Archive for 2015
August 5, 2015
THANKS TO MEDIA BLACKOUT, MOST AMERICANS ARE IN THE DARK ABOUT PLANNED PARENTHOOD VIDEOS: That could change (a bit) after tomorrow night’s GOP debate. But the media has certainly been doing its job as being the Democrats’ palace guard remarkably well.
RELATED: Great moments in murderous Orwellianisms: “Ethicist denounces ‘Water Torture’ release of Planned Parenthood videos.“
YOU CHOSE DISHONOR, AND YOU WILL HAVE WAR. Obama Urges Critics of Iran Deal to Ignore ‘Drumbeat of War.’ We were better off with sanctions and no agreement.
MEET THE PHOTOGRAPHER WHO CAPTURES THE ENERGY INDUSTRY’S POSITIVE SIDE.
DISPATCHES FROM THE FRONTLINES OF INCOME INEQUALITY: “Housing is so outrageously expensive in San Francisco the city can’t hire enough teachers: According to a report from KTVU in San Francisco, the city’s school district needs to find 51 more teachers in the 2 weeks before school starts, but is having trouble hiring due to the high cost of living.”
And just to place this report in perspective, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported in 2013, San Francisco has the lowest percentage of children of any major American city:
Just 13.4 percent of San Francisco’s 805,235 residents are younger than 18, the smallest percentage of any major city in the country. By contrast, San Jose’s percentage of children is 24.8 percent, Oakland’s is 21.3 percent, Boston’s is 16.8 percent and Seattle’s is 15.4 percent, according to Brian Cheu, director of community development for the Mayor’s Office of Housing. Even Manhattan is composed of roughly 15 percent children, according to Dan Kelly, director of planning for San Francisco’s Human Services Agency.
In 1970, children made up 22 percent of San Francisco. In 1960, they constituted 25 percent.
Curious how that number keeps “unexpectedly” declining.
(Although considering that in 2008, the Chronicle was complaining that “There is nothing more bacchanalian than a kid’s birthday party,” and how those bacchanalian birthday parties lead to increased global warming, from their perspective, those declining numbers are good news, right?)
RELATED: “Urine-Corroded San Francisco Lamp Post Falls in Street, Nearly Hits Driver.”
As Harry Stein wrote 15 years ago in How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (and Found Inner Peace), one item on the checklist that you may be drifting towards the right is that “Someone’s going on about how fantastic San Francisco is, and it suddenly hits you that’s one place on earth you never want to live.”
LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Warfighting Robots Could Reduce Civilian Casualties, So Calling for a Ban Now Is Premature.
KIDS, DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME: Tennis Balls Plus Gasoline Equals Super Mario Fireballs.
FIRST GEORGE WILL, NOW THIS: Justice Willett for the next Supreme Court Vacancy? Note that this requires a Republican in the White House to accomplish.
JOHN HINDERAKER: Jeb Bush: Not Ready For Prime Time. “In recent years, the Republican Party has suffered from far too many self-inflicted wounds. It is not enough to be well-intentioned. We need candidates who are good. At this point, Jeb Bush simply isn’t sharp enough for a successful presidential run.”
EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN, OR SOMETHING: Surfing the Internet… from my TRS-80 Model 100.
I LOVE THE SMELL OF DEMOCRATS’ PANIC IN THE MORNING: The chorus of liberal/progressive chants of “Run, Joe, Run!” grows daily. A subtle piece is this one by Washington Post writer Ruth Marcus, “Biden can’t defeat Clinton; she can do that herself.”
One troubling snapshot from a new Wall St. Journal-NBC poll: More women now view Clinton negatively than positively.
Biden has a quality of genuineness, of humanity, that seems to elude the public Clinton. My most enduring — and endearing — vision of Biden is seeing the grinning vice president at the annual summer party for the media, chasing a group of children with a Super Soaker water gun, and allowing himself to be thoroughly drenched by the tiny mob. Biden is the ultimate extrovert.
Clinton, by contrast, is self-contained and guarded, if not by nature then after years of public pounding. One person who knows her well told me that the key to understanding Clinton was to read Susan Cain’s book, “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking.” One of Cain’s examples is Eleanor Roosevelt, a heroine of Clinton’s and, like Clinton, married to the ultimate extrovert.
Marcus makes her preference for Clinton clear in this piece, painting Clinton as a misunderstood introvert in the shadow of an extroverted husband. Yawn. Clinton isn’t introverted; she’s prickly, arrogant and dismissive. As a piece in the Boston Herald put it this morning:
If Vice President Joe Biden decides to take on Hillary Clinton in a run for the White House, his best bet may be beating her on the personality front, a political strategist said this morning on Boston Herald Radio.
“It comes down to a character issue and he is different than Hillary,” said Gretchen Hamel, president and founder of Highline Strategies. “You have seen her campaign make some missteps. It’s Hillary being Hillary, she is very guarded. Biden is a more approachable, likable guy that you would want to have a beer with.”
Yeah, I’d have a beer with Uncle Joe, so long as he kept his hands to himself. In the battle of personalities, Biden wins, hands down.
Clinton is only the front-runner because she bears her husband’s name and is seen by many as carrying his legacy into a third term. Heck, my own mother insists that, if Hillary is elected, “it will really be Bill who is running things” (and she says this in a positive tone, believe it or not). Hillary’s chief accomplishment is her husband, as sad as that may be. She is hardly the kind of woman that women should want to carry the mantle of “first female president.”
We can do much better than Hillary. Carly Fiorina deserves more attention, for example, but because she’s in the wrong political party, the mainstream media is doing everything it can to ignore her.
WITH OBAMA YAMMERING ON ABOUT IRAQ IN DEFENSE OF HIS AWFUL IRAN DEAL, I’m rerunning this post again:
BOB WOODWARD: Bush Didn’t Lie About WMD, And Obama Sure Screwed Up Iraq In 2011.
[Y]ou certainly can make a persuasive argument it was a mistake. But there is a time that line going along that Bush and the other people lied about this. I spent 18 months looking at how Bush decided to invade Iraq. And lots of mistakes, but it was Bush telling George Tenet, the CIA director, don’t let anyone stretch the case on WMD. And he was the one who was skeptical. And if you try to summarize why we went into Iraq, it was momentum. The war plan kept getting better and easier, and finally at the end, people were saying, hey, look, it will only take a week or two. And early on it looked like it was going to take a year or 18 months. And so Bush pulled the trigger. A mistake certainly can be argued, and there is an abundance of evidence. But there was no lying in this that I could find.
Plus:
Woodward was also asked if it was a mistake to withdraw in 2011. Wallace points out that Obama has said that he tried to negotiate a status of forces agreement but did not succeed, but “A lot of people think he really didn’t want to keep any troops there.” Woodward agrees that Obama didn’t want to keep troops there and elaborates:
Look, Obama does not like war. But as you look back on this, the argument from the military was, let’s keep 10,000, 15,000 troops there as an insurance policy. And we all know insurance policies make sense. We have 30,000 troops or more in South Korea still 65 years or so after the war. When you are a superpower, you have to buy these insurance policies. And he didn’t in this case. I don’t think you can say everything is because of that decision, but clearly a factor.
We had some woeful laughs about the insurance policies metaphor. Everyone knows they make sense, but it’s still hard to get people to buy them. They want to think things might just work out, so why pay for the insurance? It’s the old “young invincibles” problem that underlies Obamcare.
Obama blew it in Iraq, which is in chaos, and in Syria, which is in chaos, and in Libya, which is in chaos. A little history:
As late as 2010, things were going so well in Iraq that Obama and Biden were bragging. Now, after Obama’s politically-motivated pullout and disengagement, the whole thing’s fallen apart. This is near-criminal neglect and incompetence, and an awful lot of people will pay a steep price for the Obama Administration’s fecklessness.
Related: National Journal: The World Will Blame Obama If Iraq Falls.
Related: What Kind Of Iraq Did Obama Inherit?
Plus, I’m just going to keep running this video of what the Democrats, including Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton, were saying on Iraq before the invasion:
Because I expect a lot of revisionist history over the next few months.
Plus: 2008 Flashback: Obama Says Preventing Genocide Not A Reason To Stay In Iraq. He was warned. He didn’t care.
And who can forget this?
FACT: President Obama kept his promise to end the war in Iraq. Romney called the decision to bring our troops home “tragic.”
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) October 22, 2012
Yes, I keep repeating this stuff. Because it bears repeating. In Iraq, Obama took a war that we had won at a considerable expense in lives and treasure, and threw it away for the callowest of political reasons. In Syria and Libya, he involved us in wars of choice without Congressional authorization, and proceeded to hand victories to the Islamists. Obama’s policy here has been a debacle of the first order, and the press wants to talk about Bush as a way of protecting him. Whenever you see anyone in the media bringing up 2003, you will know that they are serving as palace guard, not as press.
Related: Obama’s Betrayal Of The Iraqis.
OF THESE, THE MOST UNDER-APPRECIATED IS THE VERDICT, IN MY OPINION: 10 Decades of the Most Important Legal Films.
JAMES LILEKS: Celery + Gravity = Art!
VIDEO: WHY CG SUCKS (EXCEPT IT DOESN’T): “We believe that the reason we think all CG looks bad, is because we only see ‘bad’ CG. Fantastic, beautiful, and wonderfully executed CG is everywhere — you just don’t know it. Truly great visual effects serve story and character — and in doing so are, by their very definition, invisible.”
IN THE MAIL: From Michael Sheldon, The Violet Crow: A Bruno X Psychic Detective Mystery.
Plus, today only at Amazon: 55% Off Wolverine Women’s 1000 Mile Shoes.
And, also today only: 50-70% Off Women’s Classic & Timeless Clothing.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 818.
AUSTIN BAY REMEMBERS A WHITE HOUSE WITH ACTUAL DIPLOMATIC SKILLS: Very Smart Diplomacy: Creating Desert Storm’s Effective Coalition.
SURE, THAT SOUNDS PROMISING: China Hopes to Defy History of Market Bailouts.
China’s stock market has had a spot of trouble lately. Perhaps you’ve heard? You may also know that the Chinese government has intervened heavily to try to prevent a financial panic. And yet, as the Wall Street Journal notes today, the stock market remains well off its peak.
Whether Beijing’s policy has “worked” is somewhat subjective; if you think that financial panic was imminent, then maybe it has. But even if you think that the government’s policies have prevented a disaster, you still have to ask whether they can actually sustain a recovery.
Organized support of the market is not a new idea, and history suggests that sometimes it does work. J.P. Morgan famously assembled a group of financiers (with some government help) to prevent the market from collapsing during the Panic of 1907, and this does seem to have staved off some panic. Similarly, the Hong Kong government seems to have made some difference in the Asian market crisis of the late 1990s. The Fed organized interventions in cases like Long Term Capital Management that I think can legitimately be said to have stopped some sort of widespread panic.
And yet, even these examples — the ones that “worked” — aren’t exactly a shining testimony to the power of intervention in the stock markets. The Hang Seng had fallen by two-thirds by the time the government managed to stem the decline. The U.S. market that Morgan and friends “saved” fell more than 40 percent from its peak before stabilizing.
And then there are the interventions that really, really didn’t work. The U.S. tried organized support of the stock market again during the Great Depression, and the ultimate result was that, as John Kenneth Galbraith would later write, “Support, organized or otherwise, could not contend with the overwhelming, pathological desire to sell.” The Japanese government tried to save the Nikkei, and it eventually bottomed out at around 60 percent off its peak (though it would continue to plumb further bottoms as the “lost decade” stretched over more than 20 years).
Yeah, Obama’s “stimulus” didn’t do much either.