We Have Been Downgraded, Again

America is coming close to a precipice here, folks.  From the AP:

NEW YORK (AP) — Egan-Jones, an independent credit-research firm, downgraded its rating on U.S. government debt to AA- from AA on Friday, citing the Federal Reserve's plans to try to stimulate the economy.

The credit rating agency said the Fed's plans to buy mortgage bonds will likely hurt the economy more than help it.

The plan will weaken the value of the dollar and push up prices for oil and other commodities, Egan-Jones said. That would leave less for consumers to spend on other things.

But at the same time, Egan-Jones warned that the federal government's borrowing costs are likely to slowly rise as the global economy recovers.

On Thursday, the Fed said it would buy $40 billion of mortgage bonds a month to help the economic recovery.

It's the second time the Haverford, Pa. shop has downgraded U.S. government debt in five months. In April, Egan-Jones lowered its rating on the U.S. to AA from AA+. It stripped the U.S. of a top AAA rating in July 2011.

This is about America’s ability to handle its debts and Bernake’s recent announcement that he planned to stimulate the economy by printing money.  This means Bernake planned to make each and every person in America poorer in terms of purchasing power, and it also meant that every person holding American debt would find the value of that debt reduced.  This is not how you pay down the debt; you pay it down by raising revenues and paying it.  I’ll skip the debate on how to raise revenues for now.

This falls at the feet of President Obama, or as I like to call him, President Downgrade—a title he has earned again today.  Obama will surely point to the fact that Bush Jr. first appointed Bernake, but Obama renominated him and by all means if people want to argue we shouldn’t vote for anyone who appointed Bernake, I’m all for it.

Someone joked the other day that its not a matter of if this nation can survive four more years of Obama’s policies, but four more days.  That joke is far less funny today.

We have been drunk on debt for the last few years, but the barkeep is finally calling the tab.  If we don’t change direction, this won’t end well.

Sorry to bum you out on a Friday.  I for one was having a pretty darn good day up until now.

The Democratic Party Wasn’t Ready for a Black President

There is something that has been tossing around in my head for now almost four years.  I think it crystalized tonight when I saw that liberals had created a hashtag on Twitter: #Negrospotting.

Words cannot express how infuriated I was (although I tried).

For those less embedded in the Twitter world, a hashtag is a way of marking a subject and aggregating comments on that subject.  So apparently liberals thought it would be funny to spot how many black people were in the audience at the Republican National Convention.  I tried to put my anger into words on twitter:

*facepalm* I can't believe that libs are so un-self-aware as to create a hashtag called #negrospotting cc @michellemalkin @twitchyteam (fix)
— Aaron Worthing (@AaronWorthing) August 29, 2012

Hey libs, can you hear THIS dog whistle? #negrospotting most racist hashtag ever.
— Aaron Worthing (@AaronWorthing) August 29, 2012

If twitter existed in the 1930's #jewspotting would have been a hashtag. Shame on libs who created #negrospotting cc @michellemalkin
— Aaron Worthing (@AaronWorthing) August 29, 2012

And of course Michelle Malkin, who has had more than a little experience with liberal racism, had her own thoughts.

SHAME SHAME SHAME on all you racist progs playing the #negrospotting game. Dear God, you people are sick. #gop2012 #rnc2012
— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) August 28, 2012

And I liked Stevie J. West’s commentary too.

.@wilbs999 Liberals are finding black people at the RNC and calling it #NegroSpotting. #BecauseActualRacism
— Stevie J. West (@StevieJWest) August 29, 2012

(Sometimes hashtags are also used as a way of making a side comment, often sarcastically, which is what she did when she said “#BecauseActualRacism”)

And there is more coverage of this vileness over at Twitchy.  But then I wrote out something that might seem like a non sequitur to most of you:

It is becoming increasingly clear to me that Democrats wereNOT ready for a black president.
— Aaron Worthing (@AaronWorthing) August 29, 2012

Well, twitter only allows 140 characters, so I will explain what I mean by that.

Once Again, the Blogosphere Gets a Scoop the MSM Missed... By Reading Obama’s Books

Update: Oh my, there seems to be a discrepancy in the story told by one of the witnesses.

While we are waiting to talk about my big story (trust me, this is going to be a blockbuster) I am going to pay attention to other news.

So a few weeks back we had the unbelievable silliness of talking about how the candidates treated their dogs.  First, we learned that Mitt Romeny put his dog on top of a car in a pet carrier for a drive, because the car was full.  A little stupid, yes, but kind of a silly thing to worry about when the debt is $15 trillion and counting.  Then Jim Treacher did some deep investigative journalism in the form of reading Obama’s book, and discovered that he actually ate a dog.  Which seems kind of worse, and indeed led to great deal of Obama-ate-a-dog jokes.  And then to top it all off, we then discovered that Romney actually saved a family from drowning, including their dog.

And so now today we get the Washington Post doing an in-depth investigation into how Romney acted in high school, giving us this shocking story:

Mitt Romney returned from a three-week spring break in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School. Back on the handsome campus, studded with Tudor brick buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.

“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

So first, I am sure the family of the late John Lauber (he died in 2004) really appreciates the whole world knowing that he might have been gay.  For all we know he could have been going through a phase and married a woman and had a dozen children by now.  So let’s thank the Washington Post for respecting his privacy...

Still, turning to Romney’s behavior, of course what he did was wrong, and mean.  And I am sure Obama never did anything as bad as...

Oh, except Obama bullied a girl.  Yes, really, according to Talk of the Times.  And how did these internet sleuths discover this...?

Come on, you read the headline, right?  By reading Obama’s books (and I verified the quote on Amazon.com):

That is from Dreams of My Father, of course.

The reality is this.  We do not spring forth from the head of Zeus as fully-formed adults.  We go through a period of life called “childhood” in which we make mistakes and we learn.  Things like decency, compassion, kindness, all of those things are learned, and not something we figure out just by the virtue of being born.  There is a process called maturing and there are often speed bumps along the way.

Don’t believe me?  Okay, who is the coolest basketball player in History?  Michael Jordan, right?  I mean the man had such grace and power you would swear that he had a gravity belt:

And off court he was the definition of cool—always dressing very sharp (we are overlooking his facial hair for now).  And I am sure he was always an awesome guy, right?  Right?

Yeah, and there’s a whole gallery of this stuff.  Oy vey.  (By the way, Cracked, can we stop calling every black person who happens to be a nerd “Urkel?” The conscious “race”-matching is creepy.)

And you know that brooding Eminem guy?  This was him in high school:

We were all dorks once.  Even when we thought we were cool, we were dorks.  Look at the teenagers in The Karate Kid:

Ralph Macchio, allegedly the dork in the movie, actually comes off looking cooler in hindsight than most of the guys beating him up.  We have to recognize that there is a God-given right to be young and stupid at some point in your life and give both Obama and Romney a pass on this bullying.

But if we are going to play this game, then I see your Romney bullying story and raise you one #ObamaBulliedAGirl.

Or at least I thought we should ignore what they did as teenagers.  Then I found out something and I will share it with you.  Below the fold I am going to put a truly shocking photograph of Romney as a teenager that proves once and for all that he should never be president.  Look at your own risk:

Don’t Let Obama Change the Subject to Gay Marriage

While we are waiting for my big story to drop, the big non-story of the day is that Obama has announced that he supports gay marriage.  Again.

Seriously he already said this in 1996: “I favor legalizing same-sex marriages,and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages.”

But the President cynically hid those beliefs away to appeal to a national audience, until today when he decided to “evolve” to believing in gay marriage again.  Here’s the money quote from the ABC News interview:

I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors, when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together; when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that 'don't ask, don't tell' is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I've just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married[.]

Yes, yes, over the course of several years he has come around, to... the exact same position he had sixteen years ago.  And taking what little significance there could possibly be out of it, we get this bit, as the article writers summary:

The president stressed that this is a personal position, and that he still supports the concept of states' deciding the issue on their own.

So it’s a pointless sign of support.  Only a moron thinks that this means a damn.

Which is why Meghan McCain tweeted: “So, is Obama going to introduce legislation in congress to make gay marriage legal in all 50 states now?”  After much mockery (including from me), she deleted that tweet.

But, my conservative friends, don’t fall for any of this.  Yes, yes, of course this is Obama making sweet to the donors who care about this issue, but what it also is, is a meaningless attempt to change the conversation, from the debt, the economy all of that.  If this election is a referendum on the last few years, Obama will lose, badly.  Which is why he wants to change the subject to almost anything else.

Don’t fall for it.  Stick to the subject.  And the subject is this:

Don’t let him change the subject.

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That being said, it will be fun to watch how many liberals ignore the plain and obvious cynicism of all of this.

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Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.  And you can purchase my book (or borrow it for free if you have Amazon Prime), Archangel: A Novel of Alternate, Recent History here.  And you can read a little more about my novel, here.

I Don’t Care About Ann Romney’s Life Experiences (And I Shouldn’t Have To)

First, dear reader, I will have to apologize for the very light blogging this week.  It’s not for any bad reason.  For instance, just this week I obtained a solid court victory over the convicted terrorist (bomber technically) and perjurer Brett Kimberlin (and if you don’t know about my struggle against this cretin, you should catch up here—it might be very important in the coming days).  And my parents are in town taking up pretty much what little spare time I had.

And bluntly you should pay attention to this space.  Big, original reporting might be in the offing depending on how things work out.  But I will have to be vague on this point.

Let's just say you might have a need to get out the popcorn.

But I have been watching in the background all week as we have seen this silly dustup where first Hilary Rosen and then various other liberals criticized Ann Romney for being... a stay-at-home mom.

And I could go into how this used to be the ideal.  Or how millions of American women would prefer to be a stay-at-home mother, but because of finances couldn’t afford it.  Indeed many feel guilty for not being a stay-at-home mother.

I could point out that feminism has created this situation.  By increasing the number of women in the workplace, they increased the supply of labor.  If you increase supply, you reduce prices—a.k.a. wages—and so soon the wages of men and women are depressed until many lower income women have no choice but to work.  And that is in the classic nuclear family.  The sexual revolution has accelerated the rise of rise of single motherhood and other non-traditional living situations, increasing the financial pressure that very often forces women to work when they might prefer to be a full-time mom.

And before you get all huffy and say that I am blaming feminism for forcing women into choices they might not prefer I will emphasize that there is a difference between causation and blame.  There was nothing wrong with the many women deciding that they were not destined to stay at home.  Lord knows I don’t want people dictating my career choices to me, and I will be damned if I do so for anyone else.  So long as you can do the job, it’s not my business to stop you and I generally prefer to figure out if a person can do a given job by letting them try and succeed, or fail.  But I can’t deny that there has been a cost to feminism.

But more fundamentally than all of that, I don’t care about Ann Romney’s qualifications, politics or anything.  The job of the first spouse not to do anything that matters.  So you take up some cause that no one can get too bent out of shape over, like Nancy Reagan asking kids nicely not to do drugs, or Michelle Obama asking kids nicely to get in better shape.  Yeah, I apply the rule equally to Michelle Obama, too.  Yes we might suspect that Michelle Obama’s request might later become Barrack Obama’s demand, but the fact is as far as I can tell Barrack is his own man and to the extent that they think alike it is simply the mind meld you expect happily married couples to have.

Obama Stumbles Badly on Judicial Review (Update: Audio Link Added) (Update: Instalink!)

Update (IV): Instalink!  Sweet!  (And thanks.)


Update (III): The Fifth Circuit has revised its request and it has already been completed by the esteemed Bartholomew Simpson, Esq.:





I mean that is what it is like, right?  (Created using this site.)


Update (II): Scroll down for my analysis of the audio from the Fifth Circuit essentially spanking the U.S. counsel, for what the President said.  I am leaving her name out of this to reduce the level of embarrassment because none of this is her fault.

So yesterday the President made some stunningly stupid comments on the challenge to Obamacare:

Ultimately, I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.

I would be hardly the first commentator who pointed out that it is far from unprecedented for the Supreme Court to strike down Congressional laws as conflicting with the Constitution.  Now truthfully, they far more often strike down state laws, than Federal laws, but they do indeed get struck down all the time.

And I am not the first to point out that this claim is dishonest in another way, namely by claiming that a strong majority passed this law.  In barely squeaked by and indeed in Massachusetts, Scott Brown was elected precisely to stop this legislation, and the Democrats resorted to shenanigans to get it passed without his input.

Fewer people notice how dishonest the lines just after it are:

And I'd just remind conservative commentators that for years what we’ve heard is, the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint -- that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law.  Well, this is a good example.  And I’m pretty confident that this Court will recognize that and not take that step.

First off the average conservative commentator thinks that this law is unconstitutional.  So if anything counts as activism in their minds, it would be upholding this law, mandate and all.

Second, it’s interesting that he frames this merely as a conservative concern.  That is because he has no cause to complain about activism.  As I wrote in my Patterico days:

And notice that term “activism.”  The correct translation when a liberal says it is “a decision I don’t like.” There is no other definition for liberals.  They don’t mind cases that overturn precedents, that overturn federal laws, and that invent rights out of thin air.  Let’s suppose for the sake of argument that the judge’s opinion is not supported by the [C]onstitution or precedent—they have no principled objection to that.  So their objection is merely to losing.

You might also enjoy the “augmented” version of the quote by Dana Pico at Common Sense Political Thought (I always appreciated the kind words written there, too).

The point is that it is fundamentally dishonest for a liberal to complain about judicial activism.  That’s not to say that true judicial activism isn't a problem.  After all, suppose that secretly behind closed doors the outcome of Bush v. Gore was really about which candidate they preferred?  Then that is a problem, isn’t it?  I mean every justice, as an American citizen, has a right to vote for President, but this would give their vote infinitely more power than any ordinary citizen, if they choose election law cases based on who they want to win.  So much for one person, one vote, right?  I don’t think that is what they did, but I would be the first to denounce it if that is what I believed.

And put aside the reality behind Bush v. Gore, the case also shows how inherently dangerous it is to have a large portion of the population believe that the Supreme Court is more or less corrupt.  I mean that is what activism is, really: corruption.  It is justices disregarding their oaths of office and exercising power not granted to them.  And the problem is that when many people believe that the Supreme Court is corrupt, that they let their politics rather than the law guide their decisions, then it means that we have no neutral umpire in our government.  There is no neutral party that the other branches can go to for fair arbitration.  So when we have a crisis like the one Bush v. Gore represented, we have a very real danger that a large part of the country will not accept their decision as binding.

Anyway, today Obama tried to walkhis comments back, and ended up coming off clumsy again:

MR. SINGLETON:  Mr. President, you said yesterday that it would be unprecedented for a Supreme Court to overturn laws passed by an elected Congress.  But that is exactly what the Court has done during its entire existence.  If the Court were to overturn individual mandate, what would you do, or propose to do, for the 30 million people who wouldn’t have health care after that ruling?

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, first of all, let me be very specific. We have not seen a Court overturn a law that was passed by Congress on a economic issue, like health care, that I think most people would clearly consider commerce -- a law like that has not been overturned at least since Lochner.  Right?  So we’re going back to the ’30s, pre New Deal.

And the point I was making is that the Supreme Court is the final say on our Constitution and our laws, and all of us have to respect it, but it’s precisely because of that extraordinary power that the Court has traditionally exercised significant restraint and deference to our duly elected legislature, our Congress.  And so the burden is on those who would overturn a law like this.

So it’s not unprecedented to overturn a Congressional law, just one in the area of commercial regulation since around the New Deal, where most people agree it is commerce.  You know yesterday I thought the President couldn’t actually be ignorant enough to believe his words, especially given that he was a Constitutional Law professor at one time, but now I am not so sure.  For instance, Lochner is a 1905 decision, and the Supreme Court struck down many laws purporting to regulate commerce since then and indeed as pointed out in oral argument last week, Lochner concerned itself with state power, not Federal power.  And indeed several laws in the New Deal were also struck down.  I mean what Obama said is just bad history.

And of course Congress has asserted that the Commerce clause has applied to actions that were plainly not commerce, such as carrying a gun near a school or raping a woman.  Now, in those comments Obama seemed to be thinking of those cases when he said it was something that “I think most people would clearly consider commerce.”  Except that most people do not think that sitting on your keister and not owning insurance is commerce.

And what is really inexcusable about all of this is that he knew sooner or later he would be asked about these comments, so he had to have given them some thought, but even then he decided to half-ass the thing.

And it is still a not-very-subtle threat.  We know by now that the reason why the Supreme Court stopped challenging the other branches of government was because FDR threatened their judicial independence with a court-packing scheme.  So all this talk about how it hadn’t been done since the New Deal is plainly a reference to that threat.

And its toothless, too.  Most of the American people do not think this law is constitutional.  And a sizeable chunk of the American people won’t have an opinion on the subject, but will instead trust that the Supreme Court is right so if the Supreme Court declares it to be unconstitutional, that group will decide the Obamacare violates the Constitution.  I consider that a servile way of thinking, but it undeniably exists.  And then you have the crowd that would say somehow it is unconstitutional to strike Obamacare down—but would they even really believe it?  These are often the same people who claim with a straight face that the evangelical Christians who wrote the Fourteenth Amendment were open minded enough about gay people as to have intended—but forgot to write down—a right to gay sex in that amendment.  How many of them even believe what they are shoveling when they say that?  So how much actual outrage are we talking about here?

Anyway, regardless of his walk back, this was either too late or not good enough for the Fifth Circuit which is hearing its own Obamacare challenge right now:

In the escalating battle between the administration and the judiciary, a federal appeals court apparently is calling the president's bluff -- ordering the Justice Department to answer by Thursday whether the Obama Administration believes that the courts have the right to strike down a federal law, according to a lawyer who was in the courtroom.

The order, by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, appears to be in direct response to the president's comments yesterday about the Supreme Court's review of the health care law. Mr. Obama all but threw down the gauntlet with the justices, saying he was "confident" the Court would not "take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress."

Overturning a law of course would not be unprecedented -- since the Supreme Court since 1803 has asserted the power to strike down laws it interprets as unconstitutional. The three-judge appellate court appears to be asking the administration to admit that basic premise -- despite the president's remarks that implied the contrary. The panel ordered the Justice Department to submit a three-page, single-spaced letter by noon Thursday addressing whether the Executive Branch believes courts have such power, the lawyer said.

Greta Van Sustern has an image of the letter sent, but since it refers only to the questions during oral argument, and I can’t find a link to that, it’s not very illuminating.  You can read her notes on listening to the oral argument and I am willing to bet she will have audio tonight on her show.

Update: Google is my friend!  I just found the audio that appears to be it.  I will update when I get a chance to listen to it.

And they are specifically asking for a three page single spaced letter.  So really it is almost like an essay assignment as punishment that you might have seen in elementary school where you have to write x number of paragraphs explaining why you should not throw spitballs at other students, or something.

Update (II): I had a chance to listen to the audio from the Fifth Circuit.  I am listening on windows media player.  But if you go to the 18:00 mark you are pretty close to the beginning of this.

You can tell that when they ask her about the power of judicial review that the question is completely out of left field for her.  Here’s my somewhat editorialized transcript, but if you listen for yourself, I think you will confess to my accuracy:

Q: Let me ask you something a little more basic…  does the Department of Justice recognize that courts have the authority in appropriate circumstances to strike down a statute because of one or more constitutional infirmities?

Long pause.

A: Yeee—es your honor.

And here’s my slightly redacted transcript of her thoughts during that long pause, the accuracy of which I am equally confident:

What the f--- is he talking about?  Am I hearing him right?  Okay, go with it.

Really, it is borderline cruel what they did to this poor attorney.  It’s not her fault the President is saying these stupid things.

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Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.  And you can purchase my book (or borrow it for free if you have Amazon Prime), Archangel: A Novel of Alternate, Recent History here.  And you can read a little more about my novel, here.

New York Times: Hey, Isn’t It Great the Way Obama Brought his Race Into the Trayvon Martin Case?

Earlier today I talked about this statement by Obama:

Update: That video is not loading, so here's a substitute.

And among other things, I had this to say about it:

[H]ere is the absolute worst part of what Obama said:

“My main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” Obama said. “All of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves.”

At the beginning of the statements Obama notes that as head of the executive branch that might very well prosecute George Zimmerman for a crime, he is limited in what he can say.  He rightly recognizes that if he makes statements indicating any kind of prejudice in the case he could harm the ability of the government to prosecute it.  And please note when I say “prejudice” I don’t mean merely if he expresses any bias based on race, sex, etc. but any pre-judgment, any kind of judgment before the facts are in.

But ironically that very statement exposed himself to charges of prejudice—the kind of prejudice you think of first when you think of the word, bias based on race.  He just implied that because of racial affinity he feels particularly bad about the Trayvon killing.  So then since a hypothetical son of Barrack and Michelle Obama would not look like George Zimmerman, does that mean he feels less sympathy for him?

And indeed Trayvon does not look particularly much like Barrack or Michelle Obama.  The only way you could say that Obama’s hypothetical son would look like Trayvon is if you think all black people look alike, and gee, I thought that was a racist point of view?

One does have to wonder how this will play in the Hispanic community, too.  While the President didn’t indict Zimmerman, his racially charged remarks might play badly.  The President should have made no reference to the race of anyone involved; and indeed all good people feel sympathy for the Martin family, regardless of skin color.  If you don’t feel bad for them, yeah, I think there is something wrong with you.

But according to Jackie Calmes and Helene Cooper of the New York Times, this is swell:

President Obama did not mention race even as he addressed it on Friday, instead letting his person and his words say it all: “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

Weighing in for the first time on the death of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black teenager shot and killed a month ago in Florida by a neighborhood watch volunteer, Mr. Obama in powerfully personal terms deplored the “tragedy” and, as a parent, expressed sympathy for the boy’s mother and father.

“I can only imagine what these parents are going through. And when I think about this boy, I think about my own kids,” Mr. Obama said. “Every parent in America,” he added, “should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this and that everybody pulls together — federal, state and local — to figure out exactly how this tragedy happened.”

While speaking movingly from his perspective as the father of two girls, one a teenager, Mr. Obama notably made no reference to the racial context that has made the killing of Trayvon and the gunman’s claim of self-defense a rallying point for African-Americans. Since Mr. Obama first began campaigning to be “president of all the people,” as his advisers would put it when pressed on racial issues, he has been generally reluctant to talk about race. And after his historic election as the first black president, Mr. Obama learned the hard way about the pitfalls of the chief executive opining on law enforcement matters involving civil rights.

Bin Laden’s Plan to Ruin America: Make Joe Biden President!

Now, look, we should not make choices among candidates based on this sort of thing, but gosh, this is probably going to result in some awkwardness in the White House:

Before his death, Osama bin Laden boldly commanded his network to organize special cells in Afghanistan and Pakistan to attack the aircraft of President Obama and Gen. David H. Petraeus.

“The reason for concentrating on them,” the al-Qaeda leader explained to his top lieutenant, “is that Obama is the head of infidelity and killing him automatically will make [Vice President] Biden take over the presidency. . . . Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the U.S. into a crisis. As for Petraeus, he is the man of the hour . . . and killing him would alter the war’s path” in Afghanistan.

(Source).  My guess is Obama secretly had a laugh, and the secret service agent briefing Biden drew the short straw.

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Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.  And you can purchase my book (or borrow it for free if you have Amazon Prime), Archangel: A Novel of Alternate, Recent History here.  And you can read a little more about my novel, here.

I Read “The Space Traders” by Derrick Bell So You Don’t Have To!

This isn’t a full on fisking (though it is close), but Derrick Bell’s famous story The Space Traders is in the news again because of Obama’s association with him.  I had actually seen that HBO short based on the story and found it to be racist crap at the time, and continue to hold that opinion.  But I admit I never got around to reading the original.  But you can and I did, here.

The basic set up is that aliens come here in the far-flung year of…  2000!

And admittedly some of the fun here is looking at what Bell thought the year 2000 would look like as he offered the set up:

Those mammoth vessels carried within their holds treasure of which the United States was in most desperate need: gold, to bail out the almost bankrupt federal, state, and local governments; special chemicals capable of unpolluting the environment, which was becoming daily more toxic, and restoring it to the pristine state it had been before Western explorers set foot on it; and a totally safe nuclear engine and fuel, to relieve the nation's all but-depleted supply of fossil fuel. In return, the visitors wanted only one thing-and that was to take back to their home star all the African Americans who lived in the United States.

Stratfor Personnel Guess bin Laden Was Not Buried at Sea and Somehow This is News

Back in my Patterico days, both I and Patrick were very hard on Obama’s decision to have bin Laden buried at sea, supposedly out of respect for Islamic tradition (except it wasn’t) before there was any independent verification that we actually killed him.  We felt that doign it that way robbed the families of the 9-11 victims of closure, and gave fertile ground for conspiracy theories.  And so now today via Althouse we get this article from the Wikileaking of Stratfor’s databases:

Leaked: Bin Laden not buried at sea, body moved on CIA plane to US

The body of Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden was not buried at sea, according to leaked emails of intelligence firm Stratfor, as revealed by WikiLeaks.

Wow, holy crap, that means the Obama administration was not as dumb about this as I thought.  I take it back, I mean...

Except, um, wait a minute:

Stratfor’s vice-president for intelligence, Fred Burton, believes the body was “bound for Dover, [Delaware] on [a] CIA plane” and then “onward to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Bethesda [Maryland],” an email says.

(Emphasis added.)  Um, he believes?  As in he isn’t sure?

The official version is that the body of Al-Qaeda’s top man, who was killed by a US raid in Pakistan on May 2, 2011, was buried at an undisclosed location at sea in a proper Muslim ceremony.

"If body dumped at sea, which I doubt, the touch is very Adolph Eichman like. The Tribe did the same thing with the Nazi's ashes," Burton commented in another email. Eichman was one of the masterminds of the Holocaust by Nazi Germany. He was captured by Mossad agents in Argentina and, tried in Israel, found guilty and executed in 1962. His body was cremated and his ashes were scattered at sea over the Mediterranean.

“Which I doubt” means he is speculating...

Just a Reminder: Obama WANTS High Gas Prices (With Video Proof)

So today we see, via ABC news a report on gas prices where during the report itself they saw the station behind them raise prices by ten cents.  And it is worth noting that the prices are much, much better where I live—at around $3.60 (recognizing that there are daily fluctuations).

You can watch that on video here.  I am not embedding it because ABC videos tend to start on their own, which is annoying.  Besides a pair of screencaps tell the whole story.  First before:

And now after:

And yes, Obama wants high gas prices.  Here’s what he said about this during the 2008 campaign:

Shorter Obama: Prognosticating on the Economy is Above My Pay Grade!

I think that is a reasonable, albeit snarky, summary of what he said on 60 Minutes.  A lot of other people are focusing on Obama saying that he didn’t overpromise on the economy but right at the beginning is the part that left me stunned:

[Update: The video player was not playing the correct video.  I will try to find an alternate source.  In the meantime, you can watch the video at the Blaze.]

And in case you can’t watch the video, the Blaze has a good summary of the passage:

Still, he said the unemployment rate could drop to 8 percent before the general election in November.

“I think it’s possible,” Obama said, “But — I’m not in the job of prognosticating on the economy. I’m in the job of putting in place the tools that allow the economy to thrive and Americans to succeed.”

Well, then Mr. President, you did something that was above your pay grade.  And in doing so, you bet your ass you overpromised:

Once again, the lowest line is what your administration said would happen if we passed the stimulus.  The middle line is what they claimed would happen if we did nothing.  And that top squiggly line, is what has been happening despite—or perhaps because of—your stimulus.

And here are a few other examples of you prognosticating on the economy.  From the State of the Union, 2011:

Obama’s Economic Illiteracy on Display: Extending Unemployment Benefits is Stimulus!

I heard about this gem on Twitter last night, but I couldn’t find a citable source until this morning:

As Obama called for passage of those bills, he also responded to a recent Republican push to require him to approve the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada. "However many jobs might be generated by a Keystone pipeline," he said, "they're going to be a lot fewer than the jobs that are created by extending the payroll tax cut and extending unemployment insurance."

Okay, folks let me explain something to you that maybe a lot of you don’t know—I mean, bluntly a lot of people don’t know this in my experience.  Do you know how unemployment benefits are paid for?  In the three jurisdictions I work in (Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C.), and I believe in almost all of the rest of the country, it works like this.  Employers are required to contribute directly to the unemployment benefits fund.  Their contribution is determined by their “experience rating.”  There is a lot of complicated numbers in their formulae, but it really comes down to this.  Just about every dime of benefits paid out to an ex-employee gets taken out of the respective ex-employer’s hide.  If a former employee gets $30,000 in benefits in a given year, you can bet that one way or the other the employer will have to pay very close to $30,000 that they would not have had to pay but for that employee getting benefits.

Now this cost can be avoided by different means.  The most common one is by showing that the conduct of the ex-employee was so bad that it justified termination.  If that happens, then the ex-employee gets no benefits, and the employer doesn’t have his or her experience rating increased.  Generally the misconduct has to be reasonably severe and it can’t just be, “we found someone better than him/her.”  In this way, then, the unemployment benefits system is a tax on terminations that are based on anything but misconduct of a relatively severe nature.

So any rational employer  recognizes that if they hire a new employee they run the risk of needing to fire them and then having to pay unemployment benefits for months to come.  Last I heard we were already forcing employers to pay for 99 weeks of benefits, almost two years.  So every time you increase unemployment benefits, you increase the risk and costs associated with hiring new employees.

Now surely Obama would respond by arguing that by giving these unemployed people free money, they are likely to spend more money and that will have a stimulative effect on the economy leading to more job creation.  But that benefit is theoretical at best and so far the Obama administration has had a proven track record of being wrong on this point.

After all, let’s not forget  this chart:

Now that chart is a few months old, and the unemployment rate has crept down to 8.6% since then.  And even that number is not really as good as you might think.  Let’s let Business Week explain this to you:

A big drop in the jobless rate isn’t always good news. A lot depends on what causes the drop. Remember, the unemployment rate is calculated by adding up all the people who tell government surveyors that they can’t find work and dividing it by all the people in the labor force—those either employed or actively looking. So if people give up searching, they’re no longer counted as unemployed, and the rate falls. In November about two-thirds of the improvement in the jobless rate came from people dropping out of the labor force and thus out of the calculation of the unemployed. Only one-third was because of actual job creation.

So in other words about two times as many people gave up on looking for lawful employment* as gained new jobs.

And even if you update the chart to the current 8.6% the fact is that this is still significantly higher than Obama said it would be, even if we didn’t pass the stimulus.  As I wrote over at Patterico’s Pontifications:

Logically there are only two explanations for why things are the way they are:

1.      Either the Obama administration stinks at making predictions; or

2.      They’re making it worse.

That’s it.  There is no third option.  And either way, it leads us to the same conclusion: they need to stop what they are doing.  The reason why option #2 leads to that [conclusion is] obvious, but the reason why option #1 leads there is less so.  The reason why their inability to predict accurately proves they need to stop is simply that if they can’t predict the future, then they can’t possibly know what the effects of their policies would be.

What we need at this point is for a President who will take the Hippocratic [Oath] before attempting to treat our economic “body.”  Like Hippocrates, we need a president who understands first and foremost that he or she doesn’t know very much about the “body” that s/he is treating and therefore he or she must follow the maxim “first, do no harm.”  Obama stands before us today saying (paraphrase), “trust me, the economy would have been in much worse shape today if I didn’t intervene.”  He is like one of the quacks of old who bled a person to death’s door, claiming that if he hadn’t, then the patient would have been in even worse shape.

The maxim “first, do no harm” means that you don’t do something you know will hurt the “patient” on the hope (without proof) that the benefits will outweigh the harm.

Applied to this situation, the President is proposing to do something that we know will reduce the incentives of businesses to hire new employees.  You can be almost guaranteed that this will put a downward pressure on hiring.  On the other hand, he is also hoping that this will have a stimulative effect.  Even forgetting how just plain bad he is at predicting what will and will not stimulate the economy, that would be a dubious proposition.  First do no harm, Mr. President.  Do not depress hiring in the hopes that something good might come out of it.

And you know what really helps the economy? New hiring.  And that is because instead of paying people not to work, then you are paying them to work.  And that in turn means that those people just might help in the creation of real things that create real wealth.  Hiring 100 new employees at an auto plant is not economically identical to paying the same 100 people to sit on their duffs all day, because the members of the first group are not only receiving money that they will presumably pay into the economy, but they are creating real things of real value.

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* I wonder why economists never consider the possibility that some of these people dropping out of the labor pool might in fact be turning to illegal professions such as drug dealing or prostitution.  Now by the very nature of such work, it will be almost impossible to estimate how many people left the workforce for this reason, or just gave the hell up, you have to think that this is at least part of the explanation.

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Update: I should thank JWF for giving me this link.

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Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.

Fuller Context of the “Absorb” Comment

Yesterday I vented about the quote, yes wondering about the context but still being baffled that the president didn’t seem to understand that the terrorists wanted to do worse than just 9-11 to us.

With the context supplied, I have to eat a little crow and say that my understanding was incorrect.  Mind you, the president frankly stated it badly, but in context he absolutely acknowledges that yes, we have to worry about nuclear terrorism and the like.  And on this point I am very glad I can say I was wrong.  My feeling is more relief than anything.  Via the plumb line, here is more of the missing context, starting right in the middle of a quoted statement from the President:

"I said very early on, as a Senator and continue to believe, as a presidential candidate and now as president, that we can absorb a terrorist attack. We will do everything we can to prevent it. but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever, that ever took place on our soil, we absorbed it, and we are stronger. This is a strong, powerful country that we live in, and our people are incredibly resilient."

Then he addressed his big concern. "A potential game changer would be a nuclear weapon in the hands of terrorists, blowing up a major American city. Or a weapon of mass destruction in a major American city. and so when I go down on the list of things I have to worry about all the time, that is at the top, because that's one area where you can't afford any mistakes. And so right away, coming in, we said, how are we going to start ramping up and putting that at the center of a lot of our national security discussion? Making sure that that occurrence, even if remote, never happens."

(emphasis removed).

I think it is accurate to say the statement is incomplete because there is no mention of retaliation, but I won’t fault Obama for that.  Call it more like constructive criticism.  He is talking about it in the abstract and it can be hard to remember every piece of the puzzle.  Indeed the honest threat of retaliation is arguably part of “preventing” it.

A more substantive criticism is that he seems to think this is an “either or” kind of thing, like our intelligence and national security apparatus can’t walk and chew gum, stopping both non-WMD and WMD-based-terrorism.  Indeed, I would suspect it would be hard to segregate that kind of thing.  If you hear the terrorists chattering about an “operation” in America, how are you going to know if they plan to set off a nuke or a regular truck bomb?  It seems that if you want to prevent the WMD-based terror, you can’t discriminate based on whether you think it is WMD related or not.

Oh, and if you are going to try to do that, then you really shouldn’t tell Bob Woodward.  Then the terrorists will know that the best way to reduce the heat is to make us think its not a WMD threat.

And finally a number of people have said the whole thing seemed very cold about the prospect of another 9-11.  But sometimes you have to talk coldly about it.  On the other hand, I have no doubt that if any of the debates in 2008 he has said anything like that, he would not be president today.

And besides, guys, you are figuring out that our president is non-emotive now?

Anyway, as for my commentary yesterday, I happily take it back.  Really, seriously it is a major fucking relief to say he is not that clueless on national security.

Obama’s September 10th Mentality on Display (updated)

From Bob Woodward’s new book on the subject, we have the President saying this:

"We can absorb a terrorist attack. We'll do everything we can to prevent it, but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever . . . we absorbed it and we are stronger."

Now an appropriate sense of caution should be applied here.  Maybe there is some missing context but...  seriously, what the fuck?

Mr. President, are you under the impression that 9-11 is as bad as it possibly could get?  I mean 9-11 itself wasn’t as bad as it could have been.  If flight 93 hadn’t crashed in Pennsylvania, if the Pentagon was hit in a different place, it could have been much worse.

And then what if our enemies get weapons of mass destruction.  What if Iran gets a nuke and gives it to their friends in Hamas to attack the U.S.?  What if it goes off in downtown D.C.?

If this quote is accurate and not out of context, I can only conclude that you, Mr. President, have no fucking idea what we are faced with.  I said a long time ago, that September 11 might prove a blessing in disguise.  Because as awful as it is, it could have been much, much worse.  But now we are awakened to the danger, I said, we can prevent what might have instead been a biochemical or nuclear slaughter that would have made 9-11 look like nothing.

But I might have been wrong.  It seems that we have a president who didn’t learn that lesson.

Imagine if Washington D.C. suddenly disappeared.  Our President, our Congress, our Supreme Court, all gone.  Our military command decapitated.  I know some might genuinely wonder if on balance that would be a bad thing, but it would be.  As badly as things are run now, having nothing, suddenly, would be worse.  I believe that this country could recover, but I would never be so flippant about that nightmare scenario.

Seriously, what the fuck, Mr. President?  What...  the…  fuck?!

Update: Via Patterico, we get this explanation, anonymously, from “an administration official familiar with the interview.”  This official is characterized as saying (this is not even quoting the actual official):

Objectively, the president said, you would want to be able to stop every attack, but a president has to prioritize. So what does the president put at the top of the danger list? A nuclear weapon or a weapon of mass destruction. Why? Because—and here's where the quote in question comes in—as bad as 9/11 was, the United States was not crippled. A nuclear attack or weapon of mass destruction, however, would be a "game changer," to use a popular cliché.

Well that does in a sense address my concern.  The problem is it doesn’t fit the president’s words very well.  I mean the president said we can absorb a terrorist attack.  That doesn’t, in ordinary parlance, exclude the use of nuclear weapons.

And it is fair to say I hold the president to a higher standard.  He is a lawyer.  He knows, or should know, how to be precise.  So I am more likely to take him as meaning what he said.  Still let me put myself into the category of waiting for context.  I believe at this point Woodward has a journalistic duty to provide enough context to explain the president’s remarks and either refute of verify the implication I drew from it—that the President didn’t know just how bad it could get.