http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/is-obama-brilliant-or-stupid?f=puball The debate that is constantly swirling around the Internet’s many websites and blogs is whether Barack Obama is brilliant or stupid? Like most of the nation, opinions are fairly divided between those who think he is an evil genius and others who think he is an imbecile. When people start to defend themselves by […]
In Britain to promote her film The Butler, Oprah Winfrey gave an interview to the BBC last week. Not surprisingly, she promoted her movie about race relations in the White House with comments about race relations and the White House.
The BBC’s Will Gompertz asked: “Has it ever crossed your mind that some of the treatment of Obama and the challenges he’s faced and some of the reporting he’s received is because he’s an African American?”
Now there’s a fresh take.
Either Gompertz has been handcuffed to a radiator in someone’s windowless basement for the last five years or, more likely, he was riffing off the suggested questions Winfrey’s PR team handed out to interviewers. Neither explanation would lift the stench of staleness from the question — or the answer.
Winfrey responded: “Has it ever crossed my mind? . . . Probably it’s crossed my mind more times than it’s crossed your mind. Just the level of disrespect. When the senator yelled out, ‘You’re a liar’ — remember that? Yeah, I think that there is a level of disrespect for the office that occurs, and that occurs in some cases and maybe even many cases because he’s African American.”
Now it’s true that Representative Joe Wilson (R., S.C.) should not have shouted “You lie!” (whether or not it was a lie) at the president during his health-care address to Congress. But the evidence that Wilson was motivated by racism is simply nonexistent.
The bathos in the media is pretty annoying. His assassination was a tragedy but it cannot be used to burnish such a tarnished legacy. William McKinley and James Garfield, two mediocre presidents were also assassinated while in office. While his elegant wife did usher culture into the White House through the front door-Pablo Casals, Robert Frost, Leonard Bernstein…..the President ushered gangsters and girl friends in through the back door….Giancana, Judith Wexner, teenage intern Mimi Alford etc. rsk
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/364372/print- A BEAUTIFUL MEDIOCRITY
By almost any measure, John F. Kennedy was a middling president at best, and an occasionally disastrous one. The Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Cuban missile crisis, setting the nation on the wrong course in Vietnam, his nepotism, the spying on political rivals — all must weigh heavily in our judgment of his presidency. And while Kennedy the president was a middle-of-the-range performer at best, Kennedy the man has been relentlessly diminished by the eventual revealing of the facts of his day-to-day life.
Conservatives who see in Kennedy a committed combatant in the Cold War and a supply-side tax-cutter must keep in mind his bungling at home and abroad. Liberals who see in Kennedy a receptacle for all they hold holy must keep in mind his calculating cynicism — for example, his opposition to civil-rights legislation when he believed its passage would strengthen the Republican president proposing it. Kennedy’s virtues — his vocal anti-Communism, his assertive sense of the American national interest, his tax-cutting — would hardly make him a welcome figure among those who today claim his mantle. His vices, on the other hand, are timeless.
The Cuban missile crisis is generally presented as the great episode of Kennedy’s hanging tough in the face of Communist aggression, but, like so much about Kennedy’s life, that story represents a triumph of public relations over substance. Kennedy gave up much more than he let on to resolve the crisis, agreeing to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey — on the condition that the concession remain secret, so as not to undermine his political career or his brother’s. And the Cuban missile crisis was brought on in no small part by Kennedy’s inviting displays of weakness: His performance at the 1961 Vienna summit made little impression on Nikita Khrushchev, and within a few months the Berlin Wall was under construction. After the Bay of Pigs, the Soviets had little reason to suppose that Cuba was anything but a safe port for them.
But Kennedy had a gift for spinning gold out of goof-ups.
John Kennedy looms large in the American imagination, but not for anything he accomplished in office. He was a handsome and vivacious man whose ascendancy coincided with that of television, a politician who was one part royal, one part movie star. That Americans found his celebrity and his pretensions to aristocracy appealing is beyond argument; however, it does not speak well of our political culture. But as created personas go, JFK was a doozy: He won the Pulitzer Prize for a book largely written by somebody else; his reputation as an intellectual was largely the creation of Arthur Schlesinger; and his family was figuratively and perhaps literally in bed with Joe McCarthy (who dated two of the Kennedy women), but the stigma of McCarthyism has never attached itself to his name. His pathological sexual appetites gave him the reputation of a charming rogue, when the truth is that he was closer to a mid-century Anthony Weiner. He was a veteran with an admirable military record, an unexceptional and difference-splitting senator with an Irish name: But for his celebrity, he would have been John McCain or John Kerry.
Kennedy did not transform the country, but he did transform the presidency – largely for the worse. Combining grandiose rhetoric with shallow policy, he established the modern template of president as media hero, beginning the conversion of the office of the presidency from that of chief administrator of the federal government to the modern grotesquery it has become. The main effects of his time in the White House were to make his immediate predecessor look like Cincinnatus by comparison and to unleash the ugliness of Johnson and Johnsonism on the republic after his martyrdom at the hands of a deranged Communist. That Lyndon Johnson, a man he detested, was Kennedy’s political heir is a testament to the fact that there was hardly any devil he was unwilling to get in bed with if it brought him political power.
And what did he do with that power? Among the heaviest burdens facing the American public in 2013 are the direct expenses and unfunded liabilities associated with Medicare and Medicaid, two ill-shaped programs conceived of by the Kennedy administration but executed under Johnson — which is to say, we’ll be paying the price for Kennedy’s grand dreams for a long time to come.
He looked great in a suit, and he could deliver an applause line with the best of them. We may grieve the murder of a president, but our grief should not blind us to what kind of president, or man, he was.
In the fall of 2012, when New York Times reporter Jo Becker was working on a profile of longtime Obama confidante and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, the White House press office circulated a list of talking points to ensure that potential sources would be on the same page regarding “The Magic of Valerie.”
The memo, whose existence was first reported by Mark Leibovich in his bestseller This Town, described Jarrett as “an incredibly kind, caring and thoughtful person . . . the perfect combination of smart, savvy, and innovative,” with “an enormous capacity for both empathy and sympathy.”
The hyperbole is particularly rich in view of all the words that have been written about Jarrett’s role as “the single most influential person in the Obama White House” (which tend to paint a decidedly less flattering picture), and is perhaps more aptly captured by another talking point that appears to have slipped through the editing process: “Valerie is someone here who others inside the building know they can trust. (need examples.)”
Jarrett’s critics have no dearth of examples. She has been variously described by her critics within the Obama administration as the “Night Stalker,” on account of her general ruthlessness, as well as her tendency to follow the president into the White House residence after hours; “She Who Must Not Be Challenged”; and Obama’s “Rasputin.” Former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who clashed often with Jarrett, likened her and senior aide Peter Rouse to Saddam Hussein’s maniacal sons, Uday and Qusay.
OH THE UN’S IRRELEVANCE…WASN’T KURT WALDHEIM A KNOWN NAZI IN WORLD WAR 11 ONCE THE UN’S SECRETARY GENITAL?…RSK
As the second round of negotiations with Iran launches over its nuclear program, the UN secretary-general visited Auschwitz and declared that anti-Semitism still exists — along with “rising discrimination” against “migrants, Muslims, Roma and other minorities.”
Ban Ki-moon visited the Nazi death camp in Poland on his way to Warsaw to attend a UN climate change conference.
“I am truly overwhelmed and humbled. No words can adequately express my feelings. How can a state and individuals be so cruel and use systematic brutality against humanity?” Ban said, noting he’d twice visited Yad Vashem and the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C.
“Yet nothing can truly prepare one for this epicenter of evil, where systematic murder unique in human history reached its atrocious climax,” Ban continued. “I stare at the piles of glasses, hair, shoes, prayer shawls and dolls, and try to imagine the individual Jews and others to whom they belonged. I stand in disbelief before the gas chambers and crematorium — and shudder at at the cruelty of those who designed this death factory.”
The secretary-general noted that “decades later, it remains almost impossible to come to terms with the nature and scale of this genocidal crime.”
The promotion of diversity has been a well-known feature of the legal profession for many years. Surprisingly less well-known is the imposition of racial quotas on law firms by the actual courts themselves.
So-called “diversity orders” have been issued for years by federal judges in class-action proceedings to mandate that plaintiffs’ counsel be diverse enough to “effectively represent’” their class member-clients. The underlying assumption apparently being that proper representation can only be provided when counsel and class racially concord. Recently, the constitutionality of diversity orders was made the subject of a Supreme Court petition.
The case, Martin v Blessing [1], was an important one to watch. If review had not been denied, the more ideological judges within the federal judiciary might have seen the decision as a green light to impose more of these types of orders, not only in class-action proceedings, but perhaps elsewhere as well.
The Martin case derives from a 2010 antitrust lawsuit against Sirius-XM Radio, which raised fees on subscribers following the takeover of its only industry rival. Unhappy with the negotiated settlement (plaintiffs got a guarantee that subscriptions wouldn’t rise for 5 months, attorneys got $13 million in fees), class members filed another challenge which also included an objection to a “diversity order” made during class-certification proceedings. Before he agreed to certify class counsel, Manhattan District Court Judge Harold Baer Jr. ordered [2] that they “ensure that the lawyers staffed on the case fairly reflect the class composition in terms of relevant race and gender metrics.” Aware of the huge fees lead counsel roles can bring, the candidate firm apparently failed to mount any protest and dutifully complied with the order.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/when-obama-said-hes-sorry/print/
This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by an All-Star Cast: Ann-Marie Murrell, National Director of PolitiChicks.tv, Basil Hoffman, a Hollywood Actor (“The Artist”) and Monty Morton, a Conservative Entrepreneur.
The Gang gathered to discuss The Haunting Design of ObamaCare. The dialogue focused on the president’s true morbid objectives in implementing his health care plan, his peculiar “apology,’ the myriad ingredients and consequences of the ObamaCare nightmare, and much, much more:
Part I:
The easiest way to tell that Obama has run out of things to do in the Middle East is his desperate pivot to the peace process. The never-ending peace process, which is now on its fourth administration and its sixth prime minister, is the gift shop in the museum of the Middle East. It’s the place you stop by on the way to the exit because it’s convenient and everyone back home expects some souvenir peace t-shirts.
In 2013, the West Bank and Gaza are more irrelevant to events in the Middle East than ever before. Like toddlers left alone in their high chairs, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas have spent the last year whining that no one is paying attention to them. And no one in the Arab world is paying attention to them because suddenly killing Shiites has become more of a priority than killing Jews.
If in the past Western diplomats could claim with a straight face that peace would stabilize the region, after the diplomats tore it apart with the Arab Spring that line ought to come with its own laugh track.
If Arafat’s corpse rose from the grave to dance the Hora and Netanyahu learned to shout, “Allahu Akbar,” no one in the region would even notice. The Syrians, Turks, Qataris, Saudis, Lebanese and Iraqis are too busy fighting in the misnamed Syrian Civil War to even pretend to care about a peace process that they never really cared about even back when they were pretending to care about it.
Now they aren’t even pretending.
Obama’s trip to Israel to jumpstart another miserable round of non-negotiations between an Israeli side that wants a deal and a Palestinian Authority side that wants an excuse not to make a deal because it wouldn’t survive a day after signing an agreement was another international demonstration of his cluelessness.
Obama, the prevaricator and ideologue clearly has no shame when it comes to lying. But the ObamaCare “Got Insurance: Let’s Get Physical” ads that are now being targeted to the millennial generation hit a new record for sordidness.
I have heard that it takes a village to raise a generation. If society is supposed to protect its young, we are failing big time.
When Sarah Palin spoke about being a grizzly mama bear, many Americans responded positively because the first instinct when a child is being attacked is to fiercely defend the young no matter what cost, no matter what the struggle.
Wake up mama and papa bears.
Families across the nation are being targeted by the Obama administration. The marriage penalty in ObamaCare makes no sense except to destroy the sanctity of marriage. How does taxing married people help health care?
Now the young are being kidnapped by Mr. Cool Prez as he mesmerizes them with hip and cool slogans. In reality, the ObamaCare advertisements reflect yet another invasion into their private lives — which is, of course, the embodiment of tyrannical rule.
But with young people innocently permitting violation of their own privacy via the various social media sites, it is no wonder that Obama and his minions think that ads that pander to easy sex, thug culture, and the idea that “girl power means they never play it safe” will attract the attention of these rather naive young folk.
Letting it all hang out defines far too many of our societal expectations. It is time to sit down and start a conversation.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303680404579141781929962584?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion The Constitution’s power-constraining pieces had to be interpreted out of existence to allow judges to blindly defer to legislators. In the constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act, Chief Justice John Roberts held that requiring citizens to buy health insurance was beyond the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce. Yet he provided the […]
