Maybe it’s a good thing I have brown eyes.
July 24th, 2008 by Dana Pico
On Monday, I had the extreme pleasure of visiting the opthalmologist. Whilst getting my eyes measured by some infernal machine or other, I noticed a print of the old luxury liner, the SS United States, on the wall. I commented that I had seen the United States when it was berthed in the Newport News Marine Terminal, rusting away long after it was withdrawn from service.
Well, it turns out that my opthalmologist served as ship’s surgeon on the United States, and once had to perform an emergency hemmorrhoidectomy at sea.
And this was what my eye doctor was doing. Hmmm.
The media prefer Barack Obama over John McCain? Dog bites man.
July 23rd, 2008 by Dana PicoAs one of my friends said, if Dee Dee Myers is writing about this, it must be so obvious that it’s just plain embarrassing. Of course, such a statement assumes that the professional media could be embarrassed!
-
Is the Media Trying to Elect Obama?
by Dee Dee Myers
Tomorrow, CBS’s Katie Couric will interview Barack Obama from Jordan. On Wednesday, ABC’s Charlie Gibson will chat with him from Israel. And on Thursday, NBC’s Brian Williams will do the honors from Germany. Call it the presidential campaign equivalent of Shooting the Moon.
And to think, a few short months ago the Washington establishment was buzzing about the press’s pending dilemma: With Obama and John McCain looking like the all-but-certain nominees of their respective parties, how would the media choose between its new crush, Obama, and its long-time paramour, McCain? The Illinois senator has been a media darling since he burst onto the scene at the Democratic National Convention in the summer of 2004, and during the Democratic primary season, he bested Hillary Clinton in both quantity of coverage (he got more) and tenor (his was way more positive). But McCain has gotten so much favorable media attention over the years that he often joked that the press was his political base. In a head-to-head competition, who would win?
So far, the answer is clear: Obama is The One. In the first quarter of the general election, he has simply gotten more and better coverage than McCain. For those who need more evidence than the enormous press entourage that is treating Obama’s current trip not like the campaign swing of a presidential candidate, but like the international debut of the New American President, there are several new studies which help quantify the disparity.
The Project for Excellence in Journalism, which evaluates more than 300 newspaper, magazine, and television stories each week, found that from June 9 (after Obama had wrapped up the Democratic nomination) until July 13, Obama was more prominently covered every single week. During one particular week, July 7–13, McCain was a significant presence in 48 percent of the stories—but Obama met that mark in 77 percent of the pieces. Similarly, the Tyndall Report, a media monitoring group, found that Obama received substantially more media attention.
One of the commenters on the Vanity Fair site asked:
I am the only one left who knows that the word media is plural? English continues to die even at the hands of those who use words to make a living. And to answer the question, I hope so.
Posted 7/22/2008 by smartin765
But, but, but our friends on the left think that the media are tools of the right in this country!
He Supports Our Troops
July 23rd, 2008 by SharonFor reference (via Newsbusters), what Barack Obama has said about the surge, the troops, and the war.
–I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.
–Given the deteriorating situation, it is clear at this point that we cannot, through putting in more troops or maintaining the presence that we have, expect that somehow the situation is going to improve.
–Finally, in 2006-2007 we started to see that even after an election George Bush continued to want to pursue a course that didn’t withdraw troops from Iraq but actually doubled up and initiated the search. To not see improvements but could actually worsen the potential situation.
–We can send 15,00 more troops, 20,000 more troops, 30,000 more troops. I don’t know any expert on the region, or any military officer that I’ve spoken to privately, that believes that that is going to make a substantial difference on the situation on the ground.
Keep in mind that Obama apologist Joe Klein is trying to castigate John McCain for pointing out the obvious: Barack Obama was wrong about the surge but now wants to take credit for wanting to withdraw troops. Here’s what McCain said:
This is a clear choice that the American people have. I had the courage and the judgment to say I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war. It seems to me that Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.
What Klein is hyperventilating about is that McCain pointed out that the Obama emperor has no clothes. Ann Althouse notes that it is Klein who is scurrilous and sad.
Klein is trying to generate a big outrage to distract us from McCain’s solid point. McCain said we had to win the war, he pushed for the surge, the surge worked, and now we will have that victory that he would not give up on. Obama said the war was hopeless, we’d have to accept loss, and the surge would only waste more lives.
That is a huge, huge difference. And that is what McCain was referring to. It could have been put even more sharply.
If Klein wants to get all outraged about something, he should get outraged retrospectively about how Obama and many Democrats were ready and even eager to embrace defeat. If Klein wants to worry about who is unsuited for the presidency, he ought to recognize that if Obama had been President two years ago, we would have suffered a humiliating defeat in Iraq that would have repercussions for decades.
John McCain is right to hit Obama on this. His judgment is lacking as demonstrated by his positions on the war. If he was wrong in 2005 and 2006, we can’t trust him to make the right decisions in 2010.
Here’s the video:
Cross-posted at Gold-Plated Witch on Wheels.
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom should be arrested and charged as an accessory to murder
July 22nd, 2008 by Dana PicoUnlike some conservatives, my position on illegal immigration is that we have illegal immigration because we want illegal immigration; feel free to peruse the articles in our immigration category. But this just flat pisses me off:
- Officials try to explain suspect’s release
Man charged with killing man, 2 sons was jailed in March
Jaxon Van Derbeken, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer
SAN FRANCISCO — Authorities couldn’t fully explain Monday how an alleged gang member and suspected illegal immigrant was able walk out of jail in San Francisco - three months before police say he shot and killed a father and two sons.
Edwin Ramos, 21, appeared in court Monday on charges stemming from the June 22 slayings of Anthony Bologna and his sons Michael and Matthew. Police say the three were shot near their home in the Excelsior district when Anthony Bologna, driving home from a family picnic, briefly blocked the gunman’s car from completing a left turn down a narrow street.
Ramos is scheduled to enter a plea in the case on Wednesday.
The Chronicle reported on Sunday how Ramos, a native of El Salvador, was repeatedly shielded as a juvenile from deportation by city officials who failed to notify federal authorities of separate assault and attempted robberies he committed when he was 17.
Things took an unexplained turn earlier this year when Ramos, now a 21-year-old adult, was jailed on gun and gang allegations in San Francisco. Federal and local officials struggled Monday to explain the circumstances surrounding his release - given that his status as an illegal immigrant was known to federal authorities - when local prosecutors didn’t file charges.
Hat tip to Justin Levine of Patterico.
Mr Ramos was a member of the Mara Salvatrucha-13 street gang. He was a twice convicted violent offender, but San Francisco and its idiotic “sanctuary city” claptrap kept officials from notifying federal immigration authorities. The Chronicle reporter began his article, “Authorities couldn’t fully explain Monday how an alleged gang member and suspected illegal immigrant was able walk out of jail in San Francisco.” Really? I can explain it: they didn’t care aboput the public, they didn’t care about innocent people!
Mt Ramos had been arrested on a firearms violation, as an adult, after the juvenile record he had ammassed, and the authorities did nothing.
From Gavin Newsom’s official mayoral home page:
- Welcome to the City by the Bay
San Francisco is a city of dreamers and doers — a city of ingenuity, diversity and tolerance that I am proud to lead.
Yeah, uh huh, right. If you peruse his official site, you’ll come to this gem:
-
Mayor Newsom Announces New Anti-Gun Initiatives
06/27/08 - Joined by San Francisco Police Chief Heather Fong and District Attorney Kamala Harris, today Mayor Gavin Newsom announced a slate of new gun violence reduction initiatives. These new initiatives are in addition to legislation Mayor Newsom forwarded in summer 2007 to reduce gun violence in San Francisco.
“We don’t need to anticipate the location of future offenses to reduce gun violence,” said Mayor Newsom. “We need to get illegal firearms off the streets now and these efforts will help us do just that.”
Yet, when they had a convicted, violent felon, in custody, for a firearms violation, they let him go!
The City by the Bay proudly proclaims itself a “sanctuary city,” one which will not assist federal immigration authorities in any way. While the city’s sanctuary city ordinance was passed before Mr Newsom became mayor, he issued, on 1 March 2007, Executive Directive 07-01, containing directions for city employees to comply with the sanctuary city ordinance. That makes him responsible.
However, the ordinance itself contains a specific exemption from sanctuary for criminals:
SEC. 12H.2-1. CHAPTER PROVISIONS INAPPLICABLE TO PERSONS CONVICTED OF CERTAIN CRIMES.
Nothing in this Chapter shall prohibit, or be construed as prohibiting, a law enforcement officer from identifying and reporting any person pursuant to State or federal law or regulation who is in custody after being booked for the alleged commission of a felony and is suspected of violating the civil provisions of the immigration laws. In addition, nothing in this Chapter shall preclude any City and County department, agency, commission, officer or employee from (a) reporting information to the INS regarding an individual who has been booked at any county jail facility, and who has previously been convicted of a felony committed in violation of the laws of the State of California, which is still considered a felony under State law
This is what happens when you coddle criminals. Mr Ramos was a convicted felon. For some reason which defies common sense, once released from juvenile custody for his felony convictions, he was not put on a boat back to El Salvador, but turned loose again on the citizens of the city. And then, when picked up as an adult on firearms violations — as a convicted felon, he could not legally possess a gun in any state of the union — he was not charged with any crime, and, once again, turned loose on the streets of San Francisco.
One thing I did not find on the mayor’s website was any expression of concern for the victims of crimes. But, as the chief executive of that fair city, it is Mayor Newsom’s responsibility to try and maintain public safety. They had a perfect situation: a convicted felon, in custody for a firearms violation, and a specific exemption in the sanctuary ordinance. They could have gotten Mr Ramos off the streets, by charging him and locking him up, and then, after he had served whatever time he received, he could have been deported to Antarctica El Salvador.
They didn’t lock him up, and this time, though they did actually notify ICE, the feds did nothing either.
And as a result, three law-abiding citizens are dead, stone-cold graveyard dead.
This guy was bad news, and everybody knew he was bad news. And while the title of this post says that Mayor Newsom should be charged as an accessory to murder, he isn’t the only one. The people who didn’t charge Mr Ramos with a firearms violation when they could have ought to join Mr Newsom in an orange jumpsuit, and the ICE officials who did nothing when they had a known illegal immigrant with a felony record should be getting fitted for their prison gear as well.
This is what happens when you are lenient with thugs. In Philadelphia, Police Officer Charles Cassidy is dead because the City of Brotherly Love didn’t treat John Lewis, his killer, seriously when they had him on a drug charge, when they had him on robbery charges and even when he was identified as the perpetrator of an armed robbery.
We see this stuff all the time: there is a killing of a police officer or an innocent bystander and we later find out the the murderer had been running through the criminal justice system for years, with minimal sentences or probation and nobody giving a rat’s ass about the innocent people of the city. Then, sha-zamm! everybody wonders why Nothing Was Done with this criminal when we had the chabce to do something before he was graduated from lesser crimes to murder.
Our state legislatures have provided plenty of punishment available, and the Congress has as well; the tools are there to get these bad guys off the streets — and in the case of illegals, out of the country — before they get to the point of murder. But in far too many cases, local and state and even federal law enforcement officers don’t use the tools available to them.
Are we short on prison beds? Perhaps, but there’s nothing on God’s earth that says we can’t string up barbed wire and house them in tents for a while. And perhaps our prisons might be less crowded if men who should have been serving five years or ten years hadn’t been set free to commit crimes which put them behind bars for forty years.
While we need to hold the criminals accountable, maybe it’s time we thought of holding our public officials accountable, too. Once we incarcerate a couple of district attorneys who don’t prosecute harshly, the rest will fall in line. Once we jail a few police commissioners who don’t have their departments pursuing criminals diligently, the rest will shape up in a hurry. And once we throw a couple of criminal-coddling mayors in the can, mayors will stop coddling criminals.
Until we do something like this, we’ll keep having stories like the San Francisco murders. Fox News interviewed the widow and mother of the victims.
Now, you tell me why Mayor Newsom shouldn’t be in jail, in the same cell as Edwin Ramos.
__________________________
Cross posted on Red State.
They just don’t get it
July 21st, 2008 by Dana PicoKaren Heller, the “Populist” columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, seems a bit perturbed that presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) is being accused of elitism. In a column pretty much dripping with sarcasm, Mrs Heller asks how “elitist” is defined:
- Hard to define, harder to shake¹
By Karen Heller, Philadelphia Inquirer Columnist
In recent years, especially during political seasons, elitist has become the ultimate epithet, far worse than racist, sexist or wrong. People are elite or they aren’t. It’s an absolute, an indelible tattoo.
Barack Obama, the son of a single mother, a man who paid off his law school loans only in his 40s, has somehow become elite.
Yet John McCain, the son and grandson of four-star admirals, the son and husband of heiresses, is not.
What is the opposite of elite? There’s no word for it.
Yes, actually, there is: it’s “regular guy.”
Naturally, Mrs Heller’s article is copyrighted, so I can’t reprint the whole thing, but it’s worth a read. But in one further paragraph, Mrs Heller comes across the conundrum that has her baffled:
- George Bush, son of a president, grandson of a senator, formed by prep school, Yale, Harvard, and summers in Maine, is not elite. How he pulled this off remains a mystery, though brush clearing is somehow involved.
It’s really very simple: elitism is a state of mind. President Bush is all of the things Mrs Heller mentioned, but it isn’t the fact that he has been seen doing, and apparently enjoys doing, physical work that makes him a “regular guy.” It’s a factor that our friends on the left never grasped during the 2004 — or 2000 — elections: you could actually picture sitting down for a beer with George W Bush, where you never could with John Kerry or Al Gore.
Now, is that a realistic impression of President Bush? Maybe, maybe not, but it doesn’t really matter: it is a perception, and perception is reality.
Senator Kerry certainly recognized it, with his “Is this where I can get me a huntin’ license?” scene in Ohio. The Massachusetts Democrat did everything he possibly could to persuade the voters that he, too, was a regular guy. Then he’d do something dumb like odering a cheesesteak in Philadelphia and asking for Swiss cheese on it, about as big a flub as a politician could make.
On the other side of the coin, we have the Obamas, who weren’t the children of privilege. As Mrs Heller correctly points out, Mr Obama didn’t get his student loans paid off until he was in his early forties. But somehow, some way, they developed into nouveaux riches. Michelle Obama’s derision of what working class people could do with their $600 “stimulus” checks just drips with contempt, because she has somehow managed to banish all recollection of her less affluent days. Barack Obama has been saying that he is going to just raise taxes on the wealthy, but voted to increase taxes on the middle class as well. His “bitter” comments prior to the Pennsylvania primary, comments not made to us rubes in the sticks, but to the wine and brie set in San Francisco about us rubes in the sticks, were perceived as demonstrating utter contempt for us’ns who “cling to guns or religion.”
It has been said that you could take a man with a non-descript accent, send him to Harvard for six months, and he’d have a “Hahvahd” accent for the rest of his life. As with many things, that’s a stereotype, but stereotypes are usually based on some shade of the truth. And whether the Obamas are truly stuck up snobs is almost irrelevant; the fact that they have come across as stuck up snobs — elitists would be another good term — is all that matters.
The vast, vast majority of us will never meet the Obamas; our impressions of them will come from 15 second news clips, from third- and fourth- and further-hand descriptions. We will develop perceptions of who they are and what they are like from incomplete information.
And, quite naturally, we wicked Republicans will do what we can to foster the growth of such perceptions about the Obamas. Given the left’s unending attempts to portray George W Bush, Yale graduate and Harvard MBA, as a moron, something he clearly isn’t, I feel absolutely no sympathy for the Democrats when their own statements are turned against them to portray them as something unpleasant.
n a larger sense, the Democrats have an elitism problem — toward the end of her column, she said it was a systemic, partywide problem — because the purported party of the working man has forgotten what it is like to be a working man. The purported party of the working man has forgotten what the working man really wants, to have basic services from government — police, fire, roads and public education — and to otherwise have government out of his life and out of his pocket. Every time the Democrats try to come up with another well-intentioned public spending project, they very subtly distance themselves from the working man.
_________________________
¹ - The Philadelphia Inquirer, Monday, 21 July 2008, p. B-1
Doesn’t the 22nd Amendment apply to Barack Obama?
July 21st, 2008 by Dana PicoSome of our friends on the left have hinted that our Fascist President George Bush doesn’t plan on leaving office quietly at the end of his term, but it was Barack Hussein Obama who plans on being president for “eight to ten years:”
-
Barack Obama’s Butterfly Effect
July 20, 2008 4:45 PM
Today on CBS’s Face the Nation, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., in Afghanistan, told the paparazzi-pursued correspondent Lara Logan that “the objective of this trip was to have substantive discussions with people like President Karzai or Prime Minister Maliki or President Sarkozy or others who I expect to be dealing with over the next eight to 10 years.
“And it’s important for me to have a relationship with them early, that I start listening to them now, getting a sense of what their interests and concerns are.”
Hat tip to Allah, via Patterico.
Of course, had John McCain made a misgoof like this, our friends on the left would be yelling “Senile! Senile! Senile!” “Alzheimers!” He’s too old!”
Somehow, I’m sure this won’t bother them in the least.
Profanity does not equal persuasion
July 20th, 2008 by Dana PicoDonald Douglas has addressed a subject I was going to let pass as a topic here — though I had commented on it on other sites — the gratuitous use of profanity by many of our friends in the left blogosphere:
- Obscenities in the Blogosphere
I’ve never thought using obscenities in blogging was acceptable.
When I started, I read political scientists who were bloggers (folks who had career reputations to maintain), and I considered blogging as a new form of journalism. Cursing just seemed unprofessional, and when I did see some use profanity it was normally accompanied by equally crass opinions. It was easy to dismiss these people as unserious.
I imagine someone would have to research it, but my feeling is that lefty bloggers are more comfortable with profanity in their blogging than conservatives. Certainly top left-wing bloggers, who are discussed in Katherine Seelye’s piece, “Easing Off Online Obscenities,” find crude language in blogging acceptable, even advantageous, and they’ve invented little decision rules on when cursing might be fine and dandy:
Dr Douglas continued, somewhat further down, to address one of our favorite bloggers from the left:
- It’s not as if the bloggers profiled have advanced their journalistic or political careers by deploying gutter language. Amanda Marcotte, indeed, not only got the boot from John Edwards’ campaign in 2004, her controversy cast tremendous doubts on Edwards himself: Did he endorse her vile language and demonization? Did he condone hate speech? Was this considered an acceptable level of discourse for a presidential candidate?
The answer is clearly no (see Jawa Report for the specifics of Marcotte’s case). But the left bloggers want to make their own rules. They think the mainstream press “needs to let its hair down,” which I perceive as the lefties’ push to lower the bar on what’s proper.
As it happens, Auguste addressed this very issue on Pandagon:
- Inverse proportion
I’m sitting in what Jesse affectionately terms the “Fuck” panel, and if I’m not mistaken, Lee Papa (aka Rude Pundit) is the only one on the panel who hasn’t sworn - and this is a panel that includes Kevin Drum.
Update: That didn’t last much longer. Atrios says (extreme paraphrase) that, rather than worrying that snark and vulgarity will allow the right to shut down discourse, we should recognize that the right has already shut down the discourse and snark and vulgarity are a useful tool to shine a light on that fact. I would add that vulgarity isn’t just the light but the jackhammer - the right has built a bulwark of insensateness, and vulgarity and snark seem to be the only things which reliably break that down, even on a temporary basis. The reaction from righty bloggers when a progressive fails to live up to their fake idea of civility reveals that the bulwark is really a facade - the strong ideological defense they’ve built up is vital, since whenever it drops we see clearly that they don’t actually have an ideology.
There are so many erroneous assumptions here that it’s difficult to know where to begin. The notion that “the right has already shut down the discourse,” published on a very popular liberal blog, while some of its writers are appearing in the Nutroots Nation panel organized by the Daily Kos, a hugely, immensely popular left-wing site, is humorous; I don’t quite know how Auguste thinks that the left can’t express themselves due to interference from the right, when he’s expressing himself in public.
Gort went to the beach, and spent a lot of money!
July 20th, 2008 by Dana PicoOur friend Gort, the Wilkes-Barre blogger who specializes in more local political news, has been on vacation for the past week. I’m not sure exactly what he was doing, but he posted a YouTube of the Go-Gos for our enjoyment:
