Liberal Media Brings Out the Hockey Pucks

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, August 31, 2012

 

In 2004, Arnold Schwarzenegger, then a popular figure in the Republican Party, gave an exciting, upbeat and surprisingly funny speech at the GOP convention. He covered a lot of territory: the story of how he came to America, how he became a Republican after listening to Richard Nixon, and other highlights of his life story.

 

Afterwards, then-CBS News anchor Dan Rather reported that Schwarzenegger "slapped John Kerry around like a hockey puck."

 

The only problem: Schwarzenegger never mentioned John Kerry, not even once.

 

I bring it up because it's hardly news that much of the press likes to report the convention as they want it to be rather than as it is.

 

It's also somewhat less than a thunderclap revelation that the press and the Democratic Party tend to see things the same way. Which is why it's unremarkable that the "fact-checkers" and Democratic Party press-release writers are on the same page.

 

Hence the relentless coverage of vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan's "lies" during his convention speech. His story about a Janesville, Wis., GM plant, in particular, has stirred up a journalistic fuss:

 

"A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant. Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: 'I believe that if our government is there to support you ... this plant will be here for another hundred years.' That's what he said in 2008. Well, as it turned out, that plant didn't last another year."

 

The Associated Press fact-checkers were among the most restrained in their "correction."

 

"The plant halted production in December 2008," the AP explained, "weeks before Obama took office and well before he enacted a more robust auto industry bailout that rescued GM and Chrysler and allowed the majority of their plants -- though not the Janesville facility -- to stay in operation."

 

The first problem is that Ryan wasn't referencing the bailout at all, but the sorry state of the overall economy and President Obama's record of over-promising and under-delivering.

 

A bigger problem is that the AP didn't even look up its own reporting about the Janesville plant. "Production at the General Motors plant in Janesville is scheduled to end for good this week," the news services reported on April 19, 2009. "GM spokesman Christopher Lee says operations at the southern Wisconsin plant will cease Thursday."

 

And there's the small matter that everything about Ryan's statement was true if you go by the plain meaning of the words.

 

Or consider the media's obsession with the alleged racism of the GOP. The folks at MSNBC are particularly obsessed with the race angle. New York Magazine political reporter John Heilemann and "Hardball" host Chris Matthews concluded the other night that the word "Chicago" is racially loaded code.

 

"They keep saying 'Chicago,'" Matthews said. "That's another thing that sends that message -- this guy's helping the poor people in the bad neighborhoods, screwing us in the 'burbs."

 

Heilemann nodded, adding, "There's a lot of black people in Chicago."

 

One standard cliché is to bemoan the fact that there are so many "white faces" among the delegates. This potted observation is usually brought up in connection with some chin-pulling insight about the GOP's problems reaching out to minorities.

 

Many an hour can be wasted listening to the gang at MSNBC expressing their deep concerns about this pressing issue and how the GOP must adapt to a more diverse America. Perhaps the GOP would do better if allegedly serious people stopped going on national television and saying that even the use of the word "Chicago" is now racially loaded.

 

Meanwhile, one thing the GOP could do is put forward some really attractive and compelling minority speakers to deliver its message. Indeed, that's what the GOP did on its first night of the convention -- and the concerned folks at MSNBC opted to stop covering the speeches whenever a minority took the stage.

 

If the coverage of this convention is an indication of the trajectory the media will follow for the rest of the campaign, you can be sure of three things: Lies will be defined as facts that are inconvenient to President Obama, racists will be understood to be Republicans who are winning an argument, and truth will be slapped around like a hockey puck.

Distinguished’ Denver Teachers Encourage Students to Diss American Culture

By Kyle Olson

Friday, August 31, 2012

 

What happens when progressives run government schools? They judge teachers based upon their own socio-political values.

 

They don’t care if Billy or Suzie can read or write very well. But they want to make sure the kids are aware of all the social injustice plaguing the United States of America.

 

That’s the only possible explanation for Denver Public Schools’ new teacher evaluation system .

 

The system will rate teachers as “distinguished” – the highest rating – when they (among other things):

 

 

Encourage students to “challenge and question the dominant culture.”

 

Encourage students to take social action to change/ improve society or work for social justice.

 

Use Visuals and artifacts to represent various cultures/world groups.

 

“What exactly does this language mean?” said Pam Benigno, director of the Independence Institute’s Education Policy Center, in a news release “Will 4th graders be taking field trips to Occupy Denver for extra credit?”

 

Perhaps not “extra credit.” That may be their main assignment for the semester.

 

This is not the first time such an ideological litmus test has been placed on government school teachers.

 

The University of Minnesota College of Education took a lot of heat a few years ago, when it was revealed that students had to demonstrate they had “cultural competence” in order to receive their teaching degree.

 

That meant prospective teachers were required to “accept theories of white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and internalized oppression’ develop a positive sense of racial/cultural identity, and recognize that schools are socially constructed systems that are susceptible to racism … but are also critical sites for social and cultural transformation.”

 

And what do these types of policies lead to? Check out the following story from MinnPost.com:

 

“A month or so ago, Sarah Skahan let herself get knocked off her game by a 10-year-old boy.

 

“The boy, who is African-American, spends time with Skahan, the speech language pathologist at Westview Elementary in Apple Valley, to get support for his learning disability.

 

“On this particular day he was shading in parts of a map, finishing a geography assignment.

 

“’Man, I’m never going there,” he snorted as he started coloring Florida.

 

“Skahan stopped what she was doing and asked him what he knew about Trayvon Martin. Quite a lot, as it turned out. The shooting was a topic of frequent conversation in the boy’s home.

 

“The two spent time every day for the rest of the week working on a letter to Florida’s attorney general, urging him to prosecute Martin’s killer. When George Zimmerman was taken into custody, the student came to tell Skahan.”

 

Never mind that Florida’s attorney general is a woman. How does this language pathologist have the right to suggest to a student that a defendant in a criminal case is innocent or guilty? Shouldn’t an educator encourage an interested student to look closely at the case and carefully form an intelligent opinion, instead of clinging to a heated, kneejerk response?

 

But of course most extreme leftists convicted Zimmerman in their minds within minutes of the shooting, purely based on racial considerations. An alarming number of government school teachers are quite liberal, and they’re becoming a lot less shy about sharing their views with students.

 

But why should they be shy, when they are encouraged by their employers (and official evaluation systems) to push their views on students?

 

Who’s willing to bet that Skahan has been evaluated and determined to be a “distinguished” educator?

The ‘Deterrence Works’ Fantasy

By Charles Krauthammer

Thursday, August 30, 2012

 

There are few foreign-policy positions more silly than the assertion without context that “deterrence works.” It is like saying air power works. Well, it worked for Kosovo; it didn’t work over North Vietnam.

 

It’s like saying city-bombing works. It worked in Japan 1945 (Tokyo through Nagasaki). It didn’t in the London blitz.

 

The idea that some military technique “works” is meaningless. It depends on the time, the circumstances, the nature of the adversaries. The longbow worked for Henry V. At El Alamein, however, Montgomery chose tanks.

 

Yet a significant school of American “realists” remains absolutist on deterrence and is increasingly annoyed with those troublesome Israelis who are sowing fear, rattling world markets, and risking regional war by threatening a preemptive strike to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Don’t they understand that their fears are grossly exaggerated? After all, didn’t deterrence work during 40 years of the Cold War?

 

Indeed, a few months ago, columnist Fareed Zakaria made that case by citing me writing in defense of deterrence in the early 1980s at the time of the nuclear-freeze movement. And yet now, writes Zakaria, Krauthammer (along with others on the right) “has decided that deterrence is a lie.”

 

Nonsense. What I have decided is that deterring Iran is fundamentally different from deterring the Soviet Union. You could rely on the latter but not on the former.

 

The reasons are obvious and threefold:

 

1. The nature of the regime.

 

Did the Soviet Union in its 70 years ever deploy a suicide bomber? For Iran, as for other jihadists, suicide bombing is routine. Hence the trail of self-immolation from the 1983 Marine-barracks attack in Beirut to the Bulgaria bombing of July 2012. Iran’s clerical regime rules in the name of a fundamentalist religion for which the hereafter offers the ultimate rewards. For Soviet Communists — thoroughly, militantly atheistic — such thinking was an opiate-laced fairy tale.

 

For all its global aspirations, the Soviet Union was intensely nationalist. The Islamic Republic sees itself as an instrument of its own brand of Shiite millenarianism — the messianic return of the “hidden Imam.”

 

It’s one thing to live in a state of mutual assured destruction with Stalin or Brezhnev, leaders of a philosophically materialist, historically grounded, deeply here-and-now regime. It’s quite another to be in a situation of mutual destruction with apocalyptic clerics who believe in the imminent advent of the Mahdi, the supremacy of the afterlife, and holy war as the ultimate avenue to achieving it.

 

The classic formulation comes from Tehran’s fellow (and rival Sunni) jihadist al-Qaeda: “You love life and we love death.” Try deterring that.

 

2. The nature of the grievance.

 

The Soviet quarrel with America was ideological. Iran’s quarrel with Israel is existential. The Soviets never proclaimed a desire to annihilate the American people. For Iran, the very existence of a Jewish state on Muslim land is a crime, an abomination, a cancer with which no negotiation, no coexistence, no accommodation is possible.

 

3. The nature of the target.

 

America is a nation of 300 million; Israel, 8 million. America is a continental nation; Israel, a speck on the map, at one spot just eight miles wide. Israel is a “one-bomb country.” Its territory is so tiny, its population so concentrated, that, as Iran’s former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has famously said, “application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel, but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world.” A tiny nuclear arsenal would do the job.

 

In U.S.-Soviet deterrence, both sides knew that a nuclear war would destroy them mutually. The mullahs have thought the unthinkable to a different conclusion. They know about the Israeli arsenal. They also know, as Rafsanjani said, that in any exchange Israel would be destroyed instantly and forever, whereas the ummah — the Muslim world of 1.8 billion people whose redemption is the ultimate purpose of the Iranian revolution — would survive damaged but almost entirely intact.

 

This doesn’t mean that the mullahs will necessarily risk terrible carnage to their country in order to destroy Israel irrevocably. But it does mean that the blithe assurance to the contrary — because the Soviets never struck first — is nonsense. The mullahs have a radically different worldview, a radically different grievance, and a radically different calculation of the consequences of nuclear war.

 

The confident belief that they are like the Soviets is a fantasy. That’s why Israel is contemplating a preemptive strike. Israel refuses to trust its very existence to the convenient theories of comfortable analysts living 6,000 miles from its Ground Zero.

Ryan and His Panicky Critics

By James C. Capretta

Thursday, August 30, 2012

 

Paul Ryan’s speech accepting the Republican party’s nomination for vice president was everything that could have been hoped for by the Romney campaign and more. It made the case against President Obama in devastating terms — using humor and memorable line after memorable line to drive home the main point that the president has been a miserable failure in office. The speech is likely to have lasting impact in this campaign.

 

Which perhaps explains the panicky reaction of the mainstream press and Ryan’s liberal critics. Almost from the moment Ryan finished his speech, apologists for the president (including the Washington Post) have come out swinging, quite plainly indignant that Ryan landed so many punches when the usual media filters couldn’t stop him.

 

And, so, not surprisingly, these same apologists have resorted to the usual kind of smear tactics — accusing Ryan of offering up misleading arguments and even “lies.”

 

These criticisms of Ryan’s speech are absurd. Everything Ryan said is factual and a fair reading of the record and prior events.

 

Let’s start with Medicare. Ryan’s critics are beside themselves that the Romney campaign has effectively pinned $716 billion in Medicare cuts on the Obama administration. Two arguments are made to defend the president. First, it is said that Ryan’s own budget cut Medicare by the same amount. But the Ryan budget not only repealed all of Obamacare’s spending, it also doesn’t specify the kinds of Medicare cuts Obamacare does: It calls for the same level of savings but doesn’t spend the money elsewhere and leaves room for Congress to pursue those savings in ways that don’t rely on price controls and the elimination of benefits. Moreover, both Romney and Ryan have said that they, in a Romney administration, would meet their budgetary goals without Obamacare’s Medicare cuts by trimming elsewhere in the budget. And it is certainly the case that Romney and Ryan will have much greater flexibility than Ryan did as House Budget Committee chairman to make cuts wherever they can find them.

 

Ryan’s critics also take exception to the implication that the Medicare “cuts” will do any harm to the health care provided to seniors, arguing that the savings come from “targeted cuts to providers,” not seniors. This is utter nonsense. Among the cuts in Obamacare is a deep and permanent reduction in payments to Medicare Advantage plans. According to the Medicare trustees, that cut will force 4 million seniors out of their Medicare Advantage plans. There is no question that these seniors will lose thousands of dollars per year in health benefits because of these cuts. Moreover, the chief actuary for the Medicare program has projected that, by the end of this decade, 15 percent of facilities will have to stop taking Medicare patients because of Obamacare’s cuts. That will directly impair access to care for millions of seniors, and the percentage of hospitals and nursing homes dropping out of Medicare will grow to 25 percent by 2030.

 

Ryan’s critics are also up in arms over his mention of the closed GM plant in Janesville, Wis. They claim that Ryan blamed President Obama for the closing of the plant — but Ryan explicitly said that the plant was already closing when then-candidate Obama came to Janesville in 2008: “We were about to lose a major factory,” Ryan said last night. Second, it is worth recalling that Obama, in a June 2008 statement, said that, if elected president, he would “lead an effort to retool plants like the GM facility in Janesville.” This is further confirmation of Ryan’s point that Obama essentially promised to find a way to keep the plant open after he became president — and did not deliver.

 

But let’s step back and look at Ryan’s larger point. He was making the argument that, even with the Obama bailout, the Obama economy is so bad that the plant is still closed and, what’s worse, there’s no prospect that other vibrant industries will take its place. That’s absolutely a fair indictment of the Obama record, especially so because Obama went to the plant and promised hope and change in 2008.

 

Then there is the business of the U.S. credit downgrade and the Bowles-Simpson commission. In his speech, Ryan properly excoriated the president for his profligate spending and for his indifference to the nation’s debt crisis. During the president’s term, the national debt will rise by more than $5 trillion. Ryan pinned S&P’s decision to lower the credit rating for debt issued by the U.S. government on the president’s failure to lead on fiscal matters, and chastised him specifically for appointing the Bowles-Simpson commission and then doing nothing with the commission’s recommendations. Ryan’s critics say he is being hypocritical because Ryan himself also opposed the Bowles-Simpson recommendations.

 

But when Ryan opposed that plan (because it left in place Obamacare’s massive new entitlement spending), he proposed an alternative and passed it through the House of Representatives. What did President Obama do? Nothing. He appointed the commission to buy time during the 2010 campaign season, and then, in 2011, decided that leading on the deficit wasn’t in his political interest. So he proposed no plan of his own. And then when Ryan proposed his plan to actually head off a fiscal crisis, the president attacked it in the most partisan and demagogic terms possible. Is it any surprise, with this kind of behavior from the president, that the parties weren’t able to come to an amicable agreement? Any fair reading of the record shows that the president has abdicated his leadership responsibilities on fiscal matters. He richly deserves the blame for the downgrade.

 

Finally, Ryan’s critics cannot stomach the fact that Ryan refuses to play along with their caricatures of him as an uncaring Randian, obsessed with individualism and indifferent to the needs of the vulnerable. In his speech, Ryan specifically noted that a society should be measured by how well the strong protect the weak. That’s entirely consistent with the budget plan he favors. As usual, his critics want the world to equate more governmental programs and spending with improvement in the lives of the poor. And yet, after trillions in spending, poverty and dependence are on the rise under President Obama.

 

Under Romney and Ryan, there will be plenty of room for generous government spending on a safety net for those who are truly incapable of taking care of themselves. That’s as it should be. But what the poor really need is opportunity, for better-paying jobs and mobility up the wage scale. There is a mountain of evidence that what will help the poor more than anything else is a vibrant free-market economy. Moreover, the reason welfare reform was such a success in 1996 was not that it limited government spending (although it did do that) but that it improved the lives of millions of lower-income American families by emphasizing work over dependence. That’s a lesson that Ryan’s critics, the president included, still have not learned.

 

Paul Ryan’s acceptance speech was a tour de force, and a clear success. One measure of that success is the intensity and emptiness of the attacks coming his way. The irony is that these attacks — intended to damage Ryan by undermining his credibility — are more likely to be seen by the electorate for what they really are: desperate and dishonest tactics from those willing to say and do anything to hang on to power.

Why Bother: The New Isolationism

By Victor Davis Hanson

Thursday, August 30, 2012

 

The United States is backing off from the Middle East — and the Middle East from the United States.

 

America is in the midst of the greatest domestic-gas-and-oil revolution since the early 20th century. If even guarded predictions about new North American reserves are accurate, over the next decade the entire continent may become energy-independent, without much need of petroleum imports from the Middle East.

 

America’s diminishing reliance on the Persian Gulf coincides with mounting Chinese dependency on Middle Eastern oil and gas. So as the Persian Gulf becomes less important to us, it grows even more critical to the oil-hungry, cash-laden — and opportunistic — Chinese.

 

After two wars in the Middle East, Americans are as tired of our forces’ being sent over there as Middle Easterners are of having us there.

 

The usual Arab complaint against the United States during the Cold War was that it supported anti-communist authoritarians in the oil-rich Gulf and ignored democratic reform. After the 1991 Gulf War, the next charge was that America fought Saddam Hussein only to free an oil-rich, pro-American monarchy in Kuwait, without any interest in helping reformists in either Kuwait or Iraq.

 

After the Gulf War of 2003, there was widespread new anger about the use of American arms to force-feed democracy down the throat of Iraq. Finally, during the 2011 Arab Spring, the Arab world charged that the United States was too tardy in offering political support for insurgents in Egypt and Tunisia, and again late in “leading from behind” in helping European nations remove Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi. Now the Arab world is hectoring America to help overthrow Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

 

Let’s get this all straight. America has been damned for its Machiavellian shenanigans in supporting authoritarian governments; for its naïve idealism in using force to implant democracies; for its ambivalence in not using force to protect democratic protesters; and for its recent isolationism in ignoring ongoing Arab violence. Why, then, bother?

 

There are other growing fault lines. The old conventional wisdom was that Sunni Muslims shared Israeli fears of a Persian bomb on the horizon. The new conventional wisdom is that the Arab masses that are propelling the Muslim Brotherhood into power in Egypt prefer the idea of a nuked Israel to the danger of a nuclear Iran.

 

The subtext of Middle Eastern anti-Americanism is that the region, if given a chance, will embrace its own brand of freedom. But that does not appear to be happening in Egypt or Libya. And for now, desire for democracy does not seem to be the common glue that holds together various Syrians fighting to overthrow the odious Assad dictatorship.

 

Newly elected Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood attended college and later taught classes in California. Apparently Morsi once came here to enjoy American freedom, and for his family to be protected by our tolerance and security. Is that why he is crushing liberal opponents and the Egyptian media — to ensure that they never enjoy the protections and opportunities that were offered to him while a guest in the United States?

 

Note that anti-Americanism was often attributed to the unique unpopularity of Texan George W. Bush, who invaded two Middle Eastern countries, tried to foster democracies, and institutionalized a number of tough antiterrorism security policies. In turn, Barack Obama was supposed to be the antidote — with a Muslim family on his father’s side, his middle name (Hussein), early schooling in Muslim Indonesia, a number of pro-Islamic speeches and interviews, apologies abroad, and a post-racial personal story.

 

Yet recent polls show that Obama is even less popular in the Middle East than was Bush.

 

Staggering U.S. debt also explains the impending divorce. With $5 trillion in new American borrowing in just the last four years, and talk of slashing $1 trillion from the defense budget over the next ten years, America’s options abroad may be narrowing. President Obama also envisions a more multilateral world in which former American responsibilities in the Middle East are outsourced to collective interests like the United Nations, the European Union, and the Arab League.

 

Perhaps soon the problem will be that we simply will not have enough power to use for much of anything — and we would have to ask the U.N. for permission if we did.

 

Usually nothing good comes from American isolationism, especially given our key support for a vulnerable, democratic Israel. But for a variety of reasons, good and bad, our Humpty Dumpty policy of Middle East engagement is now shattered.

 

And no one knows how to — or whether we even should — put it together again.

New York Times Fact Checkers: Bed Rest is Work

By Ann Coulter

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

 

Poor Mickey Kaus. He's the liberal intellectual (not an oxymoron -- he's the last known living "liberal intellectual") lefties on TV are usually stealing from, but now that this welfare reform maven has concluded that Romney's welfare ad is basically correct, liberals refuse to acknowledge his existence.

 

 The non-Fox media have formed a solid front in denouncing Romney's welfare ad for daring to point out that Obama has gutted the work requirements of the 1996 welfare reform bill.

 

 The New York Times claims that Romney's ad "falsely" charges Obama with eliminating work requirements. CNN rates the ad "false." Underemployed hack Howard Fineman says Romney's ad "is just flat out wrong on the facts" and "that every fair analyst, every fact checker" has said it's "just factually wrong."

 

 When a campaign ad induces this much hysteria, you know Romney has struck gold. On closer examination, it turns out that by "every fair analyst," Fineman means a bunch of liberals quoting one another.

 

 This is how the media's "fact checkers" operate when it comes to a Republican campaign ad. One not very well-informed person (or a heavily biased person) announces that Romney's welfare ad is false, and the rest of the herd quote him, without anyone ever bothering to examine the facts, much less citing anyone who knows what he's talking about.

 

 It is striking that everyone who actually knows something about the 1996 welfare reform law says that Romney's ad is accurate.

 

 One of the principal authors of the 1996 welfare reform, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, and Douglas Besharov, who advised Hillary Clinton on the 1996 welfare reform law, say Romney's ad is accurate.

 

 Andrew Grossman, also of Heritage, produced something the MSM "fact checkers" avoid: a specific and detailed explanation of how the new waivers will allow states to evade the work requirements.

 

Even Ron Haskins, one of the reform bill's authors now at the liberal Brookings Institution -- cited far and wide for "blasting" Romney's ad -- doesn't deny the Obama administration plans to waive the work requirements. He just says he supports waivers for "job training." That's not disputing the accuracy of Romney's ads.

 

 A lot of Americans don't support waiving the work requirements, even for "job training." Mitt Romney thinks they should know that that's what Obama is doing.

 

 And liberal Kaus -- whom liberal hacks are usually plagiarizing from -- has written a series of blog posts explaining in detail why the Times is wrong and Romney's ad is not incorrect. True, he says the ad is "oversimplified," but I think most people grasp that a 30-second ad will not provide the lush analytical detail of a Kausfiles blog posting.

 

 We know liberals are reading Kausfiles; why aren't they stealing from him this time?

 

 As Kaus explains, HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius has interpreted the welfare law to allow her to waive work requirements "subject only to her opinion" as to what will serve the purposes of the law.

 

 By viewing the work requirements as optional, subject to her waiver, Kaus says, the law has been "altered dramatically": "Old system: Congress writes the requirements, which are ... requirements. New system: Sebelius does what she wants -- but, hey, you can trust her!"

 

 Sebelius is not a laid-back, third-way neoliberal who can be expected to interpret her waiver authority honestly. She's the doctrinaire feminist loon who "interpreted" Obamacare to require every insurance policy in the country to provide full coverage for birth control.

 

 Kaus points out that the HHS memo announcing that Sebelius could allow waivers from work for "job training," "job search" or "pursuing a credential" unquestionably constitutes "a weakening of the work requirement." He adds that it's also "unfair to the poor suckers who just go to work without ever going on welfare -- they don't get subsidized while they're 'pursuing a credential.'"

 

 In a follow-up post, Kaus pointed out that the Times' own editorial denouncing the Romney ad inadvertently revealed that Sebelius was proposing a lot more than "job search" exemptions from the work requirement.

 

 Both the Times and an HHS memo cheerfully propose allowing hard-to-employ "families" -- which are never actual families, by the way -- to be "exempted from the work requirements for six months." Or more than six months. It's up to Sebelius: "Exempted."

 

 The work requirements were one of two central features of the 1996 welfare reform law, along with time limits. They were heatedly opposed by the Democrats' left-wing base at the time, and have been met with massive resistance in some of our more Greece-like states ever since.

 

 A 2005 report by the Government Accountability Office found that some states were accepting such non-work substitutes from welfare recipients as "bed rest," "personal journaling," "motivational reading," "exercise at home," "smoking cessation," "weight loss," and "helping a friend or relative with household tasks and errands."

 

 (Under Sebelius, the work requirement will also be satisfied with "playing Xbox and eating Doritos.")

 

 Many liberals, such as those who write for The New York Times, agree that "bed rest" and "personal journaling" should count as a work substitute for welfare recipients. But that's not what the law says. And it's certainly not what liberals tell us when they proclaim Romney's ad "false."

 

 What "every fair analyst" and "every fact checker" means when they call Romney's ad "false" is: We, the media, don't consider exempting welfare recipients from the requirement of having to work "gutting" the work requirements.

 

 "Thoroughly debunked" is the new liberal code for "blindingly accurate."

After Romney's Birth Certificate Joke, Dems Play the Race Card

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

 

TAMPA, Fla. -- Huzzah, America, our centuries-old struggle with racism and bigotry may be coming to an end.

 

This news was confirmed by none other than Michael Eric Dyson, a professor of sociology and the author of 18 books on race, racism, racial history, black culture and black history. Suffice it to say, he knows a lot about prejudice and bigotry.

 

Yet in response to Mitt Romney's lame joke about not needing a birth certificate to prove he was from Michigan, Dyson proclaimed, to the approval of a collection of sage pundits on MSNBC, that Romney was resorting to "some of the basest, most despicable bigotry we can imagine."

 

MSNBC host Alex Wagner seemed to feel the same way, describing Romney's comment as "scraping the very bottom of this sort of racist other-ist narrative."

 

Just to recap, here's what Romney said of himself and his wife: "No one's ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place that we were born and raised."

 

As with most things Romney says, it's hard to appreciate the full breadth and depth of the blandness of his delivery from just reading the words on the page.

 

Yet this is "some of the basest, most despicable bigotry we can imagine." Clearly, if that's the worst we can come up with, the state of racial tolerance in America has never been better.

 

Within hours of Romney's joke, the Obama campaign was trying to turn its outrage into cash. An email appeal from campaign manager Jim Messina repeated Romney's quote and then said:

 

"Take a moment or two to think about that, what he's actually saying, and what it says about Mitt Romney. Then make a donation of $3 or more to re-elect Barack Obama today."

 

I know some people take this "birther" stuff very seriously. But I find the whole thing ludicrous. Apparently, if Romney jokes about Obama's birth certificate, white Americans will suddenly notice the president is black. But when Obama jokes about his birth certificate -- or even hawks birther-themed swag on his campaign website, it's all in good fun.

 

Unfortunately, the claim that Romney is trafficking in racism has proliferated. His ads attacking Obama for unwinding the 1996 welfare reform are being denounced as not simply inaccurate but racially loaded.

 

For instance, in a piece titled "Making the Election About Race," Columbia University journalism professor Thomas Edsall writes, "The racial overtones of Romney's welfare ads are relatively explicit" -- an interesting analysis given that the ads explicitly don't mention race, which you'd expect to be a minimum requirement of "explicit" racial overtones.

 

However, Edsall concedes that the racial overtones of Romney's Medicare ads are "a bit more subtle." Those ads charge that Obama raided Medicare to pay for Obamacare. Then Edsall notes that Medicare recipients are "overwhelmingly white." He conveniently leaves out the fact that American seniors are overwhelmingly white as well and, if anything, under-enrolled in Medicare.

 

Odd how Democrats have been "mediscaring" for nearly half a century, yet only Republicans are racist for appealing to "overwhelmingly" white Medicare recipients.

 

Here in Tampa, former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour told BuzzFeed that the Democrats are playing "the race card" in order to gin up black turnout. I'm sure that's true, but they're also trying to transform Romney into the ultimate unacceptable other in American politics -- a bigot (and a Mormon one to boot). Still, I also have no doubt that Dyson, Edsall and others in the media eagerly hyping the race angle are sincere in their beliefs; I just think they're wrong.

 

But I think both the cynical and the sincere race-obsessives fail to fully appreciate the damage they're doing to their own cause. In 2008, the hope for many was that Obama would transcend race, moving the nation beyond the exhausting topic. Instead of a post-racial politics, our politics are saturated with ridiculous charges of racism. "No drama Obama" is instead a source of constant drama, often hyped in the most ludicrous ways.

The Rich Don't Pay Enough?

By Walter E. Williams

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

 

If you listen to America's political hacks, mainstream media talking heads and their socialist allies, you can't help but reach the conclusion that the nation's tax burden is borne by the poor and middleclass while the rich get off scot-free.

 

Stephen Moore, senior economics writer for The Wall Street Journal, and I'm proud to say former GMU economics student, wrote "The U.S. Tax System: Who Really Pays?" in the Manhattan Institute's Issue 2012 (8/12). Let's see whether the rich are paying their "fair" share.

 

According to IRS 2007 data, the richest 1 percent of Americans earned 22 percent of national personal income but paid 40 percent of all personal income taxes. The top 5 percent earned 37 percent and paid 61 percent of personal income tax. The top 10 percent earned 48 percent and paid 71 percent of all personal income taxes. The bottom 50 percent earned 12 percent of personal income but paid just 3 percent of income tax revenues.

 

Some argue that these observations are misleading because there are other federal taxes the bottom 50 percenters pay such as Social Security and excise taxes. Moore presents data from the Tax Policy Center, run by the liberal Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, that takes into account payroll and income taxes paid by different income groups. Because of the earned income tax credit, most of America's poor pay little or nothing. What the Tax Policy Center calls working class pay 3 percent of all federal taxes, middle class 11 percent, upper middle class 19 percent and wealthy 67 percent.

 

President Obama and the Democratic Party harp about tax fairness. Here's my fairness question to you: What standard of fairness dictates that the top 10 percent of income earners pay 71 percent of the federal income tax burden while 47 percent of Americans pay absolutely nothing?

 

President Obama and his political allies are fully aware of IRS data that shows who pays what. Their tax demagoguery knowingly exploits American ignorance about taxes. A complicit news media is only happy to assist. We might ask ourselves what's to be said about the decency of people who knowingly mislead the public about taxes. Of course, I might be all wrong, and true tax fairness dictates that the top 10 percent pay all federal income taxes.

 

Aside from the fairness issue, 47 percent of taxpayers having no federal income tax liability is dangerous for our nation. These people become natural constituents for big-spending, budget-wrecking, debt-creating politicians. After all, if you have no income tax liability, what do you care about either raising or lowering taxes? That might explain why the so-called Bush tax cuts were not more popular. If you're not paying income taxes, why should you be happy about an income tax cut? Instead, you might view tax cuts as a threat to various handout programs that nearly 50 percent of Americans enjoy.

 

Tax demagoguery is useful for politicians who prey on the politics of envy to get re-elected, but is it good for Americans? We're witnessing the disastrous effects of massive spending in Greece, Italy, Ireland, Portugal and other European countries where a greater number of people live off of government welfare programs than pay taxes. Government debt in Greece is 160 percent of gross domestic product, 120 percent in Italy, 104 in Ireland and 106 in Portugal.

 

Here's the question for us: Is the U.S. moving toward or away from the troubled EU nations? It turns out that our national debt to GDP ratio in the 1970s was 35 percent; now it's 106 percent of GDP. If you think we're immune from the economic chaos in some of the EU countries, you're whistling Dixie. And when economic chaos comes, whom do you think will be more affected by it: rich people or poor people?

'Atlas Shrugged'; Liberals Whined

By Debra J. Saunders

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

 

Mitt Romney chose Paul Ryan to be his running mate. Since his teens, Ryan has been a big fan of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged." In 2005, he told The Atlas Society that the novel shaped his "values system" -- and that speech has launched a number of recent columns by liberals aghast at Ryan's taste in literature.

 

"Almost everybody in the conservative movement has read Ayn Rand. She gives a moral dimension to defending the free enterprise system," alternate delegate Bill Evers of Stanford's Hoover Institution told me Monday morning as the California GOP delegation gathered.

 

Let me confess: I tried to read Rand's "The Fountainhead" years ago and put it down twice. I found, as I talked to other Republicans, that I am not alone.

 

After liberals started complaining about Ryan's admiration of "Atlas Shrugged," I downloaded the book. I'm on Page 549 of the 1,200-plus-page opus, first published in 1957. My first-blush verdict: The characters make too many speeches and don't talk as real people talk. I laughed out loud at the dialogue in the first sex scene.

 

I have to agree with conservative radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt, who told me the novel is "a young man's book." If Rand reminds me of anyone, it's George Bernard Shaw, whose works I inhaled when I was in high school.

 

Rand was conservative; Shaw was a socialist. Yet both writers were philosopher/novelists who created brainy characters of unbendable conviction. What smart young person can resist such a combination -- especially with the bonus of the message that the world always should accommodate a clever protagonist?

 

Hewitt also called the novel "a work of genius" -- and for good reason. Rand lays out an economic scenario that actually makes readers care about where manufacturers get copper and how their goods are moved to market.

 

She captures how big corporations and big-government bureaucrats collude to protect their interests, how their actions corrupt the way people think and how dysfunction then spreads. Now when I see a broken subway escalator, I'll see the shadow of Ayn Rand.

 

Later in the morning, I approached Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif. Issa compared "Atlas Shrugged" to George Orwell's "1984." Both novels, said Issa, remind readers that "liberty isn't something that just happens." And both cautionary tales warn of consequences that did not happen.

 

So why are liberals so threatened by Rand? The New York Times' Paul Krugman wrote that "Ryan is a man of many ideas, which would ordinarily be a good thing" -- except that Ryan likes Rand, despite her "worship of the successful and contempt for 'moochers.'"

 

Krugman conveniently overlooks Rand's many corporate villains and self-serving academics who cheerlead policies that ultimately bankrupt working families. Rand supports capitalists and capitalism. She extols the social benefits of success; ergo, her book is sinister.

 

At least the Ryan pile-on is a departure from the usual dismissal of the GOP as the Party of Stupid. Now the left complains that Republicans are too fond of a weighty tome on industrial economics. The left's usual message to the right: Read a book; challenge your assumptions. Now it's this: Read a book; it challenges our assumptions.

Voters Fret About Economy, Dems Focus on Abortion

By Byron York

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

 

"This election, to me, is about which candidate is more likely to return us to full employment," says former President Bill Clinton in a new ad released by the Obama campaign. Most voters would agree, at least if one believes countless polls that show the economy and jobs are the nation's top concern.

 

So why are Democrats planning to make their convention a celebration of abortion and gay marriage? The Obama campaign has given a new and prominent surrogate role to Sandra Fluke, the former Georgetown law student and full-time lefty activist who achieved notoriety after Rush Limbaugh called her a bad name because of her energetic promotion of taxpayer-financed contraception.

 

This week, Fluke's role has been to attack Republicans over Rep. Todd Akin's "legitimate rape" statement. "Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan tried to distance themselves from the remark," Fluke wrote in an Obama campaign email, "but the fact is they're in lockstep with Akin on the major women's health issues of our time."

 

Fluke is just one part of the Democrats' plan to target Akin and the GOP on abortion. The Washington Examiner's Paul Bedard writes that the Democratic convention is becoming an "anti-Akin affair," with party leaders lining up NARAL Pro-Choice America's Nancy Keenan, Planned Parenthood's Cecile Richards, the actress Eva Longoria, Sen. Barbara Mikulski and Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, in addition to Fluke, to highlight "women's issues" in Charlotte.

 

There will be a lot of talk about abortion, all of it from one side. But not all Democrats agree with Fluke and her fellow speakers when it comes to abortion; in May of this year, Gallup found 34 percent of Democrats identify themselves as pro-life. And, perhaps more important to President Obama's re-election prospects, 47 percent of independents describe themselves as pro-life.

 

Why would a party that wants to attract the largest possible number of votes this November make such extravagant pronouncements on abortion, knowing that one-third of its own members and nearly one-half of independents disagree?

 

And that's just abortion. Democrats have already decided to make support for gay marriage a plank in the party's platform. The party's 15-member platform drafting committee unanimously voted to do so last month after hearing testimony from advocates of gay marriage. They did not invite any opponents of gay marriage to testify, suggesting that when it comes to writing a platform, the Democratic process is not entirely democratic.

 

According to the most recent Gallup poll on the matter, 65 percent of Democrats believe gay marriage should be legal, while 34 percent believe it shouldn't. A full 40 percent of independents believe gay marriage should not be legal. And the Democrats are holding their convention in a swing state, North Carolina, where voters recently approved a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

 

The rational design behind all this is that Barack Obama can't be re-elected without winning big among women. The newest Gallup polling shows equal gender gaps: Mitt Romney leads the president 50 percent to 42 percent among men, while the president leads Romney 50 to 42 percent among women. It's a gap that has been consistent for months now, and Obama hopes to eke out a victory by making a few more women nervous about voting Republican in the last weeks of the campaign. "The Obama campaign believes that college-educated women, and the margin the president could win among them, will decide the election," says a well-informed Democratic strategist not connected to the campaign.

 

But not all of this is a rational calculation. If you stand on the floor of a Democratic convention when a speaker is discussing abortion, you can feel the depth of the emotion that many Democrats feel on the issue. Conservatives like to say abortion is a liberal sacrament. Maybe that's going too far, but it is very, very important. And when something means so much to a group of people, they can easily convince themselves that it means that much to others, too.

 

Meanwhile, the voters continue to say, overwhelmingly, that they want their president to focus on the economy and job creation. By choosing to spotlight abortion and gay marriage at their national convention, Democrats could give voters the impression that they've got their priorities all mixed up. Sandra Fluke may draw headlines, but does she really represent what voters think is most important?

The Psychology of Liberal Intolerance

 

By Christopher Merola
Monday, August 27, 2012

This past Friday, August 24, 2012, while campaigning in Michigan, Republican Party presidential nominee Mitt Romney made a joke concerning his own birth certificate. The Obama campaign reacted with outrage to Romney’s joke, even though President Obama has joked about his own birth certificate in public. Naturally, responding to the Obama campaign’s outrage, some members of the media followed suit and did the same. Yet, the Obama campaign and the media refused to show outrage when Vice President Joe Biden recently made racially charged comments while on the campaign trail.

While many can agree that this is just one more example of a double standard concerning the treatment of conservatives and liberals by the media and others, there is a matter much worse than a double standard playing out today in our society. It’s the matter of liberal intolerance toward conservatives as a whole.

Ronald Reagan once said: “The frustrating thing is that those who are attacking religion claim they are doing it in the name of tolerance, freedom and open-mindedness. Question: Isn’t the real truth that they are intolerant of religion? They refuse to tolerate its importance in our lives.”

Many conservatives, especially religious conservatives, can identify with Reagan’s statement. The reason for this is found in the fact that acts of bigotry toward conservative ideals and beliefs are a common practice today among many in the media, the academic elite, and even in the work place. These acts of bigotry toward conservatives are usually carried out by those who claim that conservatives are intolerant, thus they need to be put in check. If you are a conservative, I am sure that you have felt the sting of this liberal intolerance more than a few times. In many circumstances, the intolerance of liberals toward conservatives occurs in the name of tolerance. I like to call it the practice of “intolerance in the name of tolerance.”

Here is one example of how the practice of intolerance in the name of tolerance works: A left leaning group announces to the media that they are waging a war against some intolerant practice – whether it be a true act of intolerance or a perceived one – and then the media elites join the cause by repeating the mantra of the left leaning group until many in the public practically regurgitate what has been said. This continues until the “intolerant” conservatives are completely demonized and marginalized. After the process has run its course, it is close to impossible for a conservative to get a fair shake. The label of “intolerance” has been set in stone.

There is one major reason that the practice of intolerance in the name of tolerance is so effective. It is a practice based on the Contrast Effect, a psychological phenomenon used as a counseling technique. The Contrast Effect is the tendency of humans to both play up the good and downplay the bad in our lives, or vice versa. Using the Contrast Effect during a counseling session, a counselor can reframe the way a client sees his or her circumstances. One way to do this is to greatly magnify the good experiences in a client’s life, while at the same time greatly diminishing the bad. This contrast between good and bad experiences allows the client to feel better about his or her experiences and thus move toward recovery.

What the political left does is much the same as the Contrast Effect when they engage in the practice of liberal intolerance in the name of tolerance. They magnify the minor mistakes made by conservatives as if they were major blunders, while at the same time downplaying the major blunders of liberals as if they were minor mistakes. This kind of contrast, done repeatedly, over time, creates intolerance for anything conservatives do or say, while allowing almost carte blanche tolerance for anything liberals do or say. Liberals become the heroes for calling out a perceived intolerance and trying to end it. Conservatives become the enemy for practicing some so-called intolerance. It is an easy sell as no one wants to be on the side of an intolerant cause or candidate.

The real underlying issue at hand, however, is the fact that the political left and their partners in the media actually promote intolerance for a cause in which they disagree, which contradicts their supposed belief in tolerance. They are actually engaged in intolerance disguised as tolerance. One does not have to look that hard to see how the political left advances intolerance toward conservatives by simply disguising it as tolerance.

Take for example the recent shooting at the Family Research Council (FRC), which much of the major media has either downplayed or not even discussed. It turns out that the Southern Poverty Law Center, a liberal activist organization has consistently named the FRC as an intolerant and bigoted organization. They even called the FRC a hate group. This is simply due to the fact that the FRC promotes traditional marriage instead of same-sex marriage, along with pro-life causes instead of pro-abortion causes.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s labeling of the FRC as a hate group reaped serious consequences recently as a same-sex marriage activist armed himself with a gun and 50 rounds of ammunition and then attempted to kill the people who work at the FRC. If it were not for the building operations manager stopping the shooter, and taking a shot in his arm in the process, many may have died or been seriously injured.

There is a twisted kind of irony at work here. The FRC is labeled a hate group for holding to their deeply held religious beliefs. This label incited anger and hatred toward the FRC and they came under attack by a man acting in the name of tolerance. Just who is showing bigotry and hatred? Is it the same-sex activist that armed himself with ammunition and shot a man, or is it the FRC? You may not agree with the FRC’s policies, but I do not remember the FRC calling for the shooting of same-sex marriage activists.

This is what the practice of intolerance in the name of tolerance produces: a hatred and intolerance toward those who simply disagree with a liberal position. Whatever happened to true tolerance -- one where we agree to disagree with those who have an opposing view? True tolerance means coexisting with those whom you may disagree. Such true tolerance cannot exist when intolerance is practiced by simply disguising it as tolerance.

Even more irrational than a hateful act disguised as tolerance is the idea that promoting traditional marriage is bigoted. Yet, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, if you do not support same-sex marriage then you must be intolerant and organizations that believe the same must be a hate group. Such blanket statements lead to the narrowing of minds and the inflaming of hatreds. In other words, there is no real tolerance being conducted, only the practice of intolerance in the name of tolerance.

I will be the first to admit that some socially conservative groups and organizations do a poor job of communicating their values and beliefs. In fact, sometimes the language used by some social conservatives to describe lifestyles they dislike is downright embarrassing. There certainly is a better way for social conservatives to communicate their worldview. Nonetheless, labeling these organizations as “hate groups” is a stretch. Worse yet, it does not truly promote the tolerance that many liberals claim to espouse.

It’s time for the real tolerance lovers to practice what they preach. If we are to be a society that engages in genuine tolerance, then we must reject the practice of intolerance in the name of tolerance and work to coexist with others with whom we disagree. Anything less is just plain intolerance, no matter what else some may call it.

Romney's an Extremist, and Obama Isn't? LOL

By David Limbaugh

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

 

President Obama's casting of Mitt Romney as extreme is one of the most glaring incidents of political projection in the modern era. Romney doesn't approach extremism in substance, style or disposition. Obama swims in it.

 

In an interview with The Associated Press, Obama said Romney has locked himself into "extreme positions" on economic and social issues and would implement them if in office.

 

Accusing Romney of extremism is just another arrow in Obama's fantasy quiver, because reality just doesn't help him. Romney is anything but extreme, and no serious political analyst believes otherwise. He is certainly extremely bullish on America, American business and the free enterprise system, and he doubtlessly wants to move the nation extremely away from the disastrous course on which Obama is taking it, but that's about the extent of his extremism. Romney's policies are right of center, to be sure, but not extreme, except from the perspective of a radical leftist, which brings us to Obama.

 

Let's use Obama's bill of particulars against Romney as a yardstick to measure his own place on the political spectrum -- as if it weren't painfully obvious.

 

Obama says Romney is locked into extreme positions on economic issues because Romney favors across-the-board tax cuts that "would mostly help the rich."

 

Obama discredits himself in the very words of his charge. If the cuts are across-the-board, they don't mostly favor the rich. In fact, Romney -- to my disappointment, by the way -- is suggesting reducing deductions for upper-income earners. Obama, on the other hand, apparently believes that the bottom 49.5 percent of income earners are getting ripped off because they are paying zero income taxes. He must think his actions in expanding the public sector, increasing the food stamp rolls and removing the work requirement for welfare are moderate.

 

Obama says Romney is extreme for not signing on to his quixotic wind energy hallucinations -- as if anyone who doesn't believe in the government's throwing away billions more at failed and scandalous green energy experiments is the extremist -- as opposed to recklessly implementing such policies when the nation has one foot in the bankruptcy door.

 

Obama says Romney lacks "serious ideas" and refuses to "own up" to the responsibilities of what it takes to be president. These take the cake.

 

Romney is proposing serious entitlement, tax and spending reform and reducing the unprecedented regulatory burden strangling the private sector. Nothing remotely extreme here. Sorry, Mr. Obama; that rabid dog will not hunt.

 

Obama has amassed deficits in excess of $1 trillion in each of his four years. He has not produced a budget that would yield deficits below that threshold in the next decade. He has not even presented a plan to reform entitlements, has obstructed Republican reform bills and has saddled us with a brand-new budget-busting entitlement (Obamacare). His own budgets failed to get a single vote -- not even a Democratic vote. Extremism?

 

How about Obama's serious ideas? The only idea Obama has come up with since 2008 has been government spending. There is no evidence he can even ponder economic solutions straying from that nightmare. He certainly will not reduce the tax and regulatory burden on producers and small businesses, and he most definitely will not take his pillow off the face of the smothered private sector. He can't, because he is a dogmatic extremist who would rather preside over national financial catastrophe than deviate from his straightjacketing ideology.

 

How about owning up to the responsibilities of being president? Do these include intentionally dividing Americans, sidestepping a bipartisan budget commission he formed for political cover, orchestrating America's military decline, sabotaging domestic energy producers, grotesquely gloating over the killing of Osama bin Laden, and endless golf outings?

 

Social issue extremism? Romney can hardly be called an extremist on abortion. He not only rejects Todd Akin's formulation; he supports the rape exception. Obama, on the other hand, opposed Illinois' Born Alive Infant Protection Act and supports partial-birth abortion.

 

Perhaps most laughable is Obama's assertion that unlike Romney, he will be willing to compromise on a range of issues. If his entire first term doesn't prove that claim is sheer carnival barkery, then nothing can. Romney, on the other hand, has sometimes been criticized from the right for compromising too much with Democrats.

 

Obama's left wing has become so extreme that it would have the nation believe that mainstream conservative ideas are now extreme and that the extreme positions it promotes are moderate, reasonable and routine.

 

Only if George Orwell defines the terms -- and for Obama and today's left, he increasingly does -- is Romney extreme and Obama a centrist. I suspect that in November, Obama is going to find out just how far out of phase he is with the electorate, but we shall see.