Robert Mackey at New York Times’ The Lede has a Friday post entitled “Crisis in Syria Looks Very Different on Satellite Channels Owned by Russia and Iran.”

Well, no kidding.  It’s nice to see NYT catching up with the rest of the infosphere.  But it’s not just in Russian and Iranian media that the crisis in Syria looks different.  It’s basically everywhere outside the United States.  In the US, the news centers on what the Obama administration is doing about the crisis.  Outside the US, the news is about what the nations of Europe are doing, what the Russians are doing, what the Turks are doing, what the Arab League and the OIC are doing, what alarms the Russians about Western policies (see here for a more explicit, populist-level view), how the region is reacting to the crisis, and which nations – Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, the other Persian Gulf nations, Cyprus, Lebanon, Israel – might be sucked into an armed confrontation between Russia and the West in Syria.

In American news coverage, Russia is seen as the spoiler in the UN, the bad-tempered world power that said no to an Arab-drafted peace plan backed by the US.  In other news coverage, Russia is seen as the principal military patron of Bashar al-Assad, with military advisors all over the country and a serious determination to prevent the West from regime-changing Syria out from under Russian influence.

The situation

According to Le Figaro on Tuesday, Russian military “advisors” are “omnipresent” in Syria. Besides reportedly sending S-300 anti-air missile systems to Damascus and agreeing to deliver a new batch of military aircraft, the Russians this week celebrated the reopening of a Cold War-era intelligence listening post on Mount Qassioun, the summit that dominates Damascus from the northwest.  The Russians appear increasingly dug in.

Russian advisors are also laboring to reorganize the Baath Party and arrange talks with members of the Syrian resistance.  They are making their own contacts with Arab and Islamic organizations, seeking to dilute the solidarity of the West with Arab leaders on the Syrian problem.  In a phone discussion with Nicolas Sarkozy this week, Dmitry Medvedev warned France not to use a coalition of the willing to take unilateral action in Syria.  France – not the United States – was the Perm-5 nation that inaugurated the “friends of the Syrian people” effort immediately after the Russian and Chinese vetoes in the UN on 4 February.  (Tunisia has reportedly agreed to host the first gathering of this coalition.)

On Thursday, Russia’s vice-minister of defense, Anatoly Antonov, was quoted as saying on Russian television that Russian military personnel are deployed in various sites around Syria.  (See here as well.)  This is the first high-level confirmation of such an extensive Russian presence, and it is obviously not a random comment.  The Russians are anxious to have it understood that if a Western-Arab coalition fires on Syria, it will hit Russians.  In Antonov’s words, Russia “cannot remain indifferent.”

Russian preparations

Is Russia preparing to actually do anything militarily?  She seems to be preparing to defend herself against the West and its allies, and indeed, to hold parts of the West (and perhaps Japan) at risk.  On Thursday, the Russians announced that a new Voronezh long-range missile-defense radar will go operational near St. Petersburg this month.   Along with the Voronezh radar operating near the Kaliningrad enclave on the Baltic (since November 2011), the radar in St. Petersburg will provide coverage of much of the western and polar-northern approaches to Russia.  This is one is a series of precautions, which also involve troop movements in the Southern Military District (facing the Black Sea and Caucasus), defensive exercises, and patrols.

One such patrol reportedly occurred in the Far East on Wednesday, when a flight of two Tu-95 Bear bombers, two Su-24 Fencer jets (outfitted for reconnaissance), and one A-50 Mainstay AWACS made a close approach to the airspace of northern Japan.  Russian media reported this foray in detail, along with Japan’s reaction, making sure to point out that the incident marked the first time a Russian AWACS had approached Japanese airspace.  The meaning of the AWACS participation would be twofold: first, that the Russians are ready to coordinate defensive responses to Japanese or US strike-fighters, and second, that they have the capability to coordinate air battles on offense.

Looking toward the near future, the Russians are improving the Severomorsk-1 air base near the Northern Fleet headquarters on the Barents Sea.  The project will allow the base to accommodate the Tu-160 Blackjack, Russia’s long-range supersonic jet bomber, and the Tu-95 turboprop bomber.  The move will put extended support facilities  for the bombers in Russia’s remote northwestern periphery, allowing the aircraft, now based in Engels in the interior, to get to a Western- or Northern- (polar) front fight faster, and with less vulnerability over potentially hostile territory (i.e., in Europe).  The new facilities are to be operational in May 2013; they would not be a factor in a near-term dust-up over Syria, but are another indicator of Moscow’s emerging posture toward the West.

The southern border

The Russians are attending to their vulnerable southern border as well, and here, their calculations are as much about ensuring freedom of action for their own initiatives as for securing their flank.  The geography is dictatorial: the Black Sea is the path to and from Syria (and the larger Mediterranean), and to hold the Black Sea, Russia must be able to secure the Caucasus.  That means preventing Georgia from being turned against Russian purposes by an outside power.  Russia is locally strong in the Caspian Sea, on the east side of the Caucasus; it is in the Black Sea and down the center-line, south through the Caucasus, where she needs strengthen her hand.

Reporting from December and January (see links at my earlier post above) indicated that Russia was moving troops into the Southern Military District.  In late January, the Russian defense minister announced the deployment of additional special forces (Spetsnaz) troops to Stavropol and Kislovodsk, which lie in the Caucasus close to the border with Georgia’s breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia (see map).

The Caucasus

The additional troops in the Southern Military District are unlikely to be used in Syria.  Their new location is inconvenient for that; it would be easier to airlift them to Syria from better furnished logistics hubs.  But the location is ideal for intervening quickly to take over Georgia, and thereby prevent the US from using Georgian territory, as well as establishing an uninterrupted line of military communication from Russia to Armenia, where the Russians already have a military outpost.  Controlling the territory down to Armenia would put neighboring Azerbaijan – America’s other budding ally in the Caucasus – between Russian-held territory in the west and Russian forces in the Caspian Sea to the east.

This fight would involve “internal lines of communication” for Russia, and her preparations would not necessarily all be visible from outside the region.  Air support, in particular, can be provided without visible pre-staging.

Meanwhile, Russia wants to hold the high card in the Black Sea to the extent possible, and to that end, has just – at the end of January – begun conducting strategic bomber patrols over the Black Sea.

The weather is immobilizing ships in the Black Sea at the moment, so naval manifestations from Russia are not to be expected.  There has been a noteworthy change in the Med, however.  The Admiral Kuznetsov carrier task force exited the Med at the beginning of February, and the Amur-class floating repair ship PM-56, which had been in Tartus, Syria, returned to homeport in the Black Sea on 31 January.  But a Russian naval tanker, the Ivan Bubnov, remained in the Med when the carrier task force left.

Bubnov was north of Morocco heading east on 1 February; the tanker may well spend little time in Syria, because its presence gives the Russian navy a mobile refueling capability that is not dependent on Syria.  Keeping Bubnov in the Med means the Russians intend to bring warships back as necessary, and be able to operate without a geographic tether.  (For the time being, Bubnov can take on additional fuel in most Mediterranean ports.  If tensions increased, the options could include Morocco, Algeria, Montenegro, and possibly Malta or Cyprus.)

Scope of the worst case?

It is inaccurate to underestimate or dismiss Russia.  She is neither inert nor a non-factor in the Syria crisis – and she doesn’t need to be able to “defeat” the US or NATO in a confrontation, she just has to make the cost of a confrontation too high.  I believe Russia is sending every signal she can think of to discourage the West from mounting a military operation.  The Russians don’t want to have to fight.  In Syria, that will mean breaking the already-fragile conventions holding the regional status quo together.

But they are warning in multiple ways that they will fight if they have to.  If that actually happens, the calculation will be that the NATO nations will not choose to bring their superior force to bear, and break a military defense of Syria that is backed and shielded by Russia.  Before counting Russia out, consider these questions.

1.  Can Russia airlift a tailored, small- to medium-size force to Syria?  Yes.

2.  Can Russia overrun Georgia and force concessions on the use of Georgian territory?  Yes.

3.  Can Russia deliver large weapon systems to Syria by ship?  Yes.

4.  Can Russia hold all shipping at risk in the Black Sea?  Yes.

5.  Can Russia shut down NATO’s northern logistic pipeline into Afghanistan?  Yes.

Russia has all these capabilities.  The relevant questions of power and will would be these:

1.  Would NATO actively prevent Russian warships, or cargo ships escorted by warships, from getting to Syria?  NATO could, but the question is whether we would.

2.  Would NATO oppose Russia directly and with force, if she overran Georgia?  We could.  Would we?

3.  Would NATO threaten to shoot down Russian aircraft airlifting troops and equipment to Syria?  We could.  Would we?

4.  If NATO were faced with losing Russian cooperation on the northern logistics route to Afghanistan, would the NATO nations be prepared to accept that as a cost of enforcing a solution on Russia in Syria?

It is not certain how these questions would be answered, and that’s where Russia’s dilemma lies.  I do not by any means assess that Russia is ready to launch a campaign today.  But I do assess that the West has not taken seriously Russia’s fundamental objection to seeing Syria regime-changed by an Arab coalition whose principal outside patron is not Russia.  The problem for Russia is not so much that Assad has to be replaced as that the Western powers propose to do it in conjunction with the Arab League, an arrangement that diminishes Russia’s influence on the process while opening a door for state-Islamist radicals.  If Syria is to be given a new regime through an Arab partnership, Russia wants to be in the lead.

The strategic issue for Russia here is not merely the narrow concern about having a base in the Med.  It is the approach, ever closer to Russia, of a Western-backed “tectonic shift” – Medvedev’s expression for the Arab Spring – that keeps opening political doors to the Muslim Brotherhood.  If common cause is going to be made with the Muslim Brotherhood, Russia will do it, selectively, and for her own purposes.  She will resist having Muslim Brotherhood-led or -influenced regimes inflicted on her near abroad by the West.

Libya was a different story: always an outlier in numerous ways, and in any case having old and geographically obvious ties to the major economic powers of Europe.  It was not a direct blow to Russia for the West to handle Libya in the peculiar, indeterminate manner chosen by France, the UK, and the US.  But Syria is different.  What happens in Syria will affect everything for 2,000 miles around on three continents.  Russia can’t let Syria be handled as Libya has been.  Neither can Turkey, for that matter, which is why the Turks have been eager to take the Syrian resistance under their wing, and keep coming up with new proposals for talks and coalition building.

Failures of US policy

The bottom line, however, is that the US could handle the whole Syria issue differently.  What is missing in this saga is American leadership, on traditional American principles.  The outcome in Syria is not solely about a revolution against a terrible dictator.  It has repercussions for the power relationships and security arrangements of everyone in the region.  If there is no great power seeking to foster a good outcome for the Syrian people, while also balancing the concerns of other interested parties, then there will be no balance:  there will only be a back-and-forth scramble in which the chief victims are the Syrian people.

The back-and-forth scramble is what we are seeing.  It is not strategically sound to simply back one faction in a situation like this, on the narrow basis of ideology, but that is what the Obama administration has done.  Instead of taking leadership, it has backed a plan Russia has good reason to find inimical and dangerous.

The US should be concerned about the danger as well – but instead, the Obama administration is seeking reconciliation with the Muslim Brotherhood, backing it in Syria (see here as well), and proposing to fund and treat with the terrorist group Hamas.  The Russians are justified in being worried that the US shows little discrimination in our choice of clients and protégés in the region.  Whether the reason is ideological sympathy or ideological naïveté, the US administration’s affinity for the most radical, repressive, Islamo-statist elements in the Islamic world cannot be a basis for strategically responsible uses of power.

The Obama administration showed clearly during the Libya operation that it was committed to not using US power to achieve decisive political outcomes.  Yet US power is the element most badly needed in the situation in Syria.  The feat needed in Syria is one to which only America, up to now, has been suited: acknowledging the regional implications of any Syrian outcome; bringing Russia into a group effort; and yet also bringing an end to the Assad regime on terms favorable for the Syrian people, and acceptable to the Arab world, the West, and Russia.

Perhaps, in the weeks ahead, another nation will find a way to fill that role.  France may shift her focus: from dismissing Russia and setting up a separate coalition, to trying to engage Russia.  Turkey may be able to broker a group effort in which Russia gets a role.

Russian intransigence is marginally more likely to win out; I don’t think France and the UK are really stupid enough to provoke an armed standoff with Russia, even if the US is.  But we are in uncharted territory, and that assessment may be wrong.

It’s not as great as Obama and his supporters have suggested, for the world to be free of US power, exercised with purpose and clarity.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Who did voters prefer in 2008, and who do they prefer now?

Questions? You can find me here.

According to the Mail Online, Stephanie Adams, 40, claims that police drew their guns on her and used unnecessary force after her taxi driver, Eric Darko, claimed she was armed and dangerous. Darko later tipped his hand when he further shared with city investigators his belief that Adams was a vampire.

The incident occurred on May 25 of 2006. Adams hailed Darko’s cab and gave him her home address. When he refused to take her to her destination, the two became embroiled in a dispute over passengers’ rights and called 911. When police arrived on the scene, Darko told them that Adams was armed and had threatened to shoot him. An officer asked her to step out of the cab so that she could be frisked. She refused and was ultimately wrestled to the ground.

It was not until later that police discovered that Darko had fabricated the threat because his true concern—that Adams was a vampire—might fail to get their attention. His hack license was revoked and he was fined $2,700.

Adams’ lawyer, Nina Neumunz, stated in court stated that her client’s tight-fitting clothing should have revealed to police that “there was no place to conceal a weapon” and that she was therefore unarmed.

Police Sergeant John Rajan testified that the maneuver used on Adams was “a controlled drop to the ground,” which is standard procedure when a suspect fails initially to comply with instructions to lie face down.

A doctor testifying on Adams’s behalf claimed the former model suffered injury to her spinal discs resulting in serious back pain.

Adams was featured as the Playboy centerfold in the November 1992 issue.

Related Articles

• Prosecutors come down hard on clerk who laced yogurt samples with semen
• Elementary school teacher arrested for tying up and feeding students his semen
• School accuses 6-year-old of sexual assault during schoolyard game of tag
• Woman dies after being set on fire in apartment building elevator
• Woman crushed to death by elevator in Midtown
• Woman struck by shopping cart thrown from high floor near death
• Police arrest school teacher who made students dress in bras and panties
• Black Philly teens who attacked whites not to be charged with hate crime
• MSM distorts news reporting in order to play race card
• Deranged ex-con opens fire on city bus in Queens; two dead
• Would-be mugger schooled by his victim
• NYC 8-year-old’s dismembered remains found in trash and refrigerator (updated)

Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.

]]> http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2012/02/12/playboy-bunny-who-cabby-thought-was-vampire-sues-nypd-for-abuse/feed/ 11 http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2012/02/12/embalmer-penalized-for-speaking-ill-of-dead-sues-to-get-license-back/ http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2012/02/12/embalmer-penalized-for-speaking-ill-of-dead-sues-to-get-license-back/#comments Sun, 12 Feb 2012 19:00:23 +0000 Howard Portnoy http://hotair.com/greenroom/?p=38813 If a tree is embalmed in the forest… From the Associated Press (h/t James Taranto):

Troy Schoeller admits he could have chosen his words more carefully when he talked to a reporter about bodies he worked on as an embalmer at a funeral home.

Among a litany of graphic remarks Schoeller made was that he hates embalming fat people. He also described the body of a baby as a ‘bearskin rug’ and made other crude observations about the difficulties of his work.

After his comments were published in The Boston Phoenix, the state board that licenses funeral directors and embalmers revoked his license. Now Schoeller is challenging that punishment before the highest court in Massachusetts, arguing the revocation violates his constitutional right to free speech.

Schoeller’s argument turns on what is described as “a vague and overly broad provision of the code of conduct that prohibits funeral directors and embalmers from commenting on the condition of a body entrusted to their care.” His attorney, Jason Benzaken, observes that funeral directors and embalmers routinely talk about their work in trade journals and other publications to inform a curious public.

Curious public? I never thought of myself as an incurious person, but I could have probably lived out the rest of my days happily not knowing the details of Schoeller’s reconstruction of the baby that “looked like a bearskin rug” when it arrived in his hands:

I had to rebuild it in nine hours. I used everything: duct tape, masking tape, tissue builder, wound filler…. I put, like, coat hangers and caulk in there and put him into a little baby outfit…. He looked awesome.

Massachusetts Assistant Attorney General Sookyoung Shin also appears to be of a mind that Schoeller’s true confessions provide more information than most consumers of his services probably need. “Sensitivity, dignity, respect are at the very heart of this profession,” the AG said before the Supreme Judicial Court last month, adding:

If his comments are OK, then any funeral director or embalmer in the state would have license to go out and describe the types of bodies that he finds nasty or that he finds amusing.

Ultimately, I disagree with the state’s imprimatur on the licensing board’s decision to revoke Schoeller’s license. So evidently does Lisa Carlson, executive director of the Funeral Ethics Organization, who says that naming names of deceased “clients” is a code violation but that “just generally talking about fat people” is “just poor taste.”

The AP concludes by noting that the Supreme Judicial Court is expected to rule on the case within three months.

Related Articles

• NYC mom sues city for $900 trillion for taking custody of her children
• Woman sues dead teen whose severed body parts struck her
• Brooklyn mother abandons daughters, 3 and 5, on sidewalk, drives off (Update)
• Most ridiculous lawsuits of 2011
• Ohio prison system bans pork in response to lawsuit by Muslim death row inmate
• Obese man suing White Castle because booths are ‘too small’
• Delta Airlines accused of enforcing Sharia law against Jewish passengers
• Michigan woman faces jail time for planting vegetable garden in front yard
• Michigan inmate sues state over “no-porn” policy
• Michigan State Police download cell phone data during routine traffic stop
• Transgender screener wins sex discrimination lawsuit against TSA
• White House suspends First Amendment rights in coverage of oil spill damage

Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.

]]> http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2012/02/12/embalmer-penalized-for-speaking-ill-of-dead-sues-to-get-license-back/feed/ 5 http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2012/02/12/can-obama-get-his-groove-back-and-recapture-the-youth-vote/ http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2012/02/12/can-obama-get-his-groove-back-and-recapture-the-youth-vote/#comments Sun, 12 Feb 2012 17:46:56 +0000 Howard Portnoy http://hotair.com/greenroom/?p=38798 “The Obama cultural phenomenon four years ago lit up the youth vote like no campaign before,” writes Jennifer Epstein at Politico. ”His team,” she continues, “is looking to revive the cool appeal—and reignite the young voters who’ve strayed.”

The mere need to ask the question of whether the one-time Hope and Change candidate can rekindle the youth vote hints at how far his star has fallen. A Harvard IOP Youth Voter Survey from last December quantifies the damage:

President Obama’s job performance rating among America’s 18-29 year-olds is currently at the lowest point since IOP polling of the Obama administration began in the fall of 2009. Forty-six percent (46%) of Millennials approve of the job Obama is doing as president—a decrease of nine percentage points from Feb. 2011 IOP polling (55%).

Public policy analyst Stewart J. Lawrence adds for bad measure that Obama’s approval rating was at 84% in early 2009.

So what are the president’s supporters doing to reawaken the enthusiasm? Writes Epstein:

Last Tuesday’s pre-Fashion Week fundraiser was an early strike at recapturing the magic. Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour and actress Scarlett Johansson cohosted the event at Theory, a trendy clothing store in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, hawking pro-Obama T-shirts, scarves and tote bags designed by Marc Jacobs, Tory Burch and Beyoncé Knowles with a runway show for a well-dressed crowd.

But that seems to be the opposite of the direction in which his team should be heading. Selling overpriced T-shirts to a “well-dressed crowd” is not likely to resonate with Millennials, who believe by a margin of more than 4-1 that the country is headed in the wrong direction. The chief concern of the majority of young voters, moreover, is jobs. (A secondary question Obama’s re-election posse should be asking itself is whether Beyoncé is the best liaison with youth voters considering her very uncool decision to lock down an entire floor of a New York hospital following the birth of her daughter in January.)

And then of course there is Obama himself, who has had plenty of uncool moments, such as skipping a hole while golfing to avoid being photographed out on the links one time too many. And who can forget the incredibly dorky moment evidenced here? Or that he throws a baseball like a girl?

But Team Obama has the situation under control. Epstein reports:

The Obama 2008 campaign logo, a trendy graphic design ‘O’ rising over a red-and-white striped field, is back again this year with updates. It’s been modernized with matte colors replacing the glossy and more varied shades of red, white and blue. On BarackObama.com, the 2008 color palette and design has become more sophisticated, with bright blue replaced by navy blue, baby blue and white.

The changes, said Obama 2008 design director of new media Scott Thomas, are meant to allude to the cool while introducing the notion that Obama is now ‘more distinguished and more experienced’ than he was four years ago.

Yep, how can you get any cooler than that?

Related Articles

• Now Showing: Painting of Obama trampling the Constitution
• ‘Today’ show staff swoons over Obama singing at Apollo Theater
• Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s hospital lockdown: snubbing the 99%
• Where’s Weirdo: Obama’s very special photo op
• A golfing Obama skips one hole to avoid being photographed
• Jay Carney’s shifting views on presidential vacations and photo ops
• Remember when Obama was too cool to joke about?

Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.

Older people get most of the benefits, primarily through Social Security and Medicare, but aid for the rest of the population has increased about as quickly through programs for the disabled, the unemployed, veterans and children.

The government safety net was created to keep Americans from abject poverty, but the poorest households no longer receive a majority of government benefits. A secondary mission has gradually become primary: maintaining the middle class from childhood through retirement. The share of benefits flowing to the least affluent households, the bottom fifth, has declined from 54 percent in 1979 to 36 percent in 2007, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis published last year.

And as more middle-class families like the Gulbransons land in the safety net in Chisago and similar communities, anger at the government has increased alongside. Many people say they are angry because the government is wasting money and giving money to people who do not deserve it. But more than that, they say they want to reduce the role of government in their own lives. They are frustrated that they need help, feel guilty for taking it and resent the government for providing it. They say they want less help for themselves; less help in caring for relatives; less assistance when they reach old age.

The NYT never paints wealthy liberals who don’t volunteer extra money to the state as hypocritical and guilty, but that’s no surprise. Moreover, as Tom Maguire notes (and I’m sure he’s not alone), the NYT is continuing the progressive bait-and-switch here: Social Security and Medicare were sold to America as earned benefit programs, not welfare. It’s the “secondary mission” of middle-class vote-buying — and the Boomers heading into retirement — that accounts for most of this story.

The NYT overlooks that the US welfare state contributes to the supposed income inequality problem progressives have been decrying for the past few years. Moreover, compared to other developed countries, the US system is unique only in terms of low upward mobility from the bottom among men (although cross-country comparisons of mobility can be tricky). The left would no doubt argue this means we must have ever-higher taxes and more redistribution, while the right would argue we need lower taxes and less redistribution. However, what seems clear is that the Democrats’ version of the welfare state has been a political boon to Democrats and less beneficial to the poor they claim to champion. Moreover, if the NYT is at least correct that the increase in the safety net is fueling anger at the government, it may be that the political value of the welfare state to Democrats is diminishing as well.

P.S. – Mitt Romney needs to learn these concerns are why conservatives recoil when he says he does not care much about the very poor because they have a safety net.

Share

**UPDATED MONDAY MORNING**
THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH PODCAST:
Baldwin/McCullough *LIVE* – Hr 1/Hr 2

Where can you find the radio station nearest you to hear Baldwin/McCullough? Simple enough… Click here! Where can you go to see it on television? Check your local listings, or on-screen guide:

And tonight, watch right here:

ON THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH MegaCast:
1. Whitney Houston DEAD at 48. What is the measure of a life well lived? Two very personal WWII vets gone in the past two weeks that had immeasurable impact on KMC’s life can be contrasted by comparison… Plus breaking developments. 800.345.9622.

2. How do you feel about the fact that President Obama tried to force his view of contraception on people of religious convictions. Thoughts: 800.345.9622.

ALSO: We’re BACK! CPAC 2012… we report…!

Are you looking to make a major difference in the success you can experience in business, promotion, marriage, or life? Then you owe it to yourself to discover the secrets of Dani Johnson and her transformational seminar First Steps to Success. These events sell out quickly, and many come away getting promoted, starting businesses, or earning a 6 or 7 figure income for the first time in their lives. Dani Johnson… committed to your TOTAL SUCCESS check out First Steps now!

Baldwin/McCullough Resources:

KMC’s BRAND NEW BOOK is now available:

The Kind of Man Every Man Should Be .
MuscleHead Revolution: Overturning Liberalism with Commonsense Thinking .
The Death and Life of Gabriel Phillips
The Unusual Suspect: My Calling to the new Hardcore Movement of Faith .

“Drain the Jacuzzi!”

“This government isn’t too big to fail, it’s too big to succeed.”

“We don’t want an economy built to last, we want an economy built to grow.”

“This is Obama’s Washington.”

I wonder, however, if one of the points she hammered throughout the speech really registered with her audience.  Her signature line in this speech was “The door is open.”  She meant that political conditions are becoming conducive to a renewed commitment to small government and liberty.  People’s mindsets are changing.  We are not governed by the “rules” of political seasons past; the door is open to choosing our candidates and charting our nation’s future on a different basis.  The door is open to not accepting a continuation of the false compromises of previous decades.

(As I go to press, I see that Tina Korbe picked up on this theme.)

I have referred to those false compromises – “compromises” in which the conservative, small-government side gave up virtually everything – as the “old consensus.”  I see it losing, bit by bit, in this primary season.  People are no longer obediently making their political choices within the parameters defined for them by the professional political class.

This doesn’t mean that the voters have ideal candidates with whom to make their statement against the old consensus.  Santorum and Gingrich both have their drawbacks, as Paul always has.  But a critical mass of voters has recognized that Romney is the old consensus, and they are rejecting it.  The CPAC vote was remarkable for Romney’s 38% — because it wasn’t bigger, because Santorum got 31%, and even Gingrich, in a conclave of the politically connected, got 15%.

Everyone outpolled Ron Paul at CPAC, even though he has regularly won the CPAC vote in the past.  This signals a change in the mindset of politically active conservatives – not merely a new perspective that it’s overwhelmingly important to defeat Obama, but a perspective that the core of the conservative movement is shifting, and we need a serious mainstream candidate because it is a life-or-death matter to be effective in the political process.

That obviously doesn’t mean the CPAC voters think we need a “moderate,” leadership- and media-approved candidate.  If it did, they would have gone for Romney, rather than voting 46% for the mainstream candidates who are not Romney – and who are perceived, in many if not all cases correctly, as less satisfied with and enthusiastically “managerial” about the matter of big government.

But the point to take away is that voter sentiment, as it relates to the meaning of different candidates and the basis of government, is changing.

And that, I think, is about half the reason why Sarah Palin didn’t throw her hat in the ring for this campaign cycle.  Her evaluation of political conditions is remarkably accurate and prescient:  she saw, long before most of the voters did, that the game of expectations itself needed to change, and that only we could do it.

What strategic value was there for Palin in participating in the Cynical Media Slime-fest and All-Out Kick-em-in-the-Nads, mud-slinging, business-as-usual, expectations-on-autopilot primary season?

Six or eight months ago, the sea change in the voters’ sentiments and propensities might have been foreseeable, but it hadn’t happened yet.  Those who think Palin could have won lots of primaries on the basis of pre-primary voter sentiments are wrong, I think.  After all, the business-as-usual approach – Karl Rove tells everyone how bad a candidate is, the media magnify his or her every quirk or mistake, the media and some (not all) of the other candidates pile on with allegations that range from hostile spin to outright falsehood – has so far felled our most conservative candidates.

But in the process, the voters have been changing.  That’s what Palin saw before others did.  Do I think she is counting the days to a brokered convention?  No.  There is no one who could reasonably adopt that as a “plan.”  She won’t run this year; that’s my rational assessment as well as my gut feeling.  (I could of course be wrong, although I think some big conditions will have to change more for that to be the case.)

But if she does run, it will not be because she has changed, but because we have.  There are political conditions in which she could run successfully, and conditions in which she couldn’t.  The latter have constituted our political environment up until the last couple of months.

If the conditions are changing now, I believe that is largely because voters are having to wise up to the flaws in our own thinking by going through this ugly spectacle.  We already knew that the media have no intention of giving our candidates a fair shake, and that many in the GOP leadership want to submarine the small-government conservatives.   What many voters didn’t understand is that if we want to select leaders of character, we have to graduate from high school, and overlook the vicissitudes of “presentation” that sometimes make good people look like buffoons to those who see without humility, mercy, or discrimination.  We have to see with better eyes.  We have to think independently of the jeers embedded in the media narrative.  We have to be wiser citizens, placing in political leadership only the hope that is appropriate to free men and women.

We can’t have a candidate who sounds like Mitt Romney, but will lead the way a small-government conservative would.  That’s not an option.  What we’re doing in this primary season is coming to grips with that reality.  I think Palin knew instinctively that we would have to, before it would make sense for her to jump back into the electoral fray.

But, as I said, I think that’s only about half the explanation.  The other half is that Palin is an evangelical Christian.  She believes God has a plan for her life, and that He gives her a certainty in her spirit about the big choices she has to make.  I suspect she has had a peaceful certainty that joining the campaign as a candidate for 2012 was not something she should do.  If she were to analyze it, she might say that God knows better than any of us how the voters’ concerns and expectations are going to change.

Meanwhile, the door is open.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Obama Retreats on Contraception

My first thought was, “Surely the Journal knows better than this.  Why would they headline this story as if Obama had, in fact, backed off on the mandate?  What are they, USA Today?”

The headline doesn’t reflect reality.

As Ed Morrissey pointed out yesterday, Obama has merely shifted the basis for the mandate.  The insurance companies – I use that term loosely – will be required to provide “free” contraception services to the insured who work for Catholic employers.  This means that the premiums paid by Catholic employers will fund contraception services.  And the overall mandate to purchase the insurance will continue.

I expected better of WSJ.  I expect the editors to recognize the significance of distinctions like this, and refrain from using headlines that bolster a counterfactual narrative.  Obama has not retreated.  He has moved laterally and reset the defenses for the same strategic position.

And in fact, he has done more than that.  I referred above to using the term “insurance companies” loosely, because Obama has just made crystal clear that “insurance” is not what we will be paying for under ObamaCare.  With actual “insurance,” the insured cannot expect to line up for “free” goodies mandated – arbitrarily, and at any time – by the government.  An insurance contract is finite and specific.  The insured pays a premium; the insurer makes defined pay-outs in the case of a contingency.  In most cases, for the average person, the contingency is a major personal setback of some kind:  an auto accident, the house burning down, being diagnosed with cancer.

If the federal government can step in and arbitrarily require a company to provide things for “free” that were previously elective, premium-based services, then it is no longer an insurance company.  We are not buying insurance from it; we are simply participating in a mandatory government program whose features can be changed at any time, regardless of what we or the “insurers” want.  There is no contract.  There are only the one-sided decisions of bureaucrats and future presidents.

This Obama move is the opposite of a retreat.  It’s a decision to reveal the future to us, and to insist on remaining on course for it.

Yet on their news pages (as opposed to the opinion pages), the mainstream media are stuck in the old mode of interpreting political events in a single dimension, as if all other things remain equal, and a rhetorical “retreat” from a president means the same thing it usually has in the past.  We see this in numerous aspects of their coverage.  They keep putting out stories in the same old narrative ruts, as if we have a business-as-usual political situation.  The president’s people say he has changed his mind on the contraception mandate; in the shallowest of political terms, that can be seen as a “retreat”; and no care is taken to frame the overriding reality that Catholic employers will be required to pay for “insurance” programs that distribute contraception to their employees.

That is not a change of heart, it’s a significant broadening of the state’s control, undertaken at the drop of a hat – and we have a huge mainstream media apparatus that simply does not frame what’s going on in realistic terms.  The clear implications of the Obama decision were widely discussed across the conservative blogosphere yesterday, and even on some MSM opinion pages.  But in their news reporting, the MSM characterized what had happened – falsely – as a retreat by the president.

Are they idiots?  Are they all “in the tank” for Obama?  It may feel good to excoriate them in these terms, but I see it differently in the case of at least some of the MSM.  There is no doubt that a significant segment of the MSM has the same peculiar worldview as Obama and his advisors, and takes care to frame everything in the terms of that worldview.  But that doesn’t necessarily explain the behavior of the entire MSM.

Please note:  I am speaking here of how “straight news” is framed in the news pages or broadcasts.  Various opinions may be expressed on the editorial pages, but it matters greatly how the MSM attempt to reflect reality, which is what we all tacitly accept they are doing in “straight news” reporting.  This reporting comes, over time, to write the narratives in our heads about what is going on in the world.  And I have never seen reality so reflexively misinterpreted in the retailing of “news.”

What I perceive is a sort of “capture”: the MSM being stuck in a retrograde narrative about American political conditions that no longer obtains.  We are not in the old political conditions today.  We have not had a federal budget for more than 1,000 days.  That’s extremely abnormal.  The 2010 election was a large-scale repudiation of the sitting president and his policies, but the new Congress is gridlocked, unable to exercise its proper role in the separation of powers.  President Obama, besides presiding over a network of executive agencies larger and more powerful than any previous president had at his disposal, is a deliberate political “divider,” constantly – constantly – making divisive appeals to one constituency and rhetorically “flaming” another.  No president has behaved in anything close to this manner since FDR in the mid-1930s.

This president is not Bill Clinton, or even Jimmy Carter; he is not Lyndon Johnson or JFK.  He and his administration have broken with America’s trademark political mindset of gradualism and respect – however grudging at times – for the people.  So why is the narrative by which his administration’s actions are explained the same one the MSM has used for decades?  Why is this administration being interpreted on the same terms as its predecessors, when its actions and perspectives, in both domestic and foreign policy, are so very different?

I’m not sure I have an answer for that.  But the outcome is consistent.  The longer we go in this presidency, the less relation MSM headlines have to reality.  If you asked a random sample of journalists at WSJ what the practical effect of Obama’s “retreat” on the contraception mandate would be, I’m betting more than 50% of them would get it right.  The Catholics are still stuck with paying for contraception services.  But the misleading headlines march on of their own accord, even at WSJ.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Jonathan Gruber, who also devised former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s statewide health care reforms, is backtracking on an analysis he provided the White House in support of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, informing officials in three states that the price of insurance premiums will dramatically increase under the reforms.

The revelation, as DC writer Myles Miller notes, is in direct contradiction to the president’s claim that premiums under his health reform law would be “lower than they would be otherwise; health care costs overall are going to be lower than they would be otherwise.” The new report also flies in the face of Gruber’s own 2009 projections that the law would “significantly reduce, not increase, non-group premiums.”

Echoing conservative reservations about the effects of the law on the marketplace, Gruber now acknowledges that “even after tax credits some individuals are ‘losers,’ in that they pay more than before [Obama's] reform.”

The chilling effect of ObamaCare on jobs has also been well-documented. A U.S. Chamber of Commerce Small Business Outlook Survey conducted in July of 2011 noted that 33% of business owners identified the health care law as either the greatest or second-greatest obstacle to new hiring that employers faced.

Related Articles

• Obama’s car czar: ‘We never said taxpayers would get auto bailout money back’
• Obama arranging deck chairs on the Titanic: Says ‘EPA regs create jobs’
• Obama’s Agriculture Secretary: Food Stamps create jobs (Video)
• Jay Carney claims unemployment checks create jobs
• Poll: 62% of Americans say Obama’s stimulus created more debt
• CBO: Jobs created or “saved” by stimulus cost U.S. taxpayers $228,055 a pop
• First glimpse of Obama’s big September jobs plan: Repeat the stimulus
• ObamaCare, the great job killer
• Shared sacrifice: Cutting ObamaCare could save $2 trillion

Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.

]]> http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2012/02/11/obamacare-architect-health-insurance-premiums-will-rise-not-fall-under-law-continue-reading-on-examiner-com-obamacare-architect-health-insurance-premiums-will-rise-not-fall-under-law/feed/ 10 http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2012/02/11/rick-santorum-and-the-two-playbooks/ http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2012/02/11/rick-santorum-and-the-two-playbooks/#comments Sat, 11 Feb 2012 17:20:56 +0000 Karl http://hotair.com/greenroom/?p=38773 Rich Santorum surges to a 38-23% national lead over Mitt Romney in the latest PPP poll. Indeed, “Santorum gets to 50% in the Newt free field to 28% for Romney and 15% for Paul.” (Of course, the field is not Newtless… yet.) Per usual, I am inclined to throw cold water on momentary buzz, in this case the excitement over discovering a potential consensus NotRomney.

Most would say that Santorum’s most surprising and impressive win to date was the Colorado caucus. Although weather and Romney’s overconfidence may have been factors in that win, there were likely deeper factors at work there. However, it is not clear those factors would benefit the GOP in a general election.

Seth Masket’s statistical breakdown of the Colorado win confirms a fair amount of the conventional wisdom about Santorum’s victory there, i.e., he won conservatives and his voters were more enthusiastic. But another graph shows another result that is perhaps not unexpected, but telling:

Romney’s caucus vote correlates highly with the 2010 primary vote for U.S. Senate candidate Jane Norton. Norton, you may recall, was the candidate with the solid resume, lots of insider support, and a huge monetary advantage whom the activist base nonetheless didn’t like, and she lost to a Tea Party-backed conservative. Sound familiar?

Indeed it does. Norton lost to Ken Buck, who lost in the general election. That loss is generally attributed to Buck’s comments on social issues like abortion and homosexuality, not to mention what was perceived as a gender-based attack on Norton herself.

Team Obama has pretty openly declared that one of its two playbooks would be to exploit social issues in hopes of winning Western swing states like Colorado and Nevada (where Sharron Angle similarly lost in 2010). Santorum has an expanding library of exploitable quotations on social issues and consistently criticizes the more libertarian factions of the party. In the remaining GOP field, there may be no candidate who more strongly plays into this Democrat strategy.

However, lest you think I am implicitly shilling for Romney by dumping on Santorum, note that Obama’s other playbook (2004 over 2010) is based on defining Romney as an inauthentic plutocrat, in hopes of holding the Rust Belt, including Ohio. The latest Rasmussen poll has Santorum as the better candidate against Obama. The latest Susquehanna poll has Romney and Santorum in a dead heat in Pennsylvania, but Romney as the marginally better candidate against Obama (which may change quickly if Santorum continues to surge). And PPP may well show the same surge in Michigan (although a GOP win there in November still strikes me as a long shot, regardless of candidate).

This is why a growing regional divide among the right — and having a candidate with broad appeal to more than one region, especially in a general election — matters.

This can’t be very good news for the president, who views religion as at best a bully pulpit for social change (as evidenced by his 20-year association with the incendiary Rev. Jeremiah Wright) and at worst as a force with the potential to poison the minds of leaden-eyed, gun-toting “clingers.”

Yeah, I know, on Friday he made an impassioned mini-speech about religious liberty and said that “as a citizen and as a Christian, I cherish this right.” He says lots of things that are politically expedient.

But the firestorm over Contraceptiongate, which raged out of control for a week before the administration attempted half-heartedly to dampen the flames, reveals how tin an ear our president has when it comes to the role of religion in the lives of Americans.

And what of yesterday’s gestures toward conciliation? Ed Morrissey records the reaction of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, pointing out that

the Obama administration never even bothered to contact [the bishops] to discover what their true objections are, and what would satisfy them. The White House simply presumed to know church business better than the bishops and offered an ‘accommodation’ that is anything but.

The Hill quotes Cal Jillson, a professor of political science at Southern Methodist University, as saying that Obama has a blind spot of sorts for these types of situations—that “he doesn’t have a natural feel for the depth of emotion of how some people hold their religious views.”

Writing in the National Post, Canadian radio host Rex Murphy observes:

All in all, the controversy has been an instructive one—as a glimpse into the smooth, untroubled complacencies of the caring and superior secular mind, it is without many parallels.

The question now is whether any of the GOP candidates will capitalize on this issue.

Related Articles

• WH spokeswoman cites ‘98 percenters’ in defense of contraception rule
• CA teacher will lower grade of any student who says ‘God bless you’
• Georgia middle schoolers learn ‘positives’ of Sharia law
• Delta Airlines accused of enforcing Sharia law against Jewish passengers
• DC rally to convert America to Sharia law postponed; threat remains
• Appeals court strikes down individual mandate as unconstitutional
• Shared sacrifice: Cutting ObamaCare could save $2 trillion
• Left unhappy with Obama’s concessions to GOP
• Frustrated Democrats wrest control from White House on national security issue
• How Obama missed an uncommon opportunity by not disinviting Common
• Obama’s former pastor Wright still wrong

Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.

Jake Tapper of ABC News quotes a White House source as saying that this proposal is an “accommodation,” not a “compromise.” (Democratic leaders are still smarting over the president’s last compromise in 2010.)

In an effort to put a happy face on its efforts at appeasement, the Obama campaign sent deputy manager Stephanie Cutter to appear as guest on CNN’s Starting Point—where she promptly skunked the deal by allowing it to be called a “compromise.”

In this video clip of the appearance, host Soledad O’Brien asks, “Is it possible, in fact, to make everyone happy in a compromise?” Cutter replies, “It’s already happening, Soledad.” (When asked later whether “the President [would] say, yeah, what he has done was a mistake, and now he’s backing away from the mistake?” Cutter whiffed again, replying, “This is not abortion, this is birth control.”)

But the most telling part of the interview comes in Cutter’s claim that “98% of Catholic women have taken it. The debate on this is over.”

Mediaite’s Nano di Fino observes that Cutter is likely misquoting a poll that states that 98% of sexually active Catholic women have used birth control in some form.

But take a minute to evaluate Cutter’s calculus. A 2011 study by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, which appeared in the National Catholic Reporter, asserted that “the US Catholic population is currently 77.7 million.” It is fair to assume that roughly half that population is female—that there are some 38.6 million Catholic women living in the U.S.

Even if Cutter’s claim were accurate, her assertion would be tantamount to saying that the religious convictions of 772,000 Americans (2% of 38.6 million) are necessary casualties of ObamaCare. With some finessing that can certainly make a neat bumper sticker.

Related Articles

• Obama: ‘I deserve a second term’
• Occupy Wall Street becomes Burn Down Wall Street
• Obama has made good on his promise
• Appeals court strikes down individual mandate as unconstitutional
• ObamaCare, the great job killer
• Shared sacrifice: Cutting ObamaCare could save $2 trillion
• Left unhappy with Obama’s concessions to GOP
• Extending unemployment: Where is compassion for the out-of-work self-employed?
• Frustrated Democrats wrest control from White House on national security issue

Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.

Nope, the reason it was interesting was the opportunity I had to talk with a number of engaged and interested conservative bloggers and to get their opinions on certain questions I have. I decided I could listen to the speeches anytime, they’re even archived on line, but the opportunity to talk with this collection of distinguished bloggers doesn’t happen often.

I felt the place to find CPAC gold was (and is) in the blogger’s lounge.

I got around to 10 bloggers today and ask a series of questions based on my earlier post about the enthusiasm gap. Citing the PPP poll I essentially asked each if they thought it was real or just perceived.

Most thought that there was definitely an enthusiasm gap, but many of them attributed it to different things. Duane Lester wondered if perhaps “uninspired” would be a better descriptor than “unenthusiastic”. “Can you think of a single one [of the present candidates] that could pump up a Tea Party rally”, he asked? He felt that most voters were just not inspired by the field.

Brian Garst agreed that there was little enthusiasm for the field. Jeff Dunetz feels it’s a function of voters not yet knowing who they want. And Ed Morrissey agreed there was a lack of enthusiasm but felt it was pretty normal for a primary season.

Regardless of the reason, though, all agreed that enthusiasm, at least for now, is down among the GOP. Of course, party primaries are tricky beasts. There are also legions of voters who aren’t even engaged at this point and won’t be until late next year. And there are also a good percentage who are fine with letting others who do choose to vote in the primary pick their candidate.

More interesting to me though was the concern some of them voiced about the field. Again, remember, for the most part I’m talking with conservative activists who are political junkies. So they are definitely plugged in. And many of them aren’t pleased with the choices they’re being given. That best explains the enthusiasm gap to me.

I then asked if any of them had decided on or endorsed any of the current candidates? Surprisingly, of the 9 I talked to 4 1/2 had decided on Santorum. I’ll get to the half in a minute. The rest had not yet made a pick.

The one I’m characterizing as a half is Warner Todd Houston who hasn’t yet officially endorsed but is within a gnat’s eyelash of doing so, and his pick is Santorum.

So why Santorum? Jeff Dunetz posted his endorsement earlier today. He feels Santorum is the only candidate, of the three, who can articulate the Conservative vision. Ed Morrissey has also endorsed Santorum for a variety of reasons to include integrity, presents a clear contrast to Obama, is the most consistent Conservative and has run the most honorable campaign. I asked about the charges of Santorum being a “Big Government Conservative” and got mixed reactions to that with some acknowledging the charge and others not feeling that was really significant.

But surprisingly, at least to me, Santorum was the pick of those who had made one. Not a single person went with Gingrich, Paul or Romney. As Ed said, “Romney doesn’t speak ‘conservative’ very well.” And, well, Newt is Newt.

That brought me to my next question – “So, regardless of who wins the nomination, do you think the GOP faithful will coalesce behind them?” To a person they said yes (with the caveat that “yes” didn’t apply to Ron Paul) however there were some interesting “buts”.

For instance, Warner Todd Houston thought that if the nominee was Romney, the voters would turn out and do their duty but the possibility exists that the activists, such as bloggers, wouldn’t work very hard toward his election. That would mean far fewer posts than had their candidate gotten the nominee and probably less in defense of Romney in push back. In other words they wouldn’t engage at the level they might with a more conservative candidate. And of course that lack of support could hurt in a GOTV effort where the electorate doesn’t see the level of enthusiasm necessary to convince them of the necessity to vote.

Juliette Ochieng also believed that Republican voters would turn out but not enthusiastically, as did Brian Garst. Nice Deb was of the opinion that if Romney was the candidate, the possibility existed that some Conservative voters wouldn’t support him.

Doug Mataconis (the only libertarian in the group of bloggers interviewed – he and I essentially represent the libertarian contingent here) made an important point that I think should be remembered in all this talk about enthusiasm or lack thereof. As much as Republican voters may dislike this or that Republican primary candidate, they dislike Barack Obama even more. And one has to wonder, once the focus is turned on Obama and his record, if that will provide all the incentive necessary to make Republican voters enthusiastic enough for their candidate to win.

Duane Lester thinks it will. He feels that most people are broadly motivated to either seek pleasure or avoid pain. And when November comes around, they’re going to reason that they can avoid the most pain by voting against Barack Obama. It may not be the perfect election for the Republican candidate, and Republican voters would again find themselves voting as much against one candidate as for theirs. But, as mentioned, in this election, that may be motivation enough to carry the day.

I ask each of them to put on the forecasting hats on and tell me whether they think the economy will improve enough to help Obama’s re-election chances.

Most didn’t think it would, although Jeff Dunetz said he hoped the economy would improve, not for Obama’s sake, but for the rest of the country’s sake. The bloggers felt that while there may be some improvement, it probably wouldn’t be enough to give him a boost. However, many of them felt that the media would aid and abet the perception of improvement to a much higher degree than was real. Warner Todd Houston pointed out the recent unemployment numbers as an example, where the media hyped the percentage and the drop in the unemployment number but ignored the number of people who had dropped out of the labor force (1.2 million) which, of course, makes the unemployment percentage suspect.

Peter Ingemi quipped that while there may be some improvement, Obama “can’t repeal the business cycle” no matter how badly he’d like too. And there are other things upcoming that could effect the economy negatively. Taxes, new regulations, increasing gas prices and the sequestration cuts (which I will discuss at length in another post based on the discussion of sequestration as it applies to defense with Rep. McKeon).

All of those could slow down the economy just as it is starting to pick up a little speed. Then there are some possible external events which may have an impact. The unrest in the Middle East, Iran, and the possible collapse in Europe, although Ed Morrissey thinks that a European collapse would actually benefit Obama because he’d have something to blame the economic problems on. Given the propensity of this president to attempt to blame shift, I can’t disagree.

As with any session like this we wandered off in other areas briefly. Probably one of the most interesting remarks came from Juliette Ochieng concerning how we ever elected a president like Barack Obama – “we’ve been culturally ‘softened up’ to support an Obama.”

That struck me as the most succinct description of how this all happened over many years that I’ve heard. We’ve discussed many times how the left redefines words and concepts and stands them on their heads. How academia and government are filled with leftists. How the conversation has shifted from self-reliance and being proud about it to dependence and not being ashamed of it.

And this is what it has brought us:

The Heritage Foundation’s 2012 Index of Dependence on Government shows an alarming trend under the Obama Administration of a level of dependence on our government that has never been seen before. Today, a full 70 percent of the federal government’s budget goes to pay for housing, food, income, student aid, or other assistance, with recipients ranging from college students to retirees to welfare beneficiaries.

Another future post to discuss the Heritage Foundation’s findings in conjunction with Juliette’s premise is in the offing.

But back to the bloggers – finally I asked them who they saw in the future that might be, for lack of a better description, the 21st Century Ronald Reagan. To a person, they all mentioned Marco Rubio, the Senator from Florida. Others were mentioned as well, but Rubio was a consensus pick and usually the first name mentioned. Val Prieto of the great Cuban-American blog “Babalu” said he wanted to see Rubio get a little more seasoning (like being a governor? Please) but that Rubio was someone who could make Conservatives happy. Brian Garst said that Rubio is able to articulate the Conservative vision without all the fiery rhetoric. He makes it positive, non-threatening and desirable. And he did all three during his speech to CPAC today. He also held a session with CPAC bloggers today which you may want to check out.

Anyway, a very enlightening and enjoyable day at CPAC. More of the same tomorrow as I continue to check the temperature of the Conservative world.

~McQ

Twitter: @McQandO

Sheyla Hershey, proud owner of the world’s largest breast implants, insists her 38KKK assets functioned as a second airbag when she lost control of her car last Sunday and plowed into a tree.

Hershey, 32, was on her way home from a Super Bowl party near Houston when she lost control of her Ford Mustang. She told Barcroft Media:

I think my breasts saved my life. The accident was bad and my boobs are sore, but they protected the rest of me.

Unfortunately, they couldn’t protect Hershey, who is a model by profession, from being cited by police for drunk driving and failure to wear a seatbelt. Despite her protestations that she doesn’t drink, she admitted in court to taking drugs for her bipolar disorder, headaches, and backaches. Under Texas law, a driver can be considered impaired if he is taking legal medications.

Hershey, who is obsessed with having grotesquely large boobs, has spent $100,000 on 30 breast enlargements—so far. She has expressed a desire to make her breasts two cup sizes larger despite sustaining a life-threatening infection from one of her surgeries.

NOTE: In compliance with Internet rule 32, I have included photos, which are here. (There is also a video to appease the lechers among you.)

Related Articles

• Woman busted for DUI says big boobs made her fail sobriety test
• Teen grabs wheel of school bus after driver has heart attack, saves the day
• 2-year-old child run over and left for dead in street in southern China (Video)
• NY mom arrested for feeding baby cocaine-laced breast milk
• Good Samaritan struck by NYC train while attempting to rescue another man
• Woman sues dead teen whose severed body parts struck her
• Police sent to 5-year-old’s home to collect overdue library books
• Police charge dead man with attempted murder
• FL cops ticketing drivers who warn others of speed trap (Updated)
• NY news cameraman arrested for filming police chase (Video, Updated)
• Busty model banned

Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.

Rather, that was one of the very reasons for enacting ObamaCare in the first place.

As many of us said back in 2009, the purpose of ObamaCare was never to give health insurance to needy people who couldn’t afford it. First, that category was nearly empty:

• The deserving poor were already covered by Medicaid; and if necessary, its qualification threshold could have been temporarily lowered to allow more people to benefit — say, by expanding availability to those who had recently lost their jobs (hence health insurance) but were not yet living below the Medicaid poverty line.

• The biggest chunk of those who did not have health insurance comprised the rich (who prefer to pay for their health care as necessary, rather than buy insurance), and the young, healthy, and shortsighted, who can afford health care but choose instead to gamble that they won’t get so sick or injured that they need expensive treatment. Making such a choice, even if it turns out to be a big mistake, is part of individual liberty. The proper “solution” is to allow us that liberty, then hold individuals accountable for their own decisions; actions have consequences. (Innocents swept up in those bad decisions, such as children, can be helped separately.)

• Finally, a small percentage of the uninsured could have afforded a cheaper, stripped-down policy, but cannot afford the “Cadillac” health-care plans whose costs are driven up by government mandates and regulations.

  For those unfortunates, the easiest fix — which would have benefitted everyone else as well — was to eliminate all the government meddling the caused the problem in the first place: Requiring health insurance by law to cover a littany of specialized services; policies that make it difficult for insurance companies to offer greater variety in policies, such as a medical savings account coupled with catastrophic care (which encourage more parsimony among patients, as they must pay to refill their MSA if depleted); regulations prohibiting insurance companies from offering policies cross-state and cross-border; overly plaintiff-friendly (and especially lawyer-friendly) medical malpractice laws; and so forth.

Real problems, such as people with pre-existing conditions (the faux “casus belli” for the war against private insurance), could have been handled the same way bad drivers are handled for automobile insurance: Create an “assigned risk” pool among health insurers to spread the cost; allow a reasonable increase in rates for those with such conditions, and have a reasonably short waiting period (e.g., six months) before full coverage occurs; and allow for temporary government assistance for those who truly cannot wait and incur unpayable costs. (This isn’t laissez-faire Capitalism, of course; but it’s a reasonable and inexpensive compromise between liberty and safety net.)

Such reforms would have cost a fraction of the trillion dollars that ObamaCare expropriated from the private sector. In fact, once the lifting of government mandates and the squelching of “jackpot justice” malpractice suits lowered actual health-care costs, insurance reform might have wound up cheaper than the original system it replaced. And in any event, it would have been a move towards greater freedom of choice for employers and individuals.

But the Obamunists had precisely the opposite purpose from the beginning; rather than freedom, their ultimate goal was to put more Americans than ever before under the iron boot-heel of the government. Never was it about health insurance for the poor and uninsured; it was always about the federal government seizing control not only of the health care of individuals but also nationalizing those state and local health programs already in place. ObamaCare was, first and last, a power grab by the federal government at the expense of states, local governments, and individual Americans.

So please, let’s not imitate Captain Renault in Casablanca — shocked, shocked to discover that Barack Obama has violated our First-Amendment right to freedom of religion! In fact, that specific mandate was at the heart of ObamaCare tyranny: a frontal assault on the Catholic church in particular, which is so virulently hated by the gay-activist and feminist wings of the Left.

The only element of this policy that should shock anyone is the unbelievably hamfisted way that Obama decreed it: A politically savvy politician would have patiently held off until after the election, giving himself two years to allow the furor to die down.

Instead, the president once again mistook unanimity among his left-liberal friends for a Progressivist “consensus” among the American people; he lives in a bubble of epistemic closure, talking only to true-blue believers on the left. I formerly gave him the nickname “Lucky Lefty,” because (a) he is left handed, (b) he is left-leaning, and (c) he was extraordinarily lucky. Well he’s still (a) and (b), but not so much (c) anymore, so I can no longer call him that.

Obama’s new nickname is “Bubble Boy,” honoring his world view.

But what’s done is done and cannot be undone; Obama has ripped off the mask, and he can’t put it back into the bottle. We now see ObamaCare in all its naked savagery and unAmericanism. Thank goodness for Obamunist “dumbth!”

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

Obama’s arrogance is a facet of his personal makeup that has always been in the foreground, even on occasions where he has attempted to appear humble. In his prayerful comments to the American people following the tragic shootings in Tucson in January of 2011, he was careful to exclude himself from the critique on polarizing discourse, eschewing his favored first person pronouns for the third:

At a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do, it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.

The advice itself was sound, but it was hard to square with its speaker, who a few months earlier had castigated a major cable news outlet, calling it “destructive to [America's] long-term growth.”

Yet, I must confess, I had a similar reaction to Splice Today blogger Russ Smith’s when I heard Obama tell NBC’s Matt Lauer before the Super Bowl, “I deserve a second term.” Smith writes:

Americans can, and will, decide whether or not that’s true, but the President’s sense of entitlement certainly rivals that what Romney is accused of every day. Had Obama, mindful of political manners, said, ‘I believe I’ve earned a second term, but, you know, Matt, that’s a decision voters will make in November,’ no one could complain. But ‘deserve’? Shucks, I could tell family and colleagues that I ‘deserve’ a best-selling book, say, or better eyesight, a Lotto jackpot or a map leading me to the Fountain of Youth. Such brio would be met by laughter, or scorn, and it’d be, well, deserved.

In his interview with Lauer (the relevant portion of which is captured early in this video clip), the president essays to explain his statement by tossing out a lot of impressive-sounding numbers about job creation. But even assuming all of his boasts are accurate (and there is much to suggest they paint a distorted picture), his hubristic assertion sounds delusional. It flies in the face of his own earlier prediction—made ironically to Matt Lauer prior to the Super Bowl in 2009—that unless he was able to get the economy back on track in three years his presidency would be a “one-term proposition.” In point of fact, the unemployment rate is higher than it was when Obama took office, despite his boast that his 2009 stimulus would prevent the rate from rising above 8.5%.

Obama has forsaken his own principles repeatedly. Despite an executive order early in his presidency to close the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay within a year, the prison remains open after three. Obama’s pledge to his base to “reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals” has been rendered meaningless by targeted assassinations and drone attacks.

He has failed abjectly to bridge the partisan gap that divides the country, if anything driving a deeper wedge between the two major political factions. He has made a mockery of his condemnation of greedy and evil Super Pacs by agreeing out of expediency to take money from them.

It would be fascinating to hear a frank accounting from the president of why, in spite of these and numerous other false starts and errors, he thinks he is entitled to a second term.

Related Articles

• The jobs numbers the Obama administration doesn’t want you to see
• Is Obama to blame for the polarization in country?
• Obama’s P. T. Barnum campaign strategy is working
• Study: Americans’ incomes have fallen more during recovery than during recession
• Obama to stimulate economy through executive power grab
• American Jobs Act will create 1.9 million new jobs (at $235K apiece)
• Poll: Obama approval ratings most polarized ever for presidency at two-year mark
• Obama to Latinos: Help me “punish our enemies” at the ballot box

Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.

The plaintiff, 46-year-old Fausat Ogunbayo, of Staten Island, was forced to surrender her two sons to the city’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) in 2008 after the agency investigated reports that she placed the children at risk by leaving them at home alone for several hours each day. A psychiatric evaluation revealed that Ogunbayo suffers from hallucinations but refused mental health treatment.

According to her lawsuit, which was filed last week in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, Ogunbayo contends that the government “recklessly disregarded” her “right to family integrity” and that she is in fact mentally stable. She further submits that her children, who were 9 and 12 at the time of their removal, suffered undue “emotional and mental distress” as a result.

The city released a statement to the effect that it is “unable to comment on pending litigation” but that “the amount a plaintiff requests in a lawsuit has no bearing on whether the case has any merit and no relation to actual damages if any.”

Yet, it is the dollar amount specified in the suit that has catapulted the story into the headlines. The New York Post, one of the first news outlets to report the suit, quips that if Ogunbayo wins, “she could pay off the US national debt and still have $885 trillion left.”

The Post also quotes one of her neighbors as saying, “she has this ritual where, every night around 2:30 a.m. or so, she starts chanting things like, ‘Fight those who fight against me,’ and ‘Hallelujah.’” Yahoo! News cites specific other examples of her alleged mental instability:

Ogunbayo wrote to her children’s former school, insisting that the FBI and Secret Service were after her children and that their skin was becoming darker due to radiation exposure.

The website also reports that Ogunbayo is representing herself in the case.

Related Articles

• Brooklyn mother abandons daughters, 3 and 5, on sidewalk, drives off (Update)
• Most ridiculous lawsuits of 2011
• Study: Poorly chosen baby names can lead to low self-esteem, lousy grades
• Nazi-naming couple loses custody of newborn
• Father assaults teen winner of fight against his son
• Copycat child abusers post pictures of duct-taped children on Facebook
• Obesity expert says parents of obese children should lose custody
• Dad drowns 3- and 5-year-old sons after domestic squabble
• Obese 8-year-old taken from family, placed in foster care
• Parents lose custody of son they named Adolf Hitler, two other children
• TX schools to install cafeteria “cams” to monitor student food choices

Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.

That’s the short version of recent events in the life of the CNN commentator and author of Speak, Brother! A Black Man’s View of America.

The tale begins on Super Bowl Sunday, when Martin tweeted:

If a dude at your Super Bowl party is hyped about David Beckham’s H&M underwear ad, smack the ish out of him!

and

Who the hell was that New England Patriot they just showed in a head to toe pink suit? Oh, he needs a visit from #teamwhipdatass.

The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) took umbrage, immediately tweeting back:

@rolandsmartin Advocates of gay bashing have no place at @CNN #SuperBowl #LGBT.

The organization followed up with a statement demanding Martin’s dismissal.

On Monday night Martin pled his case, writing that he “sincerely regret[ted] any offense” his tweets had occasioned and assured anyone who would listen that the target of his ridicule was the game of soccer. But the story refused to go away. By Wednesday CNN felt forced to take punitive action. In a statement network officials wrote:

Roland Martin’s tweets were regrettable and offensive. Language that demeans is inconsistent with the values and culture of our organization, and is not tolerated. We have been giving careful consideration to this matter, and Roland will not be appearing on our air for the time being.

Roland Martin, suspended on Wednesday…

Which brings us current. Today is Thursday, and the liberal blogosphere is still in a dither over the suspension, which after all is of a member of a diverse group over comments allegedly defaming another diverse group. Is a puzzlement. Whether there was true “homophobic” intent is almost beside the point. The Hollywood blog The Wrap, in its coverage of the story, links to an earlier article about GLAAD laughing off an anti-gay rant by comedian Tracy Morgan, which hints at a double standard.

Daily Caller blogger Jim Treacher stands back from the fray to observe that

maybe some good will come of [Martin’s suspension]. Maybe now he’ll think twice before he complains about ‘dog whistles.’ Maybe now he sees firsthand how unfair it is when other people decide what your motives are for you.

(In a postscript, Treacher quotes Big Journalism’s John Nolte, who quips, “Martin inadvertently stepped into a trap he probably didn’t know existed, and as a result he is now receiving an invaluable lesson about today’s politically-correct hierarchy, where gay trumps black.”)

What I want to know is when Roland Martin plans to issue an apology to the International Soccer League.

Related Articles

• LA Times calls Rick Perry a ‘hillbilly’; will liberals demand an apology?
• MSNBC catches Rick Perry using ‘coded’ racist language—again
• MSNBC: GOP views Herman Cain as ‘black man who knows his place’
• Left: Blacks are not brainwashed—except for Herman Cain
• If it’s Tuesday, the Republicans must be racist
• Poll: Race relations no better under Obama; new WH painting may explain why
• Obama’s latest executive order: to create ‘Office of Diversity and Inclusion’
• MSNBC selectively edits quote to advance claim that Perry is racist
• What to serve–or not–during Black History Month
• Tracy Morgan’s latest comedic target: The mentally challenged
• Tracy Morgan tries to walk back anti-gay invective
• Tracy Morgan doubles down on Palin-as-sex-object comments
• Tracy Morgan on TNT: “Sarah Palin is good masturbation material” (Video)

Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.

After the returns came in, I asked Santorum spokesman Hogan Gidley what he thought about Rich Beeson’s message. Sure, Santorum did well on Tuesday, but doesn’t Romney have the money and infrastructure to outdistance Santorum, and everyone else, in the long run?

“What an inspiring message,” Gidley said sarcastically. “That is really inspiring. I can’t wait to put a bumper sticker on my truck that says MONEY-INFRASTRUCTURE 2012.”

“No one had more money and infrastructure than Hillary Clinton, and hope and change wiped her off the map,” Gidley continued. “We’ll have money, and we’ll have infrastructure, but our nominee has to have a message that people can get behind and inspires people.”

In fact, Obama raised more money than Clinton headed into the Iowa caucuses. Obama’s endorsements in early states were competitive with hers. And Obama out-organized Hillary. It’s too bad for Rick Santorum that his staff apparently does not know this, as there’s an important lesson for them in it.

Obama was able to wage a long campaign against Clinton in 2008 because he followed (and improved on) McGovern’s 1972 strategy of picking up cheap delegates in caucus states, particularly “red states,” which his rivals ignored. Santorum’s wins in bluish-purple caucuses — Iowa, Minnesota and Colorado — and his plans to target Washington state’s caucus in the upcoming rounds suggest a general awareness of Obama’s strategy. The RNC, having noticed that the Dems’ long 2008 campaign drove registration and organization in more states, helped open the door to an insurgent campaign by dictating proportional allocation of delegates for primaries and caucuses held before April, although some of these early non-binding contests awarding delegates later complicate these calculations. The RNC’s plan did not anticipate this cycle’s unexciting and inept field of candidates. In any event, it also ultimately works against a NotRomney like Santorum.

In March, with its treasure trove of delegates, there are plenty of places a NotRomney could do well, including caucuses. Many of these states lean conservative and evangelical. But proportional allocation of delegates insures Romney will get a share of delegates in most of these contests. Moreover, if Newt Gingrich remains in on Super Tuesday, he may do well in Georgia (one of the biggest delegate counts that day) and other southern states, splitting the NotRomney vote. Indeed, Newt has already headed to Ohio, another state where Romney would benefit from a split vote on Super Tuesday (Ohio moved the GOP primary from June back to March. Given the likely Santorumentum from last night’s sweep, I wonder whether the Mitt-backed superPAC will dial back its attacks on Newt in Ohio.) Moreover, Ron Paul is openly pursuing the McGovern/Obama cheap delegate strategy in caucus states, which complicates efforts by other NotRomneys hoping to do the same. Furthermore, the strategy has its limits: only 486 delegates will be awarded in caucus states.

Once winner-take-all contests become prevalent in April, the calendar becomes heavily weighted to northeastern states — Pennsylvania and Wisconsin being Santorum’s best opportunities. May would be a more Santorum-friendly month. June will be dominated by California, New Jersey and Utah, all presumably Romney-friendly states.

Contra Santorum’s flack, the fact that the eventual nominee will have money and organization does not help Santorum become the nominee today. Despite the big wallet of Foster Friess, Santorum needs money and organization now. And he needs Newt to be out of the race by Super Tuesday. At the moment, that scenario seems unlikely.

Who is to be congratulated for the elimination of Cain, Perry, Bachmann, and Huntsman?  The voters.  That’s right.  Sure, the candidates made some mistakes.  The media did everything possible to prejudice voters against them, and that was a crying shame.  But voters didn’t have to let the media or the contrived, somewhat artificial debate process make their decisions for them.

There is good news in all this.  First, the voters really are making the decision.  Second, the voters are starting to think for themselves.  It would have been nice for that to happen earlier, but there’s no time like the present.

Third, with the voters thinking for themselves, candidates who are focused on liberty issues are still on the ballot, and the party dialogue on those issues continues.  I know a lot of people don’t see it this way, but they’re wrong:  the most important thing the GOP can possibly do in 2012 is decide what it is and what it wants.  Self-identified “conservative” voters may be in a national majority according to the surveys, but it has been more than 20 years since we were all pulling together.

The bottom line is that the GOP is not agreed on what the problem is. We’re fighting that out right now – and it’s healthy, if annoying.  One faction says the problem is Obama; the other faction says it’s the way we now govern ourselves, which – no matter who is in charge – cannot avoid oppressing the people with regulation, debt, and crony-enrichment schemes at the people’s expense.  The latter faction is divided between those who see enough prospect for change with one of the candidates still in the race, and those who don’t.  Those who see even Gingrich and Santorum as too reflexively “big government” in their thinking are a growing voice.

The good news is that we are having the debate in a way that matters.  That is very good news.  Never underestimate the power of ideas.  They stick with people, even when it seems they haven’t, and they are the only thing that can motivate people to unite and make positive changes.

The mainstream media don’t depict it that way, of course.  They labor to depict the GOP primary season as a turkey shoot run by Keystone Kops.  But Americans have a choice as to whether they let the mainstream media distribute their opinions to them, like thematic gift baskets, and more and more Americans are choosing to just say no.

I wrote last year about Rick Perry as a candidate of the “old consensus” – my term for the modus vivendi adopted over the last 60 years by Democrats, who were increasingly taken over by progressive statists, and Republicans, who fought a rear-guard action to keep statism from getting too big and expensive.  Under the old consensus, Republicans were largely focused on the monetary and economic expense of statism, and the tacit agreement was that the right would accept as much statism as we could “afford.”  As long as we were growing economically – so this consensus went – we could afford a fairly heavy burden of statism.  Perry, I thought (and still do think), was on the Reagan end of the consensus rather than the Rockefeller end.

But what I see happening in the Republican primaries is an awakening of conservative voters to the disasters invited by the old consensus.  The loss of fiscal integrity and loss of liberty for America are products of the old consensus, and they have proceeded in lockstep: we are losing as much of the latter as we are of the former.  I believe 2012 is the year in which a critical mass of GOP voters has awoken to the reality that the old consensus is a destructive path and is in any case unsustainable.  Voting to continue down it on any basis is voting to remain on course for destruction.

I urge GOP voters not to be discouraged about this.  Ideas outlast everything else.  The idea of individual liberty and limited government cannot be killed.  America has not had a fundamental dispute over basic ideas for a very long time; we have become conditioned to the foggy stasis of bumper-sticker slogans and complacent, rarely-visited idea-sets.  It feels unsettled and strange to truly be debating the relationship of man and the state: to be breaking up those idea-sets and repudiating things supposedly bought into decades ago.  But a movement of ideas is a force of remarkable power, and one that no state power arrangement has ever ultimately withstood.  America’s burgeoning movement of ideas will not expire ignominiously.

The future of liberty on earth depends on what happens in America in the next decade.  If there is any nation on earth that can navigate peacefully back from the brink of statist implosion and loss of liberty, it is the United States. In 2012, GOP voters can rejoice in having alternatives, imperfect as they are, to a big-government statist candidate.  Voters can choose to affect the political process – and possibly the outcome in November – by casting their votes on principle.

Some words to live by as we go forward.  The president doesn’t make us, we make him.  The integrity and character of the people are paramount.  The only sure way to lose a battle is to stop fighting.  America has beaten the odds every time.  We will beat them again.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

By contrast, a new viral YouTube video captures a little-remembered sequence from one of the GOP debates. In it, candidates Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich weigh in on a topic of grave national importance.

From a technical standpoint, the lip synching is near-flawless. Kudos to jubripley, who uploaded the video.

Related Articles

• ‘Today’ show staff swoons over Obama singing at Apollo Theater
• Where’s Weirdo: Obama’s very special photo op
• You want to create your own political cartoons? There’s an app for that
• Barack Obama: “funniest person alive”
• Remember when Obama was too cool to joke about?
• The real joke behind the White House’s unintended “laugh” line
• Obama gets his own daughter’s age wrong
• Obama signs Westminster Abbey guestbook, dates it “2008″

Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.

And it ain’t just pills, either. Some of the girls were given contraceptive implants, while others received hormones via injection.

A spokesperson for NHS is quoted as saying:

We are committed to ensuring local young people are able to access clinically appropriate sexual health support.This helps them to avoid unwanted pregnancies and protect themselves from sexually transmitted infections.

But not all parents are grateful. One told The Telegraph:

I agree that teaching teenagers about sexual health and contraception is very important, but this is a step too far. To perform a minor surgical procedure on school grounds without parents knowing is morally wrong. I cannot understand how this is allowed to happen.

But NHS managers are claiming the measures have been an unqualified success. According to their figures, they fitted out 1,700 girls aged 13 and 14 with implants last year, while another 800 received injections. In the time since, teenage pregnancies have dropped by 22%.

In addition, it’s not as though the girls weren’t themselves asked to sign a consent form or subject to a full medical history.

Related Articles

• Four-year-old brings marijuana to school, offers to share with classmates
• Brooklyn mother abandons daughters, 3 and 5, on sidewalk, drives off (Update)
• School accuses 6-year-old of sexual assault during schoolyard game of tag
• Shoot-em-up film by Harlem rapper features gun-toting teens, sex, drugs
• CT high school play that includes gay kiss creates furor
• ‘Sesame Street’ Muppet instills fear of hunger in young viewers
• Elementary school teacher tells second graders Santa Claus isn’t real
• NJ boy suspended from school because Muslim girl overheard him say “Taliban”
• NYC mandatory sex ed curriculum to include porn, bestiality
• DEVELOPING: 2nd graders perform sex acts in class; teacher suspended

Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.

Prosecutors in Los Angeles have filed lewd-acts charges against a second teacher for allegedly fondling at least one student at the beleaguered Miramonte Elementary School in Los Angeles.

Martin Springer was charged Tuesday with committing three counts of committing lewd acts on one girl, according to the Los Angeles Times, which reported that a law enforcement officer said that a second girl recanted her accusation against the teacher.

This time, the Los Angeles Unified School District took quick and decisive action and fired Springer. They also took the additional (some will say disproportionate) step of transferring out the school’s entire 128-person staff and transferring in teachers who had been laid off.

The district also reports by way of assurances to parents, who are understandably vexed, that they will check “fingerprints, backgrounds and personnel files of those individuals who are interested in coming back to temporarily teach … to ensure that they have no record of inappropriate behavior with children.” But does that suggest that such checks were not run initially, and if so why?

Another question that cries out for an answer is why suddenly accounts of pedophiliac teachers are coming out of the woodwork. The same day the story about Springer broke, the New York Post reported that a teacher’s aide at a school in Brooklyn was arrested by the FBI for the second time in two weeks for “offenses linked to illegally possessing films of underage children engaged in sexual acts.” Taleek Brooks was charged this time with making pornographic videos of students he was assaulting.

The warning signs of child predators are well-documented. Usually perverts are males who appear to be hard-working and family-oriented and—this may be key—among the most popular teachers in school. Are school administrators ignoring the signs because of the stigma associated with profiling? Or are they just uniformly bad at the jobs they are paid, often lucratively, to do?

Related Articles

• Elementary school teacher arrested for tying up and feeding students his semen
• School accuses 6-year-old of sexual assault during schoolyard game of tag
• Elementary school teacher tells second graders Santa Claus isn’t real
• Police arrest school teacher who made students dress in bras and panties
• NYC mandatory sex ed curriculum to include porn, bestiality
• GA parents incensed over 3rd-grade math problems that reference slavery
• School disciplines 10-year-old for gun-shaped pizza slice (Video)
• CA teacher will lower grade of any student who says ‘God bless you’
• Developing: 2nd graders perform sex acts in class; teacher suspended
• Teacher and aide captured on hidden audio abusing developmentally disabled child

Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.

Today is an encouraging day. We learned that the economy actually produced a substantial number of jobs instead of losing a substantial number of jobs. We are turning the corner.

Before you start popping corks, you should know that the dateline on that article is April 2, 2010. It provides a cautionary context to an Associated Press blurb on Obama’s reaction to the latest latest jobs report. On February 3 of this year, he told reporters, “The U.S. economy is growing stronger and the economic recovery is speeding up.”

But this time, we are assured, the cause for rejoicing is real. Here’s Katrina vanden Heuvel writing in the Washington Post several days after the president spoke:

The January jobs report—243,000 jobs added—was greeted with widespread relief. The economists over at the Wall Street Journal were virtually giddy: ‘a game changer,’ ‘positive report in really every way,’ ‘strength is everywhere,’ ‘a blow-out number.’ Liberal analysts celebrated its effects on Obama’s reelection prospects. Matt Yglesias hailed ‘recovery winter,’ arguing that barring ‘some tragic unforeseen disaster,’ we ‘should be in for … accelerating growth that put(s) us back on the path to full employment.’ Ezra Klein concluded that the report— ‘all good’—contained ‘the sort of numbers that win elections.’

Game, set, match. With “Recovery Winter” raining dollars down on us, can prosperity be far behind?

The answer depends on who you ask. If you ask former hedge fund manager Bruce Krasting, you get the distinct sense the government is telling the American people less than the whole story. On his blog My Take on Financial Events, Kasting writes:

The Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR) is a key economic statistic today. Changes in the LFPR are shaping the direction of the capital markets, federal economic policy, monetary policy and, most importantly, politics.

The LFPR hit a new record low on Friday. The key question that must be answered is: Is the current LFPR a temporary phenomenon, or is this the ‘New Normal?’

Another blog, Zero Hedge, quantifies this metric, complete with a graph. The author’s conclusion is that the LFPR has fallen to a 30-year low. The civilian labor force lost an unprecedented 1.2 million participants in January—the same month that produced the BLS jobs report that has liberals dancing in the street.

The reason for the disparity between the White House’s reading of the jobs report and realists like Kasting and Tyler Durden of Zero Hedge is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not factor LFPR into its equation. An article at The Blaze.com suggests the BLS may be cooking the books and cites an email from Reagan budget director David Stockman that claims

the reports are so massaged, estimated, deemed, revised, re-bench marked and seasonally adjusted that any month-to-month change has a decent chance of being noise. What deep secret might they be hiding?

Related Articles

• Obama’s P. T. Barnum campaign strategy is working
• Study: Americans’ incomes have fallen more during recovery than during recession
• Obama to stimulate economy through executive power grab
• American Jobs Act will create 1.9 million new jobs (at $235K apiece)
• Poll: Obama’s handling of debt crisis sucks less than GOP’s
• Poll: 44% of Americans say they worse off under Obama; 34% say better off
• Obama’s “Recovery Summer” clashes with predictions that another recession is looming

Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.

The conventional wisdom is that conservatives are dissatisfied with Romney, whose electoral coalition is comprised mostly of moderates and even liberal voters. That might be true of conservative media elites, but the broader electorate of conservatives have been much more amenable to Romney.

***

No doubt, Romney is dominating among moderates and liberals, but his haul is just as strong among “somewhat conservative” voters. It is only among the “very conservative” that Gingrich has a lead – although even this is much less than what one might have thought based on the way the media has been covering the story.

RTWT, as Jay has plenty of insights about how Romney’s voter base has changed from 2008 and the potential strength of his coalition. It’s also a detailed example of one of Jay’s enduring truths of elections: strong partisans do not dominate the political process. I would almost be tempted to end the summary here, as people who are sufficiently absorbed with politics to be reading (not to mention writing) are likely those most in need of a reminder that we are not all that representative a sample, even of Repbulicans or conservatives. That message might be even more important the day after Rick Santorum sweeps Romney in Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado (an impressive feat, but one involving low turnout caucuses where Romney did not camapign much).

However, as useful as Jay’s analysis is as a tonic, I doubt he would claim it tells the entire story of the GOP primary campaign. Notably, Jay wrote earlier this month about the growing regional divide among conservatives:

Those in the North and Midwest are more sympathetic to Romney, viewing him perhaps as one of their own. But when we turn Southward, the links between Romney and the right seems to be much more tenuous. What is so fascinating about this is that we’re talking about people in different states who answer the ideological question similarly. This is geography, not ideology.

I’m not sure that last bit (emphasis in original) is entirely true, depending on what Jay means by it. It seems entirely possible to me that Northerners who self-identify as conservative do not always mean the same thing as Southerners do when self-identifying as conservative. And the same is possibly true of other regions. Indeed, based on last night’s results in Minnesota and Missouri, it’s not clear that the Midwest is as sympathetic to Romney as Jay may think. Minnesota ends up looking more like Iowa than Iowa, let alone New Hampshire, Florida or Nevada (where, as Jay notes, Mitt won 57% of the somewhat conservative voters and 48% of the very conservative voters).

The easy explanation of some of these regional differences would be religion, but in examining that issue, Sean Trende adds the following caveat: “religion could be a stand-in for ideology, and that, regardless of self-identification, a self-described conservative evangelical Republican is significantly to the right of a self-described conservative who is non-evangelical.”

In sum, while I basically agree with Jay that political junkies tend to overstate the case that Romney does not appeal to conservatives, I also think we should be careful when we throw around the conservative label. To take a more obvious example, many look at polls showing twice as many identify as conservative than identify as liberal without considering that: (a) some still self-identify as conservative Democrats and are likely more liberal than moderate or liberal Republicans; and (b) many self-identifying moderates are functionally liberal, but have fled the label. Relying on self-identification may be a necessary evil in political polling. However, in a nation as diverse and sprawling as the US, we need to always keep in mind the limitations of self-identification and the necessity of any candidate appealing to more than one type of conservative.

The Mail Online reports:

Fleming—or someone on his staff—added a link to The Onion story … on his official Facebook page with the comment ‘More on Planned Parenthood, abortion by the wholesale.’

The article, which ran in the satirical publication in May, described the proposed complex as a “900,000-square-foot facility [with] more than 2,000 rooms dedicated to the abortion procedure.” It went on to “quote” Planned Parenthood’s president who boasted:

The Abortionplex’s high-tech machinery is capable of terminating one pregnancy every three seconds. That’s almost a million abortions every month. We’re so thrilled!

The link was removed from the congressman’s FB page, but not before the gaffe was noticed and Fleming skewered by the blogLiterally Unbelievable, which is devoted to reporting incidents of who people who post Onion stories to Facebook without realizing they are sendups. (Talk about your specialization!)

Joe Randazzo, the editor of The Onion, released a statement to Politico, in which he said:

We’re delighted to hear that Rep. Fleming is a regular reader of America’s Finest News Source and doesn’t bother himself with The New York Times, Washington Post, the mediums [sic] of television and radio, or any other lesser journalism outlets.

Related Articles

• Representative government: The blind leading the blind
• MSNBC’s Mika Brezinski driven nearly to tears by Gingrich critique of Occupiers
• Delegitimizing Herman Cain: Rachel Maddow’s loony “art project” attack
• MSNBC catches Rick Perry using ‘coded’ racist language—again
• MSNBC anchor Contessa Brewer’s challenge to congressman backfires
• Rachel Maddow, MSNBC sued for defamation
• Study shows elected officials more ignorant of Constitution than general public
• Egg-on-face alert: Rachel Maddow gets had; treats satire as actual news

Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.

The content, which includes full frontal nudity, violence, and crack-pipe smoking, shows members of the U.S. military rounding up and summarily executing redheaded males. The title, Born Free, is presumably meant to shed light on the video’s elusive “message.” Suffice it to say that even the seemingly sympathetic Huffington Post is unsure of what the video is meant to communicate, speculating that it might be

a comment on the absurdity of genocide (of which MIA saw plenty during her early childhood in Sri Lanka) or a challenge to the idea of ‘other’ in Arizona’s immigration law.

Craig Bannister of CNSNews.com detects a point of irony in the video, writing that “M.I.A. has actually spoken out [against] ‘American kids seeing violence on their computer screens’,” while having no qualms about showing “a U.S. soldier putting a gun to the head of a child and blowing his brains out.”

In any case, the entire episode, beginning with the obscene halftime gesture, is nothing more than a blatant attempt to get talked and written about—to promote the performer’s brand. Isn’t that the sort of crass commercialism that people who pretend to lofty social agenda are supposed to inveigh against?

Related Articles

• Activist and performer flips bird, utters obscenity in Super Bowl halftime show
• Never too early to proselytize: Planned Parenthood’s pro-choice cartoon
• ‘Mean’ Joe Greene to reprise his ad role in this year’s Super Bowl
• Proposed IN state bill would penalize ‘inappropriate’ singing of national anthem
• Russian news anchor flips the bird at mention of the name Obama (Video)
• U.S. in need of heroes to worship
• How Obama missed an uncommon opportunity by not disinviting Common
• FLOTUS’s questionable judgment in WH invite to rapper who praised a cop killer
• NJ state police “outraged” over FLOTUS invite to rapper who praises cop killers

Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.

A Florida woman who was pulled over because of her erratic driving claims she failed a field-sobriety test because of her “big breasts.” New York’s Daily News reports:

Maureen Raymond, 49, of Port St. Lucie, was collared in Jensen Beach on Jan. 29 after cops spotted her speeding and crossing double yellow lines before parking across two spaces at a drugstore.

Raymond had slurred speech, glassy eyes and staggered, a deputy wrote in his report, according to the station. She also warned him before she did any roadside tests.

‘She told me that I needed to understand that she is big-chested and … she is not going to balance well,’ he wrote.

The arrest affidavit notes that Raymond, who will turn 50 this month, had open alcohol containers in her car, which moreover reeked of booze.

But it was boobs, not booze, that she insisted made it difficult for her to walk a straight line. The deputy dutifully noted:

When I told her we were going to do some roadside tasks she told me that I needed to understand that she is big chested and if I asked her to close her eyes and balance she is not going to balance well. She told me ‘Big breast you don’t balance well.’

At one point, Raymond “began to take her clothes off” to prove to the deputy just how large her breasts were, but he stopped her.

Ultimately, she was taken to the Martin County Jail, where she was charged with DUI. She was released the following day on $750 bond.

Related Articles

• FL police tie one on on taxpayer’s dime, all in name of science
• Police sent to 5-year-old’s home to collect overdue library books
• Police charge dead man with attempted murder
• FL cops ticketing drivers who warn others of speed trap (Updated)
• NY news cameraman arrested for filming police chase (Video, Updated)
• Cop who arrested and beat man for videotaping police found guilty
• Michigan State Police download cell phone data during routine traffic stop
• Indiana Supreme Court: citizens have no right to resist unlawful police entry

Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.

First, let me be clear, the debate among scientists isn’t whether CO2 is a greenhouse gas or whether, even, it can cause warming, but instead on what real (if any) total effect it has overall on the climate. In other words, is there a saturation point where additional CO2 has little marginal effect, or does it build to a tipping point where the change is radical? Robust climate or delicate climate?

Evidence is building toward the robust climate theory, which would mean that while there may be more CO2 being emitted, it has little to no effect on the overall climate. That, of course, is contrary to the AGW crowd’s theory.

So, on to the latest high profile defections:

One of the fathers of Germany’s modern green movement, Professor Dr. Fritz Vahrenholt, a social democrat and green activist, decided to author a climate science skeptical book together with geologist/paleontologist Dr. Sebastian Lüning. Vahrenholt’s skepticism started when he was asked to review an IPCC report on renewable energy. He found hundreds of errors. When he pointed them out, IPCC officials simply brushed them aside. Stunned, he asked himself, “Is this the way they approached the climate assessment reports?”

Vahrenholt decided to do some digging. His colleague Dr. Lüning also gave him a copy of Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion. He was horrified by the sloppiness and deception he found. Persuaded by Hoffmann & Campe, he and Lüning decided to write the book. Die kalte Sonne cites 800 sources and has over 80 charts and figures. It examines and summarizes the latest science.

Vahrenholt concluded, through his research, that the science of the IPCC (if you can call it that) was mostly political and had been “hyped.”

Germany’s flagship weekly news magazine Der Spiegel today also featured a 4-page exclusive interview with Vahrenholt, where he repeated that the IPCC has ignored a large part of climate science and that IPCC scientists exaggerated the impact of CO2 on climate. Vahrenholt said that by extending the known natural cycles of the past into the future, and taking CO2′s real impact into effect, we should expect a few tenths of a degree of cooling.

That, as I said, points to the “robust” climate model.

Once more to make the point before I leave the subject:

Skeptic readers should not think that the book will fortify their existing skepticism of CO2 causing warming. The authors agree it does. but have major qualms about the assumed positive CO2-related feed-backs and believe the sun plays a far greater role in the whole scheme of things.

As Dr. Roy Spencer says, CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Adding CO2 should cause warming. The argument is “how much” and that’s based on competing theories about the climate’s sensitivity. Skeptics think the sensitivity is very low while alarmists think it is very high. The building evidence is that rising CO2 has little warming effect in real terms regardless of the amount of the gas emitted. That there is a “saturation level”. If that’s true, and indications are it is, then there’s a) no justification for limiting emissions and b) certainly no justification to tax them.

That, of course, is where politics enter the picture. Governments like the idea of literally creating a tax out of thin air, especially given the current financial condition of most states. Consequently, governments are more likely to fund science that supports their desired conclusion – and it seems that in this case there were plenty who were willing to comply (especially, as Patrick J. Michael has noted, when that gravy train amounts to $103 billion in grants).

What Vahrenholt is objecting too is the IPCC’s key definition in which it clearly states that “climate change” is a result of and because of “human contributions”. As noted above, he thinks that the sun is a much greater factor (something mostly ignored in the models) and he finds past CO2 trends to forecast nothing like the IPCC’s forecast.

What we’re finding as this argument goes forward is that Patrick Michaels was right – “AGW theory functions best in a data free environment”.

~McQ

Twitter: @McQandO

On a conference call with members of President Obama’s 2012 reelection committee Monday evening, campaign manager Jim Messina announced that donors should start funding Priorities USA, the Democratic super PAC run by two former White House staffers, Bill Burton and Sean Sweeney.

The move was a remarkable shift in approach toward the independent political expenditure groups, whose role in the political process Obama has criticized and from which his campaign had sought to keep distance.

***

Just seven months earlier, Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt assured, “Neither the President nor his campaign staff or aides will fundraise for super PACs,” according to the LA Times.

BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski collects video of Obama’s attacks on the Citizens United ruling that made this spending possible, while Ben Smith recalls Obama’s earlier campaign financing hypocrisy in rejecting public funding:

That 2008 decision wasn’t made entirely out of some reformist purity. Obama would go back on a pledge to take public financing, accepting the hit on his reform credentials (which was enacted solely on the Times editorial page) in exchange for a serious financial advantage over John McCain. And his team decided that outside allies — whether the 527s or the more traditional DNC independent expenditure, could only muddy up the purity of his very pure message.

So what has changed? One major shift is that Obama faces an opponent whose rich friends really will pour tens of millions into outside groups, unlike the underfunded and relatively isolated John McCain.

Josh Kraushaar laid this out in detail last week. Based on the 2011 numbers:

[T]he combined Obama and Democratic outside group totals to $98.3 million cash-on-hand, with the GOP groups tallying $94.1 million. Take out the Democratic groups strictly devoted to congressional activities, and it’s a virtual financial tie. With labor and environmental groups poised to help Obama’s re-election, Democrats still could hold a narrow edge. But it’s hardly the cash advantage that would allow Team Obama to run negative advertising uncontested against Romney, without an aggressive response.

It’s a far cry from the vision of a billion-dollar Obama re-election campaign bankroll that Democratic strategists are now downplaying. And it shows that the amount of time Democrats spent complaining and attacking the liberalized campaign finance laws before the 2010 midterms would have been better spent preparing for an infrastructure utilizing super PACs to their advantage. Priorities USA, headed by former White House spokesman Bill Burton, hasn’t yet shown it can compete with American Crossroads so far — and time is running short.

This was really a no-brainer for Obama. In my experience — and his — there is no political price to be paid for gaming the campaign finance system. Politico’s Jonathan Martin and others will sniff and move on, just to make sure it remains a Beltway story. Indeed, it’s barely a “Beltway story” — it made the front page of the NYT, but not the WaPo.

The National Staff Organization (NSO) is the umbrella group for the staff unions that represent employees who work for NEA’s state affiliates. Each year, NSO holds its Winter Advocacy Retreat – also known as W.A.R. College – where NEA employees learn and strategize about current labor issues, both internal and external. This year’s conference wrapped up last Saturday at the Hyatt Regency Miami.

In a report to members, NSO divulged just how bad things have gotten:

Fifteen states are considered to be financially distressed because of membership loss and their very survival is in jeopardy. And because of financial hardship, 41 state executives are on NEA’s payroll instead of being paid by their state. Two states – Indiana and South Carolina – remain under an NEA trusteeship.

…Membership losses and the precarious financial position of some states mean an estimated $12 million shortfall this year for NEA and a projected $27 million shortfall next year. As a result, NEA is looking to reduce 88 staff positions. Currently, 124 NEA staff are eligible to retire and have until March 15 to take a proposed retirement incentive.

Even allowing for overstatement, these figures put NEA in a financial bind unprecedented in its recent history. It’s important in this context to view NEA and its affiliates as private employers who can afford large and well-compensated staffs when the teacher force is growing and enjoying substantial pay raises, upon which union dues are based. However, NEA is not well-adapted to budget cuts, since its own staff unions are certain to use their considerable skills to prevent mass layoffs or salary/benefit reductions.

It is likely that the union will utilize internal budget-cutting measures to carry itself through the short-term, while banking on external efforts to reverse its fortunes in the long-term. These efforts make take the form of organizing non-union teachers, or increased lobbying and politicking for public policies that will tend to positively affect the union’s bottom line.

Unlike the American Federation of Teachers, NEA has always had an affiliate in every state, even though some of them have always been dependent on NEA subsidies for survival. Even if financially desirable, NEA could not withstand the blow to its prestige to start shutting down affiliates. At the same time, propping up weak affiliates is draining strong ones. Who will bail out whom is the difficult choice NEA now faces.

I agree with Ed that the recent tactic of not disclosing the party breakdown of the sample is simply absurd. In an era where trust in institutions — including journalism — is low and demands for increased transparency are on the rise everywhere, hiding this basic information from public view invites skepticism and ridicule. The WaPo, ABC News, and Gary Langer ought to be embarrassed.

However, Ed also complains that it’s “a poll of general population adults rather than registered or likely voters, so it’s not even a proper polling type for the predictive outcome they claim.” The poll does in fact provide head-to-head results for both adults and registered voters; the WaPo noted both results for each in its accompanying coverage:

In a general-election test, Obama leads Romney 52 to 43 percent among all Americans; more narrowly, 51 to 45 percent, among registered voters. Among all adults, it’s Obama’s first time topping 50 percent in a head-to-head matchup with Romney since July; it’s his first time ever above that point among registered voters.

(Ed has updated his post to reflect this, while noting that other hyped aspects of the story do not give the RV numbers, which is certainly a fair critique.)

The history of this poll, and comparison to other polls, can tell us a bit about what is going on in this particular poll, even without the party breakdown of the sample. Ed correctly notes that the sample in this poll tends to produce Dem-friendly results, which is probably why the recent decision to omit data about the sample really set him off. However, I would add that the dynamic producing those results has been that this poll historically tends to undersample both parties (and disproportionately undersample Republicans). The corollary, which (afaik) Ed has not stressed, is that the result inflates the sample of Independents.

Accordingly, this nugget from the WaPo coverage is doubly notable:

Obama’s momentum since mid-January has evened the score with Romney among political independents. Among independent voters in the last Post-ABC poll, Romney held a 12-point edge; now these voters split 48 percent for Obama, 47 percent for Romney.

First, this reportage tells you that the poll is still collecting the party data but not reporting it in the released results. Second, when you compare this poll’s results to other recent polls (1/12 – 2/5), the Obama +6 result is not particularly out of line. Indeed, the topline results here merely add 2 or 3 points to each side of the Rasmussen poll of likely voters conducted at roughly the same time, which is margin of error type stuff. And it’s not all that different from the mid-January PPP poll which showed a more pronounced Obama surge with independents. This poll’s similar gap with higher numbers suggests this poll’s sample probably includes more Republicans and possibly more Democrats (as the PPP poll did) at the expense of the now supposedly more Obama-friendly Indies.

What accounts for the supposed Obama surge with Indies? One possibility the WaPo coverage raises is the State of the Union speech, which fell within this poll’s window. However, that would not account for the surge in the PPP poll. A more plausible explanation is the modest uptick in the economy (and it’s overhype in the establishment media). This poll has Obama improving a few points not only in overall job approval, but approval on how he’s handling the economy. However, even this poll has his job approval with Indies underwater, so presumably his approval on the economy does not look great with Indies.

Accordingly, the underlying dynamic in this poll is probably similar to that seen in the PPP poll: it’s not about Obama as much as it is about Romney. Q25 in this poll shows 52% say that the more they hear about Romney, the less they like him, which is not as bad as Newt Gingrich’s 60%, but still bad. This is a function of the campaign and its media coverage. Technically, Romney gets marginally better coverage than Obama… but Romney is getting more coverage than Obama. Thus, people are hearing more negative coverage of Romney than Obama. Obviously, the balance will shift once the GOP nominee is effectively known. And this is one reason why head-to-head polling is basically meaningless at this point in the cycle. So it’s a bit ironic that the head-to-head is where the WaPo/ABC poll chose to report the results for registered voters.

—

Update: I wasn’t even going to mention this, but Dem pollster Margie Omero does at the HuffPo:

Today the Washington Post/ABC News released a survey showing Obama over majority support among registered voters (51% Obama, 45% Romney). But as Romney’s pollster Neil Newhouse (a partner in the firm Public Opinion Strategies) pointed out in a blast email, the poll asked about a few of Romney potential liabilities just prior to the vote question. This goes against polling best practices, and it’s possible the survey shows elevated Obama numbers as a result.

Omero also notes that Obama’s liabilities were not questioned before concluding that the underlying issue is Romney’s likability. Again, if Romney is the nominee, that is likely to shift. But Omero highlights that the problem with the poll mirrors the dynamic in the media coverage.

Fans can be heard yelling ‘Eli rules!’ and ‘Eli owns your husband’ as she made her way through Lucas Oil Stadium following the Patriots’ 21-17 defeat, the second time Giants quarterback Eli Manning has bettered three-time winner Brady on the Super Bowl stage.

The comments riled Bundchen, judging by video obtained by online gossip site ‘The Insider,’ with the model making it quite clear to those around her who she thought was to blame for Brady’s failure to land the win.

‘You [need] to catch the ball when you’re supposed to catch the ball,’ she is heard saying. ‘My husband cannot [expletive] throw the ball and catch the ball at the same time. I can’t believe they dropped the ball so many times.’

Poor baby. While there is no denying that two dropped passes late in the fourth quarter were potential game changers, so was Brady’s decision on his first play from scrimmage to drop back and pass from his own 5-yard line, which resulted in a safety.

More importantly, Bundchen could stand to learn a life lesson or two. To wit:

• Ignore taunts, which—though themselves gratuitous—go with the territory of being a public persona.
• Never publicly criticize your spouse’s friends or the people he works with.
• If you going to share your opinions in public, do it minus the profanity.

Related Articles

• Activist and performer flips bird, utters obscenity in Super Bowl halftime show
• ‘Mean’ Joe Greene to reprise his ad role in this year’s Super Bowl
• Proposed IN state bill would penalize ‘inappropriate’ singing of national anthem
• Russian news anchor flips the bird at mention of the name Obama (Video)
• U.S. in need of heroes to worship

Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.

Which in turn seems to be as good an explanation as any as for why the Real Clear Politics average spread for the president’s job approval ratings is positive for the first time in seven months. As of this morning, the spread is +2.0, with 48.5% approving of the job President Obama is doing against 46.5% who disapprove. The Rasmussen poll—which tracks the opinions of likely voters—has the president’s approval rating at 50%. The last time the positive and negative ratings were at parity was July 7, 2011.

A factor that undeniably plays a role in this surge in Obama’s approval is the brutal and relentless infighting among Republican candidates. (A secondary factor is frontrunner Mitt Romney’s well documented capacity for shooting himself in the foot).

The attacks, many of them mounted by the Gingrich camp and directed at Romney, are unprecedented in number and nature. According to the Campaign Media Analysis Group (CMAG), the Florida primary was the most negative campaign ever waged. The group found that 92% of the ads airing in the state during the run-up to the primary vote were negative. Of a total 11,586 television spots that ran between January 23 and 29, 10,633 were negative.

The Romney camp, which reportedly ran 3,276 ads, 99% of which were negative, is quoted by CNN as rationalizing:

We were being whaled on by Speaker Gingrich and didn’t respond well in South Carolina. So we decided to respond. We made it clear if people want change in Washington you have to bring in someone from outside Washington. Both the change in tactic as well as the message have had a real impact in Florida.

The content of the back-and-forth volleys is also problematic for the GOP’s chances of reclaiming the White House. Gingrich’s characterization of Romney as “Obama lite” is just the latest in a string of invectives that provides red meat to the Obama campaign.

Related Articles

• Is Obama to blame for the polarization in country?
• Obama’s fairness doctrine a recipe for AMP (Assured Mass Poverty)
• Romney: Perfect at feeding ad lines to the opposition
• Voting for the least of all evils
• Barack Obama’s not-so-amazing dreamcoat
• Is Obama as mainstream as the left thinks? His views vs those of Socialist Party
• GOP in self-destruct mode redux: The Bain attacks on Romney
• The GOP in self-destruct mode
• Romney not ready for prime time

Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.

But the real excitement, I am told, came approximately an hour earlier, during the halftime show. Since I (literally) tune out halftime shows, I wasn’t aware until this morning that an event occurred that some say rivaled Janet Jackson’s widely publicized “wardrobe malfunction” during Super Bowl XXXVIII.

This time, the buzz is over an obscene gesture and utterance by a female “performer” who goes by the stage name M.I.A. (I am proud to say that until this morning I never heard of her either). The Associated Press reports:

In front of some 110 million viewers on NBC and uncounted others online, she flipped the bird and appeared to sing, ‘I don’t give a [expletive]’ at one point, though it was hard to hear her clearly.

Several other sources have reported that the expletive was difficult to make out, though the context makes the message pretty unambiguous. A video of the relevant part of the performance is here, so judge for yourself.

NBC, the network that aired the big game, has apologized for the gesture, which it described as “completely inappropriate” and “very disappointing,” adding:

M.I.A. did not do anything similar during rehearsals and the league had no reason to believe she would pull something like that during the actual show.

But apart from the horse being out of the barn, so to speak, who does NBC think it’s kidding? Were they really unaware that M.I.A.—whose real name is Mathangi Arulpragasam—harbors rather strong political opinions? Had they not heard that she is virulently pro-Palestinian and has been accused by the Sri Lankan government (she is of Sri Lankan descent) of being a “terrorist sympathizer” and “LTTE [Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam] supporter”? But why try to pigeonhole her activism when she explains it so eloquently in her own words?

I’m not coming at it as a politician, it’s my own personal experience. And I just think that that’s just what people want to put out there, you know, ‘You don’t have the right to talk about this.’ And they use me as a puppet to explain that to you, that only people who, you know, have a PhD in this s**t are allowed to talk about this. Or that only politicians are allowed to talk about politics, and that’s why we’re f**ked, because the cycle is constantly kept within that f**king framework. There aren’t more people standing up and telling their personal experience … if a normal civilian comes up and says ‘Hey, this happened in my village and I’m not happy about it’, we’re not allowed to talk about it. You have to follow this bureaucratic bulls**t to get any sort of action, and it’s all part of this cycle. Like back in the day, we had ideals of revolution and fighting back, and most of the time that s**t starts with individual people having personal relationships, these experiences. And now it’s so disconnected and the media can paint a picture for you … they make so much bureaucracy and politics, and I think taking away the personal aspects, the human aspects of these political issues is really wrong. Whether it’s the floods, or starving people in Africa, or whatever. It’s all funnelled through this channel, you really are not getting it from the horse’s mouth, you know?

I dunno—I  think the horse has spoken loudly and clearly. Shame on NBC for pretending they weren’t listening.

Of course, it’s entirely possible her “statement” was non-political. As a performer, she has after all been compared—favorably—to Igor Stravinsky.

Related Articles

• Never too early to proselytize: Planned Parenthood’s pro-choice cartoon
• ‘Mean’ Joe Greene to reprise his ad role in this year’s Super Bowl
• Proposed IN state bill would penalize ‘inappropriate’ singing of national anthem
• Russian news anchor flips the bird at mention of the name Obama (Video)
• U.S. in need of heroes to worship
• How Obama missed an uncommon opportunity by not disinviting Common
• FLOTUS’s questionable judgment in WH invite to rapper who praised a cop killer
• NJ state police “outraged” over FLOTUS invite to rapper who praises cop killers

Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.

The US and EU backed an Arab League plan to transition Syria from the Assad regime to a new, popularly elected government.  The plan was proposed for UN endorsement, so that its execution would have the imprimatur of the UN and the implied weight of international approval.  The Obama administration made execution of this plan, through the UN, the focus of US policy on Syria, as did the EU and its major member states.

They brought the question to a vote in spite of the fact that the positions of Russia and China on intervening in Syria have been unchanged for months.  It was predictable that Russia and China would veto the resolution.  Indeed, it was a grave tactical error to force the confrontation.  Russia’s and China’s greatest concerns have not changed, and instead of addressing them, the Atlantic members of the Perm-5 forced a vote.

This was a confrontation that did not have to happen.  Russia’s and China’s concerns have sound elements.  Consider the issue in this light: do we really want to set a precedent in which the UN gives its stamp of approval to regime-change proposals from the Arab League?  Should the UN act as a fulcrum for regime change in this manner?  If we allow it to, what will that mean for the future?  For whom else will the UN endorse third-party plans for regime change?

The precedent in principle is one of the great problems here, and Russian and Chinese comments on the issue have consistently centered on it.  Remember that the UN did not give its stamp of approval to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, which had as its objective regime-changing Saddam Hussein.  I never considered that a problem, and indeed was glad that a faulty precedent was not set then.

In 2011, the UN declined to endorse any regime-change proposal for Libya.  In approving the use of force against the Qadhafi regime, the UN’s narrow justification was protection of civilians.  That principle was strategically and operationally unsound, to be sure, but by invoking it, the US delegation and the UN avoided pushing for the bad precedent we have just demanded a vote on: having the UN endorse third-party proposals for regime change.

Frankly, Russia and China have good grounds for rejecting that proposal.  It is not safe, for any nation, for the UN to be a source of such endorsements.  The character of the UN is well known; it cannot be trusted with such a portfolio.  Neither the United States nor any nation in Europe is naturally immune to attack by this method – but the Obama administration and the EU continue to behave as if we are.

Besides the flawed principle, Russia is of course concerned about her client, Bashar al-Assad, being removed by outside agency.  But her greater concern is who the remover would be.  Russia cannot tolerate giving a Western-backed Arab League the lead in picking a new leadership for Syria – any more than Russia thought it was a good idea for Turkey’s Erdogan to pick Syria’s new leadership.  The reason is a combination of factors:  Moscow fears political-power wins for the Islamic world in the context of a fading, incoherent American power – and the peril is doubled by the fact that it’s the West actively bolstering the Arab-Muslim bloc as a regional power broker.

From the Russian perspective, this Western move is either diabolical – a means of raiding Russia’s client base without confronting Moscow directly – or colossally stupid.  China, under perceived pressure from American activism in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific, also sees the move as opening doors that should be held closed: doors that will usher in new stability problems on China’s western flank.

We should be clear that Russia and China are both happy to have their own special relationships with the Arab League, and with Arab or other Muslim Middle Eastern nations individually.  They understand this as pragmatism, and have no illusions about what it means in terms of amity, goodwill, or commonality of philosophical interests.  The problem, from their perspective, is the West giving a boost on principle to a bloc that is hostile, unreliable, and potentially very exploitable by newly-empowered radical Islamists, as the “Arab Spring” spins off its thunderstorms and tornadoes.  Either the Westerners are ideological dupes, or they are playing a very deep power game.  With their passive-aggressive approach, the US and EU have chosen the path most likely to shift power relationships in negative, uncontrollable directions for everyone in Asia and much of Europe and Africa.

By operating on a set of unrealistic ideological precepts, the Obama administration has made it impossible for Russia and China to tacitly accept US leadership and extract from it the benefits they can.  The vetoes they exercised in Saturday’s vote have launched a new period in which they will make fewer and fewer bones about repudiating US leadership and pushing for alternative arrangements.

 As for Syria, France has already announced that she is pushing, in the absence of a UN resolution, for a coalition approach (emphasis added):

President Nicolas Sarkozy said France would work with its European and Arab partners to create what he called a “group of friends of the Syrian people” to apply international backing to the Arab League’s call for President Bashar al-Assad to step aside, the withdrawal of troops and a transition to democracy.

Apparently, Sarkozy is willing to dispense with American “leadership from behind,” and find a solution for Syria without the United States.  France’s approach is commonsensical and realistic, and that could be a net positive for Syria and the region.  But Russia and China have their own diplomatic channels and proposals in Syria; it is not a given that France’s initiative is the one that will carry the day.  In any case, the outcome could very well be worked out without any real input from US power.

Don’t be too quick to say, “Good riddance; France or Russia should be handling it anyway.”  If our power is so valueless that it can be dispensed with in the Eastern hemisphere, there is nothing that will prevent that region’s security problems from rapidly becoming ours.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

The judge, Barbara Jaffe, determined that the school’s decision to fire Christine Rubino, who taught at PS 203 in the borough’s Flatlands section, was disproportionate to her offense.

On June 23, 2010, Rubino wrote on Facebook:

After today, I’m thinking the beach sounds like a wonderful idea for my 5th graders. I HATE THEIR GUTS! They are all the devils [sic] spawn!

What made the remark especially invidious in the eyes of school administrators is that it came one day after a 12-year-old student, Nicole Suriel, accidentally drowned on a school trip to a Long Island beach.

The judge ruled that in spite of Rubino’s clear and obvious frustration with her students’ unruly behavior, there was no evidence that she intended to inflict actual harm on them or that the comments would impact her ability to teach.

In the administrative hearing that resulted in Rubino’s dismissal last June, presiding officer Randi Lowitt offered her view that Facebook and other social media “are becoming embedded in society.” She added, “People post without regard to the fact that what they post has a shelf life of forever.”

But the judge demurred, writing that “even though [Rubino] should have known that her postings could become public,” she enjoyed the “reasonable” expectation that her comments would be viewed only by her Facebook adult friends. Citing Rubino’s “unblemished” 15-year teaching history, she voided the termination and sent the teacher back to the Department of Education for a “lesser penalty.”

In a superficially similar case last August, a Lake County, Florida, “Teacher of the Year” was suspended after expressing opposition to New York’s gay marriage law on his personal Facebook page. That teacher, Jerry Buell, was reinstated after the American Civil Liberties Union and Liberty Counsel publicly argued that the school’s action violated his First Amendment protections.

In the current case, the Post concludes, the ruling comes as a blow to the city’s beleaguered Ed Department, underscoring, as it does, “the grueling process to fire teachers accused of misconduct or incompetence.” That process is under review following the recent reports of a teacher who is earning $100 thousand as a hanger-on in the city’s now-defunct “rubber room” policy.

Related Articles

• Epic fail: HS students unable to name current veep and other horror stories
• NYC teacher making $100K in rubber room refuses to retire
• Word ‘school’ misspelled on crosswalk outside NYC school
• GA parents incensed over 3rd-grade math problems that reference slavery
• Outrage: Perp involved in near-fatal shopping cart push may walk
• HS principal’s course credit scam may cost 100 seniors their diplomas
• Teacher suspended for Facebook comments on NY gay marriage law
• Developing: 2nd graders perform sex acts in class; teacher suspended
• NH school confiscates autistic 12-year-old boy’s American flag

Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.

He said he expects to be at parity with Romney by the April 3 Texas primary and “we will go to Tampa,” site of the GOP convention this summer.

Nor is Gingrich going to fulfill what’s no doubt another Romney fantasy — going positive. There had been reports suggesting he would, until Gingrich cleared that up at the caucus night press conference he held in Las Vegas instead of a rally. “I stayed relentlessly positive in Iowa and I lost 22 points,” he said.

The dismissal of the good-cheer strategy came amid the customary Gingrich assault on Romney and President Obama. He labeled them “George Soros-approved candidates” and added for good measure that Romney was “pro-abortion, pro-gun control, pro-tax increase,” a lousy job creator, indifferent toward the poor, and a purveyor of falsehoods. As for Obama, his administration has declared war on religion, Gingrich said, and is pursuing a “radical secular ideology.”

Newt mapped out a detailed strategy that would keep him in the presidential race all the way to the Republican convention, based on how delegates will be awarded in each of the upcoming states. And it appears that Sheldon Adelson will keep funding a pro-Gingrich SuperPAC, even as he signals he will provide even more generous support to Romney if he becomes the Republican nominee.

Gingrich paints this as his refusal to fulfill Romney’s fantasies. But I wonder about that.

After all, if Newt dropped out, media coverage of the GOP nomination campaign would drop, probably precipitously. Mitt is not helped by Newt’s attacks from the left. But Newt’s attacks from the right provide Mitt with an opportunity to not only try harder to sell himself to the conservative base of the GOP, but also subtextually suggest to mushy, unafilliated voters that Romney is not the extremist Democrats will try to portray should Mitt win the nomination. (Yes, that attack makes no sesnse to conservatives, but which GOP nominee has not been attacked as an extremist by the Dems?)

Moreover, regardless of what Newt does, Ron Paul is not going away. Paul will continue to amass delegates in hopes of influencing the platform and getting the most high-profile speaking slot he can negotiate at the convention. If Newt dropped out, the media narrative would inevitably devolve into a Romney-Paul discussion, likely funneling more votes and delegates to Paul. Should Romney win the nomination, it might be further useful to him to be accomodating “demands” from a second-place Newt on issues like Obamacare than having a media narrative of the GOP convention about struggles over defense cuts, drug legalization and the gold standard.

In short, Newt continuing his campaign may not be a “You know who this benefits?” situation… but it’s not clear that a Newtless campaign benefits Romney, either.