suits him better than the United States Senate. Franken got angry and said it is untrue that anyone is ever forced to join a union. He obviously never worked in the produce section at Shop ‘n Save in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In a closed-shop state like Pennsylvania, the laws require employees to be members of a union if the employer is unionized. Enzi quipped, in response to Franken’s error, that you wouldn’t have to join a union unless “you wanted a job.”
Ouch.
JENNIFER RUBIN: If Paul Ryan Can Run For The Senate, Why Not The Presidency?
Related: Minnesota, Wisconsin, whatever.
A MODEST PROPOSAL TO expand railroad usage.
A QUESTION THAT HAS SUDDENLY BECOME MUCH MORE RELEVANT: What kind of diplomatic immunity does the IMF’s Managing Director have?
UNREST ALONG ISRAEL’S NORTHERN BORDERS: I assume it’s meant to serve as a distraction to take the pressure off of Assad, but I wonder if Syrians will fall for it as easily as the news media have.
MARKET-BASED MEDICINE: MEDIBID. “More than a medical directory, MediBid is a resource where medical consumers can find a doctor, then actively seek bids for the care they need.”
FOR RETIREES, a real-estate nightmare. “With home prices falling for nearly five years, many Americans now must consider what to do with their homes should prices continue to collapse and the equity in their homes — if they are still lucky enough to have any equity — disappears completely.”
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: White House Down In Middle East. “The news that George Mitchell is resigning as US special envoy closes a chapter in the greatest international failure of the Obama administration to date. The President’s foreign policy team has some real successes under its belt — the reset with Russia, a marked reduction in global levels of anti-Americanism, steady progress in Iraq, and of course the spectacular Abbottabad raid to name a few — but there is no way to disguise the harsh truth: the White House flopped big time on the Israel-Palestine process.”
MICHAEL BARONE: Obama’s Hypocritical Rhetoric On Immigration Reform.