A couple of weeks ago, on a Sunday night/Monday morning, a poll at the social networking site Facebook asked the question: “Should Obama Be Killed?” Here’s a screenshot:

As soon as the objectionable poll was noticed, the site’s management pulled it down. (Actually, they disabled the poll application. DailyKos poster Vann has a diary up at that site; seems he was the app’s developer.) The Secret Service quickly determined that the perpetrator was a kid of unspecified name & age: “There was no intent on the part of this juvenile,” FBI Agent Ed Donovan said. “We’re just characterizing it as a mistake.”

Now, take another look at the screenshot.

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There’s quite a remarkable story in today’s New Orleans Times-Picayune. I wish I could cut and paste it in its entirety.

It’s the story of two very different men that we chose to lead our country, and how, in the unlikely setting of New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, we have a chance to compare and contrast their characters.

The world knows one as a blue-blooded faux Texan, bumbling idiot, spoiled child of privilege and draft dodger. The other is a compassionate man of the people who will soon join Mother Teresa, Albert Schweitzer and Nelson Mandela in the Pantheon of recipients of the Nobel Prize for Peace.

Amazing.

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Dana Perino does not like Matt Latimer’s book.

For those who don’t know, Latimer is writing an insider’s account of the Bush White House. It is the first from an unapologetic conservative. Latimer’s credentials as a real winger can’t really be messed with. He is one of us.

And he is making some news.

Dana Perino has run to National Review to call him a liar without using that word.

She had a much more muted response to Scott McClellan’s book. That’s a shame.

Speaking of, a friend sends this great clip of Dana Perino. She didn’t know what the Cuban Missile Crisis was.

On September 9, 2009, Barack Obama will address a Joint Session of Congress.

He wants to get the trains back on track for health care reform.

As Mike Allen notes, in 2001 President George W. Bush addressed a Joint Session of Congress as the first President to do so outside a State of the Union speech or a traditional first address.

The reason? International terrorism.

On September 9, Barack Obama will do it because of tea party activists. He set the stage and firmed up precedent by allowing his campaign arm, Organizing for America” refer to tea party activists as “right wing domestic terrorists.”

So great a threat are these tea party activists to his failing agenda, Obama will use the bully pulpit to strike back as he pushes for government control of American healthcare.

Promoted from the diaries by Jeff.

Is “make up your mind” really all that much to ask of President Obama?

Evidently so. At yesterday’s townhall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Obama’s oft-repeated “money line” was that tax raises are “painful” and unneccessary, and that tax cuts were awesome.

Take, for example, the following quotes from the transcript, accompanied with video.

Tax cuts are awesome:

That’s why we acted as fast as we could to pass a Recovery Act that would stop the freefall. And I want to make sure everybody understands what we did.

One-third of the money in the Recovery Act went to tax cuts that have already started showing up in the paychecks of about 500,000 working families in New Hampshire — (applause) — 500,000 families in New Hampshire. We also cut taxes for small businesses on the investments that they make, and over 300 New Hampshire small businesses have qualified for new loans backed by the Recovery Act.

Tax increases are bad:

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The White House’s actions in the health care debate have made clear the fundamental change from the Bush administration’s way of doing things that President Obama has brought to the White House.

The Bush administration treated America’s enemies as dangerous threats bent on destroying the country and used every resource at its disposal to defeat them while respecting American citizens’ right to disagree with its policies.

The Obama Administration tries to appease America’s enemies and uses every possible opportunity to cower to them while treating American citizens that disagree with its policies as dangerous threats bent on destroying the country, using every thuggish tactic at its disposal to silence them.

Since the White House has called on us to rat out our fellow Americans, I thought I would do my part.

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov

I have compiled a helpful list of people behaving in ways that strike me as “fishy”.

First up, here’s a bully who interfered with the free speech rights of a couple of gentlemen.

Rick Monday : April 25, 1976

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Jump with me to see more of these suspicious characters….

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In the post below, Fox Sports echoes what so many of us have been saying since President Obama heaved a 5.6 oz sphere 56 feet on July 14 — and sets itself up even further as the anti-ESPN with its refusal to kiss the ring of the First Fan on a daily basis.

The idea that Obama is both athletic and some sports “superfan” — and that this combination is new and groundbreaking in a President — is a head-scratcher. Sure, he roots for the White Sox and Bears, and he filled out an NCAA tournament bracket. So he clears the “Manny Ortiz”/”Lambert Field”/”Please don’t muss my coiffure, football!” bar set by John Kerry in 2004. The fact is, every Joe Six-Pack in America clears that bar, and by more than a mile.

President Bush was a baseball team owner, a mountain biker, and a runner (a real one). Obama, on the other hand, has been spotted on a bicycle once or twice (wearing a polo and jeans) and on a basketball court a few times (the UNC defense was kind enough to allow him to make a layup once, perhaps out of respect for the office and pity for a man with his sweatpants pulled up to his nipples). Besides that, his closest tie to sports comes from his wife’s relatives (his brother-in-law is an NCAA basketball coach) and from television (he’s filmed two promos for Monday Night Football).

That does not an athlete or a transformational sports fan make — no matter how hard the President and his Sports Fan Czars at ESPN want it to.

Tonight’s presser was simply more of the same from the self-styled “agent of change” and “post-partisan politician”: Pure politics, unwavering liberal ideology, appallingly transparent scare tactics, demonization of a nameless opposition, and an argument so thick with straw men that the President had better wait until he’s several hundred meters away to light his next cigarette, lest the entire building go up in flames.

Obama’s declaration tonight that the health care overhaul debate is “not about [him],” because he has “great health insurance, and so does every member of Congress” is pure canned comedy.

First of all, the claim that this is “not about” him is laughable on its face, given his accusation that those in his own party who don’t drop their objections to the fact the health overhaul bills currently in Congress will cause costs and deficits to skyrocket while utterly failing to improve coverage and care are “going to destroy [his] presidency.”

Second, everybody knows Obama and Congress have, as the President put it, “great health insurance.” The problem is that the coverage he and his Congressional allies are attempting to foist on the rest of us is far from “great.” If it were on par with what he and Congress are receiving now, then neither Obama nor his Congressional allies would object to Reps. Roy Blunt (R-MO) and John Fleming’s (R-LA) amendments that would automatically disenroll all federal elected officials from the President on down from their current “great health insurance” and replace that insurance with the Democrats’ proposed “public option” — government-run insurance plan — as their sole source of health coverage.

Like the failed “stimulus package,” President Obama is set on imposing his will on both Congress and the American people by ramming through a thousand-plus page bill that would be transformational to our economic system before any — including those expected to vote on it — have had a chance to read through it, let alone assess the proposal’s short- and long-term consequences (both intended and unintended).

The reason for this is clear. Unlike the “stimulus,” the health care overhaul isn’t a case of “not wasting a crisis,” as White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel so bluntly framed the “stimulus” debate earlier this year. Rather, Obama is seeking to shove his health care overhaul through Congress, and to impose it on the American people, as quickly as possible because every day that goes by it — like him — becomes less popular with those who will have to deal with its rules, regulations, and intended and unintended effects.

The fact that a majority of Americans don’t want any part of Obama’s government-centric health care overhaul masquerading as “reform” hasn’t stopped this elected executive or his allies among those who supposedly represent the will of their constituents. Instead, it has made the thin-skinned, hyper-partisan President Obama ratchet up his rhetoric even higher, taking on a full blown “You’re Either With Us or Against America” stance that cannot help but remind Americans of what he really (amazingly) is: the living embodiment of the left’s hated caricature of his predecessor.

Awesome video illustration on the federal budget deficit and the shrieks about Bush and the shrugs over Obama. Who says math can’t be fun?

*cross posted @

Yes, yes, Presidents get to throw out first pitches even when they throw slow girlish balls like Obama instead of the steady, fast pitches of men like George Bush.

But one thing George Bush did not get that Barack Obama is getting from Major League Baseball is a platform to espouse his policy positions. Some of us would like a few areas in life where politics, like the Mets, get shut out. This should be one of them.

More absurd, you’d think Bush would have a leg up on MLB sucking up to him considering he had been an owner and Obama has to poll test which team to support.

Perhaps Major League Baseball wants a bailout.

As Dan McLaughlin notes, the relevant point is that George Bush showed up for a ball game and never showed up to talk policy.

Worth also noting that Bud Selig is a big Democrat and contributed to Joe Biden.

Why am I taking the time to show an attack ad by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee?  Because I think it is far from damaging and I think it highlights a number of things.

First of all, the Ds must be worried about Portman because why else would they offer an attack ad this early? They know Portman is raising serious money and that his numbers are improving.  So why not take swipe at him and try and slow his momentum.

Second, how lame is this ad? Put aside the debate about trade - and the claim that Portman sent jobs overseas - are they actually accusing Portman of increasing the debt?!?  Do we have a chart?  Chart after the fold:

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Ed Frank created an interesting little video that serves as a stark reminder of how harsh the Old Media was on Bush’s “faltering” economy in comparison to today’s hearts and flowers style of reporting during the age of Obama, even though the stats are far, far worse under Obama than they ever were under Bush.

Frank’s video is shocking for its revelation of how Bush was slapped around and how every economic indicator during his tenure in the White House was deemed as obvious proof of the supposed though times we then faced. Yet now, every dismal indicator is celebrated as if recovery just around the corner. Under Bush the Old Media was sure the economy was a wreck, now the wreck proves we will surely be saved by Summer!

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Since November, I’ve become accustomed to predictions that the Republican Party is on its way to irrelevance.  Nonetheless, I was disappointed to hear that sentiment voiced by University of Virginia professor and pundit Larry Sabato, who generally tries to provide a relatively objective analysis.  On MSNBC’s Hardball today, Sabato opined that “we’re on our way from being a two-party system to being a party-and-a-half system. And the Republicans are the half a party.”  Here’s Sabato’s analysis followed by my thoughts on why such predictions are silly.

Essentially, it boils down to this. Minorities are going to be the majority by 2042. It could even be by the 2030s. Young people 18 to 29, they voted more than two to one for Obama, and their turnout is going to go up with each additional year as they age. The same with people with graduate degrees, who used to vote Republican on fiscal issues. Now they’re so turned off to Republicans because of [conservative rhetoric] and the social issues, they turned Democratic. Hey, you can`t just win with white male voters in the South, and that’s what the Republicans have left.

This sort of analysis sounds quite logical but is reminiscent of what the pundits said following the re-election of both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.  After the 1984 election, expert after expert explained why the shift of population and thus electoral votes to the Sun Belt had given the Republicans a “lock on the Electoral College.”  Despite my youthful eagerness for a GOP presidential monopoly, this electoral analysis struck me as too sweeping and simplistic to be correct.  Unfortunately, I was right.

Following the 2004 election, the message from the experts was the same, though the explanation had changed.  Now the Democrats had little chance of winning presidential elections because they were only competing in states that accounted for barely half of the 538 electoral votes.  It was a seductive argument, but again it was too simplistic and backward-looking to be true.

Predictions of electoral locks are appealing in their simplicity and particularly persuasive in the aftermath of a one-sided election.  But, like all analyses based on sample sizes of one or two elections, they’re essentially worthless, if only because the news headlines and candidates that await us are unknowable  Although it’s much less fun and won’t get you a guest appearance on MSNBC or FOX, the only honest analysis is admitting that you haven’t got a clue about what’s going to happen in future elections.

Andrew Bolt has a fine takedown of The Age newspaper in Australia’s Herald Sun today, April 17. It details quite nicely that not just the U.S. media is wallowing in leftwing “group think”. His is headlined “Picture is kiss of death for George Bush prejudice” and lays out the complete lack of historical research of even recent events perpetrated by The Age newspaper in its unthinking assumptions of what President Bush did or didn’t do over the last eight years re foreign policy. Naturally, The Age falls all over itself in support of the leftist messiah, Obama.

Bolt details the erroneous claims by The Age and refutes them with the facts. The Age claimed it was “unimaginable” that Bush could ever have “kissed” any Muslim foreign leaders, as Obama recently did to the Turkish leader, appearing to imagine that such an intimate gesture would have solved all the world’s problems. Bolt points to the photo of Bush kissing the current King of Saudi Arabia to prove The Age wrong.

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The faux outrage over “torture” during the Bush War on Terror (I refer to it as the “Bush” war because, under Obama, we’re apparently replacing the “Global War on Terror” with the “Multiple-Day Standoff on Man-Caused Disasters”) is no more becoming of the left now than it was two, three, or four years ago.

Co-opting the word “torture” to include methods far less offensive than the majority of interrogation techniques I underwent in military SERE training isn’t a victory for moralists and humanitarians in any form; rather, it’s an Orwellian perversion of a word that once had meaning by those who have spent the last eight years on constant lookout for some greviance to hold against a president whose mere existence they resented.

The sad fact is, by co-opting the word “torture” and using it to describe activities going on at Gitmo, Bagram, and elsewhere, these faux-humanitarians have left us with no word to use to describe those activities which used to be classified as torture, like beheading captives on video, hanging people from meat hooks, drilling out eyeballs, using electric current to cause severe pain and physical damage, and cutting off limbs.

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Isn’t it just a pain in the neck when there’s an alternative media that prevents strict message control by a staged-photo-op of an administration and its willing mouthpieces in the MSM?

It’s painless for us, of course; rather, that pain is being felt in the necks of those who want to insist that a bow to a Saudi king isn’t a bow, that an omnibus spending bill with 9,000 earmarks is the beginning of earmark and fiscal reform, that indecisively waiting four days while an American ship’s Captain is held hostage on a rubber raft by four Somali pirates (before being bailed out by swift action by the hostage and a SEAL team) is bold, new leadership — and that a staged event with Obama voters only and a bunch of cameras handed out as props is a real sign of soldiers’ devotion to the new, inexperienced, non-military-friendly Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces.

That’s right: courtesy of our friend Dave Hinz at The Minority Report comes the true story of a staged photo-op between a president who cares only about controlled and contrived appearances, and the component of a deployed military that was hand-selected to give him the contrived appearance he and his handlers desired.

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I read, of course, the story “Bush Aides Challenge Biden’s Boasts of Oval Office Slapdowns“:

Aides to former President George W. Bush are challenging the veracity of Vice President Joe Biden’s claim this week of having privately castigated Bush, who does not remember the incident or an earlier episode in which Biden claims to have similarly rebuked Bush.

Biden spokesman Jay Carney declined to specify the dates of his boss’s purported Oval Office scoldings of Bush. Nor would he provide witnesses or notes to corroborate the episodes.

…but this was one time that it was largely unnecessary, thanks to the people involved. When it came to the GWOT, George W Bush was and is not the sort of man who would seek out Joe Biden’s company, crave Joe Biden’s counsel, nor heed Joe Biden’s advice; an attitude which has since been proven to be fully justified, given that these days the White House is busily pretending that they’re doing anything in Iraq besides following Bush’s strategy. That’s on the one hand - and if you read the article, you’ll note that not even Biden’s dumb enough to try to claim that the President was anything except resolute on the matter.

And if you want to take Joe Biden’s word for it, absent apparently any physical evidence or corroborating testimony… feel free. You’ll be taking the word of a man who, back during the election, sat by and said nothing when his seemingly-sincere apology for a nasty political attack from his side was contemptuously retracted by his running mate’s press secretary.  That was a bit of a clarifying moment for me personally; prior to that, I had Biden merely down as a blowhard who you’d nonetheless find convivial enough company in a social setting. Afterward, I was pretty much forced to conclude that he was a blowhard whose ambitions were sufficiently petty that the goal of Vice-President of the United States would be enough to allow him to self-justify anything that would get him to his goal. Up to and including staying silent while other people lied in his name. But we’re expected to believe that a man like this would actually confront the President of the United States on a policy that both he and the President knew that the President was in the right about.

Fascinating.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

The Hollywood Reporter’s (THR.com) James Hibberd is reporting that the TV networks are “reluctantly” shuffling their on air schedules to fulfill their “responsibility” to air President Obama’s important campaign speech… er, I mean address to the nation next week. The Nets are solemnly claiming the mantle of the patriotic American fulfilling their civic duty to air presidential addresses, it appears.

It is all well and good that they should do this, of course. Keeping the nation informed is one of those long-held, self-proclaimed charges of TV news organizations, of course. But, curiously enough, that same attention to a patriotic, civic duty to air presidential speeches didn’t seem so compelling to them while Bush was in office because they often refused to air his speeches to the nation. Or, as in at least one instance, they left the speech early to go on to primetime programing.

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