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John Podhoretz announces the GOP win of Anthony Weiner’s seat.
… These may prove to be among the most suggestive special-election results in modern American history. The Democratic candidate Harris Wofford?’s win in the 1991 special for Senate in Pennsylvania proved a harbinger of Bill Clinton?’s victory in 1992, and Republican Scott Brown’s win in Massachusetts in January 2010 presaged the shellacking in the midterms last year. If Obama loses next November, the writing on the wall will have appeared tonight.
Stanley Kurtz writes about Ed Koch’s influence in NY-9.
Other than Barack Obama, no single person had a greater impact on the NY-9 race than Ed Koch. The economy and marriage issues were also key, of course, but Koch explicitly framed the election as an attempt to send a message to Obama on Israel.
This March 2010 post from Ron Radosh helps make sense of Koch’s decision. Koch is a centrist Democrat, hawkish on defense and supportive of Israel. Like Joe Lieberman, Koch represents the Democratic party of an earlier day. Because of the War on Terror, Koch broke ranks in 2004 to support President Bush’s re-election campaign. Yet unlike Lieberman, who endorsed McCain in 2008, Koch campaigned enthusiastically for Obama in 2008. In Florida that year, Koch assured Jewish voters that Obama would be a strong friend of Israel. Koch also dismissed Republican attempts to cast doubt on Obama’s commitment to Israel as unfounded and hysterical. …
Tony Blankley warns against the left’s new violent speech. The Wisconsin teacher’s union intimidation tactics turned out to be a harbinger of things to come.
In the past few weeks, leading Democrats in Congress have called Tea Party members terrorists, said they should go to hell and accused them of wanting to lynch black people. Last weekend at an event attended by President Obama, the head of the Teamsters Union, Jimmy Hoffa Jr., attacked the Tea Party, screaming, “President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march. Let’s take these sons of bitches [Tea Party members] out and give America back to an America where we belong.” (Note: The president was not on the platform when Mr. Hoffa spoke.)
So far, neither the president nor any prominent Democrat has condemned such remarks – even though the phrase “take out” is commonly used to describe an act of criminal homicide. Thus, Mr. Hoffa’s statement might rise to the level of incitement to violence. …
Thomas Sowell looks at last week’s jobs speech.
… When it comes to specific proposals, President Obama repeats the same kinds of things that have marked his past policies — more government spending for the benefit of his political allies, the construction unions and the teachers’ unions, and “thousands of transportation projects.”
The fundamental fallacy in all of this is the notion that politicians can “grow the economy” by taking money out of the private sector and spending it wherever it is politically expedient to spend it — so long as they call spending “investment.”
Has Obama ever grown even a potted plant, much less a business, a bank, a hospital or any of the numerous other institutions whose decisions he wants to control and override? But he can talk glibly about growing the economy.
Arrogance is no substitute for experience. That is why the country is in the mess it is in now.
Obama says he wants “federal housing agencies” to “help more people refinance their mortgages.” What does that amount to in practice, except having the taxpayers be forced to bail out people who bought homes they could not afford?
No doubt that is good politics, but it is lousy economics. …
FuelFix blog with more on Solyndra.
Solyndra LLC’s workers making solar-power panels in a California factory subsidized by U.S. taxpayers showed “the promise of clean energy isn’t just an article of faith,” President Barack Obama said on a visit to the company in May 2010.
Two months before Obama’s visit, accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP warned that Solyndra, the recipient of $535 million in federal loan guarantees, had financial troubles deep enough to “raise substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.”
The Obama administration stood by Solyndra through the auditor’s warning, the abandonment of a planned initial public offering and a last-ditch refinancing where taxpayers took a back seat to new investors. That unwavering commitment has come under increasing scrutiny since the company’s travails culminated in its filing for bankruptcy protection on Sept. 6 and a raid on its headquarters by the Federal Bureau of Investigation two days later.
“People including our government put blinders on and did not want to believe in the obvious,” Jonathan Dorsheimer, an analyst in Boston for Canaccord Genuity Inc. of Vancouver, said in an interview with Bloomberg Government. “The fact that the government chose Solyndra as their white horse is mind-boggling.” …
Andrew Ferguson explains how the media spins BS.
I’ve spent much of my summer trying to dodge Mark Zandi. I pick up my newspaper, I turn on the TV, I tap-tap my iPad, and there he is: explaining the past, divining the future, teasing insights from the tumultuous present. It’s his job. Zandi is not a pundit, exactly. He’s an economist by trade. What he really is, is a go-to guy, one of the most successful go-to guys in journalism history. The need for go-to guys is never less than acute, but this summer, with the failing economy and the debt-ceiling debate, demand has been particularly brisk.
Here’s how the go-to guy works. Let’s say you’re a reporter on a deadline and you need a quote right this minute about how Republicans have rendered Congress dysfunctional. Well then, your go-to guy is Norman Ornstein?, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Perhaps you want to give readers a little historical perspective, something eggheady about, say, how smoothly leaders of both parties used to work together before the lunatics (you know who they are) started running the asylum on Capitol Hill?? Quick: get “presidential historian” Douglas Brinkley on the phone before he goes live on the NewsHour! He’ll be sure to tell you, with a wistful air, that Tip O’Neill and President Reagan? were always friends after five o’clock.
If it’s the economy you’re writing about, it’s Mark Zandi. He has all the qualities that go into making a go-to guy of the very first rank. He is fluent on television and keeps his sentences short. His demeanor is pleasant. He uses the word “narrative” with abandon—“narrative” being the hottest word in journalism since “transparency”; it’s this year’s “accountability.” And he’s a liberal. All go-to guys are liberals. They can’t be identified as such, lest their authority as disinterested observers be undermined and the reader or viewer begin to get ideas. Ideological fuzziness is good; ideological hermaphroditism is better.
Ornstein, for example, is a moderate liberal, but the think tank that employs him is conservative: the politics of the one combines with the politics of the other to make a purely objective go-to guy who can offer liberal opinions without the label. Douglas Brinkley’s liberalism is deep and abiding, made explicit, to cite one instance, when he published a panting campaign biography of John Kerry in 2003. Yet he has also been chosen, inexplicably, to edit various editions of the papers of Ronald Reagan by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation. Reagan breeds with Kerry and Go-To Brinkley is born, a scholar who plays it straight down the middle, listing leftward.
In economics, Zandi is capable of meeting all of a reporter’s go-to-guy needs, so the trade has been careful in obscuring his liberalism. He is a registered Democrat, as he freely admits when asked. But he’s seldom asked. The key to his indispensability is that he once—once—did some work for a Republican. Early in the 2008 presidential campaign, one of John McCain’s economics advisors enlisted Zandi to file a weekly analysis of current economic data for the campaign’s use. He never advised McCain on matters of policy, he never met McCain, and he was never paid for his labor. The real payout, in fame and influence, came after the election.
Why a story about clamming on Long Island? Because digging clams was how Pickerhead earned money in his early teens before he was work legal. And it was on the North Shore of Long Island – Conscience Bay in Setauket, NY. A bushel was worth $11. $14 if I could catch someone going across the Sound to Bridgeport, Conn. where rivers were polluted. We get this story from Gilt Taste blog.
Every summer, my wife, son, and I pay a visit to our friend Elena and her daughters, who rent a house in Orient, on the North Fork of Long Island.
The idea in going there, apparently, is to relax. To do nothing. It’s beautiful, it’s wonderful, and… I kind of dread it, because I am not good at this. At all. I’m a restless sort. My need to move and do tends to contaminate the tranquility, and I hate to kill a (lazy) buzz.
I need a goal. A project. Something beach-y to keep my occupied, and this year, I decided my project would be clamming. Growing up in Florida, I learned two things: (1) there’s nothing in the world better than seafood you’ve pulled from the water yourself, and (2) half a day on a fishing boat will get me sunburn and seasickness with far more certainty than it will get me fish. Clams, they don’t swim away. Clamming was the perfect answer, I thought. Relaxing, yet productive, undeniably beach-y, and with the promise of pristine seafood at the end.
Having never clammed before, a bit of research was in order. I searched Twitter and hit paydirt immediately: Alec Baldwin, Long Island native, apparent guru of all things, was just then guiding actress Ali Wentworth in the finer points of the art: …