Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Bad News for Obama - Good News for Romney...
Americans are waking up the big failure Obama has been....and it's not getting any better under his leadership.....He's got to go in November...
Add it up: The prediction models look dismal for Obama. Can he still win?
Yahoo! News – 1 hr 57 mins ago...
I got into writing and thinking about politics because I was told there would be no math.
Boy, was I misled. It’s not just the torrent of polls that we have to deal with, but the numbers that supposedly forecast Presidential elections with uncanny accuracy. Depending on whom you turn to, the key lies in second quarter real GDP growth, the optimism or pessimism of the electorate, individual or family real income growth or a dizzying mix of these and other measurements.
They’re usually economic, although one prognosticator—Allan Lichtman, history professor at American University—uses broader measurements, asking whether the incumbent or challenger is charismatic or whether the incumbent party has presided over a major change in social policy. (This is considered a positive, although I don’t know if we’ve ever had a case like the Affordable Care Act, which—unlike every other major social change—passed without bipartisan backing and remains broadly unpopular.)
I’m a skeptic about the predictive power of these numbers for many reasons. For one thing, the “sample size,” which totals about twenty or so Presidential elections since most of these measurements were first made, is too small. For another, they work—unless they don’t. In 1968, strong economic figures were trumped by a divisive war and by social unrest. In 2000, every economic forecasting model predicted that Al Gore would win a comfortable or landslide plurality. They were “right” in the sense that he got half a million more votes than Bush; they were “wrong” in the fundamental outcome they offered.
So it’s with that skepticism in mind that I offer, not a prediction, but a flat pre-election assessment: If President Barack Obama is to win, he is going to have to overcome a set of numbers that no incumbent President, or incumbent party, has ever managed to surmount.
The jobless rate has been stuck at just above 8 per cent for months; you have to go back to 1936 to find a President re-elected with a higher unemployment rate. And in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s case, it was a far better number than he had inherited. Plus, growth was booming.
Today, real growth is at 1.5 per cent. In the economic forecasting models, this portends what even the liberal arts majors have been predicting: a very close election.
The core question for many voters—“Are you generally satisfied with the country’s direction, or has the U.S. gone off on the wrong track”—gets a 32.7-60.7 negative answer, according to the RealClearPolitics average. Generally, an incumbent party needs to have at least a 35% positive response to this question to win the election, says the Gallup Organization.
The consumer confidence level is now about 60 per cent. No incumbent party has ever kept the White House with a number anything like that. (It was slightly higher, at 65 per cent, in 1980 when Carter lost in a landslide.)
Now, try this as a thought exercise. Forget who is running, what the latest gaffe of the day is, who is outraged and what latest insult to what group has been perpetrated by the candidate or his staff. Ignore whom you’re rooting for, and just look at those numbers with the ice-cold heart of a bean counter.
What you would conclude, I think, is that there is no way an incumbent President could get re-elected given these current numbers.
In this sense, the 2012 election is going to test just how predictive many of these “fundamental” models are, and whether the assertion of some forecasters—that the outcome can be known irrespective of candidates and campaigns—is valid.
Why? Because, to put it bluntly: The Republicans have nominated a bad candidate.
Some (very) brief history and a hypothesis. Six years ago, Mitt Romney and his team realized that he could never win the Republican nomination as the pragmatic, moderate-conservative with moderate-to-liberal views on everything from abortion to gun control to the environment to health care. (The mandate was a conservative position back then, but put that aside.) When Team Romney saw Sen. George Allen, the likely 2008 social conservative hero, lose his re-election bid in 2006, they found an opening, and decided to reach, or lunge, for that slot.
And so, throughout the 2008 campaign and throughout this one, Romney has been running as if to claim that his four years in higher office was a case of mistaken identity. I think it has forced him to campaign in mortal fear of every word he utters, to pander to local pride and political constituencies in a manner that seems a parody of the clumsy politician.
At root, Romney is a candidate in the grip of performance anxiety. And whether on the tennis court or in more intimate settings performance anxiety is a near-guarantee of poor performance.
It’s often said that a re-election campaign is always about the incumbent; like many political observations, that’s partly, but not wholly, true. Even when the electorate is disposed to replace the President, it has to be satisfied that the challenger is up to the job. Mitt Romney has yet to meet that test.
The Obama campaign, however, can take very limited comfort from Romney’s discomfit. If the “fundamental” numbers continue to be as grim as they now are, the desire to change course will deepen. And the more that longing intensifies, the lower the bar Mitt Romney will have to clear.
..
Add it up: The prediction models look dismal for Obama. Can he still win?
Yahoo! News – 1 hr 57 mins ago...
I got into writing and thinking about politics because I was told there would be no math.
Boy, was I misled. It’s not just the torrent of polls that we have to deal with, but the numbers that supposedly forecast Presidential elections with uncanny accuracy. Depending on whom you turn to, the key lies in second quarter real GDP growth, the optimism or pessimism of the electorate, individual or family real income growth or a dizzying mix of these and other measurements.
They’re usually economic, although one prognosticator—Allan Lichtman, history professor at American University—uses broader measurements, asking whether the incumbent or challenger is charismatic or whether the incumbent party has presided over a major change in social policy. (This is considered a positive, although I don’t know if we’ve ever had a case like the Affordable Care Act, which—unlike every other major social change—passed without bipartisan backing and remains broadly unpopular.)
I’m a skeptic about the predictive power of these numbers for many reasons. For one thing, the “sample size,” which totals about twenty or so Presidential elections since most of these measurements were first made, is too small. For another, they work—unless they don’t. In 1968, strong economic figures were trumped by a divisive war and by social unrest. In 2000, every economic forecasting model predicted that Al Gore would win a comfortable or landslide plurality. They were “right” in the sense that he got half a million more votes than Bush; they were “wrong” in the fundamental outcome they offered.
So it’s with that skepticism in mind that I offer, not a prediction, but a flat pre-election assessment: If President Barack Obama is to win, he is going to have to overcome a set of numbers that no incumbent President, or incumbent party, has ever managed to surmount.
The jobless rate has been stuck at just above 8 per cent for months; you have to go back to 1936 to find a President re-elected with a higher unemployment rate. And in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s case, it was a far better number than he had inherited. Plus, growth was booming.
Today, real growth is at 1.5 per cent. In the economic forecasting models, this portends what even the liberal arts majors have been predicting: a very close election.
The core question for many voters—“Are you generally satisfied with the country’s direction, or has the U.S. gone off on the wrong track”—gets a 32.7-60.7 negative answer, according to the RealClearPolitics average. Generally, an incumbent party needs to have at least a 35% positive response to this question to win the election, says the Gallup Organization.
The consumer confidence level is now about 60 per cent. No incumbent party has ever kept the White House with a number anything like that. (It was slightly higher, at 65 per cent, in 1980 when Carter lost in a landslide.)
Now, try this as a thought exercise. Forget who is running, what the latest gaffe of the day is, who is outraged and what latest insult to what group has been perpetrated by the candidate or his staff. Ignore whom you’re rooting for, and just look at those numbers with the ice-cold heart of a bean counter.
What you would conclude, I think, is that there is no way an incumbent President could get re-elected given these current numbers.
In this sense, the 2012 election is going to test just how predictive many of these “fundamental” models are, and whether the assertion of some forecasters—that the outcome can be known irrespective of candidates and campaigns—is valid.
Why? Because, to put it bluntly: The Republicans have nominated a bad candidate.
Some (very) brief history and a hypothesis. Six years ago, Mitt Romney and his team realized that he could never win the Republican nomination as the pragmatic, moderate-conservative with moderate-to-liberal views on everything from abortion to gun control to the environment to health care. (The mandate was a conservative position back then, but put that aside.) When Team Romney saw Sen. George Allen, the likely 2008 social conservative hero, lose his re-election bid in 2006, they found an opening, and decided to reach, or lunge, for that slot.
And so, throughout the 2008 campaign and throughout this one, Romney has been running as if to claim that his four years in higher office was a case of mistaken identity. I think it has forced him to campaign in mortal fear of every word he utters, to pander to local pride and political constituencies in a manner that seems a parody of the clumsy politician.
At root, Romney is a candidate in the grip of performance anxiety. And whether on the tennis court or in more intimate settings performance anxiety is a near-guarantee of poor performance.
It’s often said that a re-election campaign is always about the incumbent; like many political observations, that’s partly, but not wholly, true. Even when the electorate is disposed to replace the President, it has to be satisfied that the challenger is up to the job. Mitt Romney has yet to meet that test.
The Obama campaign, however, can take very limited comfort from Romney’s discomfit. If the “fundamental” numbers continue to be as grim as they now are, the desire to change course will deepen. And the more that longing intensifies, the lower the bar Mitt Romney will have to clear.
..
Monday, July 30, 2012
State-Run NBC and Twitter...not so liberal when the critcism is against them....
The Liberals like State-Run NBC and Twitter will squel like pigs when they feel others rights are curtailed, BUT when it's NBC that's being criticized or it's Olympics coverage it's OK to drop the complaining party from Twitter...Censurship is alive and well when the criticism is against the liberals....
Critic of NBC has Twitter account suspended after network complains
Guy Adams (Mashable)Guy Adams works as a writer for The Independent, a national newspaper in Great Britain. He lives in Los Angeles. Throughout the Olympics, he's taken to Twitter and ripped NBC repeatedly for its coverage of the Games in America.
Namely, he's criticized the network's reliance on using tape delays, a frustration shared by millions of viewers.
Only in a marriage of old media and social media, Guy Adams no longer has a Twitter account. It was suspended Tuesday, and both NBC and Twitter ought to be humiliated by their thin-skinned, heavy-handed, and essentially pointless behavior.
Adams was no doubt relentless in his tweets.
"Am I alone in wondering why NBColympics think its [sic] acceptable to pretend this road race is being broadcast live?" he wrote in one.
"Matt Lauer: ‘Madagascar, a location indelibly associated with a couple of recent animated movies,'" he mocked on another.
Adams encouraged Lauer "to shut up" and called out Gary Zenkel, the president of NBC Olympics, as the "moronic exec behind the time delay." And he said Zenkel should be fired.
That's essentially how Twitter works, of course. It can be profane, reactionary, and often ridiculous. It breeds all sorts of over-the-top anger, outrageous talk, and off-the-handle opinions.
Adams said in a column for The Independent that Twitter claimed he crossed the line by tweeting out Zenkel's corporate email address and encouraging his followers to contact the executive directly.
The email address is easily identifiable, common with how thousands of NBC/Univision employees' email addresses are determined.
Twitter soon suspended Adams' account, he said. In an story he wrote in The Independent, Adams wrote that after filing an article critical of NBC's coverage, he checked his Twitter account only to find it had been suspended. When he inquired why, he received the following response: "Your Twitter account has been suspended for posting an individual's private information such as private email address."
With that, the account was gone.
And a controversy was born.
Adams said he emailed Rachel Bremer, Twitter's head of European PR, to dispute that he broke Twitter's rules. The email address Adams tweeted wasn't a private address belonging to Zenkel, Adams wrote, but a corporate one attainable to anyone with access to Google.
"It's no more 'private' than the address I'm emailing you from right now," Adams wrote Bremer. "Either way, [it's] quite worrying that NBC, whose parent company are an Olympic sponsor, are apparently trying (and, in this case, succeeding) in shutting down the Twitter accounts of journalists who are critical of their Olympic coverage."
The decision, as expected, has gone over poorly on the website, where the freedom to express one's opinions, especially against high-ranking executives of multinational corporations, is highly valued.
Which makes the decision a colossal mistake. You could argue forever whether Zenkel's corporate email is really "private."
You'd have to be a trusting soul to think Twitter really cared.
The issue here is that NBC and Twitter formed a corporate "partnership" for the London Games "to bring Olympic coverage and social conversation to viewers everywhere," according to a pre-Games news release. "During the games, Twitter is using its Olympics events page to highlight insiders' views, and to encourage people to watch NBC's on-air and online coverage."
So, first, they team up and then coincidentally one of the network's most relentless critics gets booted from the website? Earlier this year, film director Spike Lee tweeted what turned out to be an incorrect home address for George Zimmerman, the accused killer of Trayvon Martin. Twitter didn't suspend Lee's account.
The Independent's deputy managing editor, Archie Bland, confirmed that Adams' account was suspended for mentioning the email address. Bland tweeted himself that it's "reasonable to ask whether the suspension also had to do with his criticism of NBC's coverage of the Games and whether they'd usually take the same step."
Twitter has yet to respond for comment. NBC released a statement confirming that it contacted Twitter.
"We filed a complaint with Twitter because a user tweeted the personal information of one of our executives," the network said. "According to Twitter, this is a violation of their privacy policy. Twitter alone levies discipline."
On the rank of world transgression, some snarky journalist losing his tweeting privileges is incredibly low. This isn't even a First Amendment issue. The government isn't trying to silence the public.
This is a public-relations gaffe, and it's hard to imagine how Twitter didn't see it coming.
First, the account suspension directed far more attention to Adams' criticism than if he had simply been ignored. Second, it's an embarrassment for Zenkel. He now looks like some overly sensitive suit.
Twitter is what Twitter is – most people get slammed, at some point, on that website. The head of NBC Olympics not only should've expected the criticism, he should now expect a great deal more of it.
What Adams ranted about hardly mattered. Yes, the tape delay was frustrating. The same for the network's often poor performing online streams.
The American viewing public was tuning in at night in record numbers anyway. That was proof NBC's old formula could not only survive in today's instant information age, it could thrive.
Adams was losing. NBC was winning.
Until Twitter suspended an account and the story got reversed, making a villain out of its partner and a social media hero out of the partner's critic.
It's one more social media casualty in an Olympics full of them.
Critic of NBC has Twitter account suspended after network complains
Guy Adams (Mashable)Guy Adams works as a writer for The Independent, a national newspaper in Great Britain. He lives in Los Angeles. Throughout the Olympics, he's taken to Twitter and ripped NBC repeatedly for its coverage of the Games in America.
Namely, he's criticized the network's reliance on using tape delays, a frustration shared by millions of viewers.
Only in a marriage of old media and social media, Guy Adams no longer has a Twitter account. It was suspended Tuesday, and both NBC and Twitter ought to be humiliated by their thin-skinned, heavy-handed, and essentially pointless behavior.
Adams was no doubt relentless in his tweets.
"Am I alone in wondering why NBColympics think its [sic] acceptable to pretend this road race is being broadcast live?" he wrote in one.
"Matt Lauer: ‘Madagascar, a location indelibly associated with a couple of recent animated movies,'" he mocked on another.
Adams encouraged Lauer "to shut up" and called out Gary Zenkel, the president of NBC Olympics, as the "moronic exec behind the time delay." And he said Zenkel should be fired.
That's essentially how Twitter works, of course. It can be profane, reactionary, and often ridiculous. It breeds all sorts of over-the-top anger, outrageous talk, and off-the-handle opinions.
Adams said in a column for The Independent that Twitter claimed he crossed the line by tweeting out Zenkel's corporate email address and encouraging his followers to contact the executive directly.
The email address is easily identifiable, common with how thousands of NBC/Univision employees' email addresses are determined.
Twitter soon suspended Adams' account, he said. In an story he wrote in The Independent, Adams wrote that after filing an article critical of NBC's coverage, he checked his Twitter account only to find it had been suspended. When he inquired why, he received the following response: "Your Twitter account has been suspended for posting an individual's private information such as private email address."
With that, the account was gone.
And a controversy was born.
Adams said he emailed Rachel Bremer, Twitter's head of European PR, to dispute that he broke Twitter's rules. The email address Adams tweeted wasn't a private address belonging to Zenkel, Adams wrote, but a corporate one attainable to anyone with access to Google.
"It's no more 'private' than the address I'm emailing you from right now," Adams wrote Bremer. "Either way, [it's] quite worrying that NBC, whose parent company are an Olympic sponsor, are apparently trying (and, in this case, succeeding) in shutting down the Twitter accounts of journalists who are critical of their Olympic coverage."
The decision, as expected, has gone over poorly on the website, where the freedom to express one's opinions, especially against high-ranking executives of multinational corporations, is highly valued.
Which makes the decision a colossal mistake. You could argue forever whether Zenkel's corporate email is really "private."
You'd have to be a trusting soul to think Twitter really cared.
The issue here is that NBC and Twitter formed a corporate "partnership" for the London Games "to bring Olympic coverage and social conversation to viewers everywhere," according to a pre-Games news release. "During the games, Twitter is using its Olympics events page to highlight insiders' views, and to encourage people to watch NBC's on-air and online coverage."
So, first, they team up and then coincidentally one of the network's most relentless critics gets booted from the website? Earlier this year, film director Spike Lee tweeted what turned out to be an incorrect home address for George Zimmerman, the accused killer of Trayvon Martin. Twitter didn't suspend Lee's account.
The Independent's deputy managing editor, Archie Bland, confirmed that Adams' account was suspended for mentioning the email address. Bland tweeted himself that it's "reasonable to ask whether the suspension also had to do with his criticism of NBC's coverage of the Games and whether they'd usually take the same step."
Twitter has yet to respond for comment. NBC released a statement confirming that it contacted Twitter.
"We filed a complaint with Twitter because a user tweeted the personal information of one of our executives," the network said. "According to Twitter, this is a violation of their privacy policy. Twitter alone levies discipline."
On the rank of world transgression, some snarky journalist losing his tweeting privileges is incredibly low. This isn't even a First Amendment issue. The government isn't trying to silence the public.
This is a public-relations gaffe, and it's hard to imagine how Twitter didn't see it coming.
First, the account suspension directed far more attention to Adams' criticism than if he had simply been ignored. Second, it's an embarrassment for Zenkel. He now looks like some overly sensitive suit.
Twitter is what Twitter is – most people get slammed, at some point, on that website. The head of NBC Olympics not only should've expected the criticism, he should now expect a great deal more of it.
What Adams ranted about hardly mattered. Yes, the tape delay was frustrating. The same for the network's often poor performing online streams.
The American viewing public was tuning in at night in record numbers anyway. That was proof NBC's old formula could not only survive in today's instant information age, it could thrive.
Adams was losing. NBC was winning.
Until Twitter suspended an account and the story got reversed, making a villain out of its partner and a social media hero out of the partner's critic.
It's one more social media casualty in an Olympics full of them.
Been Away....But I'm Back Now
Been away for the past week or so....moved from Houston to Austin...Not sure how I will get a long with the liberals here, but from a personal move this is the right place for my wife and I now....
Still committed to see Republicans elected in the House, Senate and White House....It's our only chance....
Still committed to see Republicans elected in the House, Senate and White House....It's our only chance....
Bloomberg....Running New York like Natzi Germany.....
Who does Bloomberg think he is GOD!....he's running New York like he's a gestapo general...does he not remember world war 2 Germany????....This is America and people have the freedom to chose....
This is just a small example of what will happen on a national basis if Obamacare doesn't get repealed...Just more reason to vote Republican in November...
Bloomberg pushes new moms to breastfeed, hides the formula
Published: 8:55 AM 07/30/2012 By Neil Munro
New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg is locking up the baby formula, because he wants newborns to drink breast milk instead.
He’s using his mayoral power to direct maternity-ward nurses to hide baby-milk formula after Sept. 2 so that new moms feel pressured to provide breast milk to their newborns.
Bloomberg’s mammary-mandate is supported by white-coated public-health officials, who say the scientific data shows that mothers’ milk aids infants’ digestive systems and shields them from some diseases.
His wishes are law because he controls much of the city’s health network in a city-wide version of Obamacare.
But Bloomberg’s lactate-dictate is likely to get him a slap in the face from women who prefer to choose how they will raise their children, and how they juggle child-rearing and work in a city where unemployment has reached at least 14 percent in the Bronx.
The “reality is that some women may not want to breastfeed their baby and it is simply their choice,” said Cherlyn Harley LeBon, a lawyer, mom and member of the libertarian-minded Project 21’s advisory board.
“I completely support breastfeeding our babies… [but] the government should not force them to do it,” she said in a July 29 statement.
“Mayor Bloomberg is now playing the role of pediatrician and neonatal specialist… [who has declared that] a mother is now forced to breastfeed unless she has a medical reason for not doing so.”
The story was broken by The New York Post, where commentators were merciless.
“I’m another former member of La Leche League who nursed all my kids,” said Rosemarie Scott, at Marymount Manhattan College. “I’m all for encouraging women to breastfeed but agree that this is NOT the way to do it. Leave it to Bloomberg to be so heavy-handed as to turn off even a breastfeeding advocate like myself.”
The mayor’s formula-fatwa follows his earlier effort to stop moms — or any one else — from buying cups of soda larger than 16 ounces.
Babies, however, will be pushed to drink from cups sizes A to DDD under the new rules, dubbed “Latch On NYC.”
Women who refuse to nurse their infants face no penalty, because there’s no requirement that they discharge milk before they’re discharged from the hospital.
Twenty seven of the city’s 40 hospitals are complying with Bloomberg’s nursery rules.
The breast-behest is the newest feature of Bloomberg’s big-government, nanny-state, experts-first-citizens-second, progressive outlook.
He’s a social liberal, but is eager to impose rules when allied professionals say they’re good for city government.
He’s a self-declared feminist and outspoken supporter of unrestricted abortion-choice who opposes any limit on women’s ability to buy abortion services. But once the infant escapes from the womb, they’re now under the rule of Bloomberg’s nanny-state rules.
Bloomberg’s personal involvement in the private lives of citizens extends far beyond cup sizes.
He’s an outspoken critic of protests against the now-moribund effort to build a mosque alongside the Twin Towers’ ground-zero, where Islamists killed almost 3,000 Americans on 9/11.
He’s been in the news recently because of his — quickly recanted — call for cops to go on illegal strikes until Americans lose their constitutional right to guns, and because of his applause for President Barack Obama’s decision in June to offer a campaign-trail de-facto amnesty to at least 800,000 illegal aliens, despite a record national unemployment rate.
New York’s unemployment rate is at least 10 percent, and half of African-American adults in the city lack jobs.
This is just a small example of what will happen on a national basis if Obamacare doesn't get repealed...Just more reason to vote Republican in November...
Bloomberg pushes new moms to breastfeed, hides the formula
Published: 8:55 AM 07/30/2012 By Neil Munro
New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg is locking up the baby formula, because he wants newborns to drink breast milk instead.
He’s using his mayoral power to direct maternity-ward nurses to hide baby-milk formula after Sept. 2 so that new moms feel pressured to provide breast milk to their newborns.
Bloomberg’s mammary-mandate is supported by white-coated public-health officials, who say the scientific data shows that mothers’ milk aids infants’ digestive systems and shields them from some diseases.
His wishes are law because he controls much of the city’s health network in a city-wide version of Obamacare.
But Bloomberg’s lactate-dictate is likely to get him a slap in the face from women who prefer to choose how they will raise their children, and how they juggle child-rearing and work in a city where unemployment has reached at least 14 percent in the Bronx.
The “reality is that some women may not want to breastfeed their baby and it is simply their choice,” said Cherlyn Harley LeBon, a lawyer, mom and member of the libertarian-minded Project 21’s advisory board.
“I completely support breastfeeding our babies… [but] the government should not force them to do it,” she said in a July 29 statement.
“Mayor Bloomberg is now playing the role of pediatrician and neonatal specialist… [who has declared that] a mother is now forced to breastfeed unless she has a medical reason for not doing so.”
The story was broken by The New York Post, where commentators were merciless.
“I’m another former member of La Leche League who nursed all my kids,” said Rosemarie Scott, at Marymount Manhattan College. “I’m all for encouraging women to breastfeed but agree that this is NOT the way to do it. Leave it to Bloomberg to be so heavy-handed as to turn off even a breastfeeding advocate like myself.”
The mayor’s formula-fatwa follows his earlier effort to stop moms — or any one else — from buying cups of soda larger than 16 ounces.
Babies, however, will be pushed to drink from cups sizes A to DDD under the new rules, dubbed “Latch On NYC.”
Women who refuse to nurse their infants face no penalty, because there’s no requirement that they discharge milk before they’re discharged from the hospital.
Twenty seven of the city’s 40 hospitals are complying with Bloomberg’s nursery rules.
The breast-behest is the newest feature of Bloomberg’s big-government, nanny-state, experts-first-citizens-second, progressive outlook.
He’s a social liberal, but is eager to impose rules when allied professionals say they’re good for city government.
He’s a self-declared feminist and outspoken supporter of unrestricted abortion-choice who opposes any limit on women’s ability to buy abortion services. But once the infant escapes from the womb, they’re now under the rule of Bloomberg’s nanny-state rules.
Bloomberg’s personal involvement in the private lives of citizens extends far beyond cup sizes.
He’s an outspoken critic of protests against the now-moribund effort to build a mosque alongside the Twin Towers’ ground-zero, where Islamists killed almost 3,000 Americans on 9/11.
He’s been in the news recently because of his — quickly recanted — call for cops to go on illegal strikes until Americans lose their constitutional right to guns, and because of his applause for President Barack Obama’s decision in June to offer a campaign-trail de-facto amnesty to at least 800,000 illegal aliens, despite a record national unemployment rate.
New York’s unemployment rate is at least 10 percent, and half of African-American adults in the city lack jobs.
Monday, July 23, 2012
The Welfare Train Under Obama Continues.....
8,753,935: Workers on Disability Set Another Record in July; Exceed Population of 39 States
By Terence P. Jeffrey July 23, 2012
(CNSNews.com) - The number of workers taking federal disability insurance payments hit yet another record in July, increasing to 8,753,935 during the month from the previous record of 8,733,461 set in June, according to newly released data from the Social Security Administration.
The 8,753,935 workers who took federal disability insurance payments in July exceeded the population of 39 of the 50 states. Only 11 states—California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina and New Jersey—had more people in them than the number of workers on the federal disability insurance rolls in July.
Virginia, the twelfth most-populous state, had 8,096,604 people in 2011, according to the latest Census Bureau estimate. That would make Virginia’s population about 657,331 less than the number of workers who took federal disability insurance payments in July.
Congress enacted legislation in 1956 to add federal disability insurance to the Social Security system. Over the decades, the number of Americans actually working has dramatically declined relative to the number claiming federal disability insurance payments.
By July 1967, there 74,520,000 Americans actually working and 1,145,663 workers taking disability payments. That made a ratio of 65 actual workers for each worker collecting disability. In July 1987, there were 112,634,000 people actually working and 2,759,852 people collecting disability—a ratio of about 41 actual workers to each worker collecting disability.
When President Barack Obama took office in January 2009, there were 142,187,000 people actually working and 7,442,377 workers collecting disability—a ratio of about 19 to 1.
In June, there were 142,415,000 people actually working and 8,733,461 workers claiming disability—a ratio of about 16 to 1.
In July, in addition to the 8,753,935 workers who received federal disability insurance payments, there were also 165,564 spouses of disabled workers and 1,850,653 children of disabled workers who received payments. That brought the total number of disability beneficiaries to 10,770,152.
Federal disability insurance is funded by a 1.8 percent payroll tax that is split between employers and workers. Self-employed people pay the entire 1.8 percent.
The Social Security System’s Disability Insurance Trust Fund has run deficits in each of the last three fiscal years, meaning the government has needed to borrow money to pay disability benefits to the workers claiming them. In fiscal 2009, the Disability Insurance Trust Fund ran a deficit of $8.5 billion. In fiscal 2010, it ran a deficit of $20.8 billion. And in fiscal 2011, it ran a deficit of $25.3 billion.
To be eligible for federal disability insurance payments, a person must have worked long enough to have qualified for the benefits and must also meet the Social Security Administration’s definition of “disabled.”
“We consider you disabled under Social Security rules if: You cannot do work that you did before; we decide that you cannot adjust to other work because of your medical condition(s); and your disability has lasted or is expected to last for at least one year or to result in death,” says the Social Security Administration.
Whether someone has worked long enough to qualify for federal disability insurance payments depends on their age and the number of “credits” they have earned from the Social Security system.
“Social Security work credits are based on your total yearly wages or self-employment income,” the Social Security Administration explains. “You can earn up to four credits each year. The amount needed for a credit changes from year to year. In 2012, for example, you earn one credit for each $1,130 of wages or self-employment income. When you've earned $4,520, you've earned your four credits for the year.”
According to the Social Security Administration’s formula, someone under 24 years of age would qualify for disability payments if he or she had earned at least 6 credits—or about $6,780—over the three years before they became disabled.
By Terence P. Jeffrey July 23, 2012
(CNSNews.com) - The number of workers taking federal disability insurance payments hit yet another record in July, increasing to 8,753,935 during the month from the previous record of 8,733,461 set in June, according to newly released data from the Social Security Administration.
The 8,753,935 workers who took federal disability insurance payments in July exceeded the population of 39 of the 50 states. Only 11 states—California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina and New Jersey—had more people in them than the number of workers on the federal disability insurance rolls in July.
Virginia, the twelfth most-populous state, had 8,096,604 people in 2011, according to the latest Census Bureau estimate. That would make Virginia’s population about 657,331 less than the number of workers who took federal disability insurance payments in July.
Congress enacted legislation in 1956 to add federal disability insurance to the Social Security system. Over the decades, the number of Americans actually working has dramatically declined relative to the number claiming federal disability insurance payments.
By July 1967, there 74,520,000 Americans actually working and 1,145,663 workers taking disability payments. That made a ratio of 65 actual workers for each worker collecting disability. In July 1987, there were 112,634,000 people actually working and 2,759,852 people collecting disability—a ratio of about 41 actual workers to each worker collecting disability.
When President Barack Obama took office in January 2009, there were 142,187,000 people actually working and 7,442,377 workers collecting disability—a ratio of about 19 to 1.
In June, there were 142,415,000 people actually working and 8,733,461 workers claiming disability—a ratio of about 16 to 1.
In July, in addition to the 8,753,935 workers who received federal disability insurance payments, there were also 165,564 spouses of disabled workers and 1,850,653 children of disabled workers who received payments. That brought the total number of disability beneficiaries to 10,770,152.
Federal disability insurance is funded by a 1.8 percent payroll tax that is split between employers and workers. Self-employed people pay the entire 1.8 percent.
The Social Security System’s Disability Insurance Trust Fund has run deficits in each of the last three fiscal years, meaning the government has needed to borrow money to pay disability benefits to the workers claiming them. In fiscal 2009, the Disability Insurance Trust Fund ran a deficit of $8.5 billion. In fiscal 2010, it ran a deficit of $20.8 billion. And in fiscal 2011, it ran a deficit of $25.3 billion.
To be eligible for federal disability insurance payments, a person must have worked long enough to have qualified for the benefits and must also meet the Social Security Administration’s definition of “disabled.”
“We consider you disabled under Social Security rules if: You cannot do work that you did before; we decide that you cannot adjust to other work because of your medical condition(s); and your disability has lasted or is expected to last for at least one year or to result in death,” says the Social Security Administration.
Whether someone has worked long enough to qualify for federal disability insurance payments depends on their age and the number of “credits” they have earned from the Social Security system.
“Social Security work credits are based on your total yearly wages or self-employment income,” the Social Security Administration explains. “You can earn up to four credits each year. The amount needed for a credit changes from year to year. In 2012, for example, you earn one credit for each $1,130 of wages or self-employment income. When you've earned $4,520, you've earned your four credits for the year.”
According to the Social Security Administration’s formula, someone under 24 years of age would qualify for disability payments if he or she had earned at least 6 credits—or about $6,780—over the three years before they became disabled.
Why ANY Jew would Vote for Obama has me Baffled.....
Why any Jew would vote for Obama has me baffled.....this guy really doesn't give a damn about Israel....he cares more about his Mulsim Brothers than our best ally.
President Obama will visit Israel in second term, says campaign aide
By Justin Sink - 07/23/12 12:11 PM ET
President Obama will travel to Israel if he's elected to a second term, a campaign aide said Monday.
“We can expect him to visit Israel in a second term should he be elected," Colin Kahl, the former deputy assistant secretary of Defense for the Middle East, said on a conference call with reporters.
Obama has been criticized for not visiting the Middle Eastern ally since a trip during the 2008 election. Republican candidate Mitt Romney will visit the country during a trip that will begin later this week, and he plans to meet with Israeli leaders including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Romney has also said, if elected, his first foreign visit would be to Israel.
On Monday, former U.N. ambassador John Bolton blasted the president for not scheduling a trip during his first term.
“Obama has been in office three and a half years, and he has had time to do more fundraisers than any other first-term American president, has probably played more rounds of golf than any other president since Dwight Eisenhower, and yet he has not had time to fit into his busy schedule even one trip to Israel," Bolton told WABC Radio's Aaron Klein.
And Romney has said that his first trip, if elected, would be to Israel.
"If I’m president of the United States, my first trip — my first foreign trip will be to Israel to show the world we care about that country and that region,” Romney said during a GOP debate last year in Washington, D.C.
But Kahl dismissed calls for the president to visit Israel as "basically a distraction."
"Being a friend to Israel, at least in our view, shouldn't be judged purely by a travel itinerary," Kahl added. "The president has been to Israel multiple times, but more than that he's backed up his words with feats."
The Obama aide also pointed out that President George W. Bush didn't visit the country until the final year of his second term and that President Reagan never visited Israel.
"Obviously you didn't hear Republicans complaining then as a result of that travel itinerary," Kahl said. "I don't think this is a really serious policy difference, this is basically a distraction."
Obama's support among Jewish voters has dropped since his election, according to a Gallup poll in June, but he was still besting Romney among that voting bloc.
Saturday, July 21, 2012
This couldn't happen to a more deserving person...Obama deserves a DUD of a campaign launch...
Obama Paid $93k for Half-Empty Stadium Kick-Off Event
12:35 PM, Jul 21, 2012 • By DANIEL HALPER
According to disclosure forms with the Federal Election Commission, President Obama's reelection team appears to have paid $92,751.50 to rent the Ohio State University's Jerome Schottenstein Center, the site of the campaign's much touted kick-off even in May.
The disclosure appears on records of the campaign's June spending, though the event took place May 5. And of course does not include other costs associated with the event; only the cost of renting the arena.
The event was widely considered a dud, and perhaps best remembered for images of the numerous empty seats:
The Drudge Report headline after the campaign launch event read, "OBAMA LAUNCHES CAMPAIGN IN HALF EMPTY STADIUM."
But it was not supposed to be that way. As ABC News reported the day of the event, "The Obama campaign expects overflow crowds ... as part of carefully orchestrated optics. Aides want to portray the president as still highly popular among young people and still able to energize large crowds."
Considering the event's failed attempt to achieve its stated goal, the $92,751.50 price tag for the arena that could hold a maximum 20,000 might not have been worth the cost. Especially now: The AP reports this morning that"President Barack Obama's re-election campaign spent more than it collected in June."
The official Obama campaign stat from its Tumblr account stated, "14,000 people showed up to see Obama (and the First Lady) at his first campaign rally." But the thousands and thousands of empty seats came at a serious cost.
As Breitbart.com wrote at the time:
It's a campaign faux pas to hold an event in a room that isn't full; to promise the media a more-than-capacity crowd then fall this far short of that promise is utter incompetence. In 2008, Obama ran a near-flawless campaign, buoyed by enthusiasm and effective organizing. But it's not 2008 any more, and on day one of the 2012 campaign, Team Obama has already made an embarrassing blunder.
IF State-Run ABC had ANY Integrity they would Promptly FIRE Brian Ross.....
Brian Ross of ABC takes heat for another blunder
By DYLAN BYERS | 7/20/12 8:38 PM EDT
In television journalism, few reporters are as controversial as Brian Ross of ABC News.
The investigative correspondent has landed major scoops and won prestigious awards for his reporting on the Peace Corps, Solyndra, and U.S. antiterrorism efforts — to name just a few. And yet, he has also produced more high-level haphazard reporting than perhaps any other reporter on television.
Ross came under attack again Friday when he reported that James Holmes, the suspect of today’s theater shooting in Aurora, Colo., may have connections to the tea party — basing that on a single web page that listed an Aurora-based “Jim Holmes” as a member of the Colorado Tea Party Patriots.
“There is a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado, page on the Colorado Tea Party site as well, talking about him joining the tea party last year,” Ross reported on Good Morning America. “Now, we don’t know if this is the same Jim Holmes – but this is Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado.”
The report — which no other media touched and ABC News and Ross later would apologize for — drew immediate criticism from right-wing bloggers and ultimately from journalism experts on both sides of the aisle who felt that Ross irresponsibly sought to politicize the tragedy and engender controversy.
Rem Rieder, the editor and senior vice president of the American Journalism Review, called it an “egregious blunder” that delivered “yet another blow to the reeling credibility of the news media.”
“Brian Ross lost big time and so did ABC News,” Jay Rosen, an associate professor at New York University’s school of journalism, told POLITICO. “Ross reacted and went on instinct… So strong was this instinct that it overrode common newsroom sense and any innate sense of caution that might be left in Brian Ross.”
On Fox News, Charles Krauthammer called the false report of a connection to the tea party “not only scandalous but stupid.”
One senior media executive gloated about Ross’s mistake, “This happens all the time. Every single time.”
ABC News declined a request to interview Ross or an ABC News representative. When asked for comment, ABC pointed to Ross’s award-winning reporting and referred POLITICO to the statement it made earlier regarding today’s report.
“An earlier ABC News broadcast report suggested that a Jim Holmes of a Colorado Tea Party organization might be the suspect, but that report was incorrect,” the statement read. “ABC News and Brian Ross apologize for the mistake, and for disseminating that information before it was properly vetted.”
But sources at ABC News, who spoke to POLITICO on the condition of anonymity, said that for all of his landmark scoops, Ross’s latest and much-publicized blunder had further solidified his reputation inside the network as a reporter who is prone toward spectacular errors.
To his critics, those failures are legion.
In 2001, Ross reported that Iraq and Saddam Hussein may have been responsible for anthrax attacks on the United States, citing four anonymous high-level sources who claimed there was bentonite in the anthrax. The White House later stated that “no tests ever found or even suggested the presence of bentonite” and that “the claim was concocted from the start.”
In 2006, Ross reported that Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert was a target in the federal corruption investigation involving then-lobbyist Jack Abramoff. After the Justice Department denied the story, Ross stood by his reporting and stated that Hastert was ‘very much in the mix’ of the probe, despite the fact that Hastert had never been approached by prosecutors.
In 2007, Ross accepted a claim by former CIA agent John Kiriakou that 35 seconds of waterboarding had led suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah to disclose terrorist plots to the CIA. Despite the fact that Kirakou was not present at Zubayadah’s interrogation, the claim was repeated for days by other networks and newspapers and used as evidence for advocates of the waterboarding technique. A year and a half later, a Justice Department memo would show that Zubayadah had undergone waterboarding “at least 83 times.”
In 2010, Ross reported that a defect in Toyota cars was responsible for “unintended acceleration.” As part of his report, he showed video footage of the Toyota’s tachometer going from 1,000 RPMs to 6,000 RPMs in a single second. But the same footage revealed that the car was actually parked with the doors open when Ross claimed it was moving. ABC News confirmed that the stage footage had been spliced into Ross’s video.
For six years, Ross also oversaw ABC News consultant Alexis Debat, the self-proclaimed counterterrorism expert who was forced to resign after it was revealed that he had misrepresented himself on his resume and faked an interview with then-Senator Barack Obama.
Glenn Greenwald, the lawyer and Salon columnist who has been one of Ross’s fiercest critics over the years, argues that the ABC reporter is driven by a penchant for sensationalism.
“Brian Ross is responsible for several of the establishment media’s most shameful and reckless journalistic falsehoods of the last decade,” Greenwald told POLITICO. “His reporting philosophy seems to be to go on TV and say whatever he thinks will garner attention and create ‘scoops,’ without the slightest concern for whether it’s actually true.”
When asked what may have motivated Ross to report a connection between the alleged shooting suspect and the tea party, based off nothing more than a matching name and location, sources at ABC News attributed it to Ross’s desire to create news, and dismissed any suspicion of partisanship.
“I would emphatically say its not a left-right thing. I’ve never discerned in his reporting any ideological movement,” one ABC News source told POLITICO. “It’s the big sensational story that he’s after, and he’ll do the same on either side.”
To be sure, many of Ross’s stories have earned him numerous awards and even led to changes in federal legislation.
One report on the Peace Corps won Ross and the ABC investigative unit a Peabody award, a George Polk award, a Deadline Club award, a Society of Professional Journalists award, an Investigative Reporters and Editors award, and a Gracie award — and led President Obama to sign a new federal law protecting Peace Corps assault victims.
Ross and his team also won won a Society of Professional Journalists award for a joint report with the Center for Public Integrity on Solyndra. In April, Ross broke the news that U.S. officials were on the watch for terrorists with body bombs looking to target U.S.-bound planes.
Under David Westin, who served as president of ABC News from 1997 to 2010, the network seems to have tolerated Ross’s errors in exchange for his scoops and exclusives. Sources say they are uncertain how Ben Sherwood, who took over from Westin in 2010, will respond to Ross’s report on the tea party connection.
Obama - Willing to say anything, do anything (legal or illegal), lie about anything just to try to tell us what he thinks we want to hear to get him relected.....No Character!
I think this tells us something about Obama....he's not selling what he believes in ...he's trying to sell what he thinks we want to hear....and we already know he'll lie and do things against the Constitution to do just that....He's one of those candidates that puts his finger in the air to see what way the wind is blowing and THEN forms his rhetoric.....and we all know from last time what he actually would do once elected has NOTHING to do with what he might say now....
Obama is Just BAD NEWS and he has to be defeated in November.
Obama Campaign Spends More than $2.6 Million for Polling—in June
10:22 AM, Jul 21, 2012 • By DANIEL HALPER
Campaign disclosure forms for Obama for America, President Obama's reelection team, reveal a heavy emphasis on public opinion polling. According to the forms, in the month of June alone, Obama for America spent a whopping $2,639,265.72 on polling.
This appears to be a record this election cycle. And it does not include money spent on polling by the Democratic party in the month of June.
In May, for instance, both the Democratic National Committee and Obama for America combined to spend $2,105,107.93 on polling, according to disclosure forms with with the Federal Election Commission. And most of that money came from the Democratic party ($1,627,107.93), while the Obama campaign chipped in $478,000 for polling research.
In April, for the sake of comparison, the Democratic party and the Obama election team combined to spend $456,083.01 on polling. Of that, only $18,000 came from Obama's campaign proper, while $438,083.01 was spent on polling in that month by the Democratic National Committee.
Polling is often conducted by campaigns to make sure the candidate's message is in sync with what the voters want to hear.
Meanwhile, looking at the June numbers, the AP reports, "President Barack Obama's re-election campaign spent more than it collected in June."
Obama is Just BAD NEWS and he has to be defeated in November.
Obama Campaign Spends More than $2.6 Million for Polling—in June
10:22 AM, Jul 21, 2012 • By DANIEL HALPER
Campaign disclosure forms for Obama for America, President Obama's reelection team, reveal a heavy emphasis on public opinion polling. According to the forms, in the month of June alone, Obama for America spent a whopping $2,639,265.72 on polling.
This appears to be a record this election cycle. And it does not include money spent on polling by the Democratic party in the month of June.
In May, for instance, both the Democratic National Committee and Obama for America combined to spend $2,105,107.93 on polling, according to disclosure forms with with the Federal Election Commission. And most of that money came from the Democratic party ($1,627,107.93), while the Obama campaign chipped in $478,000 for polling research.
In April, for the sake of comparison, the Democratic party and the Obama election team combined to spend $456,083.01 on polling. Of that, only $18,000 came from Obama's campaign proper, while $438,083.01 was spent on polling in that month by the Democratic National Committee.
Polling is often conducted by campaigns to make sure the candidate's message is in sync with what the voters want to hear.
Meanwhile, looking at the June numbers, the AP reports, "President Barack Obama's re-election campaign spent more than it collected in June."
Romney even manages Campaign Money better than Obama....
Obama effort spends more in June than it takes in
Published July 21, 2012 Associated Press
Amid a heavy barrage of advertising by opposing "super" political groups, President Barack Obama's re-election campaign spent more than it collected in June. While outraised again by Republican Mitt Romney, Obama ended the month with a hefty $97.5 million in the bank.
June was the second consecutive month in which Romney brought in more money than Obama, finance reports filed Friday show. Romney's money advantage prompted Obama's campaign advisers to warn earlier this month that the president could lose the election if the financial disparity continued.
Obama tried to answer the super PACs supporting Romney by spending $38.2 million on television advertising. Romney spent less than a third of that -- $10.4 million -- on TV time.
Romney's campaign nearly doubled its spending in June compared with the previous month, underscoring the close proximity of the November general election in which Republicans hope to unseat Obama and, in part, dismantle the president's signature health care overhaul.
Much of Romney's financial advantage -- he raised $106 million last month with the help of the Republican Party -- came from larger donations in a handful of battleground states. Those included Florida, where the Romney Victory Fund pulled in about $4.4 million in individual contributions, records show.
Competing fiercely to keep the presidency, Obama reported more than $46 million in June and total spending of $58 million. The Democratic Party reported $37.5 million in the bank.
Romney, during the same period, reported receipts of $33 million and spending of $27.5 million for June. The challenger's cash on hand was almost a mirror image of Obama's and the DNC's, as Romney reported $22.5 million in the bank and the Republican National Committee said it had $89.4 million.
Romney retains a vast advantage overall when super PACs working in the former Massachusetts governor's favor are factored in. Groups like American Crossroads and Restore Our Future have already spent tens of millions of dollars on pricey television ads to either attack Obama or specifically promote Romney's candidacy.
Wealthy, repeat donors are helping independent Republican groups maintain their financial strength. They include casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, who donated a combined $10 million last month; and Texas homebuilder Bob Perry, one of the largest GOP super PAC donors, who gave another $2 million on June 1.
For Obama's part, a handful of super PACs helping his re-election pulled in a combined $25 million in June. Those contributions included a $1 million contribution to Priorities USA Action from actor Morgan Freeman, who joined a list of Hollywood figures like Steven Spielberg trying to help Obama secure a second term.
Beyond the dollar amounts, the president's campaign released an updated list of big-dollar fundraisers, known as "bundlers," who have collected at least $50,000 toward his re-election. Obama named 638 bundlers, adding 106 more to his total earlier this year. Romney does not list his bundlers, even though he has received repeated calls during the campaign to identify them.
Both candidates enjoyed a wide swath of contributions from all 50 states and the District of Columbia, although Romney's financial reports listed higher dollar amounts in key battleground states like Florida, Michigan and New Hampshire. Meanwhile, Obama tends to receive more contributions dollar-wise from donors who give less than $200; such small amounts do not have to be reported to the Federal Election Commission.
Published July 21, 2012 Associated Press
Amid a heavy barrage of advertising by opposing "super" political groups, President Barack Obama's re-election campaign spent more than it collected in June. While outraised again by Republican Mitt Romney, Obama ended the month with a hefty $97.5 million in the bank.
June was the second consecutive month in which Romney brought in more money than Obama, finance reports filed Friday show. Romney's money advantage prompted Obama's campaign advisers to warn earlier this month that the president could lose the election if the financial disparity continued.
Obama tried to answer the super PACs supporting Romney by spending $38.2 million on television advertising. Romney spent less than a third of that -- $10.4 million -- on TV time.
Romney's campaign nearly doubled its spending in June compared with the previous month, underscoring the close proximity of the November general election in which Republicans hope to unseat Obama and, in part, dismantle the president's signature health care overhaul.
Much of Romney's financial advantage -- he raised $106 million last month with the help of the Republican Party -- came from larger donations in a handful of battleground states. Those included Florida, where the Romney Victory Fund pulled in about $4.4 million in individual contributions, records show.
Competing fiercely to keep the presidency, Obama reported more than $46 million in June and total spending of $58 million. The Democratic Party reported $37.5 million in the bank.
Romney, during the same period, reported receipts of $33 million and spending of $27.5 million for June. The challenger's cash on hand was almost a mirror image of Obama's and the DNC's, as Romney reported $22.5 million in the bank and the Republican National Committee said it had $89.4 million.
Romney retains a vast advantage overall when super PACs working in the former Massachusetts governor's favor are factored in. Groups like American Crossroads and Restore Our Future have already spent tens of millions of dollars on pricey television ads to either attack Obama or specifically promote Romney's candidacy.
Wealthy, repeat donors are helping independent Republican groups maintain their financial strength. They include casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, who donated a combined $10 million last month; and Texas homebuilder Bob Perry, one of the largest GOP super PAC donors, who gave another $2 million on June 1.
For Obama's part, a handful of super PACs helping his re-election pulled in a combined $25 million in June. Those contributions included a $1 million contribution to Priorities USA Action from actor Morgan Freeman, who joined a list of Hollywood figures like Steven Spielberg trying to help Obama secure a second term.
Beyond the dollar amounts, the president's campaign released an updated list of big-dollar fundraisers, known as "bundlers," who have collected at least $50,000 toward his re-election. Obama named 638 bundlers, adding 106 more to his total earlier this year. Romney does not list his bundlers, even though he has received repeated calls during the campaign to identify them.
Both candidates enjoyed a wide swath of contributions from all 50 states and the District of Columbia, although Romney's financial reports listed higher dollar amounts in key battleground states like Florida, Michigan and New Hampshire. Meanwhile, Obama tends to receive more contributions dollar-wise from donors who give less than $200; such small amounts do not have to be reported to the Federal Election Commission.
Classical Mark Steyn.....Obama has virtually nothing to show for our wasted money....
July 21, 2012 4:00 A.M. By Mark Steyn
Golden Gateway to Dependency
Obama has put nothing but roadblocks in the path to opportunity and growth.
On the evidence of last week’s Republican campaign events, President Obama’s instant classic — “You didn’t build that” — is to Mitt Romney what that radioactive arachnid is to Spider-Man: It got under his skin, and, in an instant, the geeky stiff was transformed into a muscular Captain Capitalism swinging through the streets and deftly squirting his webbing all over Community-Organizerman. Rattled by the reborn Romney, the Obama campaign launched an attack on Romney’s attack on Obama’s attack on American business. First they showed Romney quoting Obama: “He said, ‘If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.’” And then the Obama team moved in for the kill: “The only problem? That’s not what he said.”
Indeed. What Obama actually said was:
“If you’ve got a business, you, you didn’t build that. [Interjection by fawning supporters: “Yeeaaaaah!”] “Somebody else made that happen.”
Since the president is widely agreed to be “the smartest guy ever to become president” (Michael Beschloss, presidential historian), the problem can’t be “what he said” but that you dummies aren’t smart enough to get the point he was trying to make. According to Slate’s David Weigel, the “you didn’t build that” bit referred back to something he’d said earlier in the speech — “somebody invested in roads and bridges.” You didn’t build those, did you? Or maybe he was referring back to “this unbelievable American system we have that allowed you to thrive.” You didn’t build the system, did you? Or maybe he was referring to the teleprompter. You didn’t build that, did you? Well, unless you’re Rajiv or Suresh from the teleprompter factory in Bangalore, you didn’t. Maybe he was referring back to something he said in a totally different speech — the Berlin Wall one, perhaps. You didn’t build that, did you? Who are we to say which of these highly nuanced interpretations of the presidential text is correct?
If this is the best all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can do to put Humpty Dumpty’s silver-tongued oratory together again, they might as well cut to the chase and argue that accurately quoting President Obama is racist. The obvious interpretation sticks because it fits with the reality of the last three and a half years — that America’s chief executive is a man entirely ignorant of business who presides over an administration profoundly hostile to it.
But, just for the record, I did “invest in roads and bridges,” and so did you. In fact, every dime in those roads and bridges comes from taxpayers, because government doesn’t have any money except for what it takes from the citizenry. And the more successful you are, the more you pay for those roads and bridges.
So here’s a breaking-news alert for President Nuance: We small-government guys are in favor of roads. Hard as it may be to credit, roads predated Big Government. Which came first, the chicken crossing the road or the Egg Regulatory Agency? That’s an easy one: Halfway through the first millennium b.c., the nomadic Yuezhi of Central Asia had well-traveled trading routes for getting nephrite jade from the Tarim Basin to their customers at the Chinese court over 2,500 miles away. On the other hand, the Yuezhi did not have a federal contraceptive mandate or a Bloombergian enforcement regime for carbonated beverages at concession stands at the rest area two days out of Khotan, so that probably explains why they’re not in the G-7 today.
In Obama’s world, businessmen build nothing, whereas government are the hardest hard-hats on the planet. So, in his “you didn’t build that” speech, he invoked, yet again, the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge. “When we invested in the Hoover Dam or the Golden Gate Bridge, or the Internet, sending a man to the moon — all those things benefited everybody. And so that’s the vision that I want to carry forward.”
He certainly carries it forward from one dam speech to another. He was doing his Hoover Dam shtick only last month, and I pointed out that there seemed to be a certain inconsistency between his enthusiasm for federal dam-building and the definitive administration pronouncement on the subject, by Deanna Archuleta, his deputy assistant secretary of the Interior, in a speech to Democrat environmentalists in Nevada:
“You will never see another federal dam.”
Ever. So the president can carry forward his “vision,” but it apparently has no more real-world application than the visions he enjoyed as a member of his high-school “choom gang” back in Hawaii. Incidentally, I was interested to learn from David Maraniss’s enlightening new biography that, during car-chooming sessions, young Barry insisted all the windows be rolled up so that no marijuana smoke would escape. If you can seriously envision President Obama opening a 21st-century Hoover Dam, you need to lower the windows on your Chevy Volt.
The Golden Gate Bridge? As Reason’s Matt Welch pointed out, the Golden Gate cost at the time $35 million — or about $530 million today. So, for the cost of Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill alone, we could have had 1,567 Golden Gate Bridges. Where are they? Where are, say, the first dozen? If you laid 1,567 Golden Gate Bridges end to end, you’d have enough for one Golden Choom Bridge stretching from Obama’s Punahou High School in Honolulu over the Pacific all the way to his Occidental College in Los Angeles, so that his car-chooming chums can commute from one to the other without having to worry about TSA patdowns.
A stimulus bill equivalent to 1,567 Golden Gate bridges. A 2011 federal budget equivalent to 6,788 Golden Gate bridges. And yet we don’t have a single one.
Because that’s not what Big Government does: Money-no-object government spends more and more money for less and less objects. For all the American economy has to show for it, President Bob the Builder took just shy of a trillion dollars in stimulus, stuck it in his wheelbarrow, pushed it halfway across the Golden Gate bridge, and tossed it into the Pacific.
Instead of roads and bridges, Obama-sized government funds stasis and sclerosis: The Hoover Dam of regulatory obstruction, the Golden Gateway to dependency. Last month, 80,000 Americans signed on to new jobs, but 85,000 Americans signed on for Social Security disability checks. Most of these people are not “disabled” as that term is generally understood. Rather, it’s the U.S. economy that’s disabled, and thus Obama incentivizes dependency. What Big Government is doing to those 85,000 “disabled” is profoundly wicked. Let me quote a guy called Mark Steyn, from his last book:
The evil of such a system is not the waste of money but the waste of people. Tony Blair’s ministry discovered it was politically helpful to reclassify a chunk of the unemployed as “disabled”. A fit, able-bodied 40-year old who has been on disability allowance for a decade understands somewhere at the back of his mind that he is living a lie, and that not just the government but his family and his friends are colluding in that lie.
Millions of Americans have looked at the road ahead, and figured it goes nowhere. Best to pull off into the Social Security parking lot. Don’t worry, it’s not your fault. As the president would say, you didn’t build the express check-in to the Disability Office. Government built it, and, because they built it, you came. In Obama’s “visions,” he builds roads and bridges. In reality, the president of Dependistan has put nothing but roadblocks in the path to opportunity and growth.
That he can build. That’s all he can build.
— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012 Mark Steyn
Golden Gateway to Dependency
Obama has put nothing but roadblocks in the path to opportunity and growth.
On the evidence of last week’s Republican campaign events, President Obama’s instant classic — “You didn’t build that” — is to Mitt Romney what that radioactive arachnid is to Spider-Man: It got under his skin, and, in an instant, the geeky stiff was transformed into a muscular Captain Capitalism swinging through the streets and deftly squirting his webbing all over Community-Organizerman. Rattled by the reborn Romney, the Obama campaign launched an attack on Romney’s attack on Obama’s attack on American business. First they showed Romney quoting Obama: “He said, ‘If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.’” And then the Obama team moved in for the kill: “The only problem? That’s not what he said.”
Indeed. What Obama actually said was:
“If you’ve got a business, you, you didn’t build that. [Interjection by fawning supporters: “Yeeaaaaah!”] “Somebody else made that happen.”
Since the president is widely agreed to be “the smartest guy ever to become president” (Michael Beschloss, presidential historian), the problem can’t be “what he said” but that you dummies aren’t smart enough to get the point he was trying to make. According to Slate’s David Weigel, the “you didn’t build that” bit referred back to something he’d said earlier in the speech — “somebody invested in roads and bridges.” You didn’t build those, did you? Or maybe he was referring back to “this unbelievable American system we have that allowed you to thrive.” You didn’t build the system, did you? Or maybe he was referring to the teleprompter. You didn’t build that, did you? Well, unless you’re Rajiv or Suresh from the teleprompter factory in Bangalore, you didn’t. Maybe he was referring back to something he said in a totally different speech — the Berlin Wall one, perhaps. You didn’t build that, did you? Who are we to say which of these highly nuanced interpretations of the presidential text is correct?
If this is the best all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can do to put Humpty Dumpty’s silver-tongued oratory together again, they might as well cut to the chase and argue that accurately quoting President Obama is racist. The obvious interpretation sticks because it fits with the reality of the last three and a half years — that America’s chief executive is a man entirely ignorant of business who presides over an administration profoundly hostile to it.
But, just for the record, I did “invest in roads and bridges,” and so did you. In fact, every dime in those roads and bridges comes from taxpayers, because government doesn’t have any money except for what it takes from the citizenry. And the more successful you are, the more you pay for those roads and bridges.
So here’s a breaking-news alert for President Nuance: We small-government guys are in favor of roads. Hard as it may be to credit, roads predated Big Government. Which came first, the chicken crossing the road or the Egg Regulatory Agency? That’s an easy one: Halfway through the first millennium b.c., the nomadic Yuezhi of Central Asia had well-traveled trading routes for getting nephrite jade from the Tarim Basin to their customers at the Chinese court over 2,500 miles away. On the other hand, the Yuezhi did not have a federal contraceptive mandate or a Bloombergian enforcement regime for carbonated beverages at concession stands at the rest area two days out of Khotan, so that probably explains why they’re not in the G-7 today.
In Obama’s world, businessmen build nothing, whereas government are the hardest hard-hats on the planet. So, in his “you didn’t build that” speech, he invoked, yet again, the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge. “When we invested in the Hoover Dam or the Golden Gate Bridge, or the Internet, sending a man to the moon — all those things benefited everybody. And so that’s the vision that I want to carry forward.”
He certainly carries it forward from one dam speech to another. He was doing his Hoover Dam shtick only last month, and I pointed out that there seemed to be a certain inconsistency between his enthusiasm for federal dam-building and the definitive administration pronouncement on the subject, by Deanna Archuleta, his deputy assistant secretary of the Interior, in a speech to Democrat environmentalists in Nevada:
“You will never see another federal dam.”
Ever. So the president can carry forward his “vision,” but it apparently has no more real-world application than the visions he enjoyed as a member of his high-school “choom gang” back in Hawaii. Incidentally, I was interested to learn from David Maraniss’s enlightening new biography that, during car-chooming sessions, young Barry insisted all the windows be rolled up so that no marijuana smoke would escape. If you can seriously envision President Obama opening a 21st-century Hoover Dam, you need to lower the windows on your Chevy Volt.
The Golden Gate Bridge? As Reason’s Matt Welch pointed out, the Golden Gate cost at the time $35 million — or about $530 million today. So, for the cost of Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill alone, we could have had 1,567 Golden Gate Bridges. Where are they? Where are, say, the first dozen? If you laid 1,567 Golden Gate Bridges end to end, you’d have enough for one Golden Choom Bridge stretching from Obama’s Punahou High School in Honolulu over the Pacific all the way to his Occidental College in Los Angeles, so that his car-chooming chums can commute from one to the other without having to worry about TSA patdowns.
A stimulus bill equivalent to 1,567 Golden Gate bridges. A 2011 federal budget equivalent to 6,788 Golden Gate bridges. And yet we don’t have a single one.
Because that’s not what Big Government does: Money-no-object government spends more and more money for less and less objects. For all the American economy has to show for it, President Bob the Builder took just shy of a trillion dollars in stimulus, stuck it in his wheelbarrow, pushed it halfway across the Golden Gate bridge, and tossed it into the Pacific.
Instead of roads and bridges, Obama-sized government funds stasis and sclerosis: The Hoover Dam of regulatory obstruction, the Golden Gateway to dependency. Last month, 80,000 Americans signed on to new jobs, but 85,000 Americans signed on for Social Security disability checks. Most of these people are not “disabled” as that term is generally understood. Rather, it’s the U.S. economy that’s disabled, and thus Obama incentivizes dependency. What Big Government is doing to those 85,000 “disabled” is profoundly wicked. Let me quote a guy called Mark Steyn, from his last book:
The evil of such a system is not the waste of money but the waste of people. Tony Blair’s ministry discovered it was politically helpful to reclassify a chunk of the unemployed as “disabled”. A fit, able-bodied 40-year old who has been on disability allowance for a decade understands somewhere at the back of his mind that he is living a lie, and that not just the government but his family and his friends are colluding in that lie.
Millions of Americans have looked at the road ahead, and figured it goes nowhere. Best to pull off into the Social Security parking lot. Don’t worry, it’s not your fault. As the president would say, you didn’t build the express check-in to the Disability Office. Government built it, and, because they built it, you came. In Obama’s “visions,” he builds roads and bridges. In reality, the president of Dependistan has put nothing but roadblocks in the path to opportunity and growth.
That he can build. That’s all he can build.
— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012 Mark Steyn
Huma Abedin IS connected to the Muslim Brotherhood....
AFTER READING THIS ARTICLE IT SEEM TOTALLY RATIONAL AND NECESSARY TO LOOK INTO HUMA ABEDIN..... ....ARTICLE ALSO SHOWS JUST JOHN MCCAIN CAN BE INFLUENCED BY PERSONAL CONNECTIONS....
July 21, 2012 4:00 A.M. By Andrew C. McCarthy
Questions about Huma Abedin
A State Department adviser has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Der Spiegel pointed out the obvious: “A certain role of the Muslim Brotherhood in the transition process [to ‘democracy’] in Egypt seems acceptable to the Obama White House.” It was early February 2011, the moment when the uprising that would oust Hosni Mubarak was bubbling over in Tahrir Square. The prominent German newsmagazine figured, who better to ask about the Muslim Brotherhood than the American political establishment’s resident foreign-policy genius, John McCain?
So, the reporter asked him, does Obama’s tolerance of the Muslim Brotherhood “concern you”?
Senator Maverick shot back without hesitation: “It concerns me so much that I am unalterably opposed to it. I think it would be a mistake of historic proportions.”
Senator McCain elaborated that he was “deeply, deeply concerned that this whole movement [toward democracy] could be hijacked by radical Islamic extremists.” And what, he was specifically asked, “is your assessment of the Muslim Brotherhood”? McCain pulled no punches:
I think they are a radical group that, first of all, supports sharia law; that in itself is anti-democratic — at least as far as women are concerned. They have been involved with other terrorist organizations and I believe that they should be specifically excluded from any tra nsition government.
In fact, so apprehensive was he over the Brotherhood and its sharia agenda that McCain was quick to brand Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel laureate, as a Brotherhood tool. Many of us watching developments at the time noted the apparent collusion between ElBaradei and the Brothers. McCain went farther: “Oh yeah, I think it’s very clear that the scenario is very likely he could be their front man.”
Senator Straight Talk reasoned that since ElBaradei appeared to be on the same page as the Brotherhood, and was being hailed as a potential Mubarak successor despite having “no following nor political influence in Egypt,” we should assume that he must be in cahoots with the Brotherhood. It did not matter that ElBaradei was a renowned international figure and an important leftist ally of President Obama’s. So pernicious was the threat posed by the Brotherhood that, in McCain’s considered opinion, you just had to assume the worst.
The Spiegel interview was classic McCain; the senator is never at a loss for bloviation. His professed anxiety, only a year ago, over the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as his blithe willingness to assume that ElBaradei must be an Islamist coconspirator, are worth remembering today. For the sage has suddenly decided that the Brothers — unapologetic Islamic supremacists who say outright that they are on a “grand jihad” to destroy America and the West — are a pretty swell lot, after all. Instead, McCain reserves his signature “shoot first, think later” ire for the target he has always preferred: conservatives.
The Arizonan took to the Senate floor this week to lambaste five conservative members of the House who, unlike McCain, are actually serious about addressing threats the Brotherhood poses to American interests. McCain’s bipartisan “Islamic democracy” promoters seem content to keep burning through taxpayer trillions until the Brotherhood is finally running every government in the Middle East. To the contrary, the House conservatives — Michele Bachmann (Minn.), Louie Gohmert (Texas), Trent Franks (Ariz.), Tom Rooney (Fla.), and Lynn Westmorland (Ga.) — have concluded that the Brotherhood needs to be regarded as the serious anti-American business that it is.
Toward that end, the quintet is justifiably concerned that the Brotherhood’s sharia agenda — the one to which McCain used to be “unalterably opposed” — is being abetted not just by some Nobel-toting Egyptian progressive, but by officials in highly sensitive positions inside the United States government
One official about whom they raise questions is Huma Abedin, deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Ms. Abedin has been an aide since she interned at the White House in 1996 and was assigned to the then–first lady’s staff. The family tie for which she is best known is her husband, Anthony Weiner, the New York Democrat who resigned from Congress in disgrace last year. But it is Ms. Abedin’s parents and brother who have drawn the attention of the five House GOP members. They all have connections to the Muslim Brotherhood — the organization itself or prominent members thereof.
For pointing this out and merely asking the State Department’s inspector general to look into it and report back to Congress — which is part of the IG’s duties under the statute that created his position — McCain & Co. (i.e., his fans in the left-wing media and his admirers in the Republican establishment) are screaming “smear” and “McCarthyism.” McCain’s antipathy toward conservatives (except during election years) is an old story. And it is no secret that he has long been smitten by Mrs. Clinton, whose transnational-progressive leanings mirror his own.
The Maverick is also a man about town — towns like Tripoli. Back in 2009, you may recall, he was an honored guest in the compound of Libya’s dictator, Moammar Qaddafi — celebrating the former master terrorist as an important American ally against jihadist terror, helping to grease the wheels so the Obama administration could increase American aid that would bolster Qaddafi’s military. Yet in the blink of an eye, it seemed, McCain would later be railing that Qaddafi was a died-in-the-wool terrorist monster whose military had to be smashed by the United States — in an undeclared, unauthorized, unprovoked war, if necessary — so Libyans could be “free” to elect the Muslim Brotherhood and other assorted Islamic supremacists to their new Parliament.
But the point is that McCain gets around. And when he does, the State Department is often his escort. Between his globetrotting and his case of Hillary hauteur, the senator has gotten friendly over the years with Ms. Abedin, who is said to be smart, able, and quite charming. Ever the Maverick — chivalrous to a fault . . . at least when the damsel in distress is an exotic, progressive sharia-democracy devotee rather than a conservative national-security worrywart from Minnesota. McCain has leapt to Ms. Abedin’s defense against these vicious House troglodytes.
The senator’s tirade featured his trademark indignation, incoherence, and infatuation with immigrant success stories. (Ms. Abedin was born in Michigan, but no reason to let that get in the way of “what is best about America.”) McCain blasted Representative Bachmann and the others, falsely accusing them of doing to his friend Huma what he had actually done to ElBaradei, namely, implicating her as “part of a nefarious conspiracy.”
To the contrary, the House members have drawn no such conclusions. Instead, they have pointed out the State Department’s dramatic, Brotherhood-friendly policy shifts during Ms. Abedin’s tenure as a top adviser to the State Department’s boss. They have asked — completely consistent with national-security guidelines, to which I’ll come shortly — that an investigation into those policy shifts be undertaken.
That investigation would include an inquiry into whether Ms. Abedin’s family ties render her unsuitable for a position that involves access to classified information about the Brotherhood. The shrieks aside, this is not remotely unreasonable, nor is it an inquisition into Ms. Abedin’s decency and rectitude. When I was a prosecutor, the Justice Department would not have let me take a case that involved friends of my family. It’s not that they didn’t trust me; it’s that government is supposed to avoid the appearance of impropriety — legitimacy hinges on the public’s belief that actions are taken on merit, not burdened by palpable conflicts of interest.
Regarding Ms. Abedin’s family ties, McCain rebukes his House colleagues for alleging “that three members of Huma’s family are ‘connected to Muslim Brotherhood operatives and/or organizations.’” “These sinister accusations,” he insisted, “rest solely on a few unspecified and unsubstantiated associations of members of Huma’s family.”
Now, I’m perfectly willing to believe that McCain may not know what the words “unspecified” and “unsubstantiated” mean. That, however, would not excuse his use of them in this context. The ties of Ms. Abedine’s father, mother, and brother to the Muslim Brotherhood are both specific and substantiated.
Ms. Abedin’s father, the late Syed Z. Abedin, was an Indian-born Islamic academic who founded the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs in Saudi Arabia. That institute was backed by the Muslim World League. As the Hudson Institute’s Zeyno Baran relates, the MWL was started by the Saudi government in 1962 “with Brotherhood members in key leadership positions.” It has served as the principal vehicle for the propagation of Islamic supremacism by the Saudis and the Brotherhood. That ideology fuels the “Islamic extremism” that, only a year ago, had McCain so worried that he thought allowing the Brotherhood into the Egyptian-government mix “would be a mistake of historic proportions.”
McCain’s frivolous retort is that Professor Abedin died 20 years ago. That would be a great point if someone were accusing Ms. Abedin of being in her father’s institute or the MWL. It is irrelevant when the question is whether it is reasonable to infer Islamist sympathies from her parents’ allegiances — not to make conclusive judgments about her, mind you, but to draw an inference that would merit deeper inquiry. That is standard fare in government background checks. Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s emir, has been out of the Brotherhood for more than 30 years. Does that mean the Brotherhood is now irrelevant to his ideological outlook, or to the sympathies of his close associates?
As it happens, the same MWL that supported Abedin père’s institute also helped the Brotherhood establish the Muslim Students Association. The MSA is the foundation of the Brotherhood’s American infrastructure, the gateway through which young Muslims join the Brotherhood after being steeped in the supremacist writings of Brotherhood theorists Hassan al-Banna (who founded the Brotherhood in the 1920s) and Sayyid Qutb (the animating influence of such jihadist eminences as Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden, and the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel Rahman).
Speaking of which, it was through the MSA that Egypt’s new president, Mohammed Morsi, joined the Muslim Brotherhood. He was studying engineering in California at the time, the early Eighties. By her own account, Morsi’s wife, Nagla Ali Mahmoud, also joined. She became a leading member of a cognate outfit known as “the Muslim Sisterhood.” And it is here that we get to Huma Abedin’s mother, the Pakistani-born academic Dr. Saleha Abedin.
Dr. Abedin, too, has been a member of the Muslim Sisterhood, “which is essentially nothing more than the female version of the Brotherhood,” according to Walid Shoebat, a former Brotherhood member who has renounced the organization. The Brotherhood is not only the font of Sunni supremacist ideology, it spearheads the international support network for Hamas, the terrorist organization that openly proclaims itself as the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch.
According to one report, Dr. Abedin has on occasion represented herself as a delegate of the MWL. Moreover, as William Jacobson documents at Legal Insurrection, Dr. Abedin has led the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child (IICWC), an Islamist organization that hews to the positions of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Brotherhood’s leading sharia jurist. Like Brotherhood entities, the IICWC defends such practices as female genital mutilation and child marriage, which find support in Islamic law and scripture.
Sheikh Qaradawi, of course, is the Brotherhood eminence who promises that Islam “will conquer Europe, we will conquer America.” He is a vigorous supporter of Hamas, and his fatwas lionize suicide terrorism — including the killing of Americans in Iraq. It is Qaradawi who brings us to Huma Abedin’s brother, Dr. Hassan Abedin. He has been a fellow at the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies in Great Britain. Contemporaneously, Sheikh Qaradawi was a member of the Oxford Center’s board of trustees. So was Omar Naseef, onetime secretary-general of the MWL as well as the founder of the Rabita Trust — an Islamic “charity” notorious for funding jihadists and for having an al-Qaeda founder (Wael Hamza Julaidan) as one of its chief executives.
These connections are not contrived or weightless — like when the Left wanted to keep Samuel Alito off the Supreme Court because, 40 years ago, he was a member of “Concerned Alumni of Princeton.” Of course, knowing members of an organization whose goals include conquest of the West and destruction of Israel is not a crime. Nor is it a crime to have close relatives who are either members of, or associated with members of, such an organization. Again, however, no one is accusing Huma Abedin of a crime.
The five House conservatives, instead, are asking questions that adults responsible for national security should feel obliged to ask: In light of Ms. Abedin’s family history, is she someone who ought to have a security clearance, particularly one that would give her access to top-secret information about the Brotherhood? Is she, furthermore, someone who may be sympathetic to aspects of the Brotherhood’s agenda, such that Americans ought to be concerned that she is helping shape American foreign policy?
Now, Senator McCain is no stranger to smear. No need to confirm that with Mr. ElBaradei; we’ve watched for years as he has slandered, for example, critics of his advocacy for illegal aliens as “nativists” seeking to reprise Jim Crow laws. Nevertheless, since McCain purports to be a tireless guardian of our security, one would think he’d appreciate the distinction between a smear, on the one hand, and a routine application of security-clearance standards, on the other.
The State Department is particularly wary when it comes to the category of “foreign influence” — yes, it is a significant enough concern to warrant its own extensive category in background investigations. No criminal behavior need be shown to deny a security clearance; access to classified information is not a right, and reasonable fear of “divided loyalties” is more than sufficient for a clearance to be denied.
The guidelines probe ties to foreign countries and organizations because hostile elements could “target United States citizens to obtain protected information” or could be “associated with a risk of terrorism” — note: The Brotherhood checks both these boxes. Thus, when someone is proposed for a sensitive position, it is necessary to consider “conditions that could raise a security concern and may be disqualifying.” These, the State Department tells us, include “contact with a foreign family member, business or professional associate, friend or other person who is a citizen or resident in a foreign country if that contact creates a heightened risk of foreign exploitation, inducement, pressure, or coercion.”
Furthermore, in light of the Brotherhood’s well-known abhorrence of the United States, it is also pertinent that State’s guidelines raise alarms if a person seeking access to classified information has an “association or sympathy” with people who seek to overthrow our government, or even with people who just seek to prevent Americans from exercising their constitutional rights. The Brotherhood does not just aim to upend our system; it would restrict our rights, such as free expression, to the extent they contradict sharia.
In his diatribe, McCain speciously asserted that the GOP conservatives had failed to cite “an action, a decision, or a public position that Huma has taken while at the State Department” that showed she was either “promoting anti-American activities within our government” or having a “direct impact” on harmful policies. Of course, to assess a person’s fitness for a sensitive position, background investigators are not restricted to asking whether someone has committed some transgression. Their main job is to find out whether there are circumstances and competing allegiances that could tempt someone to take positions or actions that could harm the United States. That is why, for example, we have hearings before we confirm federal judges — we don’t just hand them a gavel and hope for the best.
In addition, as McCain knows, Ms. Abedin is an adviser, not a policymaker. She gives advice to the secretary of state. Unless you were in the room with the two of them, you’d never be able to demonstrate what “direct impact” the adviser was having. Again, that’s why people are supposed to be vetted before they get these sensitive positions and before they get access to the nation’s secrets.
Since Mrs. Clinton has been secretary of state, with Ms. Abedin as one of her top advisers, the State Department has strongly supported abandoning the federal government’s prior policy against dealing with the Muslim Brotherhood. State, furthermore, has embraced a number of Muslim Brotherhood positions that undermine both American constitutional rights and our alliance with Israel. To name just a few manifestations of this policy sea change:
The State Department has an emissary in Egypt who trains operatives of the Brotherhood and other Islamist organizations in democracy procedures.
The State Department announced that the Obama administration would be “satisfied” with the election of a Muslim Brotherhood–dominated government in Egypt.
Secretary Clinton personally intervened to reverse a Bush-administration ruling that barred Tariq Ramadan, grandson of the Brotherhood’s founder and son of one of its most influential early leaders, from entering the United States.
The State Department has collaborated with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a bloc of governments heavily influenced by the Brotherhood, in seeking to restrict American free-speech rights in deference to sharia proscriptions against negative criticism of Islam.
The State Department has excluded Israel, the world’s leading target of terrorism, from its “Global Counterterrorism Forum,” a group that brings the United States together with several Islamist governments, prominently including its co-chair, Turkey — which now finances Hamas and avidly supports the flotillas that seek to break Israel’s blockade of Hamas. At the forum’s kickoff, Secretary Clinton decried various terrorist attacks and groups; but she did not mention Hamas or attacks against Israel — in transparent deference to the Islamist governments, which echo the Brotherhood’s position that Hamas is not a terrorist organization and that attacks against Israel are not terrorism.
The State Department and the Obama administration waived congressional restrictions in order to transfer $1.5 billion dollars in aid to Egypt after the Muslim Brotherhood’s victory in the parliamentary elections.
The State Department and the Obama administration waived congressional restrictions in order to transfer millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinian territories notwithstanding that Gaza is ruled by the terrorist organization Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch.
The State Department and the administration recently hosted a contingent from Egypt’s newly elected parliament that included not only Muslim Brotherhood members but a member of the Islamic Group (Gama’at al Islamia), which is formally designated as a foreign terrorist organization — so that providing it with material support is a serious federal crime. The State Department has refused to provide Americans with information about the process by which it issued a visa to a member of a designated terrorist organization, about how the members of the Egyptian delegation were selected, or about what security procedures were followed before the delegation was allowed to enter our country.
On a just-completed trip to Egypt, Secretary Clinton pressured General Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, head of the military junta currently governing the country, to surrender power to the newly elected parliament, which is dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, and the newly elected president, Mohamed Morsi, who is a top Brotherhood official. She also visited with Morsi; immediately after his victory, Morsi proclaimed that his top priorities included pressuring the United States to release the Blind Sheikh. Quite apart from the Brotherhood’s self-proclaimed “grand jihad” to destroy the United States, which the Justice Department proved in federal court during the 2007–8 Holy Land Foundation prosecution, the Brotherhood’s supreme guide, Mohammed Badie, publicly called for jihad against the United States in an October 2010 speech. After it became clear the Brotherhood would win the parliamentary election, Badie said the victory was a stepping stone to “the establishment of a just Islamic caliphate.”
This is not an exhaustive account of Obama-administration coziness with the Muslim Brotherhood. It is just some of the lowlights.
Senator McCain is an incorrigible vacillator. It is to be expected that he has “evolved” from last year’s claimed opposition to the Brotherhood to a new position, more aligned with that of his friend Secretary Clinton and the Obama administration. Some of us, however, really are “unalterably opposed” to the Muslim Brotherhood. The five House conservatives are asking questions to which the State Department’s own guidelines, to say nothing of common sense, demand answers. Answers not just about Huma Abedin but, far more significantly, about the government’s policy toward virulently anti-American Islamists. Americans deserve nothing less — even if the usual GOP spaghetti spines would prefer to give them nothing, period.
— Andrew C. McCarthy is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.
July 21, 2012 4:00 A.M. By Andrew C. McCarthy
Questions about Huma Abedin
A State Department adviser has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Der Spiegel pointed out the obvious: “A certain role of the Muslim Brotherhood in the transition process [to ‘democracy’] in Egypt seems acceptable to the Obama White House.” It was early February 2011, the moment when the uprising that would oust Hosni Mubarak was bubbling over in Tahrir Square. The prominent German newsmagazine figured, who better to ask about the Muslim Brotherhood than the American political establishment’s resident foreign-policy genius, John McCain?
So, the reporter asked him, does Obama’s tolerance of the Muslim Brotherhood “concern you”?
Senator Maverick shot back without hesitation: “It concerns me so much that I am unalterably opposed to it. I think it would be a mistake of historic proportions.”
Senator McCain elaborated that he was “deeply, deeply concerned that this whole movement [toward democracy] could be hijacked by radical Islamic extremists.” And what, he was specifically asked, “is your assessment of the Muslim Brotherhood”? McCain pulled no punches:
I think they are a radical group that, first of all, supports sharia law; that in itself is anti-democratic — at least as far as women are concerned. They have been involved with other terrorist organizations and I believe that they should be specifically excluded from any tra nsition government.
In fact, so apprehensive was he over the Brotherhood and its sharia agenda that McCain was quick to brand Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel laureate, as a Brotherhood tool. Many of us watching developments at the time noted the apparent collusion between ElBaradei and the Brothers. McCain went farther: “Oh yeah, I think it’s very clear that the scenario is very likely he could be their front man.”
Senator Straight Talk reasoned that since ElBaradei appeared to be on the same page as the Brotherhood, and was being hailed as a potential Mubarak successor despite having “no following nor political influence in Egypt,” we should assume that he must be in cahoots with the Brotherhood. It did not matter that ElBaradei was a renowned international figure and an important leftist ally of President Obama’s. So pernicious was the threat posed by the Brotherhood that, in McCain’s considered opinion, you just had to assume the worst.
The Spiegel interview was classic McCain; the senator is never at a loss for bloviation. His professed anxiety, only a year ago, over the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as his blithe willingness to assume that ElBaradei must be an Islamist coconspirator, are worth remembering today. For the sage has suddenly decided that the Brothers — unapologetic Islamic supremacists who say outright that they are on a “grand jihad” to destroy America and the West — are a pretty swell lot, after all. Instead, McCain reserves his signature “shoot first, think later” ire for the target he has always preferred: conservatives.
The Arizonan took to the Senate floor this week to lambaste five conservative members of the House who, unlike McCain, are actually serious about addressing threats the Brotherhood poses to American interests. McCain’s bipartisan “Islamic democracy” promoters seem content to keep burning through taxpayer trillions until the Brotherhood is finally running every government in the Middle East. To the contrary, the House conservatives — Michele Bachmann (Minn.), Louie Gohmert (Texas), Trent Franks (Ariz.), Tom Rooney (Fla.), and Lynn Westmorland (Ga.) — have concluded that the Brotherhood needs to be regarded as the serious anti-American business that it is.
Toward that end, the quintet is justifiably concerned that the Brotherhood’s sharia agenda — the one to which McCain used to be “unalterably opposed” — is being abetted not just by some Nobel-toting Egyptian progressive, but by officials in highly sensitive positions inside the United States government
One official about whom they raise questions is Huma Abedin, deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Ms. Abedin has been an aide since she interned at the White House in 1996 and was assigned to the then–first lady’s staff. The family tie for which she is best known is her husband, Anthony Weiner, the New York Democrat who resigned from Congress in disgrace last year. But it is Ms. Abedin’s parents and brother who have drawn the attention of the five House GOP members. They all have connections to the Muslim Brotherhood — the organization itself or prominent members thereof.
For pointing this out and merely asking the State Department’s inspector general to look into it and report back to Congress — which is part of the IG’s duties under the statute that created his position — McCain & Co. (i.e., his fans in the left-wing media and his admirers in the Republican establishment) are screaming “smear” and “McCarthyism.” McCain’s antipathy toward conservatives (except during election years) is an old story. And it is no secret that he has long been smitten by Mrs. Clinton, whose transnational-progressive leanings mirror his own.
The Maverick is also a man about town — towns like Tripoli. Back in 2009, you may recall, he was an honored guest in the compound of Libya’s dictator, Moammar Qaddafi — celebrating the former master terrorist as an important American ally against jihadist terror, helping to grease the wheels so the Obama administration could increase American aid that would bolster Qaddafi’s military. Yet in the blink of an eye, it seemed, McCain would later be railing that Qaddafi was a died-in-the-wool terrorist monster whose military had to be smashed by the United States — in an undeclared, unauthorized, unprovoked war, if necessary — so Libyans could be “free” to elect the Muslim Brotherhood and other assorted Islamic supremacists to their new Parliament.
But the point is that McCain gets around. And when he does, the State Department is often his escort. Between his globetrotting and his case of Hillary hauteur, the senator has gotten friendly over the years with Ms. Abedin, who is said to be smart, able, and quite charming. Ever the Maverick — chivalrous to a fault . . . at least when the damsel in distress is an exotic, progressive sharia-democracy devotee rather than a conservative national-security worrywart from Minnesota. McCain has leapt to Ms. Abedin’s defense against these vicious House troglodytes.
The senator’s tirade featured his trademark indignation, incoherence, and infatuation with immigrant success stories. (Ms. Abedin was born in Michigan, but no reason to let that get in the way of “what is best about America.”) McCain blasted Representative Bachmann and the others, falsely accusing them of doing to his friend Huma what he had actually done to ElBaradei, namely, implicating her as “part of a nefarious conspiracy.”
To the contrary, the House members have drawn no such conclusions. Instead, they have pointed out the State Department’s dramatic, Brotherhood-friendly policy shifts during Ms. Abedin’s tenure as a top adviser to the State Department’s boss. They have asked — completely consistent with national-security guidelines, to which I’ll come shortly — that an investigation into those policy shifts be undertaken.
That investigation would include an inquiry into whether Ms. Abedin’s family ties render her unsuitable for a position that involves access to classified information about the Brotherhood. The shrieks aside, this is not remotely unreasonable, nor is it an inquisition into Ms. Abedin’s decency and rectitude. When I was a prosecutor, the Justice Department would not have let me take a case that involved friends of my family. It’s not that they didn’t trust me; it’s that government is supposed to avoid the appearance of impropriety — legitimacy hinges on the public’s belief that actions are taken on merit, not burdened by palpable conflicts of interest.
Regarding Ms. Abedin’s family ties, McCain rebukes his House colleagues for alleging “that three members of Huma’s family are ‘connected to Muslim Brotherhood operatives and/or organizations.’” “These sinister accusations,” he insisted, “rest solely on a few unspecified and unsubstantiated associations of members of Huma’s family.”
Now, I’m perfectly willing to believe that McCain may not know what the words “unspecified” and “unsubstantiated” mean. That, however, would not excuse his use of them in this context. The ties of Ms. Abedine’s father, mother, and brother to the Muslim Brotherhood are both specific and substantiated.
Ms. Abedin’s father, the late Syed Z. Abedin, was an Indian-born Islamic academic who founded the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs in Saudi Arabia. That institute was backed by the Muslim World League. As the Hudson Institute’s Zeyno Baran relates, the MWL was started by the Saudi government in 1962 “with Brotherhood members in key leadership positions.” It has served as the principal vehicle for the propagation of Islamic supremacism by the Saudis and the Brotherhood. That ideology fuels the “Islamic extremism” that, only a year ago, had McCain so worried that he thought allowing the Brotherhood into the Egyptian-government mix “would be a mistake of historic proportions.”
McCain’s frivolous retort is that Professor Abedin died 20 years ago. That would be a great point if someone were accusing Ms. Abedin of being in her father’s institute or the MWL. It is irrelevant when the question is whether it is reasonable to infer Islamist sympathies from her parents’ allegiances — not to make conclusive judgments about her, mind you, but to draw an inference that would merit deeper inquiry. That is standard fare in government background checks. Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s emir, has been out of the Brotherhood for more than 30 years. Does that mean the Brotherhood is now irrelevant to his ideological outlook, or to the sympathies of his close associates?
As it happens, the same MWL that supported Abedin père’s institute also helped the Brotherhood establish the Muslim Students Association. The MSA is the foundation of the Brotherhood’s American infrastructure, the gateway through which young Muslims join the Brotherhood after being steeped in the supremacist writings of Brotherhood theorists Hassan al-Banna (who founded the Brotherhood in the 1920s) and Sayyid Qutb (the animating influence of such jihadist eminences as Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden, and the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel Rahman).
Speaking of which, it was through the MSA that Egypt’s new president, Mohammed Morsi, joined the Muslim Brotherhood. He was studying engineering in California at the time, the early Eighties. By her own account, Morsi’s wife, Nagla Ali Mahmoud, also joined. She became a leading member of a cognate outfit known as “the Muslim Sisterhood.” And it is here that we get to Huma Abedin’s mother, the Pakistani-born academic Dr. Saleha Abedin.
Dr. Abedin, too, has been a member of the Muslim Sisterhood, “which is essentially nothing more than the female version of the Brotherhood,” according to Walid Shoebat, a former Brotherhood member who has renounced the organization. The Brotherhood is not only the font of Sunni supremacist ideology, it spearheads the international support network for Hamas, the terrorist organization that openly proclaims itself as the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch.
According to one report, Dr. Abedin has on occasion represented herself as a delegate of the MWL. Moreover, as William Jacobson documents at Legal Insurrection, Dr. Abedin has led the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child (IICWC), an Islamist organization that hews to the positions of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Brotherhood’s leading sharia jurist. Like Brotherhood entities, the IICWC defends such practices as female genital mutilation and child marriage, which find support in Islamic law and scripture.
Sheikh Qaradawi, of course, is the Brotherhood eminence who promises that Islam “will conquer Europe, we will conquer America.” He is a vigorous supporter of Hamas, and his fatwas lionize suicide terrorism — including the killing of Americans in Iraq. It is Qaradawi who brings us to Huma Abedin’s brother, Dr. Hassan Abedin. He has been a fellow at the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies in Great Britain. Contemporaneously, Sheikh Qaradawi was a member of the Oxford Center’s board of trustees. So was Omar Naseef, onetime secretary-general of the MWL as well as the founder of the Rabita Trust — an Islamic “charity” notorious for funding jihadists and for having an al-Qaeda founder (Wael Hamza Julaidan) as one of its chief executives.
These connections are not contrived or weightless — like when the Left wanted to keep Samuel Alito off the Supreme Court because, 40 years ago, he was a member of “Concerned Alumni of Princeton.” Of course, knowing members of an organization whose goals include conquest of the West and destruction of Israel is not a crime. Nor is it a crime to have close relatives who are either members of, or associated with members of, such an organization. Again, however, no one is accusing Huma Abedin of a crime.
The five House conservatives, instead, are asking questions that adults responsible for national security should feel obliged to ask: In light of Ms. Abedin’s family history, is she someone who ought to have a security clearance, particularly one that would give her access to top-secret information about the Brotherhood? Is she, furthermore, someone who may be sympathetic to aspects of the Brotherhood’s agenda, such that Americans ought to be concerned that she is helping shape American foreign policy?
Now, Senator McCain is no stranger to smear. No need to confirm that with Mr. ElBaradei; we’ve watched for years as he has slandered, for example, critics of his advocacy for illegal aliens as “nativists” seeking to reprise Jim Crow laws. Nevertheless, since McCain purports to be a tireless guardian of our security, one would think he’d appreciate the distinction between a smear, on the one hand, and a routine application of security-clearance standards, on the other.
The State Department is particularly wary when it comes to the category of “foreign influence” — yes, it is a significant enough concern to warrant its own extensive category in background investigations. No criminal behavior need be shown to deny a security clearance; access to classified information is not a right, and reasonable fear of “divided loyalties” is more than sufficient for a clearance to be denied.
The guidelines probe ties to foreign countries and organizations because hostile elements could “target United States citizens to obtain protected information” or could be “associated with a risk of terrorism” — note: The Brotherhood checks both these boxes. Thus, when someone is proposed for a sensitive position, it is necessary to consider “conditions that could raise a security concern and may be disqualifying.” These, the State Department tells us, include “contact with a foreign family member, business or professional associate, friend or other person who is a citizen or resident in a foreign country if that contact creates a heightened risk of foreign exploitation, inducement, pressure, or coercion.”
Furthermore, in light of the Brotherhood’s well-known abhorrence of the United States, it is also pertinent that State’s guidelines raise alarms if a person seeking access to classified information has an “association or sympathy” with people who seek to overthrow our government, or even with people who just seek to prevent Americans from exercising their constitutional rights. The Brotherhood does not just aim to upend our system; it would restrict our rights, such as free expression, to the extent they contradict sharia.
In his diatribe, McCain speciously asserted that the GOP conservatives had failed to cite “an action, a decision, or a public position that Huma has taken while at the State Department” that showed she was either “promoting anti-American activities within our government” or having a “direct impact” on harmful policies. Of course, to assess a person’s fitness for a sensitive position, background investigators are not restricted to asking whether someone has committed some transgression. Their main job is to find out whether there are circumstances and competing allegiances that could tempt someone to take positions or actions that could harm the United States. That is why, for example, we have hearings before we confirm federal judges — we don’t just hand them a gavel and hope for the best.
In addition, as McCain knows, Ms. Abedin is an adviser, not a policymaker. She gives advice to the secretary of state. Unless you were in the room with the two of them, you’d never be able to demonstrate what “direct impact” the adviser was having. Again, that’s why people are supposed to be vetted before they get these sensitive positions and before they get access to the nation’s secrets.
Since Mrs. Clinton has been secretary of state, with Ms. Abedin as one of her top advisers, the State Department has strongly supported abandoning the federal government’s prior policy against dealing with the Muslim Brotherhood. State, furthermore, has embraced a number of Muslim Brotherhood positions that undermine both American constitutional rights and our alliance with Israel. To name just a few manifestations of this policy sea change:
The State Department has an emissary in Egypt who trains operatives of the Brotherhood and other Islamist organizations in democracy procedures.
The State Department announced that the Obama administration would be “satisfied” with the election of a Muslim Brotherhood–dominated government in Egypt.
Secretary Clinton personally intervened to reverse a Bush-administration ruling that barred Tariq Ramadan, grandson of the Brotherhood’s founder and son of one of its most influential early leaders, from entering the United States.
The State Department has collaborated with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a bloc of governments heavily influenced by the Brotherhood, in seeking to restrict American free-speech rights in deference to sharia proscriptions against negative criticism of Islam.
The State Department has excluded Israel, the world’s leading target of terrorism, from its “Global Counterterrorism Forum,” a group that brings the United States together with several Islamist governments, prominently including its co-chair, Turkey — which now finances Hamas and avidly supports the flotillas that seek to break Israel’s blockade of Hamas. At the forum’s kickoff, Secretary Clinton decried various terrorist attacks and groups; but she did not mention Hamas or attacks against Israel — in transparent deference to the Islamist governments, which echo the Brotherhood’s position that Hamas is not a terrorist organization and that attacks against Israel are not terrorism.
The State Department and the Obama administration waived congressional restrictions in order to transfer $1.5 billion dollars in aid to Egypt after the Muslim Brotherhood’s victory in the parliamentary elections.
The State Department and the Obama administration waived congressional restrictions in order to transfer millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinian territories notwithstanding that Gaza is ruled by the terrorist organization Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch.
The State Department and the administration recently hosted a contingent from Egypt’s newly elected parliament that included not only Muslim Brotherhood members but a member of the Islamic Group (Gama’at al Islamia), which is formally designated as a foreign terrorist organization — so that providing it with material support is a serious federal crime. The State Department has refused to provide Americans with information about the process by which it issued a visa to a member of a designated terrorist organization, about how the members of the Egyptian delegation were selected, or about what security procedures were followed before the delegation was allowed to enter our country.
On a just-completed trip to Egypt, Secretary Clinton pressured General Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, head of the military junta currently governing the country, to surrender power to the newly elected parliament, which is dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, and the newly elected president, Mohamed Morsi, who is a top Brotherhood official. She also visited with Morsi; immediately after his victory, Morsi proclaimed that his top priorities included pressuring the United States to release the Blind Sheikh. Quite apart from the Brotherhood’s self-proclaimed “grand jihad” to destroy the United States, which the Justice Department proved in federal court during the 2007–8 Holy Land Foundation prosecution, the Brotherhood’s supreme guide, Mohammed Badie, publicly called for jihad against the United States in an October 2010 speech. After it became clear the Brotherhood would win the parliamentary election, Badie said the victory was a stepping stone to “the establishment of a just Islamic caliphate.”
This is not an exhaustive account of Obama-administration coziness with the Muslim Brotherhood. It is just some of the lowlights.
Senator McCain is an incorrigible vacillator. It is to be expected that he has “evolved” from last year’s claimed opposition to the Brotherhood to a new position, more aligned with that of his friend Secretary Clinton and the Obama administration. Some of us, however, really are “unalterably opposed” to the Muslim Brotherhood. The five House conservatives are asking questions to which the State Department’s own guidelines, to say nothing of common sense, demand answers. Answers not just about Huma Abedin but, far more significantly, about the government’s policy toward virulently anti-American Islamists. Americans deserve nothing less — even if the usual GOP spaghetti spines would prefer to give them nothing, period.
— Andrew C. McCarthy is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.
A Picture's worth 1,000 Words...
Once again Obama doesn't want to focus on the real issues...he'd rather keep playing small ball with Romney....Romney's right not to put out all his taxes because if/when he did it would just be something else.....
Diversions, diversions, diversions....Obama will raise anything...talk about anything....lie about anything to talk about ANYTHING BUT his pitiful record as President...
Diversions, diversions, diversions....Obama will raise anything...talk about anything....lie about anything to talk about ANYTHING BUT his pitiful record as President...
Friday, July 20, 2012
Interesting....from Peggy Noonan
Noonan: A Remedial Communication Class
Lessons from three recent failures, at the Olympics and on the campaign trail.
By PEGGY NOONAN
Thoughts on three recent failures to communicate:
In the controversy surrounding the uniforms of the 2012 U.S. Olympic team, the problem isn't China. That the uniforms were made there is merely a deep embarrassment and a missed opportunity. Our textile and manufacturing companies deserved that work. You wonder how it could be that no one in the American Olympic Committee or in Ralph Lauren's company asked, "By the way, we're making the outfits in America, right?"
And—here's part of the missed opportunity—on being told yes, someone might have thought: "Hey, we could do a nice commercial to run during the games, with American women and men making the uniforms, looking up from their sewing machines as the camera goes by and saying, 'Good luck America.' The last shot is of a seamstress at the end of the day on a floor in the New York Garment District. As she goes to turn off the lights, she walks by a mannequin wearing the full uniform, gives the shoulder a little pat and says, 'Good luck, kid.'" As if we're all in this together, and what we're all in is actually bigger than the games.
Instead—sigh—China.
But that isn't the biggest problem. That would be the uniforms themselves. They don't really look all that American. Have you seen them? Do they say "America" to you? Berets with little stripes? Double breasted tuxedo-like jackets with white pants? Funny rounded collars on the shirts? Huge Polo logos? They look like some European bureaucrat's idea of a secret militia, like Brussels's idea of a chic new army. They're like the international community Steven Spielberg lined up to put on the spaceship at the end of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."
Americans wear baseball caps, trucker hats, cowboy hats, watch caps, Stetsons, golf caps, even Panama hats and fedoras. They wear jeans and suits and khakis and shorts and workout clothes. The Americans in the now-famous uniform picture look like something out of a Vogue spread where the models arrayed on the yacht look like perfect representatives of the new global elite.
Our athletes aren't supposed to look like people who'd march under a flag with statues and harps and musical notes. Also, the women's uniforms make them look like stewardesses from the 777 fleet on Singapore Airlines.
The failure of the uniforms is that they don't communicate: "Here comes America."
They communicate: "Chic global Martians coming your way."
***
The reason Mitt Romney isn't releasing more tax returns can be reduced to three words: Bill Clinton's underwear. When he first ran for president, Bill Clinton put out his tax returns. Lisa Schiffren, an enterprising young writer for The American Spectator, went through them and found that the Clintons, when they were in Little Rock, had gone to great lengths to limit their tax bills, to the point of itemizing each contribution to local charities, including Mr. Clinton's old underwear. Hilarity ensued. This is the kind of thing everyone in national politics fears.
But the question remains. Mr. Romney has known at least since 2007 that he would be running for president. He never in that time made sure his taxes from that date would pass rigorous public examination? This is odd, especially since he's supposed to be so methodical, tidy, organized and prudent. The political answer to the question "Should Romney reveal more tax returns?" is, "That depends on what's in them." But the nonpolitical answer is yes, he should.
The failure of communication here involves failing to arm proactively against the problem, and reacting flat-footedly when it arrived.
***
The president stepped in it this week with his own failure to communicate.
Mr. Obama, at a campaign appearance at a fire house in Roanoke, Va.: "Look, if you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own." If you own a store or factory "somebody invested in roads and bridges," somebody built the infrastructure that allows for commerce. Fair enough. We all built it, with public moneys for public benefit. But it makes as much sense to tell the wealthy businessman, "Feel guilty because the taxes of the poor built that highway," as it does to tell a mother on public assistance, "Feel guilty because your hardworking neighbors built that road."
How about nobody feel guilty?
The president seemed to me to be confusing a poor argument—he implied we owe our wealth and growth as a nation to government programs—with a good one, that nobody achieves success alone. This is true: Nobody proceeds unhelped through life, everyone who's achieved something got some encouragement from a neighbor or a teacher or a coach.
But Mr. Obama makes this point mischievously. He aims his argument at his political opponents—Republicans, Romney supporters. Yet many of them—most, probably—are involved one way or another with churches, synagogues, civic groups and professional organizations whose sole purpose is to provide assistance and encouragement to those who are ignored and disadvantaged. Conservatism doesn't mean "do it alone." God made us as social animals and asks us to help each other.
Mr. Obama was trying to conflate a nice thought—we must help each other—with a partisan and ideological one, that government has and needs more of a role in creating personal success. He did not do it well because his approach was, as it often is, accusatory and vaguely manipulative. Which makes people lean away from him, not toward him.
It is odd he does not notice this, because communicating is his obsession. He made this clear again in his interview last week with Charlie Rose. "The mistake of my first couple of years was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right," he said. "But, you know, the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism."
I am certain the president has no idea how patronizing he sounds. His job is to tell us a story? And then get our blankie and put us to sleep?
When he says "a story" he means "the narrative," but he can't use that term because every hack in politics and every journalist they spin uses it and believes in it.
We've written of this before but it needs repeating. The American people will not listen to a narrative, they will not sit still for a story. They do not listen passively as seemingly eloquent people in Washington spin tales of their own derring-do.
The American people tell you the narrative. They look at the facts produced by your leadership, make a judgment and sum it up. The summation is spoken—the story told—at a million barbecues in a million back yards.
The narrative on the president right now is: He's not a bad guy, but it hasn't worked.
Some people will vote for him anyway, some won't. But all, actually, know it hasn't worked. That's the narrative.
To get that wrong—that the American summation comes from the bottom up and not the top down—is a big mistake. It means you don't know you've got to change some facts, as opposed to some words.
Lessons from three recent failures, at the Olympics and on the campaign trail.
By PEGGY NOONAN
Thoughts on three recent failures to communicate:
In the controversy surrounding the uniforms of the 2012 U.S. Olympic team, the problem isn't China. That the uniforms were made there is merely a deep embarrassment and a missed opportunity. Our textile and manufacturing companies deserved that work. You wonder how it could be that no one in the American Olympic Committee or in Ralph Lauren's company asked, "By the way, we're making the outfits in America, right?"
And—here's part of the missed opportunity—on being told yes, someone might have thought: "Hey, we could do a nice commercial to run during the games, with American women and men making the uniforms, looking up from their sewing machines as the camera goes by and saying, 'Good luck America.' The last shot is of a seamstress at the end of the day on a floor in the New York Garment District. As she goes to turn off the lights, she walks by a mannequin wearing the full uniform, gives the shoulder a little pat and says, 'Good luck, kid.'" As if we're all in this together, and what we're all in is actually bigger than the games.
Instead—sigh—China.
But that isn't the biggest problem. That would be the uniforms themselves. They don't really look all that American. Have you seen them? Do they say "America" to you? Berets with little stripes? Double breasted tuxedo-like jackets with white pants? Funny rounded collars on the shirts? Huge Polo logos? They look like some European bureaucrat's idea of a secret militia, like Brussels's idea of a chic new army. They're like the international community Steven Spielberg lined up to put on the spaceship at the end of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."
Americans wear baseball caps, trucker hats, cowboy hats, watch caps, Stetsons, golf caps, even Panama hats and fedoras. They wear jeans and suits and khakis and shorts and workout clothes. The Americans in the now-famous uniform picture look like something out of a Vogue spread where the models arrayed on the yacht look like perfect representatives of the new global elite.
Our athletes aren't supposed to look like people who'd march under a flag with statues and harps and musical notes. Also, the women's uniforms make them look like stewardesses from the 777 fleet on Singapore Airlines.
The failure of the uniforms is that they don't communicate: "Here comes America."
They communicate: "Chic global Martians coming your way."
***
The reason Mitt Romney isn't releasing more tax returns can be reduced to three words: Bill Clinton's underwear. When he first ran for president, Bill Clinton put out his tax returns. Lisa Schiffren, an enterprising young writer for The American Spectator, went through them and found that the Clintons, when they were in Little Rock, had gone to great lengths to limit their tax bills, to the point of itemizing each contribution to local charities, including Mr. Clinton's old underwear. Hilarity ensued. This is the kind of thing everyone in national politics fears.
But the question remains. Mr. Romney has known at least since 2007 that he would be running for president. He never in that time made sure his taxes from that date would pass rigorous public examination? This is odd, especially since he's supposed to be so methodical, tidy, organized and prudent. The political answer to the question "Should Romney reveal more tax returns?" is, "That depends on what's in them." But the nonpolitical answer is yes, he should.
The failure of communication here involves failing to arm proactively against the problem, and reacting flat-footedly when it arrived.
***
The president stepped in it this week with his own failure to communicate.
Mr. Obama, at a campaign appearance at a fire house in Roanoke, Va.: "Look, if you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own." If you own a store or factory "somebody invested in roads and bridges," somebody built the infrastructure that allows for commerce. Fair enough. We all built it, with public moneys for public benefit. But it makes as much sense to tell the wealthy businessman, "Feel guilty because the taxes of the poor built that highway," as it does to tell a mother on public assistance, "Feel guilty because your hardworking neighbors built that road."
How about nobody feel guilty?
The president seemed to me to be confusing a poor argument—he implied we owe our wealth and growth as a nation to government programs—with a good one, that nobody achieves success alone. This is true: Nobody proceeds unhelped through life, everyone who's achieved something got some encouragement from a neighbor or a teacher or a coach.
But Mr. Obama makes this point mischievously. He aims his argument at his political opponents—Republicans, Romney supporters. Yet many of them—most, probably—are involved one way or another with churches, synagogues, civic groups and professional organizations whose sole purpose is to provide assistance and encouragement to those who are ignored and disadvantaged. Conservatism doesn't mean "do it alone." God made us as social animals and asks us to help each other.
Mr. Obama was trying to conflate a nice thought—we must help each other—with a partisan and ideological one, that government has and needs more of a role in creating personal success. He did not do it well because his approach was, as it often is, accusatory and vaguely manipulative. Which makes people lean away from him, not toward him.
It is odd he does not notice this, because communicating is his obsession. He made this clear again in his interview last week with Charlie Rose. "The mistake of my first couple of years was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right," he said. "But, you know, the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism."
I am certain the president has no idea how patronizing he sounds. His job is to tell us a story? And then get our blankie and put us to sleep?
When he says "a story" he means "the narrative," but he can't use that term because every hack in politics and every journalist they spin uses it and believes in it.
We've written of this before but it needs repeating. The American people will not listen to a narrative, they will not sit still for a story. They do not listen passively as seemingly eloquent people in Washington spin tales of their own derring-do.
The American people tell you the narrative. They look at the facts produced by your leadership, make a judgment and sum it up. The summation is spoken—the story told—at a million barbecues in a million back yards.
The narrative on the president right now is: He's not a bad guy, but it hasn't worked.
Some people will vote for him anyway, some won't. But all, actually, know it hasn't worked. That's the narrative.
To get that wrong—that the American summation comes from the bottom up and not the top down—is a big mistake. It means you don't know you've got to change some facts, as opposed to some words.
Another Example of Terrible State-Run Media Reporting...
Where do they get these State-Run Media commentators????....
Another Example of Obama Just Lying....
President Obama's latest attack ad on Mitt Romney accuses the governor of lying and mis-quoting the president. However, it's the ad that is erroneous. Gov. Romney quoted President Obama perfectly. So, as a service to the president, here is the ad re-edited... with the truth inserted.
Obama's Lying Again!!!!.....Now he's lying to try to coverup his statements last Friday....
Here he is ....Obama's lying AGAIN....Trying to dig his way out of his truthful statement last Friday.....
Obama calls 'you didn't build that' furor 'bogus,' as Romney releases new ad
Published July 20, 2012 FoxNews.com
President Obama, one week after his controversial "you didn't build that" remark, claimed Friday that the criticism he's taking from Republicans is "bogus."
Though Republicans say the president was implying that business owners didn't build their businesses, Obama said he was just talking about roads and bridges.
In an interview with WCTV-TV in Tallahassee that aired Friday, Obama said: "What I said was together we build roads and we build bridges."
He added: "That's the point I've made millions of times, and by the way, that's a point Mr. Romney has made as well, so this is just a bogus issue."
That's not the explanation that initially came from the Obama campaign when it was first asked about the speech last Friday in Roanoke, Va.
The fresh pushback from Obama comes as Mitt Romney and Republicans escalate attacks over the comment. Romney's campaign announced Friday that it was releasing a new TV ad, which is a condensed version of the scathing web video released a day earlier on the comment.
The ad features a New Hampshire business owner criticizing Obama for the remark. "My father's hands didn't build this company? My hands didn't build this company? Through hard work and a little bit of luck, we built this business. Why are you demonizing us for it?" he asks.
The Obama campaign on Thursday started to push back, claiming the president's quote was taken out of context. It released a web video of its own accusing Romney of launching a "false attack." The video showed Romney reading the selected "you didn't build that" quote, then said: "That's not what he said."
Here's what Obama said last Friday:
"There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me because they want to give something back," the president said. "If you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own. You didn't get there on your own. I'm always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.
"If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen," he said. "The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet."
While Obama now claims the "you didn't build that" was in reference to roads and bridges, that's also not the only section of the speech that Republicans have taken issue with.
The video released Thursday by the Romney campaign included the section in which Obama said he was "struck" by business people who think they succeeded "because I was just so smart."
Romney said Thursday in Massachusetts that the remarks were "not a gaffe."
"It was instead his ideology," Romney said. "The president in fact believes that people who build enterprises like this really are not responsible for it, that in fact it is a collective success of the whole society that somehow builds enterprises like this. In my view we ought to celebrate people who start enterprises and employ people."
Obama calls 'you didn't build that' furor 'bogus,' as Romney releases new ad
Published July 20, 2012 FoxNews.com
President Obama, one week after his controversial "you didn't build that" remark, claimed Friday that the criticism he's taking from Republicans is "bogus."
Though Republicans say the president was implying that business owners didn't build their businesses, Obama said he was just talking about roads and bridges.
In an interview with WCTV-TV in Tallahassee that aired Friday, Obama said: "What I said was together we build roads and we build bridges."
He added: "That's the point I've made millions of times, and by the way, that's a point Mr. Romney has made as well, so this is just a bogus issue."
That's not the explanation that initially came from the Obama campaign when it was first asked about the speech last Friday in Roanoke, Va.
The fresh pushback from Obama comes as Mitt Romney and Republicans escalate attacks over the comment. Romney's campaign announced Friday that it was releasing a new TV ad, which is a condensed version of the scathing web video released a day earlier on the comment.
The ad features a New Hampshire business owner criticizing Obama for the remark. "My father's hands didn't build this company? My hands didn't build this company? Through hard work and a little bit of luck, we built this business. Why are you demonizing us for it?" he asks.
The Obama campaign on Thursday started to push back, claiming the president's quote was taken out of context. It released a web video of its own accusing Romney of launching a "false attack." The video showed Romney reading the selected "you didn't build that" quote, then said: "That's not what he said."
Here's what Obama said last Friday:
"There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me because they want to give something back," the president said. "If you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own. You didn't get there on your own. I'm always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.
"If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen," he said. "The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet."
While Obama now claims the "you didn't build that" was in reference to roads and bridges, that's also not the only section of the speech that Republicans have taken issue with.
The video released Thursday by the Romney campaign included the section in which Obama said he was "struck" by business people who think they succeeded "because I was just so smart."
Romney said Thursday in Massachusetts that the remarks were "not a gaffe."
"It was instead his ideology," Romney said. "The president in fact believes that people who build enterprises like this really are not responsible for it, that in fact it is a collective success of the whole society that somehow builds enterprises like this. In my view we ought to celebrate people who start enterprises and employ people."
You Knew they would Try to Blame this Terrible Shooting on the Republicans.....The State-Run Media is just dispicable.....
You knew that it wouldn't take long before the state-run media OR Obama would try to blame George Bush, the Republicans, the Tea Party, Big Oil, Wall Street or someone....
This is just terrible reporting by Brian Ross and show the liberal bent of the state-run media....
ABC News, Brian Ross apologize for report suggesting shooting suspect tied to Tea Party
Published July 20, 2012 FoxNews.com
ABC News and correspondent Brian Ross apologized Friday after Ross suggested on air that the Colorado mass shooting suspect could be tied to the Tea Party.
As the name of the suspect, identified as 24-year-old James Holmes, first emerged Friday morning, Ross reported on ABC News that he'd found a web page for a "Jim Holmes" on a Colorado Tea Party site.
"There is a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado, page on the Colorado Tea Party site as well, talking about him joining the Tea Party last year," Ross reported.
He added: "Now we don't know if this is the same Jim Holmes, but it's Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colo."
That man is not the same Jim Holmes. The Colorado Tea Party Patriots, whose website Ross was looking at, put out a statement criticizing Ross for even floating the possibility -- noting the Jim Holmes with the Tea Party group is 52 years old and not the same person.
"The attempts of some media organizations to characterize the shooter as a Tea Party member without having made any effort to contact our organization are shameless and reprehensible," the group said in a statement.
Ross clarified on air Friday, as ABC News issued a formal apology.
"An earlier ABC News broadcast report suggested that a Jim Holmes of a Colorado Tea Party organization might be the suspect, but that report was incorrect. ABC News and Brian Ross apologize for the mistake, and for disseminating that information before it was properly vetted," the statement said.
On air later in the morning, Ross also said: "An earlier report that I had was incorrect that he was connected with the Tea Party. In fact, that's a different Jim Holmes. He was not connected to the Tea Party and what we do know about him is he is a 24-year-old white male who went to Colorado for a Ph.D."
At least 12 people were killed in the shooting overnight at an Aurora movie theater, while at least 50 were injured.
Details are still emerging about the suspect, who is in custody
The Tea Party is Justifiably Upset...
Tea party leader tells media to stop ‘reckless and false reporting’ after Batman shooting
Published: 12:53 PM 07/20/2012 By Alex Pappas
A leader of the Tea Party Patriots called on media outlets to “stop all reckless and false reporting” after ABC News incorrectly linked one of its Colorado activists to the Batman shooting massacre at an Aurora movie theater early Friday morning.
“We call on ABC News to immediately stop all reckless and false reporting, and we are putting all media outlets on notice that false political attacks on the American people will no longer be tolerated,” said Jenny Beth Martin, the national co-founder of Tea Party Patriots.
“We demand the media report responsibly,” Martin said, adding, “It is irresponsible for any media outlet to suggest anyone was responsible for this tragedy other than those involved.”
Brian Ross of ABC News on Friday wrongly suggested that the shooting suspect – identified by authorities as 24-year-old James Holmes — could be a tea party activist. Appearing on “Good Morning America,” Ross told host George Stephanopoulos that “there’s a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colo., page on the Colorado Tea Party site.”
Ross apparently was referencing this page on the website of the Colorado Tea Party Patriots.
ABC News has since apologized.
“An earlier ABC News broadcast report suggested that a Jim Holmes of a Colorado Tea Party organization might be the suspect, but that report was incorrect,” the organization said on its website. “ABC News and Brian Ross apologize for the mistake, and for disseminating that information before it was properly vetted.”
Regina Thomson, the president of the Colorado Tea Party Patriots, said in a statement, “The member of the Colorado Tea Party Patriots, Jim Holmes, age 52 is not the same person who has been identified as the shooter.”
“The attempts of some media organizations to characterize the shooter as a Tea Party member without having made any effort to contact our organization are shameless and reprehensible,” she said.
Breitbart News on Friday was given a comment from James Michael Holmes, the 52-year-old man who Ross incorrectly suggested may have been the shooter.
“It was freaky,” Holmes said, saying he has disconnected his phone.
WHY IS BRIAN ROSS WORKING FOR ANY NEWS NETWORK?????
Why Is Brian Ross Still Working for ABC News?
ABC News reporter Brian Ross committed what used to be a fatal mistake to a journalist’s career: He blurted out a wild, unsubstantiated, speculative observation that hadn’t been vetted by anyone and was explosively political at the same time.
Via Breitbart:
Here is the exchange between ABC News chief investigator Brian Ross and host George Stephanopoulos about apparent suspect James Holmes:
Stephanolpoulos: I’m going to go to Brian Ross. You’ve been investigating the background of Jim Holmes here. You found something that might be significant.
Ross: There’s a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado, page on the Colorado Tea party site as well, talking about him joining the Tea Party last year. Now, we don’t know if this is the same Jim Holmes. But it’s Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado.
Stephanolpoulos: Okay, we’ll keep looking at that. Brian Ross, thanks very much.
Thanks for what? Ross just tried to connect the Tea Party to the murder of 12 innocents based on the thinnest of speculation: that the name on the website almost matched the name of the suspect.
The political implications of the attempted smear were dynamite. And yet, the casual manner in which Ross reported this “fact” — even with a fig leaf caveat — was shocking. No attempt was made to confirm anything.
ABC News has now issued a correction and Ross has included an apology.
ABC News and Brian Ross are apologizing for an “incorrect” report that James Holmes, the suspect in the Colorado theater shooting, may have had connections to the Tea Party.
“An earlier ABC News broadcast report suggested that a Jim Holmes of a Colorado Tea Party organization might be the suspect, but that report was incorrect,” ABC News said in a statement. “ABC News and Brian Ross apologize for the mistake, and for disseminating that information before it was properly vetted.”
In a similar statement released minutes earlier, ABC News said the report was “incorrect” but did not include the apology. “Several other local residents with similar names were also contacted via social media by members of the public who mistook them for the suspect,” the initial statement read.
Several other residents may have been contacted but how many of their employers, associations, or political affiliations were broadcast live on air?
And what made Ross make a beeline straight for the Tea Party website in the first place? Did he also check the Occupy Denver page? Somehow, I doubt whether it even crossed his mind.
There used to be a time when journalists had a rough integrity about what they said over the air and took pride in striving for accuracy. Who could ever forget ABC’s Frank Reynolds, ABC News anchorman, who, after receiving and announcing word that James Brady had been killed in the Reagan assassination attempt only to discover the press secretary was still alive, got visibly angry and to no one in particular barked on air, “Let’s get this right. Let’s nail this down.”
Today, Stephanopoulos thanked Brian Ross for smearing the Tea Party by reporting a lie. Ross should be suspended or lose his job for this attempt to inject politics into a national tragedy.
This is just terrible reporting by Brian Ross and show the liberal bent of the state-run media....
ABC News, Brian Ross apologize for report suggesting shooting suspect tied to Tea Party
Published July 20, 2012 FoxNews.com
ABC News and correspondent Brian Ross apologized Friday after Ross suggested on air that the Colorado mass shooting suspect could be tied to the Tea Party.
As the name of the suspect, identified as 24-year-old James Holmes, first emerged Friday morning, Ross reported on ABC News that he'd found a web page for a "Jim Holmes" on a Colorado Tea Party site.
"There is a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado, page on the Colorado Tea Party site as well, talking about him joining the Tea Party last year," Ross reported.
He added: "Now we don't know if this is the same Jim Holmes, but it's Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colo."
That man is not the same Jim Holmes. The Colorado Tea Party Patriots, whose website Ross was looking at, put out a statement criticizing Ross for even floating the possibility -- noting the Jim Holmes with the Tea Party group is 52 years old and not the same person.
"The attempts of some media organizations to characterize the shooter as a Tea Party member without having made any effort to contact our organization are shameless and reprehensible," the group said in a statement.
Ross clarified on air Friday, as ABC News issued a formal apology.
"An earlier ABC News broadcast report suggested that a Jim Holmes of a Colorado Tea Party organization might be the suspect, but that report was incorrect. ABC News and Brian Ross apologize for the mistake, and for disseminating that information before it was properly vetted," the statement said.
On air later in the morning, Ross also said: "An earlier report that I had was incorrect that he was connected with the Tea Party. In fact, that's a different Jim Holmes. He was not connected to the Tea Party and what we do know about him is he is a 24-year-old white male who went to Colorado for a Ph.D."
At least 12 people were killed in the shooting overnight at an Aurora movie theater, while at least 50 were injured.
Details are still emerging about the suspect, who is in custody
The Tea Party is Justifiably Upset...
Tea party leader tells media to stop ‘reckless and false reporting’ after Batman shooting
Published: 12:53 PM 07/20/2012 By Alex Pappas
A leader of the Tea Party Patriots called on media outlets to “stop all reckless and false reporting” after ABC News incorrectly linked one of its Colorado activists to the Batman shooting massacre at an Aurora movie theater early Friday morning.
“We call on ABC News to immediately stop all reckless and false reporting, and we are putting all media outlets on notice that false political attacks on the American people will no longer be tolerated,” said Jenny Beth Martin, the national co-founder of Tea Party Patriots.
“We demand the media report responsibly,” Martin said, adding, “It is irresponsible for any media outlet to suggest anyone was responsible for this tragedy other than those involved.”
Brian Ross of ABC News on Friday wrongly suggested that the shooting suspect – identified by authorities as 24-year-old James Holmes — could be a tea party activist. Appearing on “Good Morning America,” Ross told host George Stephanopoulos that “there’s a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colo., page on the Colorado Tea Party site.”
Ross apparently was referencing this page on the website of the Colorado Tea Party Patriots.
ABC News has since apologized.
“An earlier ABC News broadcast report suggested that a Jim Holmes of a Colorado Tea Party organization might be the suspect, but that report was incorrect,” the organization said on its website. “ABC News and Brian Ross apologize for the mistake, and for disseminating that information before it was properly vetted.”
Regina Thomson, the president of the Colorado Tea Party Patriots, said in a statement, “The member of the Colorado Tea Party Patriots, Jim Holmes, age 52 is not the same person who has been identified as the shooter.”
“The attempts of some media organizations to characterize the shooter as a Tea Party member without having made any effort to contact our organization are shameless and reprehensible,” she said.
Breitbart News on Friday was given a comment from James Michael Holmes, the 52-year-old man who Ross incorrectly suggested may have been the shooter.
“It was freaky,” Holmes said, saying he has disconnected his phone.
WHY IS BRIAN ROSS WORKING FOR ANY NEWS NETWORK?????
Why Is Brian Ross Still Working for ABC News?
ABC News reporter Brian Ross committed what used to be a fatal mistake to a journalist’s career: He blurted out a wild, unsubstantiated, speculative observation that hadn’t been vetted by anyone and was explosively political at the same time.
Via Breitbart:
Here is the exchange between ABC News chief investigator Brian Ross and host George Stephanopoulos about apparent suspect James Holmes:
Stephanolpoulos: I’m going to go to Brian Ross. You’ve been investigating the background of Jim Holmes here. You found something that might be significant.
Ross: There’s a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado, page on the Colorado Tea party site as well, talking about him joining the Tea Party last year. Now, we don’t know if this is the same Jim Holmes. But it’s Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado.
Stephanolpoulos: Okay, we’ll keep looking at that. Brian Ross, thanks very much.
Thanks for what? Ross just tried to connect the Tea Party to the murder of 12 innocents based on the thinnest of speculation: that the name on the website almost matched the name of the suspect.
The political implications of the attempted smear were dynamite. And yet, the casual manner in which Ross reported this “fact” — even with a fig leaf caveat — was shocking. No attempt was made to confirm anything.
ABC News has now issued a correction and Ross has included an apology.
ABC News and Brian Ross are apologizing for an “incorrect” report that James Holmes, the suspect in the Colorado theater shooting, may have had connections to the Tea Party.
“An earlier ABC News broadcast report suggested that a Jim Holmes of a Colorado Tea Party organization might be the suspect, but that report was incorrect,” ABC News said in a statement. “ABC News and Brian Ross apologize for the mistake, and for disseminating that information before it was properly vetted.”
In a similar statement released minutes earlier, ABC News said the report was “incorrect” but did not include the apology. “Several other local residents with similar names were also contacted via social media by members of the public who mistook them for the suspect,” the initial statement read.
Several other residents may have been contacted but how many of their employers, associations, or political affiliations were broadcast live on air?
And what made Ross make a beeline straight for the Tea Party website in the first place? Did he also check the Occupy Denver page? Somehow, I doubt whether it even crossed his mind.
There used to be a time when journalists had a rough integrity about what they said over the air and took pride in striving for accuracy. Who could ever forget ABC’s Frank Reynolds, ABC News anchorman, who, after receiving and announcing word that James Brady had been killed in the Reagan assassination attempt only to discover the press secretary was still alive, got visibly angry and to no one in particular barked on air, “Let’s get this right. Let’s nail this down.”
Today, Stephanopoulos thanked Brian Ross for smearing the Tea Party by reporting a lie. Ross should be suspended or lose his job for this attempt to inject politics into a national tragedy.
Your Hard Earned Money Being Wasted by the Federal Government!
The Federal Government WASTING your money AGAIN...this one is totally outrageous.....it's an example of people taking advantage of a government program for free stuff (in this case cell phones)...........and who do you think this lady will be voting for in November?????...That's why thinking people need to vote Republican to stop this mess that Obama has encouraged....
Let's see how Obama really handles this....
It will be very interesting to see how/if Obama addresses this to his liberal, Hollywood buddies who make these violent movies....he probably will never mention anything because he needs their money....and as we all know with Obama its ONLY about money for his reelection campaign....
Obama 'shocked and saddened' by Colorado mass shooting
Published July 20, 2012 FoxNews.com
President Obama said he is "shocked and saddened" by the mass shooting overnight at a Colorado movie theater that left 14 dead and up to 50 wounded.
The president, in a statement released early Thursday morning, urged the nation to "come together as one American family" and keep the people of Aurora, the site of the shooting, in their prayers.
"Michelle and I are shocked and saddened by the horrific and tragic shooting in Colorado," Obama said. "Federal and local law enforcement are still responding, and my Administration will do everything that we can to support the people of Aurora in this extraordinarily difficult time.
"We are committed to bringing whoever was responsible to justice, ensuring the safety of our people, and caring for those who have been wounded. As we do when confronted by moments of darkness and challenge, we must now come together as one American family. All of us must have the people of Aurora in our thoughts and prayers as they confront the loss of family, friends, and neighbors, and we must stand together with them in the challenging hours and days to come."
The suspect, believed to be a lone gunman, is in custody. The gunman opened fire at a movie theater during a showing of "The Dark Knight Rises."
Mitt Romney also released a statement Thursday saying he and wife Ann are "deeply saddened by the news of the senseless violence."
"We are praying for the families and loved ones of the victims during this time of deep shock and immense grief. We expect that the person responsible for this terrible crime will be quickly brought to justice," Romney said.
Obama 'shocked and saddened' by Colorado mass shooting
Published July 20, 2012 FoxNews.com
President Obama said he is "shocked and saddened" by the mass shooting overnight at a Colorado movie theater that left 14 dead and up to 50 wounded.
The president, in a statement released early Thursday morning, urged the nation to "come together as one American family" and keep the people of Aurora, the site of the shooting, in their prayers.
"Michelle and I are shocked and saddened by the horrific and tragic shooting in Colorado," Obama said. "Federal and local law enforcement are still responding, and my Administration will do everything that we can to support the people of Aurora in this extraordinarily difficult time.
"We are committed to bringing whoever was responsible to justice, ensuring the safety of our people, and caring for those who have been wounded. As we do when confronted by moments of darkness and challenge, we must now come together as one American family. All of us must have the people of Aurora in our thoughts and prayers as they confront the loss of family, friends, and neighbors, and we must stand together with them in the challenging hours and days to come."
The suspect, believed to be a lone gunman, is in custody. The gunman opened fire at a movie theater during a showing of "The Dark Knight Rises."
Mitt Romney also released a statement Thursday saying he and wife Ann are "deeply saddened by the news of the senseless violence."
"We are praying for the families and loved ones of the victims during this time of deep shock and immense grief. We expect that the person responsible for this terrible crime will be quickly brought to justice," Romney said.
Democrats Support Women....I don't think so!
So much for the Democrats support of women...here's Nancy Pelosi and "dirty" Harry Reid donating money to a person accused of creating an "intimidating work environment, especially among female employees".....Where's there support for these women...Just more corrupt behavior by liberal Democrats....
Reid's foundation to donate $10,000 to Jaczko legal fund
By DARIUS DIXON | 7/19/12 9:14 PM EDT
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s Searchlight Foundation is planning to cut a $10,000 check to help former Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko pay off legal fees he built up over the last year or so during his troubled tenure at the agency.
Karen Wayland, a former energy policy adviser to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi who has been organizing fundraising efforts for Jaczko, told POLITICO on Thursday that Reid’s nonprofit organization contacted her to get instructions on how to make the donation.
The goal for the legal defense fund, Wayland said, is to raise dollars somewhere in “the low six-figure range.” Jaczko’s fundraisers have also purchased a domain name to solicit donations: www.JaczkoLegalFund.com.
The fundraising is meant to help Jaczko with the legal fees he accrued hiring two lawyers to defend his leadership of the agency, where he faced accusations of creating an intimidating work environment, especially among female employees.
Republicans in Congress seized on the accusations to discredit Jaczko's handling of the NRC — and, by extension, to attack Reid, who used to employ Jaczko as an aide. Reid helped push former President George W. Bush to name Jaczko to the commission, where, after President Barack Obama elevated him to chairman, Jaczko helped secure Reid's goal of terminating the agency's work on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada.
Reid established the foundation to pay for improvements in his hometown of Searchlight, Nev., according to past articles in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Reid's foundation to donate $10,000 to Jaczko legal fund
By DARIUS DIXON | 7/19/12 9:14 PM EDT
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s Searchlight Foundation is planning to cut a $10,000 check to help former Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko pay off legal fees he built up over the last year or so during his troubled tenure at the agency.
Karen Wayland, a former energy policy adviser to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi who has been organizing fundraising efforts for Jaczko, told POLITICO on Thursday that Reid’s nonprofit organization contacted her to get instructions on how to make the donation.
The goal for the legal defense fund, Wayland said, is to raise dollars somewhere in “the low six-figure range.” Jaczko’s fundraisers have also purchased a domain name to solicit donations: www.JaczkoLegalFund.com.
The fundraising is meant to help Jaczko with the legal fees he accrued hiring two lawyers to defend his leadership of the agency, where he faced accusations of creating an intimidating work environment, especially among female employees.
Republicans in Congress seized on the accusations to discredit Jaczko's handling of the NRC — and, by extension, to attack Reid, who used to employ Jaczko as an aide. Reid helped push former President George W. Bush to name Jaczko to the commission, where, after President Barack Obama elevated him to chairman, Jaczko helped secure Reid's goal of terminating the agency's work on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada.
Reid established the foundation to pay for improvements in his hometown of Searchlight, Nev., according to past articles in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
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