Is this where Obama got the idea for a little strategic ass-kicking?
(By the way, the lead singer is Hugh Laurie, star of the TV show “House,” in his younger—and less curmudgeonly—days.)
[Hat tip: commenter “liamalpha.”]
Reuters makes excuses…
…that no one will believe, continuing its long slide downwards from news organization to propagandist for the left.
What do gay men and heterosexual women have in common?
They both feel the need to be sexually appealing to men. And this may give them something surprising in common.
But it’s not all rosy for heterosexual men, either. Women seem to prefer arrogant guys who engage in risky behavior.
Twas ever thus:
[NOTE: The above song has an odd history—was it by the Crystals or the Blossoms? Let’s blame Phil Spector.]
Thoughts on yesterday’s primaries
Yesterday was primary day in a great many states. It was widely billed as a challenge for incumbents, and as Michael Barone writes:
…[O]ne way to look at the results is that no incumbent member of Congress lost his or her bid for reelection.
But Barone says incumbents don’t have that much to rejoice about, either, because their margins of victory were far less than would be ordinarily expected, and their day of reckoning may merely have been postponed till November 2.
We’ve been anticipating that 2010 election for quite some time now, but in political terms it remains distant. There’s still a lot of money to be spent and name-calling to be done in the five loooong months between now and then.
As Barone points out, the selection of incumbent Blanche Lincoln is an especially interesting phenomenon. She was in big trouble after the passage of HCR, so one might imagine that her primary victory represents a triumph of sorts. Yes and no. She lives to fight another day. But her prospects in November are shaky, at least at the moment. She won yesterday, but not by much for an incumbent.
And conservatives have something to cheer about in her win, because it represents a defeat for the labor unions and especially their pet project card check. Unions put big money behind Lincoln’s Democrat opponent in the primary, Halter. Lincoln had ended up opposing card check, knowing it was very unpopular in her state of Arkansas and would impact negatively on businesses there. As Barone observes:
Big labor decided to teach her””and all Democratic members of Congress who were quailing at the prospect of voting for card check””a lesson. The lesson would be that, however much a vote for card check would reduce your chances of winning a general election, opposition to card check would result in your defeat in a Democratic primary. Their ready and willing instrument was Bill Halter, whose path to higher office seemed otherwise occluded. At the beginning of March he announced his candidacy and proclaimed himself the champion of the working man. Blanche Lincoln, in agonized response, proclaimed herself the target of outside interests. In a matter of weeks labor unions and moveon.org””originally formed to defend Bill Clinton against impeachment””sent millions to Bill Halter’s campaign.
To no avail. By winning her relatively narrow victory, Lincoln thwarted union plans to effectively threaten the primary victories of candidates around the country who oppose card check:
It’s a huge defeat for the unions. White House political operatives are already complaining, as Ben Smith notes in Politico, that “Organized labor just flushed $10 million of their members’ money down the toilet on a pointless exercise,” [a senior White House] official said.
I couldn’t be happier about that loss of cash, although I have sympathy for the (sometimes involuntary) union members who have no say in how their dues money is used politically after it is extracted from their hands (see this for my opinion of card check). It is a special and delicious irony that the only reason unions were able to spend this sort of money to try to unseat Lincoln was the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, a ruling previously excoriated by the left as tending to help big business. Funny thing, that.
In other primary news, Harry Reid can heave a small sigh of relief at the Nevada Republicans’ selection of Sharron Angle, tea-party-backed candidate whose especially conservative views and associations will be fully exploited by the Reid camp in the months to come. It may not matter, however; Reid remains deeply unpopular. But Angle’s victory reminds us that party primaries don’t always lead to the strongest candidates the party might offer.
Remember Obamacare?
Here’s a blog that would like to remind you, in case it’s slipped your mind.
Our kick-ass president
Criticized even (or perhaps especially) by supporters for not showing enough passion and anger about the Gulf oil spill, President Obama has set about rectifying that situation. But, like many such efforts, it appears to be an over-correction. And like many of Obama’s forays into his street-fighter persona, it appears to be both tone-deaf and classless:
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Defensive, self-focused, and then shifting to the tough trash-talk, the statement sets a disturbing and awkward tone that ends up projecting false bravado.
Once a president has established a public persona he needs to mostly stick to it. He can fine-tune it here and there. But it doesn’t work to veer in a completely opposite direction. Obama as president has been the unemotional professor, not the ass-kicker—and, although in private he may kick ass with the best of them, he sounds a jarring note of trying too hard when he steps out of verbal character this way.
[NOTE: Just to show I’m not picking solely on Obama, I’d like to call your attention to this post of mine from 2005 in which I lament the decline of decorum and class in public statements (particularly interviews) from our elected officials on both sides of the aisle.]
[ADDENDUM: I was doing a little research on the phrase “kick ass,” and one of the things that came up was this song from a recent movie of that title. Seems oddly apropos:
[ADDENDUM: The whole thing reminds me somehow of John Kerry and the hunting license.]
A mind may be a difficult thing to change…
…but Obama’s performance as president seems to be encouraging the ranks of the Republican Jewish Coalition to swell, making the term “Jewish Republican” seem a bit less of an oxymoron.
Van der Sloot: the wheels of justice grind slow
Joran van der Sloot, the man who almost certainly killed Natalee Holloway in Aruba in 2005, has confessed to murdering another young woman in Peru. Thus, justice of a sort will finally come—unfortunately, too late to save his latest victim, twenty-one-year-old Stephany Flores.
The Peruvian authorities had the advantage of having a fairly airtight case against van der Sloot, due to video evidence. No doubt that (and perhaps some other forms of “persuasion?”) helped motivate the psychopathic serial killer to confess in hopes of getting a reduced sentence. Too bad the maximum in Peru for murder is 35 years.
Van der Sloot’s story illustrates not just the fact that certain cases grab the public imagination and become tabloid fodder, but also that sometimes a suspect is pretty much known to be the murderer but falls through the tracks of a justice system anyway, either because there is not enough evidence to charge and convict, or because that system is incompetent and/or compromised, or perhaps both.
Van der Sloot appears to have been an angry time bomb waiting to go off. A statement attributed to him in the present case by a Peruvian newspaper is, if true, a perfect example of the mindset of the psychopathic killer:
According to La Republica newspaper, Van der Sloot told officials he broke Flores’ neck in a rage after he discovered she had used his notebook computer without permission and learned he was involved in the disappearance of Holloway.
“I did not want to do it,” La Republica quoted him as saying. “The girl intruded into my private life.”
It is a terrible thing that van der Sloot was able to kill again. But it is a good thing that he has finally been caught, although belatedly and at great price. But had he not murdered another woman and been trapped by the evidence, he might have remained free forever, as many murderers do.
In the United States, for example, an average of slightly more than a third of all murders remain unsolved. This represents a marked increase in the last few decades, a disturbing trend:
National clearance rates for murder and manslaughter have fallen from about 90 percent in the 1960s to below 65 percent in recent years.
The majority of homicides now go unsolved at dozens of big-city police departments, according to a Scripps Howard News Service study of crime records provided by the FBI…
Experts say that homicides are tougher to solve now because crimes of passion, where assailants are easier to identify, have been replaced by drug- and gang-related killings. Many police chiefs – especially in areas with rising numbers of unsolved crimes – blame a lack of witness cooperation.
But the percentage of unsolved murders is extremely variable:
In 2008, police solved 35 percent of the homicides in Chicago, 22 percent in New Orleans and 21 percent in Detroit. Yet authorities solved 75 percent of the killings in Philadelphia, 92 percent in Denver and 94 percent in San Diego.
“We’ve concluded that the major factor is the amount of resources police departments place on homicide clearances and the priority they give to homicide clearances,” said University of Maryland criminologist Charles Wellford, who led a landmark study into how police can improve their murder investigations.
Apparently we have the ability to change things. We just don’t have the will and won’t appropriate the money. It seems that this might be money well spent, however. It’s not just solving a certain crime. As the case of van der Sloot shows, putting one murderer behind bars in a timely fashion might prevent a repeat act, and save another family the agony of losing a member in such a dreadful fashion.
If Republicans take the House in 2010, a possible Obama pivot to center?
If Republicans manage to gain control of the House in the 2010 election, and Nancy Pelosi loses her post as Speaker, Fred Barnes speculates that Obama may breathe a sigh of relief and pivot to the center, much as Clinton did before him:
With Republicans in charge, he’d have to be bipartisan. He’d surely have to accede to serious cuts in spending””even as he complains they are harsh and mean-spirited. Mr. Obama could play a double game, appeasing Democrats by criticizing the cuts and getting credit with everyone else by acquiescing to them.
Mr. Clinton did this brilliantly in 1996. He fought with Republicans over the budget, winning some battles, losing others, as he lurched to the center. He twice vetoed Republican welfare reform bills, then signed a similar measure. He was hailed as the president who overhauled the unpopular welfare system…In 1994, Republicans freed the president from the clutches of liberal Democratic leaders in Congress. In 2010, they can do it again.
But Obama is not Clinton, who from the start was a pragmatist and political realist rather than a doctrinaire ideologue. Obama has shown almost no sign of being the former, and given every indication of being the latter. What’s more, Clinton had some knowledge of economics, and Obama appears to have little or none.
Of course, with Obama, anything is possible—including a head fake to the center in order to lure a majority of Americans into voting for him again in 2012. But if I had to go out on a limb and make a prediction, I would say that I doubt such an Obama move will happen, even if the Republicans were to win the House in 2010. Obama would not only be betraying his own deeply-held belief system, but would risk having his base stay home instead of going to the polls in 2012.
What’s more, even if I’m wrong and Barnes is right, I think that the American public would be suspicious of such a turn by Obama at so late a date. At the beginning, Obama’s talk of bipartisanship and moderation was believed by many voters. It would not ring true any more, because we’ve seen him demonstrate the exact opposite time and again. Obama is a blank screen no longer.
Helen Thomas retires
It appears we won’t have Helen Thomas to kick around any more, as the veteran White House correspondent has retired, effective immediately.
And not a moment too soon. Thomas is turning 90 in August, so we can’t exactly call it an early force-out. She stayed too long at the fair, long enough so that she opened her mouth just one too many times, and was caught on camera in this day and age of You Tube and near-instant dissemination.
[ADDENDUM: And right on schedule, here’s a Helen Thomas defender in the comments section.]
Remember Bernie Madoff?
He’s pretty sure you do.
This article from NY Magazine makes it clear that Madoff’s arrogance remains undiminished, even (or perhaps especially) in prison. It contains some fascinating nuggets, such as a purported conversation between Madoff and convicted spy for Israel Jonathan Pollard, who resides in the same facility (“Pollard thought that taking advantage of old ladies was ‘kind of fucked up.’ ‘Well, that’s what I did,’ Madoff said matter-of-factly”)
Here’s my favorite, though, in which Madoff expresses a sentiment about the SEC that I happen to share:
Madoff saved his scorn for the SEC. He did impressions of its agents, leaning back with his hands behind his head just as one self-serious agent did””“a guy who comes on like he’s Columbo,” but who was “an idiot,” Madoff said, as recorded in the extraordinary exhibit 104, a twelve-page account of the interview that is part of Kotz’s report. Madoff is no ironist. His disdain for the SEC is professional, even if the agency’s incompetence saved his skin for years””all Columbo had to do was make one phone call. “[It’s] accounting 101,” Madoff told Kotz, still amazed.
Madoff seems to have adjusted to prison quite nicely, which must infuriate a lot of people. He doesn’t seem racked by guilt, which is hardly surprising, and he’s admired by many of his fellow inmates because of the scope of his con. What’s more, he’s giving investment advice.
So maybe it’s not so different for him in prison compared to out as one might think.
Well, at least Helen Thomas…
…didn’t tell the Israelis to “go back to Auschwitz,” like a passenger on the Mavi Marmara told an Israeli Navy radio operator initially contacting the Turkish ship. The speaker was one of those gentle “peace activists,” no doubt.
And by the way, when did the words “I regret” come to constitute an apology? Here’s the full statement Helen Thomas released in an attempt to absolve herself after her initial offensive remarks—and remember, this woman is a writer, so we can assume she is choosing her phrases carefully here:
I deeply regret my comments I made last week regarding the Israelis and the Palestinians. They do not reflect my heartfelt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance. May that day come soon.
Are these words of apology? Where is any indication that Thomas acknowledges her moral transgression? And to whom is she “apologizing?” There is no object of this so-called apology.
Translation of Thomas’s statement:
I wish I hadn’t said it, and I especially wish I hadn’t gotten caught on camera saying it.
But I don’t take it back, I won’t apologize to those evil Israelis/Jews. Instead, I’ll put out some cover words that indicate I want peace to come to the Middle East. Of course, my idea of “peace” in the Middle East is for the illegitimate Israelis to leave the area and make it Judenrein, as I made crystal clear in my previous, more spontaneous, statement.
And then I’ll speak in some general moral equivalency terms about respect and tolerance on both sides—a respect and tolerance I completely failed to show towards the Israelis. That sort of non-apology ought to do the trick and get me off the hook with the idiots who don’t think too deeply.
Whatever has happened to words, and our understanding of what they mean?