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… Will It Address Stark’s Lunacy In 2007?

Posted by Always To The Right on Tuesday, September 15, 2009 12:53:54 PM

As the House prepares to censure Wilson …

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The Green Czar Affair Should Put The Final Lie To The Times’ ‘Objectivity’

Posted by Always To The Right on Sunday, September 13, 2009 6:40:26 PM
How bad was the NYT’s whitewash of Van Jones? This bad

“This is not an excuse,” the managing editor of The New York Times said after offering the following excuse for completely missing the Van Jones story, except in a blog post: “Our Washington bureau was somewhat short-staffed during the height of the pre-Labor Day vacation period.”
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Hmmmm

Posted by Always To The Right on Saturday, September 12, 2009 11:01:52 AM

US accepts Iran talks offer, Iran hints at nuclear negotiations

Last night, the media reported that the US had accepted an offer of direct talks with Iran for the first time without preconditions.  The timing could not  have been worse, since people across America had spent the day commemorating the deaths of 3,000 of their countrymen at the hands of the kind of radical Islamists that run Iran.  Was the administration hoping to bury this in a Friday-afternoon document dump?

Aside from the remarkably tone-deaf timing, though, it’s not a surprise at all.  Obama has three basic choices for policy change when it comes to Iran: go to war, increase the sanctions to attempt to change their behavior, or open direct negotiations.  None of these are completely mutually exclusive, for that matter.  Obama simply will not take the first option — no one can seriously think that Obama would declare war on anyone absent a military attack on the US — and Russia pulled the rug out from underneath the second option.  China wouldn’t have supported more sanctions either.  That meant either the status quo or an offer for direct talks.

That’s much more give than the Iranians have ever publicly offered.  Do they really want to put their nuclear program on the table?  Of course not.  The Iranians understand that this concession by Obama and other UNSC nations will not be popular in the West, especially in the US.  They want to give Obama and other leaders a piece of paper they can wave in the air while promising “peace in our time,” in order to give them enough political cover to continue.

At this point, though, there doesn’t seem to be much opportunity for success through policy change.  Obama won’t go to war, and in any event a war against Iran would be a very ill-advised affair; Iran is not Iraq or Afghanistan, except in the worst possible ways for terrain and fanaticism.  The rest of the world won’t tighten sanctions enough to change Iran’s course.  Talks will be fruitless and will likely lull the West while Iran completes its bomb and tightens its oppression, plus it has the effect of endorsing the regime that just rigged an election and triggered a promising uprising among the Iranian people.  In this case, the status quo was the better option.



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More Insured, More Uninsured

Posted by Always To The Right on Friday, September 11, 2009 12:42:11 PM

Who are the uninsured, 2009 edition

The Census Bureau released its annual income, poverty, and health insurance survey

(2008) yesterday, giving both sides new numbers to use in the health-care debate.  ObamaCare advocates can claim that the number of uninsured rose in the year, which it did, from 45.6 million in 2007 to 46.3 million in 2008.  Opponents of the administration’s efforts can point to the increased numbers of Americans covered by insurance (255.1 million, up from 253.7 million in 2007) and the wider coverage of existing government programs — which increased by almost 5 million to 87.4 million people in 2008.

The focus will fall on the breakdown of the uninsured.  What comprised the 46,340,000 uninsured, according to the Census Bureau?

  • 35.2 million are in families, and 10.7 million are single
  • 21.3 million are white, 14.6 million Hispanic, and 7.2 million black
  • Just over 30 million are between 25 and 64 years of age, while 7.3 million are children
  • Almost all of them are in major metropolitan areas (39.2 million)
  • 17.8 million make more than $50,000 a year in annual household income
  • 10.7 million did not work in the past year

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At Least They Didn’t Throw Shoes

Posted by Always To The Right on Thursday, September 10, 2009 1:17:27 PM

Flashback: Democratic etiquette in the Bush era

Let’s start off by acknowledging that Rep. Joe Wilson needed to apologize for his outburst in Congress last night during the speech by President Barack Obama. Getting called a liar by the President in a speech may be infuriating, but a certain level of decorum is expected of our elected officials, and Wilson violated that decorum. He did the right thing by apologizing afterward.

Unfortunately, people on the Left want to keep hyperventilating about this as though the world was born on the day Barack Obama won the presidential election. As Omri Ceren and Michelle remind people, the Democrats were hardly models of decorum in the last administration. Here’s a clip from the State of the Union speech in 2005, when George Bush warned Congress that Social Security was going broke and needed reform immediately. Did Democrats politely listen to the warning? Not exactly. Listen to the boos and catcalls
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Guess Why

Posted by Always To The Right on Wednesday, September 09, 2009 10:55:28 AM

US drops to #2 on competitiveness

The effect of the Obama administration’s economic policies have already had an impact on our international standing — and that is bad news.  Financial Times reports that the US has dropped out of its customary position as the most competitive economic environment, allowing Switzerland to capture the top spot.  Why?

The full report has much more detail, but government interventions already committed have dragged our competitiveness down.  That doesn’t include the government takeover of health care and the government takeover of energy production, both under consideration now by Congress.  If the government imposes itself on both industries, it will control more than 30% of the American economy — and the next rating will not be as kind as First Runner-Up.

How did we come to lose our spot?  One reason can be found on page 295 of the report, which ranks nations on the burden of government regulation.  Currently, we rank 53rd on that list, behind such free societies as Morocco, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and China.  The US regulatory scheme is actually 32 nations worse

than communist China’s.  (The UK ranks 86th on this list, if that makes us Yanks feel any better.)



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Listening To A Liar

Posted by Always To The Right on Tuesday, September 08, 2009 11:26:26 AM
The most important thing about what anyone says are not the words themselves but the credibility of the person who says them. full story
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Plus: We Should Have Vetted More, Says White House

Posted by Always To The Right on Monday, September 07, 2009 1:43:30 PM

“Meet the Press” finds the big lesson in the Van Jones story: You can’t trust the Internet

Hey, Tom? He’s a Truther in charge of $60 billion in taxpayer money. We’re not talking about some alderman here who got caught saying something off-color at the Dairy Queen. Quoth Jonah Goldberg: “What a tragedy that fewer people will support cop-killers and anti-American conspiracy groups because of poor Van Jones chilling effect on the culture.”

Oh, and speaking of whitewashes, the White House wants you to believe that they didn’t know about any of it.

A White House official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a personnel matter, said Sunday that Jones’s past was not studied as intensively as other advisers because of his relatively low rank.

Jones’s position, for example, did not require Senate confirmation. So he avoided the kind of vetting Cabinet officials were subjected to…

“He was not as thoroughly vetted as other administration officials,” the official said. “It’s fair to say there were unknowns.”

Valerie Jarrett seemed pretty excited about him, so presumably she had an inkling about his past. But even if they’re telling the truth and somehow the multiple-page questionnaire all administration officials are required to fill out wasn’t broad enough to catch, ahem, Trutherism, this is nothing less than a confession by the White House that its czars might very well be unsavory characters with skeletons in their closets. Why vet them if they don’t have to pass the Senate, right? And if you do vet them and conclude that they can’t pass the Senate — as almost certainly happened with Jones — then just make them a czar and the problem is solved.

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Under The Bus

Posted by Always To The Right on Sunday, September 06, 2009 1:15:56 PM

Van Jones resigns

In this case, the “vicious smear campaign” consisted of (a) accurately quoting Jones and (b) citing documents he signed. But no matter. He’s headed for left-wing martyrdom, Trutherism notwithstanding and replete with lies about how Beck supposedly attacked him only after the Color of Change boycott began (wrong) and how the Truther petition itself was credibly challenged by other signatories (wrong twice over). Howard Dean’s already pushing the latter point, in fact, and calls Jones’s resignation “a loss for the country,” which is fitting insofar as Dean-o himself was once a bit warmer to Truther theories than even some lefty commentators could bear.

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Rebuked

Posted by Always To The Right on Saturday, September 05, 2009 2:47:59 PM

Video: Constituent lectures Congressman on executive power

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Shame On The Selfish Associated Press. Shame.

Posted by Always To The Right on Friday, September 04, 2009 6:59:39 PM
By Michelle Malkin  •  September 4, 2009 02:16 PM

Before I get to the Associated Press and its vile decision to publish an embedded photographer’s image of a dying soldier in Afghanistan over the objections of the soldier’s family and the Pentagon, I want to remind you that we’ve been down this disgusting road before.

In February 2007, the New York Times published an embedded staff team’s photograph and videotape of a Texas soldier dying in Iraq. The solider was Army Staff Sgt. Hector Leija and his personal motto was “Bound by Honor”–a foreign concept at the NYTimes. As I noted at the time, embeds are required to read and agree to a clear set of ground rules forbidding release of names and video of wounded service members without their prior consent . I know, because I had to sign the forms when I embedded in Baghad in January 2007:

But ambitious, agenda-driven members of the MSM don’t let rules or wishes get in the way of a good story.

And so, it has happened again. Via Politico, AP defies common decency for the Greater Good (hat tip – Blackfive)
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Leaks Are Bad. Except This One, Of Course

Posted by Always To The Right on Friday, September 04, 2009 1:18:29 PM

CIA leaks that it wants DoJ probe of leaks

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Almost 300,000 More Jobs Lost

Posted by Always To The Right on Thursday, September 03, 2009 1:40:48 PM

August job losses outstrip expectations

How will the Washington Post report the latest assessment of job losses in August?  Earlier this week, the Post said that the expected loss of 228,000 jobs would give “strong evidence that improvement in the economy is finally filtering through to the job market.”  Unfortunately for the Post’s attempts to spin a growth in unemployment from 9.4% to 9.5% as great news for the Obama administration, job losses were more than 30% above expectations, according to the Wall Street Journal

What is also plain enough is that the stimulus has done very little to stimulate, now more than six months after its passage.  Joe Biden will make the mistake today of bragging about Porkulus rolling ahead of schedule, which should prompt people to ask — where’s the stimulus?

If so, then why has the money slowed?  If Porkulus is ahead of schedule, then why haven’t we seen an economic stimulus?  The President’s Council of Economic Advisers justified the spending of $787 billion on the prediction that it would create enough jobs to keep unemployment under 8%.  We’re now heading towards 10% and above without a single sign that this massive spending has done anything but stimulate the government.

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There’d Be No Domestic Automakers?

Posted by Always To The Right on Wednesday, September 02, 2009 12:11:33 PM

Tapper on Obama’s “precipitous slide”

How bad has Barack Obama’s slide in the polls become? So bad,Jake Tapper reports

for ABC News, that the White House has abandoned the talk of mandates and now cast Obama as a courageous statesman willing to do the unpopular. Why, the world would look much different if Obama was concerned about mandates

“If we only did what was popular in polls, the banks would have failed, there’s be no domestic automakers, and we’d pull all of our troops out of Afghanistan tomorrow …”

Well, except for that one domestic automaker that didn’t take the government cheese. How is Ford doing, by the way? It leads Government Motors in market share for the first time in 80 years. And can we remember to put the statement on Afghanistan in the memory banks for later retrieval when the Obama administration gets squishy on the Af-Pak theater?

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Will’s Loss Of Nerve

Posted by Always To The Right on Tuesday, September 01, 2009 8:12:29 PM
“It is a column that could have been written in Japanese aboard the USS Missouri”
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