The Buried "Gaffe"

Congressman Pete Stark (D-CA) is in the news this week for a gaffe in which he confusedly thought that Solyndra -- the notorious solar panel maker touted by Obama and subsidized by you and me to the tune of $500 million or so, only to go bankrupt -- was a manufacturer of electric cars:

CA East Bay Rep. Fortney “Pete” Stark, 80, identified Fremont-based Solyndra — perhaps the nation’s most notorious solar energy firm and a lightening rod in the 2012 election — as a car manufacturer in his editorial board meeting this week with the San Francisco Chronicle.

Stark’s comments appear to confuse Solyndra — which went bankrupt last year after receiving a $535 million federal loan guarantee — and Tesla Motors, a Fremont-based manufacturer of upscale electic cars now located at the site of the former NUMMI plant.

Asked about his views on new policies regarding Silicon Valley and high tech, including Solyndra, the Congressman said: “I wish I had enough expense allowance to get one of those new “S’s” that Solyndra’s going to make down there, the electric car..my 10 year old  (son) is after me. He no longer wants a Porsche. He wants dad to have an “S” sedan,’ Stark said. “They sound wild. They run $60,000-$90,000.”

The gaffe isn't what the newspapers think, however.  Stark, at 80 years old, should be cut some slack for confusing the names of two companies.   It happens.

But the real gaffe (or gaffes) to me is the following:

1. The reporter fails to note that Tesla Motors is also government-subsidized.

2. No one seems smart enough to ask... why are we subsidizing the manufacture of cars that can only be purchased by very rich people?

As for Stark, when so much of my tax money is flowing out of the federal government to so many Obama contributors and left cronies.... hell, I'd probably mix up their names too.   That's what happens when the government gets too big.

Girl of the Day - Easy Call Version (Audrey Hepburn)

The Girl of the Day is a very easy call today, since it's Audrey Hepburn's 83rd birthday.  

Wow!   Just... wow!

Two Stories, One Story - Or, Chuck and Vic Strike Again!

Charles Krauthammer and Victor Davis Hanson are, with Mark Steyn, in my triumverate of pundits whom I will read no matter what.   Here's Krauthammer on the hypocrisy of the Obama 2012 campaign, which self-evidently seeks to divide Americans along race, gender, class and ethnic lines, only four years after he ran as the "great uniter," the great healer of divisions:

The entire Obama campaign is a slice-and-dice operation, pandering to one group after another, particularly those that elected Obama in 2008 — blacks, Hispanics, women, young people — and for whom the thrill is now gone. 


What to do? Try fear. Create division, stir resentment, by whatever means necessary — bogus court challenges, dead-end Senate bills, and a forest of straw men.


Why else would the Justice Department challenge the photo-ID law in Texas? To charge Republicans with seeking to disenfranchise Hispanics and blacks, of course. But in 2008 the Supreme Court upheld a similar law from Indiana. And it wasn’t close: 6–3, the majority including that venerated liberal, John Paul Stevens.

Moreover, photo IDs were recommended by the 2005 Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired by Jimmy Carter. And you surely can’t get into the attorney general’s building without one. Are Stevens, Carter, and Eric Holder anti-Hispanic and anti-black?

And here, in a nearly perfect statement, is Hanson, writing on the nearly sociopathic attitudes of Obama cabinet secretaries like Hilda Solis, Tim Geithner, Stephen Chu, and Eric Holder:

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has overseen some $5 trillion in new debt. To help pay for it, he wants the rich — the top 1 percent, which already contributes more in income taxes than does the bottom 90 percent — to pay more for what he calls “the privilege of being an American.” Geithner, whose department oversees the IRS, should have taken his own advice: As a rich American one-percenter, he once failed to pay his own self-employment taxes, and improperly claimed his children’s camp costs as a dependent-care deduction....

Then there is the even stranger case of Energy Secretary Steven Chu, whose department helped oversee millions in bad loans to green companies like Solyndra, First Solar, and Solar Trust of America — the Teapot Dome scandals of our times. Chu infamously quipped before assuming office that he wanted U.S. gas prices to reach European levels. Apparently Chu wanted to force a decrease in fossil-fuel burning — although he later confessed that he does not drive a car....

The common theme with these cabinet secretaries is loud, uninformed rhetoric; a lack of practical experience; a certain utopian zealotry — and an expectation that there are rules for government grandees and quite different ones for the rest of us.

What do these two stories have in common?

They.   Think.   We're.   Stupid.

God, do I despise these people.  

Commentary, Albeit Belated

The Regular Guy has had a lot of work lately, so blogging has necessarily taken a back seat.   Here are some quick hits on recent stories:

1. Elizabeth "Pocahantas" Warren.   A lily-white law professor claims to be Native American in order to qualify as a "minority" hire for Harvard's diversity police.   Then she runs for Senate in Massachusetts, presumably hoping no one would notice.  

Now would be a good time to have, as Obama would say, a "national conversation on race."   Specifically, could we have a frank national conversation on the wisdom of continuing the corrupting regime of affirmative action.   And, could we have that conversation civilly, without calling anyone a racist?

I doubt it.   For obvious reasons.   There are too many jobs on the left wrapped up in diversity and the industries it's spawned.    Follow.   The.   Money.

***

John Fund captures an additional nuance of the story:

But last week it came out that in 2009, the Warren household had an income of $980,000 and indeed in recent years has always been part of the top “1 percent” of income earners. But Massachusetts has long offered tax filers a choice between paying the standard 5.3 percent flat income-tax rate or a higher 5.85 percent rate. All they have to do is check a box. Despite her belief that the rich should pay more, Warren has never paid the higher rate. “I did not make a charitable contribution to the state,” she explained to reporters. Nor did she volunteer to donate much to charity.

Warren is free to believe that she has Native American ancestry, just as she is free to keep as much of her money as she is legally entitled to. But her choices in filling out forms are instructive. In checking the boxes claiming Native American status for so many years and in not checking the box to pay a higher state income-tax rate, she has revealed more than we need to know to brand her as yet another sanctimonious liberal who wants to have it all ways.

He calls it, instructively, "check-the-box liberalism."

2.  The Life of Julia.   I am not the first person to notice that "Julia" -- the heroine of an epic tale of bureaucracy and nanny-state dependency touted as Obama's "vision" -- shares the name of the love interest of Winston Smith in the dystopian nightmare of Orwell's 1984.   The irony, the sweet, sweet irony!   Here's a taste of the deep-thinking, "reality-based" Democratic Party ca. 2012:

I don't want to live in a country where government leaders think in cartoons.   Or where voters can be convinced by cartoons.   But that's just me.  

3. Occupy Shows Its Stripes.   For anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear, the "Occupy Wall Street" movement was always a creature of the proto-violent anarchist hard left.   Now, in Cleveland, five members of "Occupy Cleveland" have been arrested for plotting to blow up a bridge.  These are the people Obama was supporting and fomenting just a few months ago.   Will anyone in the MSM notice?   If a right-wing group had plotted a terrorist bombing after receiving support from George W. Bush a few years back, do you think that would have led the news?   No and Yes.

Once Again, the BLS Unemployment Rate is BS

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today that the unemployment rate had once again ticked down to 8.1%.   It will likely be under 8.0% by November, and you can expect the Obama campaign (it's no use calling it an Administration any more) to crow that the recovery has gained steam.   But the only reason it ticked down, and not up, this time is the huge number of people who are leaving the workforce.   In other words, where in a real recovery the growth in the numerator is driving the unemployment rate decreasing, in Obamaworld the rate is driven by a shrinking denominator.  

Anyway, here is all you need to know about the Obama recovery:

Two Stories, One Story VI

Haven't done this feature for awhile, but the Obama "magic composite white girlfriend" and the Warren "I'm approximately 3.5% Cherokee" stories beg for the treatment.   Here's my take.

Conservatives believe in things outside of themselves.   Liberals only believe in themselves.  

Conservatives believe in objective truth.   Liberals believe that truth is up for grabs and a matter of "rhetoric."

Conservatives believe in doing actual things.   Liberals believe in advancing their careers.

Conservatives believe in merit.   Liberals believe in resumes.

What do both of these stories have in common?   Liberals lying in writing to advance their careers by pretending to be cooler and hipper and more exotic than they really are.   Obama was a half-white preppy from Hawaii, but he wanted to tell the story about being an angry black man whom his white girlfriend just couldn't understand.   Warren was a lily-white product of academia, but she wanted to cover herself with the patina of "minority" status.

In short, both of them were pretending to be authentic.

Only in America.

How Weird Is This on the Obamameter?

OK, this is just weird:

One of the more mysterious characters from President Obama's 1995 autobiography Dreams From My Father is the so-called 'New York girlfriend.' Obama never referred to her by name, or even by psuedonym, but he describes her appearance, her voice, and her mannerisms in specific detail.

But Obama has now told biographer David Maraniss that the 'New York girlfriend' was actually a composite character, based off of multiple girlfriends he had both in New York City and in Chicago.

"In Dreams from My Father, Obama chose to emphasize a racial chasm that unavoidably separated him from the woman he described as his New York girlfriend," Maraniss writes, offering a passage from the book in which they go to see a play by a black playwright:

One night I took her to see a new play by a black playwright. It was a very angry play, but very funny. Typical black American humor. The audience was mostly black, and everybody was laughing and clapping and hollering like they were in church. After the play was over, my friend started talking about why black people were so angry all the time. I said it was a matter of remembering—nobody asks why Jews remember the Holocaust, I think I said—and she said that’s different, and I said it wasn’t, and she said that anger was just a dead end. We had a big fight, right in front of the theater. When we got back to the car she started crying. She couldn’t be black, she said. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. She could only be herself, and wasn’t that enough.

"None of this happened with Genevieve," Maraniss writes. "She remembered going to the theater only once with Barack, and it was not to see a work by a black playwright. When asked about this decades later, during a White House interview, Obama acknowledged that the scene did not happen with Genevieve. “It is an incident that happened,” he said. But not with her. He would not be more specific, but the likelihood is that it happened later, when he lived in Chicago. “That was not her,” he said.

Look, I've told stories about my past that weren't true.   It's very tempting when you go away to college or graduate school or move for work, and the people from your past who would know the truth aren't around to correct you... to call "bullshit" on you.   So I get it.   But it's one thing to do that in conversation with strangers.   It's another to do it in a published freakin' memoir that you "wrote" (leaving aside the potential that Bill Ayers actually was the ghostwriter for the book) for the purpose of advancing your political career.

Can we see this guy's transcripts now?   How about his medical records?   Does it matter that he's a serial liar about his past?   Can we ask about Bill Ayers?   Or Jeremiah Wright?    I mean, now that he's admitted that he lies about what he's done and who he's done it with?

Where is the MSM on this sort of thing?

Oh, right... I forgot.

In.   The.   Tank.

More on Obama's "Tough Decision"

Here's Don Rumsfeld on whether or not Obama's decision to go after bin Laden was a "tough decision":

RUMSFELD: ... You mentioned there was a tough decision. I don't think it was a tough decision. We've seen a lot of instances where presidents over the years have -- have had to make decisions like that.
I think after spending that amount of time, that number of years and that much money -- we increased the special operations forces by about 50 percent. We increased their budget. We increased their equipment. And they develop these skill sets and improve the intelligence capability of our country.
And finally, when all that comes together, to not make that decision, it seemed to me, would just be dumbfounding. I can't imagine any president not making that decision. That's not to say it wasn't a huge accomplishment. It was.
VAN SUSTEREN: But not a -- but in your mind, not a tough decision.
RUMSFELD: No. Not at all.

Exactly so.   FDR and Eisenhower deciding to invade Europe on D-Day was a tough decision.  Truman deciding to drop the A-bomb was a tough decision.  Kennedy in the Cuban Missile Crisis -- arguably a tough decision.   Nixon bombing Cambodia -- a tough decision.    Reagan deciding to face down the Soviets in the 1980s -- lots of tough decisions.   

Heck, George W. Bush first going into Afghanistan weeks after 9/11, and then into Iraq, and then ordering the surge in Iraq when the war looked lost... those were all touch decisions.

A tough decision is one where horrible consequences for the nation ensue if you get it wrong (the Cuban Missile Crisis).   A tough decision is one you take when the politically expedient thing is to do nothing (the surge in Iraq). 

Giving the order to go after bin Laden just wasn't that tough.   Know how I know it wasn't that tough?   Because almost anyone who isn't an American-hating pacifist would have done the same thing.

Reductio ad absurdum on Affirmative Action

You may have heard the story of the Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate, Elizabeth Warren, pictured above, who claimed to be a "minority" -- she claims, without proof, to be 1/32nd Cherokee -- as a "plus factor" in gaining her position as a Harvard Law Professor.   Victor Davis Hanson weighs in today:

Senate candidate, Harvard law professor, and 1-percenter Elizabeth Warren, apparently at an earlier, less established point in her cursus honorum, claimed a Native American pedigree — based not on the proverbial Jim Crow 1/16th drop, but perhaps either a 1/32nd mist, or an even vaguer and unprovable claim of some family lore about Native American relatives. Warren’s is the sort of comical “Cherokee con” that every professor at some time hears from white males yearning to find some edge in admissions or hiring; in that regard, I once had a student from North Africa check “African-American” on a PhD application form, despite my warning that as an Arab American he was not eligible for affirmative-action. More recently, my Punjabi American neighbor farmer still does not understand why his family’s quite dark complexions and exotic names don’t qualify his children for the special consideration in university admissions that much lighter teenaged foreign nationals that recently cross the border from Mexico enjoy. He finds that strange. 

A cynical professor, Warren apparently realized that affirmative action/diversity had long become a bankrupt concept, 50 years after the civil-rights movement in an increasingly multiracial, intermarried society with millions of first-generation immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The blonde, pale Warren, of course, looks Anglo; she had no ties to any perceived Indian tribe, and apparently had never complained about ill-treatment due to the supposed race of one of her great-great-great-grandparents.

For my part, one of my friends in graduate school was an African-American -- that is, she was a white South African who had emigrated to America and married an American.   Yet she got a good job at a tony college on the strength, I'm certain of her combination of the African-American credential and her exoticism as a Third World-born scholar.  

It all sheds some light on how Barack Obama made it from middling performance at Occidental to Columbia and then to Harvard Law, doesn't it?

As Hanson notes, the complex machinery of affirmative action is bankrupt as policy and, worse, it's immoral, and always has been.   The only moral way to treat other individual human beings is as individuals worthy of full human dignity and respect, including affording them the right to succeed (and fail) on their own merits.

The Constitution is simple on the question:  every citizen is entitled to equal protection regardless of race.   It doesn't say, "but if you're 1/32nd Cherokee, you get preferential treatment."  

Simpler is better.

Girl of the Day - Jessica Pare

The character of Megan Draper, Don's second (or is it third?) wife, played by Jessica Pare, just keeps getting better and better this year.   It's a great, unexpected swerve in the show, which also keeps getting better and better.   As we're watching the fifth season, we have also gone back and re-watched the four earlier seasons with the Regular Son... the build-up of Megan's character through the year was so gradual, no one could have predicted that she would end up, this year, being almost the central character.   Last Sunday's episode, in which we meet her dysfunctional parents, we learn that she had grand ambitions that didn't include advertising, and yet we also find out that she is a natural-born ad-man (or ad-girl, as the case may be), was spectacular.   And, something we never would have expected, but which is clear after the cleaning the carpet in her black underwear show, and the running away from the HoJo show, and now the Megan saves the Heinz account show... she has Don Draper wrapped around her little finger.   At this point, and please excuse the language, she can basically lead him around by his pecker.   Wow!   Who would have called that?   And what will Don do now?

Best show on TV.

Obama Spikes the Football... Like a Girl!

A wise man once told me that you could learn about all you need to know about a man either by playing golf with him or going hunting or fishing with him.   President Obama does not hunt or fish, but he does play a lot of golf (but I guess that's OK if you're not a Republican named Bush).  

To my mind, however, you can learn a lot about someone by seeing how they throw a baseball.   If you throw like a girl, you probably weren't a "regular guy" (to coin a phrase) growing up.

Obama throws like a girl:




I guarantee you his 2012 campaign won't have him throwing out any first pitches. 

But they are apparently convinced that he can "spike the football" figuratively by celebrating his "triumph" in "taking out" Osama bin Laden.   Hence his triumphal visit to Afghanistan on the first anniversary of the (justifiable) murder of the arch-terrorist by Navy Seal Team 6.   Obama wants to take credit for the "tough decision" to launch the mission and, essentially, wants to steal credit from the brave Navy Seals who actually planned it and carried it out successfully.

Two things:  first, Special Operators don't want publicity for themselves.   But I guarantee they don't like an armchair quarterback pretending that he was a super-hero rappelling down out of a Blackhawk himself.   To wit, the following reactions from actual, not ersatz, Seals:

A serving SEAL Team member said: ‘Obama wasn’t in the field, at risk, carrying a gun. As president, at every turn he should be thanking the guys who put their lives on the line to do this. He does so in his official speeches because he speechwriters are smart.

‘But the more he tries to take the credit for it, the more the ground operators are saying, “Come on, man!” It really didn’t matter who was president. At the end of the day, they were going to go.’

Chris Kyle, a former SEAL sniper with 160 confirmed and another 95 unconfirmed kills to his credit, said: ‘The operation itself was great and the nation felt immense pride. It was great that we did it.

‘But bin Laden was just a figurehead. The war on terror continues. Taking him out didn’t really change anything as far as the war on terror is concerned and using it as a political attack is a cheap shot.

‘In years to come there is going to be information that will come out that Obama was not the man who made the call. He can say he did and the people who really know what happened are inside the Pentagon, are in the military and the military isn’t allowed to speak out against the commander- in-chief so his secret is safe.’

Second, the decision by Obama is only meaningful as a criterion for evaluating his leadership if some other President would have made a different decision.   If no one could possibly make another decision -- and I would submit that no President, not even Jimmy Carter, would have done differently -- then it's not really a decision at all, and he shouldn't take much credit for it:

Ryan Zinke, a former Commander in the US Navy who spent 23 years as a SEAL and led a SEAL Team 6 assault unit, said: ‘The decision was a no brainer. I applaud him for making it but I would not overly pat myself on the back for making the right call.

‘I think every president would have done the same. He is justified in saying it was his decision but the preparation, the sacrifice - it was a broader team effort.’

Girl of the Day - Leslie Caron

The Regular Guy was up late last night working on a brief, and I had on in the background a 1950s musical that I hadn't ever seen before, Daddy Long Legs, with an older Fred Astaire as a rich bachelor who anonymously sends a young French orphan girl, played by Leslie Caron, to college in the U.S., only to fall in love with her.   These kinds of April-December romances were common in movies of that era -- I'm thinking of the various pairings of a waifish Audrey Hepburn with Gary Cooper (Love in the Afternoon) or Humphrey Bogart (Sabrina) when each was in their mid-50s -- but now they seem a little icky.

Anyway, when Daddy Long Legs came out, Caron was 24 and Astaire was 56.   A little odd, particularly when she's calling him "Daddy" as a nickname.   A great dancer and a great, though unorthodox beauty, Caron also starred, of course, in the greatest of movie musicals, An American in Paris, with (again, older) Gene Kelly.

Here she is in a show-stopper with Astaire:

April is the Cruelest Month... for Albert Pujols

Albert Pujols, the erstwhile Cardinals first-baseman, signed over the offseason with the Los Angeles Angels for a whopping $250 million.   The Cardinals faithful were not pleased.   So there is some schadenfreude in the fact that Prince Albert has gotten off to by far his worst start ever.   Indeed, his month of April, with a .217 BA, O HRs, and only 4 RBIs, is easily his worst month ever.   Consider his worst months before this year:

1. In July 2001, his rookie season, Albert hit .241, with 4 HRs and 12 RBIs.

2.  In May 2002, his sophomore season, Albert hit .272, with 5 HRs and 11 RBIs.

3.  In May 2011, last year, Albert hit .288 with 2 HRs and 13 RBIs.

He has never had a month where he didn't get at least 11 RBIs.   He has never had a month where he didn't hit at least 2 HRs.   He has had only one month where his batting average ended up under .250.   He went whole years, and nearly a whole decade, without having what could even remotely be considered a bad month, only some months (like August 2006, with a .287 BA, 7 HRs and 16 RBIs) that were merely mortal.

What has happened?

Some people will say the weight of his huge contract and the pressure that comes with it.

Some people will say the transition to a new league and new pitchers.

I say:   he got old all of a sudden.   Happens to all of us.  

John Mozeliak, the GM of the Cardinals, is looking like a genius.  But, then, who didn't know that you couldn't spend $250 million over ten years on a 32-41 year old first-baseman?

Girl of the Day - Show Tune Version (Shirley Jones)

Regular Daughter No. 2 and I were singing show tunes over the weekend, including this one, with Gordon MacRae and the great Shirley Jones:

Birthday Today - Sheena!

It's Sheena Easton's birthday today.   She was ubiquitous on MTV in the early 1980s, and it's somewhat alarming to contemplate that she's now 53 (and was born in 1959 less than a month before the Regular Guy).   Here's her biggest hit, which brings back memories, some of them marginally OK, most of them horrific to think of:

Growth and Policy

UPDATE:   It's hard to overestimate just how hard the liberals in the MSM will spin to make sure that Obama is re-elected.   Sometimes it gets humorous:

Hat tip:   Ace of Spades.

***


The U.S. growth rate slowed in 1Q 2012 to 2.2%.   Here's how the New York Times reported it, putting as much liberal-bias spin on it as they could muster and still remain marginally credible:

The economic output of the United States grew at an annual rate of 2.2 percent in the first quarter of the year, easing from the prior quarter’s growth rate of 3 percent but maintaining what many economists have started to call a “sustainable” pace of recovery.

Really?  Let's put that in perspective.   Here is the GDP growth rate in the first quarter of 1984, 1992, 1996, and 2004, the re-election years for Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton and George W. Bush:

8.0% (1984 - Reagan re-elected)

4.4% (1992 - Bush I not re-elected)

2.8% (1996 - Clinton re-elected)

2.7% (2004 - Bush II re-elected)


Reagan was presiding over a real boom after a long and deep recession, wholly attributable to his tax-cutting policies, and he was re-elected in a landslide.   Bush I was coming off a recession and a few quarters of very slow growth (under 2%), so the electorate (with the help of the MSM) didn't register his recovery and credit how robust it would become).   Yet he probably would have won, but for Ross Perot's third-party candidacy.  Clinton's growth rate in 2Q 1996 was over 7%, and he was re-elected against a very week candidate, Bob Dole, by a very significant margin.   Bush II was still in some of the after-glow of 9/11 and ran against a very week candidate, John Kerry, and growth beginning in 2Q 2003 after the Iraq War triumph had been very strong for three quarters, so people had the perception that the economy was moving in the right direction.

I don't think people have a positive perception that the economy is moving in the right direction, and there is no tangible evidence in employment or income statistics suggesting that Obama's economic performance has meant anything good to average Americans.   I think most Americans see slow growth and they tie it to his policies:  pro-government, pro-taxes, anti-business, anti-energy development, pro-union, especially public employee unions, pro-environmental regulations, all of which translates into Obama as the anti-job President.

In short, he's ripe for the picking.

Girl of the Day - Back to Blogging Version

Out of town on work this week, so I didn't get to blog much.   Getting back to it, I think it's good to make sure that I'm providing quality content for interested readers:

Check.

VDH Shoots... and Scores!

NHL playoffs metaphor there... Go Blues!

Victor Davis Hanson had a great article yesterday on NRO.   Here's the money quote:

If our students are burdened with oppressive loans, why do so many university rec centers look like five-star spas? Student cell phones and cars are indistinguishable from those of the faculty.

The underclass suffers more from obesity than malnutrition; our national epidemic is not unaffordable protein, but rather a surfeit of even cheaper sweets.

Flash mobbers target electronics stores for more junk, not bulk food warehouses in order to eat. America’s children do not suffer from lack of access to the Internet, but from wasting hours on video games and less-than-instructional websites. We have too many, not too few, television channels.

The problem is not that government workers are underpaid or scarce, but that so many of them seem to think mind readers, clowns, and prostitutes come with the job.

An average American with an average cell phone has more information at his fingertips than did a Goldman Sachs grandee 20 years ago. Over the last half-century, bizarre new words have entered the American vocabulary — triple-dipping, Botox, liposuction, jet set, COLA (cost of living adjustment), three-day weekend, Medi-something compounds (Medicare, Medicaid, Medi-Cal) — that do not reflect a deprived citizenry. In 1980, a knee or hip replacement was experimental surgery for the 1 percent; now it is a Medicare entitlement.

American poverty is not measured by absolute global standards of available food, shelter, and medical care, or by comparisons with prior generations, but by one American now having less stuff than another.

As America re-examines its military, entitlements, energy sources, and popular culture, it will learn that our “decline” is not due to material shortages, but rather arises from moral confusion over how to master, rather than being mastered by, the vast riches we have created.

Trayvon Redux - What is Racism?

When your kids are little, if you are a responsible parent, which most people are, you teach your children that judging other people by their race or by how they look is bad.   It is wrong to ascribe a particular quality to an individual simply because they are a member of a group.   Thus, it is wrong to assume that all Arab Muslims are terrorists, just as it is wrong to assume that all Jews are avaricious, just as it is wrong to assume that all Chinese are good at math, just as it is wrong to assume that all black Americans are criminals.   That is prejudice, because it is "pre-judging" an individual based on group characteristics.

But who are the racists in the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin affair?   If Zimmerman had been, as the media first suggested, a white person/Southern conservative who stalked a young black boy simply because he was black and murdered him simply because he was black or even who "profiled" him as a criminal simply because he was black, then, yes, that was racism.   He would have "prejudged" Trayvon.

But the stories that have come out since have thrown this narrative into the dustbin.   Zimmerman was not white, he was Hispanic, and now we have learned that he actually comes from a family with black ancestors and grew up in a home with black cousins.   Zimmerman was not a conservative; he was a liberal Democrat with strong Catholic social justice leanings, including doing a lot of volunteering in working for the poor, mentoring young black youths, etc.   In short.... narrative fail.  

So who were the real racists?   Hmmmm.... could it be the mainstream media and the race industry hucksters like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson?   Didn't they "pre-judge" Zimmerman solely because of how he looked?   Didn't they assume that because he was (they thought) white and from the South that he must be a racist murderer?   In abstract terms... didn't they attribute a malevolent quality to an individual based on his supposed membership in a group?   Isn't that the essence of racism?

We're reached an interesting moment in American history.   Liberals are reactionaries in terms of government, refusing to even consider any changes to the way we've operated the welfare state for the past fifty years.   And liberals are now the racists, because they see an incident involving a white man and a black man and they always assume that the black man is innocent and the white man is evil.   Facts be damned; defending the structure of the racialist narrative is all that matters.

Why the NFL Has a Problem

In case you wondered why NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell came down so hard on the New Orleans Saints and their practice of paying "bounties" to players who injured another team's stars, check out this headline:

Girl of the Day - Joan Leslie

I have occasion sometimes to look at World War II history and sometimes come upon a pinup of an actress I hadn't really registered before, at least not as a pinup.   Here's one -- Joan Leslie, whose short career was highlighted by playing good girls in early 1940s films like Sergeant York and Yankee Doodle Dandy, when she was 17 years old.   Given her age at the time, this sort of shot seems a little bit hinky, but what the hell... it was wartime.

Here she is, singing in the 1944 movie Hollywood Canteen:

If I Wanted America to Fail...

This is awesome.   Pass it on.  

Space, the Final Frontier

If by "final" you mean "the last time we ever tried anything great as a country."   Now, our future is Orwellian -- the daily grind of making, taxing, spending, consuming; the slow march to senescence for an aging population; a youth sated and stupefied by toys and virtual reality games.   Here's Charles Krauthammer on the demise of the space shuttle, the rise of Russian and Chinese space programs, and what it all means as symbol:

As the space shuttle Discovery flew three times around Washington, a final salute before landing at Dulles airport for retirement in a museum, thousands on the ground gazed upward with marvel and pride. Yet what they were witnessing, for all its elegance, was a funeral march.

The shuttle was being carried — its pallbearer, a 747 — because it cannot fly, nor will it ever again. It was being sent for interment. Above ground, to be sure. But just as surely embalmed as Lenin in Red Square.

Is there a better symbol of willed American decline? The pity is not Discovery’s retirement — beautiful as it was, the shuttle proved too expensive and risky to operate — but that it died without a successor. The planned follow-on — the Constellation rocket-capsule program to take humans back into orbit and from there to the moon — was suddenly canceled in 2010. And with that, control of manned spaceflight was gratuitously ceded to Russia and China.

Russia went for the cash, doubling its price for carrying an astronaut into orbit to $55.8 million. (Return included. Thank you, Boris.)

China goes for the glory. Having already mastered launch and rendezvous, the Chinese plan to land on the moon by 2025. They understand well the value of symbols. And nothing could better symbolize China overtaking America than its taking our place on the moon, walking over footprints first laid down, then casually abandoned, by us.

Who cares, you say? What is national greatness, scientific prestige or inspiring the young — legacies of NASA — when we are in economic distress? Okay. But if we’re talking jobs and growth, science and technology, R&D and innovation — what President Obama insists are the keys to “an economy built to last” — why on earth cancel an incomparably sophisticated, uniquely American technological enterprise?

I was ten when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.   The last time any human being walked on that nearest "planet" was Apollo 17 in December 1972 -- nearly forty years ago.   Imagine if you had asked any American in the early 1970s where the space program would be in forty years ago... would any of them have said defunct?

It's almost inexpressibly sad.   In the late 1940s the cry of the anti-Communists was "Who Lost China?"  

What I want to know is.... who lost Space?

Birthday Today - Jack Nicholson

Jack Nicholson turns 75 today.   When you look back at his career, he seems oddly like an old-fashioned movie star, in that he has rarely played characters that weren't simply versions of himself.   He's like Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant or Gary Cooper in that way... they simply were themselves on screen.   But, because they had bigger personalities than the rest of us, they became stars.   Back when I was a pretentious youth -- it's unclear to me when that period ended, if it ever did -- I remember watching Five Easy Pieces, one of Nicholson's early great movies.   I can't help thinking that this scene captures the essential Nicholson, and that he never really did much of anything too different after this.

HBO's Campaign Commercials

The new comedy with Julia Louis-Dreyfus on HBO called Veep ostensibly treats the usually absurd job of a Vice-President in a bi-partisan fashion.   At least this is the premise of a review on NRO by Jim Geraghty, so I'll take that on authority.   But is it really so non-partisan?  Consider: this is the same network that offered Game Change a few months ago, a blisteringly critical portrait of Sarah Palin.   Now they give us a comedy series about a ditzy female Vice-President?    Hmmmm....

Remember, a year or more ago -- when these series would have had to be greenlighted for production planning, stars would have had to be contacted and brought under contract, use of locations would have had to be arranged, sets would have had to be designed, etc. -- Sarah Palin was a likely Presidential nominee for the Republicans.   I don't think it's beyond the realm of possibility that HBO decided that political movies and TV shows featuring Palin-like figures (either Palin herself in a docudrama or a parody of Palin in a fictional comedy) would get good ratings.  

I also don't think it's beyond the realm of possibility that HBO consciously planned to make a huge, under-the-table, in-kind contribution to the Obama '12 campaign by presenting shows that inevitably would serve as negative advertising against a GOP ticket headed by Palin.   That's how the MSM works.  

Girl of the Day - Too Busy to Blog Edition

The Regular Guy has been too busy to blog this week, so it's a good thing that not much is happening in the election -- other than debates about who ate whose dog.   Meanwhile, as Mark Steyn would say, the twin icebergs of insolvency and Islamism loom, and the arrangement of the deck chairs on the Titanic becomes of less and less importance.   So, as we hurtle toward Armageddon,we might as well enjoy ourselves.  Not quite sure who this big girl is, but, man, can she sing:

On Polling

The New York Times and CBS -- no right-wingers, they -- have a new poll out showing that Obama and Romney are tied at 46-46.   A few points to remember on polling going forward:

1.  Always look for polls of "likely" voters.   Republican voters tend to be more settled in life and more affluent, which means they are marginally more likely to vote than Democratic voters (who tend to skew slightly younger and more transient).   So a poll of registered voters will tend to marginally favor the Democratic candidate.   This poll was a poll of 862 registered voters, so I think Romney would have been slightly ahead among likely voters.

2. Always look for the underlying split between Democratic and Republican responses.   If the poll shows that it polled a signifcantly higher number of Democrats than Republicans, that means that they probably are undercounting Republicans, as the division ought to be close to 50-50, with perhaps only a slight advantage to Democrats.  In this poll, they don't provide the underlying data, so you can't tell.... another warning sign.

3. Always remember... undecided voters tend not to vote for the incumbent.   If you're still undecided about Obama after he's been in the public eye for four years and President for three plus years, you're not going to vote for him.  Undecided votes break late for the challenger.

4. If you're the President and you can't get more than 50% at this stage, you probably aren't going to win.

This is another way of saying... don't be confused by polls showing Obama marginally ahead or tied.   They know they are in trouble, and they are going to be desperate throughout the summer... expect talk about race and the "war on women" and the "Buffett rule" and the 1% to increase.   I'd also expect some "planned chaos" over the summer, including demonstrations that "spontaneously" get out of control and turn semi-violent.  

Girl of the Day - Maria Bello

Maria Bello has made a career playing tough gals in gritty noir dramas, including Payback, A History of Violence (an underrated crime thriller directed by David Cronenberg for which she got nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress) and the recent TV show, Prime Suspect (where she Americanizes the character played in England by Helen Mirren).   She turns 45 today.

Peripheral Scandals and the Central Problem of Big Government

There are a score of scandals that have percolated around the periphery of the Obama Administration.   The two biggest, of course, are under the umbrella of Solyndra and the "pay-for-play" aspect of the administration funnelling "loans" and "grants" to green energy companies that just happened to have connections to large Obama donors; and Fast and Furious and the scandal of trying to run guns to Mexican drug cartels as a way of creating a propaganda opportunity to argue for more gun control, with the resulting death of at least one American agent and dozens, if not hundreds, of Mexicans.  

Now, two more scandals are getting a lot of press.   The first involves a million-dollar party the General Services Administration threw for some of its employees in Las Vegas.   The pure waste is shocking, particularly when liberals argue for more and more taxes to fund more and more government "programs."  

The second involves a sex scandal among Secret Service agents serving the President in Cartagena, Colombia in advance of his trip there this week.    Again, the image of men on the taxpayers' dime seeking prostitutes is shocking.

Should such scandals tar the President?   Can a President really be held responsible for the actions of men and women at the periphery of his government?

No and Yes.

No... the President is presiding over a federal government with several million employees, thousands of offices, thousands of functions.   He can't be expected to know about or be responsible for the conduct of all of them.   To imagine that he could be is ridiculous.

On the other hand, this particular President is openly the President of Big Government.   And the problem with Big Government is that it's.... well, big.  

When you have an absolute incapacity to monitor the behavior of your employees because of the sheer size of the organization, there is an argument to be made that the organization is simply too big.  

I think that's the lesson to be learned from these peripheral scandals.  

Let's Call the Whole Thing Off

Great Britain has been America's staunchest ally for, what, a hundred and fifty years?   They have certainly been our staunchest ally in the War on Terrorism.   British soldiers have fought and died in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

So, does it matter that the President, in speaking at a summit in Colombia this week supposedly dealing with issues affecting South America, spoke of the "Maldives Islands"?   Well, yes, in two ways.

First, dummy, the Maldives Islands are in the Indian Ocean, on the other side of the world.   Here they are, Mr. President, in case you needed a map:

What he meant to say, of course, was the Malvinas Islands, which are off the coast of Argentina, and which, of course, were in dispute in the Falklands War in the early 1980s.    Here they are:

But, here's the rub... the Brits don't call the Malvinas by that name.   That's what the Argentines call it.   The Brits call them the "Falklands.   And they have a right to, because the islands are claimed by (and have long been occupied by) British citizens.

So when Obama called them the Maldives, it was a double gaffe.  First, because he got the name wrong.   (Can you imagine if Bush... oh, hell, aren't you tired of calling attention to the double standard?)  

And, second, because he needlessly insulted our best ally.

But, then, needlessly insulting allies (Great Britain, Israel, Poland, etc.) is apparently what this President does best.