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Charles Krauthammer has a warning for those who love liberty. That would be the GOP. Unless, of course, we are talking about people like Trent Lott, Tom Delay, or Ted Stevens; who love money and their careers more.
In the political marketplace, there’s now a run on Obama shares. The left is disappointed with the president. Independents are abandoning him in droves. And the right is already dancing on his political grave, salivating about November when, his own press secretary admitted Sunday, Democrats might lose the House.
I have a warning for Republicans: Don’t underestimate Barack Obama. …
… The next burst of ideological energy — massive regulation of the energy economy, federalizing higher education and “comprehensive” immigration reform (i.e., amnesty) — will require a second mandate, meaning reelection in 2012.
That’s why there’s so much tension between Obama and congressional Democrats. For Obama, 2010 matters little. If Democrats lose control of one or both houses, Obama will probably have an easier time in 2012, just as Bill Clinton used Newt Gingrich and the Republicans as the foil for his 1996 reelection campaign. …
Abe Greenwald answers the administration’s excuse mongers.
It somehow has never dawned on the Obama devotees who like to cite the administration’s “inherited mess” that this president’s failures don’t exactly reflect the overcautiousness of a leader constrained by a crisis. Taking over one-sixth of the private sector in an unintelligible health-care scheme is not an indication of tied hands; it’s a demonstration of unbridled recklessness. So too is dumping unprecedented billions into a liberal wish-list and calling it a stimulus. And so is cooking up financial reform that makes growth impossible and charges responsible banks with the task of bailing out irresponsible ones.
But it is Barack Obama’s most devoted supporters who should be most offended by the White House’s newest spin on the president’s shortcomings. Obama, we are now told, could never have lived up to people’s expectations of him.
Of the two excuses, the second is the more ignoble. The first merely passes the buck to another politician; the second places the blame at the feet of everyone else. We’re not just talking about Americans, either. On Thursday, the European Commission’s president José Manuel Barroso told an interviewer that he was disappointed in the EU-America relationship under Obama. The administration’s response: “Senior U.S. figures said Obama could never live up to Europe’s sky-high expectations.” …
Roger Simon sums up our thoughts.
Mel Gibson isn’t the only vengeful narcissist in town.
Like spurned lovers eager to get back on the American people before the public votes them out of office, the U. S. Congress has enacted financial regulatory legislation that – remarkably like their healthcare legislation before it – exists only in broadest outlines for manipulation by generations of unregulated bureaucrats to come. …
Kimberley Strassel wonders if the financial regulatory bill is such a victory for the Dems.
… Democrats turned the financial regulation bill into a monstrosity. What started as a promise to streamline and modernize the financial system turned into 2,300 pages of new agencies and new powers for the very authorities that fomented the financial crisis. The bill is laden with uncertainty and brimming with costly regulations on small businesses. Sen. Chris Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank made it easy for Republicans to pronounce their bill more Obama Big Government—a “Main Street takeover”—and to justify their votes against it.
Those votes were made easier by the knowledge that, like stimulus and health care, this is legislation that has overpromised. The bill does nothing to address the root causes of the crisis. Yet Mr. Obama recently assured the nation that it not only fixes the system’s problems, but was “good for businesses, it’s good for the entire economy.”
This is the same White House that just launched a new campaign to convince Americans that its stimulus bill—which it promised would keep unemployment below 8%—is working. It’s the same White House struggling to explain why health-care costs continue to rise, and benefits continue to disappear, after grandly promising that it would stop all that.
A recent CBS poll found that 86% of Americans believe the president’s policies have hurt them or had no effect. The financial regulatory bill has to be viewed in this context—a public that isn’t begging to be fooled a third time. A Bloomberg National Poll this month says four out of five Americans have just a little or no confidence that the Democratic financial services bill will prevent or significantly soften a future crisis. …
Joel Kotkin says Obama’s business problem is with the little guys.
… Obama’s big problems with business did not start, and are not deepest, among the corporate elite. Instead, the driver here has been what you might call a bottom-up opposition. The business move against Obama started not in the corporate suites, but among smaller businesses. In the media, this opposition has been linked to Tea Parties, led by people who in any case would have opposed any Democratic administration. But the phenomenon is much broader than that.
The one group that has fared badly in the last two years has been the private-sector middle class, particularly the roughly 25 million small firms spread across the country. Their discontent—not that of the loud-mouthed professional right or the spoiled sports on Wall Street—is what should be keeping Obama and the Democrats awake at night.
Small business should be leading us out of the recession. In the last two deep recessions during the early 1980s and the early 1990s, small firms, particularly the mom and pop shops, helped drive the recovery, adding jobs and starting companies. In contrast, this time the formation rate for new firms has been dropping for months—one reason why unemployment remains so high and new hiring remains insipid at best. …
David Harsanyi sees a lot in Toy Story 3.
… It’s not surprising that animation and commercials are the most sensitive to public trends. It was “South Park’s” mild poke at religious fundamentalism that illustrated how dangerous religious extremism can be to free expression. Shows like “Family Guy” and “The Simpsons” regularly opine on sensitive areas of race, religion and culture that others would never dare touch.
Perhaps inadvertently, it was Audi’s “Green Police” Super Bowl spot — featuring law enforcement officials confiscating batteries and arresting enviro- scofflaws — that most effectively poked fun at environmentalists.
It is a matter of time before concerns about liberty begin to filter into mainstream popular culture. The clues are everywhere: A remake of the greatest film of the 20th century, “Red Dawn,” is underway. As is a production of “Atlas Shrugged.”
Is “Toy Story 3″ part of that movement? Let me engage in a bit of wishful thinking and say: Of course it is.
You can’t make up how tone death some people are. Columbia University’s president proposes the government subsidize the media. He thinks DC will never run out of money. Jennifer Rubin posts on the latest liberal lunacy.
I thought this headline might be sardonic: “Journalism Needs Government Help; Media budgets have been decimated as the Internet facilitates a communications revolution. More public funding for news-gathering is the answer.” It’s an op-ed from Columbia University professor Lee Bollinger in the Wall Street Journal, so I was hopeful that we’d get a touch of iconoclastic common sense. My hopes were misplaced. And I wonder whether the Journal editors didn’t decide to publish this on their pages just to show how ludicrous liberal statism has become. First, Bollinger’s complains that “journalism” is failing. (Umm, not the Journal, not Fox News — so it’s really only liberal print publications he’s pining over). So the solution is government funding. We learn:
“Both the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission are undertaking studies of ways to ensure the steep economic decline faced by newspapers and broadcast news does not deprive Americans of the essential information they need as citizens. One idea under consideration is enhanced public funding for journalism.”
In other words, taxpayers will be forced to pay for what they won’t watch or read of their own volition. And the journalistic monstrosity will be a merger of PBS and NPR. The result sounds like something George Orwell would have dreamed up:…
Claudia Rosett has more on the story.
You think there are problems now with the mainstream media? Just wait. Columbia University President Lee Bollinger joins the drumbeat of those proposing fixes that are guaranteed to make the MSM much, much worse — and he wants to do it with your tax dollars.
In a July 14th op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Bollinger argues that the time has come to rescue the declining fortunes of newspapers and broadcast news with “enhanced public funding for journalism.” He envisions the future of American journalism as a “mixed system,” part public, part private. Otherwise, worries Bollinger, Americans might not get the news they need. Absent a pipeline of government money, he fears the Fourth Estate cannot continue to perform its fabled function as a watchdog, prowling the globe and speaking truth to power.
But wouldn’t public money compromise the independence and impair the integrity of American journalism? Not to worry, says Bollinger, who believes the mission in mixing public money with news reporting is simply “to get the balance right.” As examples of what he considers terrific balance, he points to American public universities, and the British taxpayer-supported BBC. That’s a hoot, because both are notorious hotbeds of leftist bias. Maybe he should check out the 2007 report that the BBC commissioned to look into itself — which concluded, as summarized in the UK by the Sunday Times — that the BBC “is an organization with a liberal, anti-American bias and an almost teen-age fascination with fashionable causes.” Or has Bollinger not worked around to reading any of the multiple private news sources that might have enlightened him on the rot at the BBC? …