Monthly Archives: August 2011

Wet People

Featured image During the George W. Bush administration, liberals became so unhinged that a psychological condition called Bush Derangement Syndrome was diagnosed. Years later, some on the Left still suffer from it. The phrase has been turned to other uses, but W. has been the undisputed champion when it comes to bringing out the insanity in political opponents. Until now. We saw it here in Minnesota, and now we are experiencing it »

Obama’s Midsession Budget Review: A Leading Indicator

Featured image Much attention is focused on the speech that President Obama will give next week–he and John Boehner are jockeying over the date–to unveil his new, improved job-creation plans. New, improved plans are required because what the Democrats did during the two years when they controlled all the levers of power in Washington was a total failure; but I digress. Meanwhile, the administration’s mid-session budget review has been flying under the »

Green Jobs, Up In Smoke

Featured image There have been a number of similar stories lately–highly touted “green jobs” companies that got millions in federal subsidies are going under, one after another. The latest is a California company called Solyndra: A California solar panel manufacturer which President Obama had made the poster child of his effort to expand the green economy and grow jobs has filed for bankruptcy, the company announced today. … “Regulatory and policy uncertainties »

Rick Perry, Southern Democrat?

Featured image One of my cousins is a professor of political science at a Texas university. I was with him a few weeks ago and asked what he thinks of Rick Perry, particularly of his history as a Democrat. My cousin, a liberal, assured me that southern Democrats of Perry’s time and place were solid conservatives. Still, I wonder. Jennifer Rubin points out that Perry’s record is rather weirdly mixed for someone »

Does anybody really know what time it is?

Featured image I had never purchased an iPhone app before the Obama clock arrived on the scene. Having first read about it at No Left Turns and Hugh Hewitt, I immediately sought it out and shelled out $0.99 for it. The app provides regular updates of Obama’s approval rating, the national debt, the unemployment level, the average price of regular gasoline per gallon, and the movement in the housing price index. And »

Man Bites Dog Today on NPR

Featured image Okay, I’ll admit it–I sometimes listen to NPR in the morning if I’m driving into DC to the office.  Just think of it as good opposition research.  Good to know what the enemy is thinking.  But I almost drove off the road in amazement the morning when “Morning Edition” (which I typically label “Morning Sedition” to go along with the afternoon marquee show, “All Things Distorted”) got something spectacularly right. »

Dreams from his uncle

Featured image The Boston Globe fills in the story of Barack Obama’s Uncle Onyango Obama in “Obama’s uncle is called a fugitive.” The article adds details to his immigration history, his immigration status, and his employment history. It also clarifies his name, which the Boston Herald has previously referred to as Obama Onyango: The uncle of President Obama arrested here last week on drunken driving and other charges has been a fugitive »

The Times Doubles Down (Cont.)

Featured image On August 14, the New York Times ran a front-page smear of Congressman Darrell Issa. Issa has made life difficult for the Obama administration in his capacity as Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, so the Times and its reporter Eric Lichtblau wanted to weigh in on behalf of their party. The gist of Lichtblau’s hit piece was that Issa, who made a good deal of money »

The Koch Conspiracy Theory: Consider the Source

Featured image Maybe you thought it was Jane Mayer of the New Yorker who came up with the idea of recasting conservatism in general, and the Tea Party movement in particular, as the creature of two rich brothers, Charles and David Koch. Or maybe you thought this bizarre meme was traceable to ThinkProgress, the wacky left-wing web site with the apt acronym TP. But no: at Big Journalism, Joel Pollak traces the »

How Obama Lost His Presidency

Featured image Our friend Andrew Breitbart has an op-ed in today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Andrew traces the downfall of the Obama administration to the events of August 2009, when the American people rose up against Obamacare, and the administration and its allies responded with thuggery. An excerpt: When the history of Barack Obama’s one-term presidency is written, August 2009 will be remembered as the turning point. It was then that thousands of »

Our Shrinking President

Featured image It has been widely noted that the more petulantly President Obama acts, the more he tries to blame others for his own failings, the smaller he becomes. If that principle is correct, by this time he has faded away pretty much to nothingness. Michael Ramirez illustrates the point: »

The Population is the Prize

Featured image Our friend Pete Hegseth, founder of Vets For Freedom, is now posted to Afghanistan, where he is training Afghans as well as American and coalition troops. His reports on the situation there are as knowledgeable as any you can find. Here is his latest dispatch, hot off the press: In counterinsurgency warfare, the population is the prize. The strategic sympathies of people in cities, villages, and the countryside are what »

“Maybe the Sun Has Something to Do With It?”

Featured image William F. Buckley Jr. delighted in telling the story of how Willmoore Kendall used to infuriate his liberal colleagues on the Yale faculty back in the 1950s (which eventually led Yale to buy out is contract to get rid of him) with simple comments such as the time he was in a faculty meeting where the assembled luminaries were fulminating about McCarthyism. Kendall took the floor and said, “You know, »

All in the family

Featured image The saga of the extended Obama family continues to amaze. In the closing days of the 2008 campaign, we met Barack Obama’s Aunt Zeituni, the woman whom he fondly recalled from his voyage to Kenya in Dreams From My Father. (Her name is Zeituni Onyango and she is the half-sister of Barack Obama, Sr.) In the closing days of the campaign Aunt Zeituni was found, not in Kenya, but rather »

The Times Doubles Down on Its Issa Smear

Featured image On August 14, the New York Times ran a front-page smear of Congressman Darrell Issa, who has been a nuisance to the Obama administration in his capacity as Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The Times article, by Eric Lichtblau (who relied on the goofball far-left site ThinkProgress for research assistance) was titled A Businessman in Congress Helps His District and Himself. Lichtblau’s theme was that Issa »

The Gibson Guitar Saga Gets Steadily Curiouser

Featured image These days, you can’t keep up with all the news. There is just too much going on. So inevitably, there are interesting stories that you have to catch up with when you can, like a moving train. The Justice Department’s raid on four Gibson guitar factories is in that category. The raid took place last Wednesday; this Memphis Daily News story, published this morning, is a good place to start: »

Ohio Mondays

Featured image So today finds me in Ohio, where I’ll be every Monday for the next 15 weeks, where I am a “distinguished visiting professor” at Ashland University, teaching a special new course on political economy for the Ashbrook Center’s honors program in politics and history.  (By the way, driving in to Ashland this morning I spotted a billboard that read, “Discover Ashland—World Headquarters of Nice People,” and my first thought was »