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Weekly Standard spots a liberal Huffington Post writer who is disgusted by Obama’s campaign.
Is the left turning against the reelection campaign of Democratic President Barack Obama? That’s the impression one gets from a recent article in the left-leaning Huffington Post.
In an article titled, “The Obama Campaign Is Unworthy of a Democratic President,” Georges Ugeux, who identifies himself as the chairman and CEO of Galileo Global Advisors and an adjunct professor at ColumbiaLawSchool, writes, “As a Democrat and a staunch support of Barack Obama, I am completely disgusted by his campaign. Are we talking about the President of the United States? Are we talking about a principled man who has boosted our ideal for a fair and equitable America? Does this have anything to do with the American people?” …
Anna Wintour gets the Roger Simon treatment over Vogue’s gushing piece from last year over the wife of Syria’s Assad.
Events in Syria that seem — emphasis on the seem — to point to the imminent demise of Bashar al-Assad (often referred to as a strongman — more in a moment) have turned my mind again to last year’s coverage of the Syrian regime by Vogue.
Some will recall that in March 2011 the magazine published a glowing profile of Assad’s wife by novelist Joan Juliet Buck titled “Asma al-Assad, A Rose in the Desert.” That encomium has long since been cleansed from the Vogue site, leaving behind their own (stylish?) version of a 404 error. The original can be found here and elsewhere. It begins:
Asma al-Assad is glamorous, young, and very chic—the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies. Her style is not the couture-and-bling dazzle of Middle Eastern power but a deliberate lack of adornment. She’s a rare combination: a thin, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement. Paris Match calls her “the element of light in a country full of shadow zones.” She is the first lady of Syria.
It goes on from there, including photographs of the trendy Assads on the floor playing games with their kids, just like your average family in, say, the Upper West Side or Brentwood.
More recently, Vogue publisher Anna Wintour has surfaced as a leading public spokesperson for Barack Obama, making her a fascinating case study in what we might refer to as the psychopathology of the modern liberal. What is their weltanschauung and why do they think the way they do? In other words, just who are these people? …
Michael Barone compares towns in CA and ND.
… Near to glamorous Silicon Valley, with lower rents, it seemed the ideal place for what the Obama Democrats were convinced would be the green energy business of the future, the manufacture of solar panels. Just the place for green jobs!
So Fremont is the site of the gleaming headquarters of Solyndra, the solar panel firm promoted by an Obama megacontributor, which got a $535 million loan guarantee from Obama’s stimulus package.
But the wave of the future turned out to be a stagnant puddle. Solyndra went bankrupt. Meanwhile, Fremont, like most of coastal California, has had continual outmigration to other states and has grown only due to immigrants. It grew only 6 percent between 2000 and 2011.
If the Obama folks back in 2009 thought Fremont was the harbinger of America’s future, one wonders what thoughts they had, if any, about Williston, N.D.
Probably none at all. North Dakota was for many years the state least visited by people from other states, an orderly rural state with about the same population as in 1930. There’s no voter registration because everyone would know if a stranger came in to vote.
On the Missouri River bordering Montana, Williston and surrounding Williams County were quiet farming territory. The county’s population reached 19,000 in 1930, then slumped, and only topped 19,000 again in 2000.
Williams County was the home of Henry Bakken, the farmer after whom the Bakken shale formation was named when it was discovered in 1953. For years geologists knew there was a lot of oil packed into the shale rock, but it was not economic to get it out.
That changed late in the last decade. …
Time now for a look at the behavior of one ABC reporter following the news of the shooting in Aurora. Pajamas Media is first.
ABC News reporter Brian Ross committed what used to be a fatal mistake to a journalist’s career: He blurted out a wild, unsubstantiated, speculative observation that hadn’t been vetted by anyone and was explosively political at the same time.
Via Breitbart:
Here is the exchange between ABC News chief investigator Brian Ross and host George Stephanopoulos about apparent suspect James Holmes:
Stephanopoulos: I’m going to go to Brian Ross. You’ve been investigating the background of Jim Holmes here. You found something that might be significant.
Ross: There’s a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado, page on the Colorado Tea party site as well, talking about him joining the Tea Party last year. Now, we don’t know if this is the same Jim Holmes. But it’s Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado.
Stephanopoulos: Okay, we’ll keep looking at that. Brian Ross, thanks very much.
Thanks for what? …
The first time we learned Brian Ross was reckless was when the NBC had to cough up $5 million for a story he got wrong. Here’s a NY Times article from 1987.
A Federal district judge has reduced to $5.3 million the $22.8 million libel judgment that the entertainer Wayne Newton won against NBC, ruling that the evidence did not support Mr. Newton’s assertion that television broadcasts linking him to organized crime figures had hurt his reputation or income.
However, the judge, Myron Crocker, has upheld the jury’s determination that the entertainer was defamed and that the network had shown a reckless disregard for the truth.
Judge Crocker said Wednesday that he was convinced the NBC News reporters, Brian Ross and Ira Silverman, had ”serious subjective doubts as to the truth of the broadcasts” but went ahead anyway. …
In a 2006 post in the Blog Sweetness and Light we get a rundown of more of the fast and loose tactics of Mr. Ross. They include the infamous rigged exploding GM truck on Dateline NBC.
Brian Ross of ABC News is the reporter behind the story that Rep. Dennis Hastert is being investigated by the Department Of Justice. Ross is sticking to his charges despite vehement denials from both the DOJ and Hastert himself.
Some may recall that Brian Ross has been involved in past journalistic controversies. Just last week, Mr. Ross reported he was tipped off by unnamed “senior federal officials” that his cell phone was tapped by NSA.
Last month, Ross was one of the first (if not the first) to report that Rush Limbaugh “had been arrested.” Reports which turned out to be greatly exaggerated, but which Ross never corrected.
In January, Brian Ross was the first to promulgate the claims of the self-proclaimed NSA whistleblower, Russell Tice. Ross treated Tice has a highly credible source even though Tice had been cashiered from the agency due to “psychological problems.”
But all of these recent achievements pale in comparison to Mr. Ross’s earlier journalistic lapse, if an earlier entry in Wikipedia is to be believed. For it claimed Ross who was responsible for Dateline NBC’s rigging of truck fuel tanks in 1993.
Here is how the earlier Wikipedia entry for Dateline NBC used to read, via their mirror site at Answers.com: …
Walter Russell Mead calls our attention to a WSJ article on middle aged people drowning in student debt. Would it surprise you to learn the dead hand of government is involved?
… Sadly, government’s fingerprints are all over this mess. In a well-intentioned effort to make higher education more widely accessible, the government offered large student loans without asking many questions. Two things happened.
First, colleges kept raising tuition. College tuition has been rising faster than inflation for quite some time, in part because schools added layers of administrative bureaucracy and offered gold-plated student services. As long as students could rely on government loans to help pay their way, colleges have chosen to compete on amenities rather than on value.
Second, students got out of the habit of thinking about a college education as an economic decision. Students were encouraged by parents, teachers, college guidebooks and guidance counselors to find the school of their dreams rather than a school that they could afford. Unfortunately, if you borrow money, you have to pay it back. Many graduates are now learning this lesson years too late.
Banks and Wall Street, as usual, got into this act too. And with all that student debt on their hands, they lobbied to make sure it couldn’t be discharged in bankruptcy. Now we have $1 trillion of student debt, and a lot of it can’t be repaired. Lives are being damaged, and young people who should be thinking about starting families and careers are instead being saddled with new burdens. …
Here’s that WSJ article.
… Two-thirds of the nation’s $900 billion in student debt is held by Americans under 40, the Fed estimates. But borrowers over 40 are having a particularly tough time with student debt for several reasons, consumer and higher-education experts say.
Many debtors over 40 are still paying balances from college years ago, while their home values and savings have declined sharply in recent years. Some have stopped payments after losing jobs. Many parents—no longer able to tap home equity to pay for their children’s education—are taking out new student loans to do so. An Education Department program that provides loans to parents to fund their kids’ education is among the fastest-growing of the government’s education loan programs.
Student debt has been rising as enrollments and tuition climb. The Fed data show the number of Americans with student debt rose to 37 million this year from 23 million in 2005.
Since 2005, the number of Americans in their 50s with student loans has doubled to 4.6 million, and borrowers in their 60s and older more than tripled to 2.2 million. …