Greetings from a fellow blog blogger:
Hmm it appears like your site ate my first comment (it was extremely long) so I guess I’ll just sum it up what I wrote and say, I’m thoroughly enjoying your blog. I too am an aspiring blog blogger but I’m still new to the whole thing.
Ace speculates that Mediscare will come in September:
Bain is not Obama’s Big Attack.
Mediscare is his biggest attack — demolishing Romney among seniors over his support of the unpopular (and yet wise) Ryan plan.
He hasn’t played that card yet because he doesn’t want to waste it so far out from the election. That’s something we’ll be seeing in September.
I agree.
But what will come in October? Romney has no sealed divorce records, so it can’t be that. Could it be a sexual harassment charge, a la Herman Cain, or an alleged affair, a la John McCain? Or, because of Romney’s unfortunate (to Obama, that is) squeaky-clean history on those scores, will it be more allegations of nefarious business deals instead?
Then again, perhaps it will involve whomever Romney chooses for Veep, even though it won’t be Sarah Palin. Nobody’s perfect, right? Especially when challenging the very perfect Barack Obama.
[NOTE: I’ve been referring lately to Obama’s history of nasty and underhanded campaigning, but I thought it would be a good idea to recycle a portion of a post I wrote in October of 2008 that explains the phenomenon in greater detail. I think it takes on even greater significance now.]
…[A] pattern with Obama [is to use] the press…as surrogates to do his dirty work and allow him to maintain plausible deniability…I refer to how Obama got his start in national politics…[involving] his political rival Blair Hull…Obama’s campaign was directly involved in what the press did to torpedo Hull’s chances…[unfortunately the link, to a NY Times article that appeared in April of 2007, is broken]:
[Obama’s campaign manager] Axelrod is known for operating in this gray area, part idealist, part hired muscle. It is difficult to discuss Axelrod in certain circles in Chicago without the matter of the Blair Hull divorce papers coming up. As the 2004 Senate primary neared, it was clear that it was a contest between two people: the millionaire liberal, Hull, who was leading in the polls, and Obama, who had built an impressive grass-roots campaign. About a month before the vote, The Chicago Tribune revealed, near the bottom of a long profile of Hull, that during a divorce proceeding, Hull’s second wife filed for an order of protection. In the following few days, the matter erupted into a full-fledged scandal that ended up destroying the Hull campaign and handing Obama an easy primary victory. The Tribune reporter who wrote the original piece later acknowledged in print that the Obama camp had “worked aggressively behind the scenes” to push the story. But there are those in Chicago who believe that Axelrod had an even more significant role ”” that he leaked the initial story.
And then there’s the matter of Obama’s next opponent, Jack Ryan, to whom the same thing happened. I must be careful here; there is documentation that Obama’s staff pushed and promoted the Hull revelations by the press, but there is no evidence so far of the same involvement occurring with the Ryan outing. However, unless it’s a strange coincidence…it is mighty suspicious; Obama’s staff certainly had the tools, the connections, the motivation, and the experience.
Here’s a discussion of Axelrod’s modus operandi, which may sound familiar:
What kind of campaign can we expect from Axelrod in the general election? Overtly positive themes and public posturing complemented by covertly delievered and mercilessly negative “stiletto” attacks against key people around John McCain that are not directly traceable to Axelrod. The model for this strategy is the previous Obama senatorial campaign in Illinois, where Obama’s two most formidible, centimillionaire, rivals, Democrat Blair Hull and Republican Jack Ryan were personally destroyed in the primaries when salacious details from their sealed divorce records were mysteriously leaked to the media, which then pressured for their full release, notably in the pages of the Chicago Tribune.
I wrote all of the above in 2008. But I would like to add that now, in 2012, Axelrod is still a top aide and strategist for Obama’s campaign. Axelrod has been one of the constants for Obama’s entire political life, having met him twenty years ago during Obama’s early post-Harvard days in Chicago:
Axelrod’s ties with Obama reach back more than a decade. Axelrod met Obama in 1992 when Obama so impressed Betty Lou Saltzmann, a woman from Chicago’s “lakefront liberal crowd,” during a black voter registration drive he ran that she then introduced the two. Obama also consulted Axelrod before he delivered an 2002 anti-war speech and asked him to read drafts of his book, The Audacity of Hope.
By the way, I want to make it crystal clear that this is not a case of “if only Stalin knew.” Whatever dirty tricks Axelrod’s up to are executed with the knowledge and approval of Obama, and represent a goodly part of the reason Axelrod is so invaluable to him.
One of the hallmarks of Obama’s presidency has been the persistence in his life of a small group of close and trusted advisers such as Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, who’ve both known him approximately the same amount of time. My impression is that Obama trusts almost no one else, except Eric Holder and Michelle Obama.
[NOTE: See also this.]
Here’s a Yahoo article that says some recent research indicates that spanking leads to increased mental illness. But this Slate piece says Yahoo’s wrong:
Despite the Yahoo headline, and many others like it, the study, published in Pediatrics in early July, does not actually link spanking to mental illness. In fact, the study has nothing to do with spanking at all. Canadian researchers asked 34,000 adults how often they had been pushed, grabbed, shoved, slapped, or hit by their parents or other adults when they were children. The authors explain that they were trying to assess the long-term effects of regular harsh physical punishment, which, they write, “some may consider more severe than ”˜customary’ physical punishment (i.e., spanking).” Ultimately, the researchers reported that adults who have mental problems are more likely to say they were pushed, grabbed, shoved, slapped, or hit by their parents than healthy adults are.
And spanking itself? As the Slate article says, “the research on spanking is messy and controversial.” Read the whole thing; it contains a pretty good discussion of why spanking is inherently difficult to evaluate.
As for my opinion, here it is (and this was true even before I read the Slate article): I believe that a little mild spanking when a rule is violated and the nature of the infraction has been made clear to the child causes no lasting harm. But the problem is that spanking is a practice that can easily escalate. The temptation is great, and parenting is stressful, especially with a defiant child (the ones most likely to get spanked).
A good parent tends to spank in a manner that doesn’t hurt a child in any significant way, and it can help the child learn the rules, especially important ones (don’t run into the street!!). But a good parent doesn’t usually need that tool; he/she can almost always control a child well without it. Whereas an ineffective or abusive or bad parent is almost never able to spank that way and then spanking can easily segue into an angry show of arbitrary anger, raw power, or outright abuse.
…is today.
The French rallying cry “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” sounds something like our “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” but in actuality it was very different. Although originally the “equality” meant equality under the law, things soon changed [emphasis mine]:
This identification of liberty and equality became problematic during the Jacobin period, when equality was redefined (for instance by Frané§ois-Noé«l Babeuf) as equality of results, and not only judicial equality of rights. Thus, Marc Antoine Baudott considered that French temperament inclined rather to equality than liberty, a theme which would be re-used by Pierre Louis Roederer and Alexis de Tocqueville, while Jacques Necker considered that an equal society could only be found on coercion.
The third term, Fraternité, was the most problematic to insert in the triad, as it belonged to another sphere, that of moral obligations rather than rights, links rather than statutes, harmony rather than contract, and community rather than individuality.
It is no coincidence that the French Revolution was marked by the Reign of Terror, and inspired both the Soviet and Chinese communist revolutions.
I don’t think I’ll celebrate much.
Close to it, it seems.
[Hat tip: Maetenloch at Ace’s.]
Mickey Kaus points out a recent action of Obama’s that’s been flying under the radar, and deserves a lot more attention:
Here are some quick initial reactions to the administration’s apparent surprising (and possibly illegal) attempt to grant waivers of the work requirements written, after great effort, into the 1996 welfare reform law…
The Democrat’s 2009 stimulus bill changed the incentives of the 1996 reform by once again rewarding states that expanded their welfare rolls…Rector and Bradley of Heritage (among the first to attack Obama’s action) make the case that the law’s work requirements were specifically designed to not be waivable, and that Obama is using HHS’s authority to waive state reporting requirements as a tricky way of voiding the underlying substantive requirements that are to be reported about. The Heritage argument”“that what HHS did was illegal”“seems powerful, but I haven’t read the other side’s brief. Perhaps Obama is invoking the long-lost “we can’t wait” clause to enact a change that would never pass a democratically elected Congress”“in this case not because Congress is “gridlocked” and and “dysfunctional” and “partisan” but because relaxing work requirements has never been popular with voters…
HHS’s rationale is not the recession, but the alleged need to find “new more effective ways to meet the goals of [the reformed welfare program], particularly helping parents successfully prepare for, find, and retain employment.” In short, job prep, counseling and training…Job training for welfare recipients always sounds good”“instead of making a single mom take a dead end $10/hr job, why not let her stay on the dole while she gets a degree that will let her land a higher paying position? The problem is that if you let single moms mix welfare and training that will encourage more single moms to go on welfare in the first place”“sign up, and we’ll pay you to go to community college! The rolls might grow, not shrink…
Read the whole thing.
Kaus wonders why Obama is doing this because, after all, it’s not a move designed to be popular with a lot of voters. I offer the following:
(1) The move may not be wildly popular, but it’s certainly popular among Obama’s base, for that all-important election turnout. And I don’t know why Kaus labels the move “surprising,” because Obama has long criticized the original law, and in the late 90s he vowed to “use all the resources at his disposal to undo it.”
(1) So now he’s got a lot more resources at his disposal; he’s doing this because he can. Obama has a history of going around Congress, though czars and agencies and executive decisions that bypass the stated will of the people and have so far been largely unchallenged. Here he’s experimenting with pushing the envelope even more, and if re-elected (and especially if Congress is Republican and refuses to go along with his wishes), expect to see a lot more of this.
(2) Obama’s general goal is always to foster greater government dependence for greater numbers of people.
(3) There may be a Cloward-Piven agenda here, as well. Recall that the original thrust of Cloward-Piven involved overburdening the welfare system, and have no doubt that Obama is very, very familiar with this sort of technique:
The [Cloward-Piven] strategy was formulated in a May 1966 article in left-wing magazine The Nation titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty”.
Cloward and Piven…were critical of the public welfare system, and their strategy called for overloading that system to force a different set of policies to address poverty. They stated that many Americans who were eligible for welfare were not receiving benefits, and that a welfare enrollment drive would strain local budgets, precipitating a crisis at the state and local levels that would be a wake-up call for the federal government, particularly the Democratic Party, thus forcing it to implement a national solution to poverty. Cloward and Piven wrote that “the ultimate objective of this strategy [would be] to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income…” There would also be side consequences of this strategy, according to Cloward and Piven. These would include: easing the plight of the poor in the short-term (through their participation in the welfare system); shoring up support for the national Democratic Party then-splintered by pluralist interests (through its cultivation of poor and minority constituencies by implementing a national solution to poverty); and relieving local governments of the financially and politically onerous burdens of public welfare (through a national solution to poverty)…
Michael Reisch and Janice Andrews wrote that Cloward and Piven “proposed to create a crisis in the current welfare system ”“ by exploiting the gap between welfare law and practice ”“ that would ultimately bring about its collapse and replace it with a system of guaranteed annual income. They hoped to accomplish this end by informing the poor of their rights to welfare assistance, encouraging them to apply for benefits and, in effect, overloading an already overburdened bureaucracy.
Whatever Obama’s motives might be, Romney is not ignoring this, even thought the MSM may be. Here’s his response, which I hope will be followed by more:
Friday morning, with Obama’s action still largely unreported, Romney released a statement…
“President Obama now wants to strip the established work requirements from welfare,” Romney said. “The success of bipartisan welfare reform, passed under President Clinton, has rested on the obligation of work. The president’s action is completely misdirected. Work is a dignified endeavor, and the linkage of work and welfare is essential to prevent welfare from becoming a way of life.”
I hope it will be followed by more hard-hitting emphasis on what’s going on here by the Romney campaign.
[NOTE: Meanwhile, this new brouhaha is somewhat related.]
I like this jujitsu response from Romney’s campaign communications director, Gail Gitcho, to the charges:
“The Obama campaign has issued these reckless and wild accusations that Mitt Romney is a criminal and a felon. That just simply doesn’t pass the laugh test,” she continued, “and frankly it just shows us signs of a desperate and unraveling campaign for them to continue along these lines when there have been independent fact-checkers from all over the country who are saying they are running a dishonest attack.”
Of course, I doubt whether enough people are paying attention to make it worthwhile. It’s July, after all. I also wonder why this attack on Romney was launched now instead of two days before the election. What are they saving for later?
[NOTE: Why do I use the term “jujitsu“?:
“JÅ«” can be translated to mean “gentle, supple, flexible, pliable, or yielding.” “Jutsu” can be translated to mean “art” or “technique” and represents manipulating the opponent’s force against himself rather than confronting it with one’s own force. Jujutsu developed among the samurai of feudal Japan as a method for defeating an armed and armored opponent in which one uses no weapon, or only a short weapon. Because striking against an armored opponent proved ineffective, practitioners learned that the most efficient methods for neutralizing an enemy took the form of pins, joint locks, and throws. These techniques were developed around the principle of using an attacker’s energy against him, rather than directly opposing it.]
Singer Judy Collins and British actress Jean Marsh.
Yesterday…
And today…
I was busy all day and evening yesterday, and so I didn’t have time to write about the brouhaha over the Boston Globe’s rehash of its 2002 charge (answered effectively by Romney at that time, but in the Globe’s estimation good for another go-round) that he was still influencing Bain after he said he’d left. The story was the talk of the MSM and the blogosphere yesterday and still is today, with the Obama-supportive press and the left (is that redundant?), including Obama’s deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter, alleging that Romney is a liar and possible felon.
Just another class act on the part of the Obama campaign and its willing handmaidens. Follow the links and you’ll find the story of charge, reaction, and counter-reaction, if you’re not already familiar with it. One of the best summaries of the situation so far is by Sister Toldjah, who puts it succinctly in the subtitle of her post, “MSM, liberal blogs, Team Obama collude to paint Romney as a ‘felon'”:
The idea is classic “mud on the wall” gutter politics. See what all smears you can throw against a wall and make stick.
Why this, why now? A few thoughts of mine:
(1) Habit. It’s Obama’s tried-and-true m.o. to uncover dirt on opponents and destroy them, and he’s used to having the cooperation of the press, going way back to before he ran for president (note this October 2008 post of mine entitled “Obama’s campaign and the press: a long history of working hand-in-hand”). Obama’s usual method involves the press publicizing the previously-sealed records of unsavory divorces, but since Romney is still married to his high school sweetheart (seemingly happily), that avenue is closed to them this time. Pity.
(2) Fear. I think Romney has gotten under Obama’s skin. Obama probably thought he’d be an easier mark, but he’s proving a bit tougher than Obama thought.
(3) A disdain for truth, and a strategic relationship to it. The Globe and the Obama camp don’t seem to care whether their allegations can be rather easily disproved, because they assume that most of the public is never going to hear the truth and that the lies will work. That’s the “mud on the wall” ploy. Keep repeating “Romney liar” and “Romney felon” and it will seep into many people’s brains and be believed.
And no one should be surprised. Get ready for more.
And it wouldn’t have mattered one whit who had been the Republican nominee, if it were someone different; dirt would have been found or manufactured in due time—although if Obama were far ahead of the person in the polls it would not have been as necessary.
The funny thing (although not funny-ha-ha) is that with many people Obama retains his reputation as a high-handed gloves-on kind of guy. But that’s the way the Big Lie rolls.
[ADDENDUM: See also this.]
It’s reported that Romney was booed a couple of times during his NAACP speech (full video here, which I have not yet watched), although he was also cheered at times.
Which brings us a more general question I’ve long wondered about: what is the significance of booing in a crowd? How many people have to boo someone to have it be meaningful? After all, in an audience composed of hundreds or even thousands, a mere ten people can make quite a loud noise, and fifty can sound highly significant.
If the press is trying to emphasize the booing, it becomes an entire crowd that’s against the speaker. If the press wants to de-emphasize it for a candidate it likes, the booing either remains unreported, or is linked to a few isolated troublemakers or even plants from the opposition.
Unless an entire crowd stands up in unison and walks out in protest, or tosses a fusillade of rotten tomatoes en masse at the speaker, how would we really have a clue what’s going on?
Dunno, but it’s moot for me anyway, because most of these hairstyles are undoable for my type of hair, which features irrepressible waves/curls with a strong-willed mind of their own. That mind sometimes segues into outright frizz if I don’t take it firmly in hand and give it a serious talking-to. But on the few occasions I’ve been too stern, and blow-dried or ironed or otherwise forced it to straighten completely, I haven’t liked the results. Too severe for my face, no shine, and altogether too flattened. Nature seems to know best, with a little judicious coaxing.
Of all the hairstyles featured in the article, the only ones compatible with my hair type are #7, finger waves; #12, Diana Ross’s big curls (which I sometimes achieve even without meaning to); #13, Jessica Parker’s Sex and the City waves; and #15, Jackie Kennedy’s bouffant (oh boy, do I ever remember teasing, otherwise known as backcombing, at which I was a pro). Jackie must have had hair like mine, but in the days of setting on large rollers and the generous use of hairspray, she transformed it into her iconic do.
One hairdo the article skipped was Jennifer Beals in “Flashdance.” Can do:
Speaking of which, have you ever noticed one of those nearly-immutable facts of life: those of us with straight hair spend a lot of time wishing we had curly/wavy hair, and vice versa? I was disabused of that yearning myself early on, when I ironed my hair as a teenager (to emulate #8, Cher, and a celebrity who didn’t make the cut, Mary Travers of Peter Paul and Mary) and discovered, much to my great surprise, that I looked absolutely awful with straight hair.
[NOTE: And by the way, what’s up with the repeats of the photos in the article? There are nowhere near 50 there.]