Girls of the Day - All Brits, All the Time! (Helen Mirren, Kate Beckinsale)

Helen Mirren turns 66 today, Kate Beckinsale, 39.   We just last night watched Beckinsale in the movie version of Emma that came out a few years back (better than the Gwneth Paltrow version).   Two classy British gals.   But, for the important question:  who's hotter, a young Mirren, or Beckinsale?   My vote:  Mirren, hands down.

Girl of the Day - Laura Fraser of Breaking Bad

Not sure how big a character she'll be, but the nervous would-be mass murderer/loving mother Lydia, played by Laura Fraser, made a big splash in this week's episode of Breaking Bad.    I have a hard time seeing how the character survives, but we'll see.   "Mike" (Jonathan Banks) almost whacked her, then decided not to.

The Future is Now

Newsweek is apparently going to a digital-only publication.   We are reaching a tipping point where modes of getting information or entertainment of the past -- hard copy books, newspapers, magazines, TV news, broadcast television in general, in-theater movies -- are going to pass away like the dodo bird.   Within twenty years (maybe sooner), no one will even think of buying a hard copy of a book, a newspaper or a magazine, or watch a TV show at a specified time the broadcast network says it's "on," or go to a movie theater where, among other things, you have to be part of a crowd of people you don't know who might, oh, be carrying weapons.   Instead you will read and view everything on a handheld reading device/computer/phone, which in turn will interface with built-in wall screens in every room of your house wirelessly.

Newsweek is a lefty rag that was losing circulation because of its idiotic editorial policies anyway.   But that's not the only reason why it's dying.   Even if it were the best buggy whip magazine in the world, it's still rapidly becoming obsolete.

Recall to Nowhere

Wisconsin was the epicenter of national politics in early June when Democrats tried to recall Governor Scott Walker (and failed), and tried to recall State Senator John Lehman (and succeeded, flipping the Senate to a 17-16 Democratic majority).   Well, Democratic State Senator Tim Cullen has now resigned from the Democratic caucus, meaning that the Senate is back to being a 16-16 tie.

Why did we go through all that recall business?   Remind me.   

File This Under "Why Fewer and Fewer People Watch Network News"

By now you have heard of the epic failure of ABC News correspondent Brian Ross in reporting that a Jim Holmes living in Aurora, CO was a member of the Colorado Tea Party, only to recant hours later upon finding that that Jim Holmes was a fifty-something law-abiding citizen, while the perpetrator was a 24 year-old grad student.   Gabriel Malor provides useful context of the series of failed attempts by the MSM to pin violent acts on the Tea Party or conservative Republicans:

* September 2009: The discovery of hanged census-taker Bill Sparkman in rural Kentucky fueled media speculation that he’d been killed by anti-government Tea Partiers. In fact, he’d killed himself and staged his corpse to look like a homicide so his family could collect on life insurance.
* February 2010: Joe Stack flew his small plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas. The media immediately suggested that the anti-tax rhetoric of the Tea Party led to the attack. In fact, Stack’s suicide note quoted the Communist Manifesto.
* That same month, a professor at the University of Alabama, Amy Bishop, shot and killed three colleagues at a faculty meeting. The gun-loving Tea Party came under immediate suspicion. But Bishop was a lifelong Democrat and Obama donor.
* March 2010: John Patrick Bedell shot two Pentagon security officers at close range. The media went wild with speculation that a right-wing extremist had reached the end of his rope. Bedell turned out to be a registered Democrat and 9/11 Truther.
* May 2010: New York authorities disarmed a massive car bomb in Times Square. Mayor Bloomberg immediately speculated that the bomber was someone upset about the president’s new health-care law. The media trumpeted the idea that crazed conservatives had (again, they implied) turned to violence. In fact, the perp was Faisal Shahzad, an Islamic extremist.
* August 2010: Amidst the debate over the Ground Zero Mosque, Michael Enright stabbed a Muslim cab driver in the neck. It was immediately dubbed an “anti-Muslim stabbing,” with “rising Islamophobia” on the political right to blame. In fact, Enright, a left-leaning art student, had worked with a firm that produced a pro-mosque statement.
* September 2010: James Lee, 43, took three hostages at the Discovery Channel’s headquarters in Maryland. The media speculation was unstoppable: Lee was surely a “climate-change denier” who’d resorted to violence. Oops: He was an environmentalist who viewed humans as parasites on the Earth.
* January 2011: Jared Lee Loughner went on a rampage in Tucson, Ariz. Again the media knew just who to blame: the Tea Party and its extremist rhetoric. In fact, Loughner was mostly apolitical — a conspiracy theorist who, to date, has been judged too mentally incompetent to stand trial.

For me, I don't really consider these examples to be conscious propaganda.   Perhaps some of them are the result of the media's suggestiblity -- liberal Democrats might effectively plant a story of right-wing extremism as the possible source of violence, and then the MSM will run with it.   But I think in most cases the real cause of these serial mistakes by the MSM is simply that reporters like Brian Ross aren't very smart.   These are people who have lived their lives within a very small cocoon of the news/entertainment industry, and who for the most part now live within a very small cocoon of liberal elite New York/Los Angeles/Washington.   They have almost no experience being friends with normal Americans who run small businesses, go hunting and fishing, own firearms, go to 4th of July parades, have family members in the military, and who struggle to do things like send their kids to parochial school when the government is taking 30-40% of everything they earn.   They are strangers, not fellow Americans.   And so they are easily demonized.   Thus, when a demonic act occurs, it's easy to blame it on people who are already demons in your world-view.  

On the other hand, why should people like me -- roughly the half of America who are conservative -- watch a news program delivered by people who aren't very smart who hate me?   Doesn't really seem like a feasible business model for a TV network. 

Columbine Redux

A young medical school dropout has murdered more than a dozen people at a showing of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado, and some are already trying to make political hay.   ABC, in the most shameful example, went on the air to report that the murderer had a connection to the Colorado Tea Party, only to have to recant minutes later when they learned that the gentleman they identified, though having the same name as the murderer, is a 52 year-old ex-law enforcement Hispanic, not a 24 year-old, as the suspect had already been reported to be.   Too good to check, as they say, so they ran with it, apparently suffering from the liberal elite belief that Tea Party members are psychopathic mass murderers waiting to happen.  

The reality, I'm fairly certain, is that the young man was suffering from manic depression/schizophrenia, and was simply very sick.   We will shortly find that there was nothing political whatsoever about this tragedy.  

Will that keep the media and the Democrats from exploiting it?   I doubt it.

Girl of the Day - More Elizabeth Bennett

More Jennifer Ehle, that is.   Here, a little bit older, but still just as scrumptious:

Birthday Today - Edgar Degas

Born in 1834.   Not in the upper pantheon of great artists, in my judgment, but, then again, we remember certain images and the style of Degas 150 years later, so he must have been doing something right.

The Port of Los Angeles

Outsourcing?   We used to call that commerce, the never-ending process of entering new markets or seeking out new trade partners or, back in the really old days, "exploration."   Importing and exporting.   Buying low abroad and selling high at home.   Normal, routine, everyday business.   That's what Obama has been demonizing when he lambastes Romney for "oursourcing."

In this context, Kevin Williamson has a terrific note on The Corner:

I spent this morning at the Port of Los Angeles, one of the world’s great industrial sites. If you believe as I do that the division of labor is the foundation of civilization — something without which we are basically very, very clever monkeys — it is indeed a place of wonder, a head-clutchingly complex operation through which vast amounts of goods and vast sums of wealth travel, bringing Americans that to which we have become accustomed, i.e., all the best that the world has to offer....

It is also a place at which one can see a great number of young men and women making a very good living loading, unloading, trucking, and tracking cargo containers marked MAERSK and CHINA SHIPPING. Watching them at work, I could not help but think of President Obama’s recent anti-globalization rhetoric and Harry Reid’s ridiculously Sinophobic poppycock, and wonder: Why do the Democrats hate Los Angeles? And California? And truck drivers? And crane operators? And the logistics industry?

Birthday Today - Rick Ankiel

Maybe the most tragic baseball career ever.   He was going to be the next Sandy Koufax.   Then he blew up in the most spectacular fashion in the 2001 playoffs, throwing, if memory serves, five wild pitches in a single inning.   Then he fought his way back to the bigs as an outfielder and power hitter.   In 2008 for the Cards he hit 25 homeruns and looked like he would become a star.   Then, for a time, he couldn't hit the curve ball.   He's managed to hang on, but is a part-timer only, now with the Washington Nationals.   He turns 33 today.   When he was 20, he struck out 194 batters in 175 innings, going 11-7.   It looked like he was going to the Hall of Fame. 

Again, tragic.   Rick Ankiel is also probably my favorite player ever.   Sports are funny that way.

Girl of the Day - Jennifer Ehle

The Regular Wife and I have been watching classic BBC series with the Regular Son.   We've been through Brideshead Revisited and I, Claudius, and now we're on to Pride and Prejudice.   So, inevitably, the wondrous Jennifer Ehle:

Sometimes You Miss It When the Something That Is Happening Is That Nothing Is Happening

It has occurred to me that there is an inherent contradiction in the Obama campaign in terms of its attitude toward "defining" Romney.   On the one hand, one of the major motivating psychological/emotional forces behind support for Obama in 2008 was that he was the "cool"/"hip" candidate, which only works if you paint your opponent as a "square."   That worked with John McCain -- no one would dare paint the war hero as a corrupted or corruptible sort, but you could paint him as a square.   And, on a certain level, that is how they've tried to play it with Romney.   He's a square -- you know, white-bread, Mormon, married to the same girl for forty-plus years, five white-bread sons, never a hint of sexual scandal, doesn't even drink.   You know:  square.   To be contrasted with the cool, hip, with-it Obama.

But they also recently have been trying to paint Romney, the square, the Dudley Do-Right, as somehow corrupt.   He won't reveal his tax returns.   What's he hiding?   The breathless innuendo -- is he a felon?  Why did he still sign  Bain SEC filings after he said he left to go run the Olympics?  Whispers, whispers, whispers.

The problem is that those two frames for the narrative don't really go together, do they?   Romney can't be both a square and a scheming wheeler-dealer.  

And, of course, neither narrative works very well anymore, because they both imply contrasts that either no longer obtain, or never did.   Romney the square is only contrasting if we assume that the mass of Americans still thinks Obama is hip or cool or exciting.   But they don't... he's an emperor-has-no-clothes bore.   You can practically see the eye-rolling when he launches into his canned teleprompter speeches.   People were once fainting.   Now they are looking at their watches and wondering if they can make it home in time for "Breaking Bad."

And the contrast of Romney as corrupt or dishonest really doesn't work unless Obama has a reputation for incorruptibility and probity.   But the mass of Americans don't think Obama is as clean as Caesar's wife; they think he's a typical Chicago pol.   They don't think he's honest; they know he's a liar.

So there are reasons beyond simply being false that the Romney as corrupt or dishonest narrative the Obama campaign has tried in the past few weeks won't work.   People may wonder about Bain.   They may wonder about why Romney won't release his tax returns.   But those things won't make them want to vote for Obama, because they won't make anyone conclude, against all evidence, that Obama is honest and selfless and good and true.

Anyway, the something that is happening in the title of this post is that nothing is happening in the polls.   The latest CBS/New York Times poll shows that, after weeks of pounding Romney with negative ads and hounding him about Bain and his tax returns, Romney holds a 47-46 lead in a poll of registered voters with a Democratic sampling of plus-6 (meaning that Romney is really way out ahead among likely voters if the 2010 even partisan split holds).   All that effort, and it hasn't moved anyone an inch.  

Girl of the Day - Elizabeth McGovern

The American-born wife of an English lord in Downton Abbey, Elizabeth McGovern was an ingenue in Robert Redford's first movie, the Academy Award-winning Ordinary People, playing Timothy Hutton's girlfriend.   Next she was in Ragtime, for which she was a Best Supporting Actress nominee, and one of my favorites, Racing With the Moon (although I haven't seen it now going on 30 years).  It seemed as though she disappeared for awhile, but she was mostly appearing on British TV because she had married a British movie director and settled in the UK.   But she was right in the Regular Guy's wheelhouse when I was just out of college and going to a lot of movies.   She turns 51 today.

Romney and Geithner

Just a thought on the Romney tax returns kerfuffle.   Isn't the Secretary of the Treasury and, hence, the supervisor of the IRS, Timothy Geithner, who famously failed to pay self-employment taxes in the early 2000s while he was working at the International Monetary Fund? 

Meanwhile, what could we possibly learn from Romney's tax returns?   Two things that we would undoubtedly learn is that he pays more in taxes each year and gives more to charity each year than most people earn in their lifetimes.  

But he's right not to release them -- Obama would just demogogue that there were years where he paid very small percentages (undoubtedly for tax year 2008 and 2009 because of capital losses, and perhaps other years because of carry-forward treatment of losses from the market crash of 2000-2002).  And the media would spend the next month picking them apart, exhibiting a curiosity they have never had for the details of Obama's past.

Finally, again, it bears repeating that a man like Romney has extraordinarily complex personal finances, administered through a blind trust which undoubtedly has a corporate trustee and a silk-stocking law firm and a Big Four accounting firm.   The notion that a man at that level would have anything untoward in his tax returns after all that vetting is ludicrous.

Propaganda Versus Fact in Campaign '12

 The level of propaganda that Hollywood is contributing to the Obama campaign this time around is astonishing.   Frankly, it walks the line between protected free speech and valuable under-the-table in-kind contributions to the Obama campaign by what amount to unregistered PACs.   Consider the TV shows that have made it to your home screens:

• Game Change - the unflattering HBO movie about the McCain-Palin campaign.
• Veep - the unflattering HBO series about a ditzy female Vice-President.

Both would have had to have been "green-lit" at a time when Sarah Palin was a potential Presidential nominee on the Republican side.   Accidental?   I don't think so.

Then consider these:

• Political Animals - the flattering ABC drama starring Sigourney Weaver as a female democratic Secretary of State who used to be married to a womanizing President (sound familiar?).
• The Obama Effect - a new (and apparently dreadful) movie about how Obama's 2008 election changed one black man's life for the better.

Again, Hollywood is using fiction to present the Democratic candidates and regimes as noble.

On the other hand, there is Paul Kengor's new book, The Communist, about Obama's mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, a card-carrying communist/Stalinist journalist.   Or David Maraniss' new biography of Obama that pointed out so many falsehoods in his memoirs.   Or Stanley Kurtz' book about Obama, Radical-in-Chief, detailing his many connections to the ultra-left in Chicago.  

Do you think Kengor will even get a review in the New York Times?   Or an interview on Today?  

The mainstream media is serving the same function Goebbels served -- presenting noble falsehoods at the service of the regime, while suppressing embarrassing facts about that same regime.

Birthday Today - Jimmy Cagney

Born in 1899, Cagney, along with a very few others like Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy, Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, John Wayne -- a real pantheon -- were the heroes that dominated my youth in the 1960s through re-runs of their black-and-white movies.   For some reason -- OK, the obvious reason -- today's stars like Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Tobey McGuire, Leo DiCaprio just don't have the same weight.   Doesn't it seem to say a lot that it's hard to imagine two or three of those 1930s and 1940s stars being able to kick the crap out of a dozen or so of today's nancy boys?   Doesn't Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible character look like a little boy next to Cagney's gangsters?

Anyway, Cagney, of course, was also a wildly talented tap dancer, here in a routine with the great Bob Hope:

Girl of the Day - More Daniela Hantuchova!

Five foot-eleven world-class tennis player blonde and with an accent?   That works!

Or:  it would work, if I weren't 53, short, balding, squatty, and married (very happily) to the Regular Wife.  :)  

Do You Want to Talk "Fairness"?

Harvard professor Greg Mankiw does!   Here's his calculation of the net tax burden by quintile of the population, meaning the percentage of one's income one pays in taxes net of transfer payments one receives.   In other words (his):

Because transfer payments are, in effect, the opposite of taxes, it makes sense to look not just at taxes paid, but at taxes paid minus transfers received.  For 2009, the most recent year available, here are taxes less transfers as a percentage of market income (income that households earned from their work and savings):

Bottom quintile: -301 percent
Second quintile: -42 percent
Middle quintile: -5 percent
Fourth quintile: 10 percent
Highest quintile: 22 percent

Top one percent: 28 percent

The negative 301 percent means that a typical family in the bottom quintile receives about $3 in transfer payments for every dollar earned.

This is where we are in America ca. 2012 -- in an undeclared war of moochers versus makers.

Takers.

Versus.

Givers.

How exactly is a democracy founded on the concept of limited government to survive if more than half the people are net takers from the government trough?

Live by the Liberal Nanny State, Die by the Liberal Nanny State

Liberals Bruce Springsteen and Paul McCartney are upset that their concert was shut down by government lackeys enforcing a curfew ordinance.   Oh, boo-hoo.   When government regulations affect a small shop owner or a small manufacturing company (or big companies for that matter), do you think liberals in the entertainment industry bemoan the intrusiveness of the regulatory state Leviathan?   Liberals only like liberty when it's at the service of the things they think are "cool" -- sex, drugs, rock and roll.   For the rest of us trying to make a living, they don't care at all if government makes it harder.

Sorry, Bruce.   We still love you even if you're a political fool.

"If You've Got a Business -- You Didn't Build That"

The conservative blogosphere is going nuts -- rightly so -- about these comments from President Obama about success in America:

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. 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.


The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.

See, I don't recall a lot of government "help" when my Dad started his business in the late 1960s.   I remember him quitting a good job as a top salesman for a chemical company, paying himself next to nothing (if I remember it correctly, he paid himself to start something like $600/mo.), putting his life savings at risk, borrowing against our house, getting his friends and parents to "invest" in his fledgling enterprise, getting his best friend to come into the business with him, also making next to nothing at first, convincing Mom to go back to work, first as a Special Ed teacher and then as a 5th grade teacher, to support us during those years, having us kids both do without a lot of things and occasionally help out with assembly jobs on the weekends.  

I remember him spending a lot of days and nights away from home traveling on business, oftentimes driving to plating businesses across the Midwest and South because some bath wasn't working properly because when you only have a few customer you have to go the extra mile to keep them.  

I remember summer months when the money was tight and we had a vegetable garden in the backyard -- more zucchini dishes than you could imagine.  

I remember him scraping and re-glazing and priming and painting every window in our old house almost every weekend in the summer (in St. Louis!) up on a ladder, because (I know this in retrospect) it was cheaper than hiring someone and cheaper than replacement windows.   I remember him teaching himself how to fix nearly everything, from the furnace to the air conditioner to the disposal, because there wasn't enough money to hire people to fix your things for you, and why would you if you could do it yourself.  

I also remember him ultimately hiring about twenty or thirty people to work in his small company, paying them good wages, giving them health benefits and a pension plan, and I remember that very few of them ever left working for my Dad, because the lives they had working for him were better than the lives they would have had otherwise.

I remember his funeral when people he had met in business, hundreds of them, paid their respects, and younger men whom I had never met told me that he had been their wise counselor when they were starting out.

But, try as I might, I just can't remember much by way of government "help."   Friends, sure; family, of course; his wife, my mom, always.   But not much from the government.

Oh, except for paperwork and taxes and hassling from the EPA because he was in a chemical business.

Obama's father was an academic; his mother was an academic; his life up to his political career was spent in academia or else in non-profit activity.   I doubt he's ever had a close family member who started a small business.  

He.   Knows.   Nothing.  

Seriously, I don't think anything this jerk has ever said has made me as mad as this.

It Can't Happen Here

Sinclar Lewis, the author of Babbitt and Main Street and other classics of American literature, wrote a bad but timely novel in the 1930s about the dangers of a fascist dictatorship taking hold in America called It Can't Happen Here.   The novel follows Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, a charismatic and power-hungry politician, who is elected President of the United States on a populist platform, promising to restore the country to prosperity and greatness, and promising each citizen $5,000 a year.   Once in power, however, he becomes a dictator: he outlaws dissent, puts his political enemies in concentration camps, and creates a paramilitary force called the Minute Men who terrorize citizens.

Meanwhile, the Regular Son and Regular Wife and I have just finished watching the great old BBC series I, Claudius, about the tyrannical reigns of the series of Roman emperors from Augustus through Nero (including Caligula).   My takeaway:  the notion that deception, scheming, lying and even murder "can't happen here" in America is wishful thinking, human nature being what it is, and power corrupting the way power corrupts.  It has always been thus, going back 2,000 years and more.  

Here's my nightmare scenario then.   Obama is re-elected after running a mercilessly negative campaign in which he demonizes "the rich" and, by implication, much of white America.   He pushes us off the tax cliff on January 1, 2013, and, combined with defaults in the Eurozone, the oncoming debacle of Obamacare, and a recession in China, we fall into Depression Era conditions.   Given fifty years of victimology in America, a 15% unemployment rate is the trigger for riots and racial scapegoating -- there will be black-on-white murders and there will be white-on-black murders, and no one will remember who was retaliating against whom.   Meanwhile the real "rich" will begin moving assets offshore and the middle class will descend into a quiet anarchy, including massive tax avoidance (more massive than now) and gun purchases.   At some point Obama will declare a national emergency and begin ruling through fiat and executive order (even more so than he does now).   Imagine, for instance, an executive order in which Obama, in order to maintain funding for social programs at a time of high unemployment and low revenues (in part because of tax avoidance, in part because of a continuing horrible economy), declares that the federal government will confiscate 50% of all 401k assets, and 100% of all such assets over $1 million dollars, demogoguing this massive theft as "fairness" in taxing only the "rich."   Or imagine an executive order where Obama, rather than outlawing gun purchases (illegal under the Second Amendment), places a 10,000 percent sales tax on gun sales (legal under the now expansive, post-Roberts taxing power), effectively making legal gun purchases impossibly expensive for most people.   Or imagine a scenario where he declares by executive order, not just tha the won't prosecute illegal aliens, but that henceforth all illegal aliens are American citizens with full voting rights, demogoging this naked power grab as "fairness" and "civil rights," and labeling all who disagree as "racists."

It can't happen here?   I hope not.   And I still think this is an unlikely scenario.  But if we don't beat Obama in 2012, it becomes more likely.

Bain and Lawyers

Here is how cynical the Obama campaign is in attacking Romney as a potential "felon" for having signed his name to SEC filings for Bain Capital after he had left active management of the firm in 1999 to run the Salt Lake City Olympics.   Consider:

1. The highest levels of any Presidential campaign in the modern era is populated by a high percentage of talented lawyers.

2. These lawyers are inevitably drawn from the top-tier, silk-stocking law firms of Washington and New York.  

3. Such law firms derive a disproportionate share of their income from servicing corporate clients, and especially publicly-traded corporations that routinely report to the SEC.

4. Ergo, the lawyers in the Obama campaign know as a fact that before any significant corporation -- and Bain Capital would qualify -- makes a filing with the SEC, that filing is vetted down to the comma by highly-trained and capable corporate lawyers whose job it is to make sure that the company, including all of the company's signatories, are complying with federal securities laws.

5. Ergo, the lawyers in the Obama campaign knew that the SEC filings by Bain to which they are calling attention were documents that had been thoroughly vetted by attorneys -- perhaps some in their own firms.

6. Ergo, the lawyers in the Obama campaign know that the Bain attack on Romney is a cynical lie.   They also know that there is no merit whatsoever in the insinuation that Romney could or would ever be charged criminally for signing routine SEC filings more than a decade ago.   But they are going ahead with it anyway, because they don't have anything else to run on.

And we wonder why people hate lawyers.

Birthday Today - Sir Joshua Reynolds

The great British portrait painter of the 1700s, often of military heroes of the Empire.   Here is his Lord Keppel: 

Girls of the Day - Hard to Beat (Barbara Stanwyck and Ginger Rogers)

Hard to beat the actresses who were born today for Girls of the Day:  Barbara Stanwyck (1907) and Ginger Rogers (1911).  





They don't make them that way anymore.

Logic 101: Bain v. Fast and Furious

President Obama recently said in an interview that Romney, as chief executive, has to take responsibility for what occurred at Bain on his watch:

SCOTT THUMAN: What about Bain Capital? It’s a big issue for the past 24 hours right now. Mitt Romney’s campaign says he left in ’99, yours says it’s 2000, there’s a significant difference, is he being dishonest with the American public?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, here’s what I know, we were just talking about responsibility and as president of the United States, it’s pretty clear to me that I’m responsible for folks who are working in the federal government and you know, Harry Truman said the buck stops with you.

Now, my understanding is that Mr. Romney attested to the SEC, multiple times, that he was the chairman, CEO and president of Bain Capital and I think most Americans figure if you are the chairman, CEO and president of a company that you are responsible for what that company does.

Ultimately Mr. Romney, I think, is going to have to answer those questions, because if he aspires to being president one of the things you learn is, you are ultimately responsible for the conduct of your operations, but again that’s probably a question that he’s going to have to answer and I think that’s a legitimate part of the campaign.

Putting aside the undisputed fact that Romney was on a leave of absence during the period in question when Bain supposedly was "outsourcing" jobs, and that, during that period, he was doing a good thing -- saving the Salt Lake City Olympics -- consider this logic.

1.  If Romney is responsible as a chief executive for outsourcing by his company, Bain.

2.  Then Obama is responsible as a chief executive for gunrunning by his agencies in the Fast and Furious program in which more than 2,000 weapons were "walked" to Mexican drug cartels for reasons that have never been explained.

3. So Romney is responsible for a private business doing something that is legal.

4. While Obama is responsible for the federal government doing something that is illegal.

How exactly does this analogy help Obama? 

Lest We Forget

The Poles hit a home run with this new statue in Gdansk of Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan, commemorating their triumph in ending Soviet domination of Eastern Europe:

Boo-yah!

Everything's Up!

Unemployment?   Up.
People on food stamps?   Up.  
People on disability?   Up?

Now, apparently, President Obama wants more people on welfare, since he's effectively repealed the 1996 welfare reform enacted under President Clinton.


Hey, didn't Al Gore once complain that everything was up that should be down?

It's Coming!

Get ready for Sunday night!

Bain and Kenya and Cocaine

The Obama campaign has tried to make hay out of the question of whether Mitt Romney still was active at Bain Capital during a period when it may have "outsourced jobs," a period, 1999-2002, when Romney was leading the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.   As I've said before, so what?   A private equity firm is in business to make money.   If they chose to move operations overseas for cheaper labor costs or better tax treatment, good for them.  

On the other hand, if Obama wants to start making comparisons... when Romney was running the Olympics, Obama was a hack Illinois state senator (the most corrupt state in the country), voting "present" and a parti-time lecturer at a law school who never published a single law review article.   And, if we really want to talk about whether documents show that Romney was more involved at Bain than he's said, let's recall that documents during the same time frame -- Obama's publisher's bio for him -- also state that Obama was born in Kenya.  

And, of course, if the Obama campaign wants to insinuate that Romney is a "felon" for falsifying information to the SEC (he's not, this charge is ridiculous)... let's remember that Obama's own memoir admits cocaine usage, which is a felony.   There are literally millions of young black men in federal and state prison today because of America's drug laws... what must they think when a preppie Ivy Leaguer like Obama gets to coopt street cred by admitting being a pothead in high school and a coke user in college?

Condi for VP?

The idea of Condoleeza Rice as Romney's pick for Vice-President is being floated as a trial balloon.  

The sad truth is that this makes some sense in a world where we are all programmed to consider diversity as a main criterion for position.   I do not mean to say that Condi Rice is unqualified.   I just mean to say that the reason she would be considered a "game-changing" selection is that she is (a) black and (b) a woman.   Selecting her might innoculate Romney against what would be the inevitable charges of being out of touch as a rich white guy (weirdly, if you're a successful white businessman in a country that has almost always been led by successful white businessmen you're now "out of touch"; you would think it would be the opposite).   It might also be a preemptive move, with the concern that Obama is going to dump Biden and replace him with Hillary Clinton to have the first "no white men need apply" ticket.

On the other hand, here's Peggy Noonan relating a recent story:

When conversation turned to the vice presidential nominee, I said we all know the names of those being considered, spoke of a few, and then said Condoleezza Rice might be a brilliant choice.

Here spontaneous applause burst forth.

Consider: A public figure of obvious and nameable accomplishment whose attainments can't be taken away from her. Washington experience—she wouldn't be learning on the job. Never run for office but no political novice. An academic, but not ethereal or abstract. A woman in a year when Republicans aren't supposed to choose a woman because of what is now called the 2008 experience—so the choice would have a certain boldness. A black woman in a campaign that always threatens to take on a painful racial overlay. A foreign-policy professional acquainted with everyone who's reigned or been rising the past 20 years.

I should add here the look on the faces of the people who were applauding. They looked surprised by their own passion. Actually they looked relieved, like a campaign was going on and big things might happen and maybe it could get kind of . . . exciting.

On the other other hand, here's  Ramesh Ponnoru at NRO arguing against Rice as a pick:

Her selection would seriously offend many social conservatives — possibly enough to depress their turnout. In general, I think claims that conservatives will stay home in this election are overblown: Opposition to President Obama is running pretty hot. A vice-presidential nominee who is “mildly” in favor of letting a million unborn children be killed every year, though, would be one of the few things that would make this scenario plausible. Keep in mind, she would be the first pro-choicer on a Republican ticket since Roe v. Wade — unless she flipped and made herself look like a political hack just as the country was being introduced to her as a candidate.... Romney would be nuts to pick Rice.