Jason Samenow in the Washington Post:

To educate viewers on the science of the recent mega-blizzard that socked New England, MSNBC’s Craig Melvin brought onto his program noted “science guy” Bill Nye . What followed was the one of the most flawed discussions of meteorology I’ve ever seen on a national network.

In likening the blizzard and hurricane Sandy, Nye implies both storms originated off the coast from Africa, which is wrong. Sandy formed in the Caribbean (not from an African wave) and the blizzard formed off the Mid-Atlantic coast (from the merger of two North American disturbances).

Nye then draws an absurd comparison between East Coast storms and West Coast storms in an attempt to equate them.

“If you live on the West Coast … that same type of storm is called a Sou’wester,” Nye says. “If you go to the sailboat store you can get a Nor’easter hat in New England but it’s a Sou’wester hat in Seattle.”

Hurricane Sandy has also been “linked” to climate change by witless journalists and scientific scoundrels.

Note that when Sandy made landfall, it was no longer a hurricane. It was a “super storm” because:

• it coincided with a very high tide, thus exacerbating the storm surge. This is astronomy, not climate change.
• the billions in damage (“super” damages?) were a function of the millions of people who live where the storm landed. Again, that’s not climate, it’s urbanization and the law of averages

Have hurricanes become more intense of late? No. The US has not had a category 3 hurricane make landfall in eight years, the longest stretch since 1990.

More killer tornadoes? No.

More floods? Again, no.

Killer Chris Dorner is (was?) an outspoken liberal, a supporter of gun control and hater of the NRA. He adores Obama.

Iowahawk

When it comes to airbrushing away inconveniences, the San Jose Mercury-News can teach those 1938 Soviets a thing or two.

Case in point: their story on suspected serial killer Chris Dorner (complete with handy ‘RACISM’ headline and camo-American flag photo) refers to his “14-page manifesto.” Hmm. 14 you say? I seem to recall it was 22. I wonder where those missing 8 pages vanished.

Luckily the M-N provides a link to their “transcript” of Dorner’s rambling rant.

Oddly enough there seem to be a few words missing that appear in complete version. Words like “gun control.” And “Obama.” And “Hillary,” and “Piers Morgan,” and “NRA,” and “Chris Matthews.”
In fact, the M-N seems to have disappeared an entire 8 pages worth of star-struck mash notes to media celebs and lefty politicians, threats to George Zimmerman, and death wishes to NRA officials.

Well, I suppose it wasn’t that newsworthy, and they were probably running out of pixels. Who am I to question the judgment of professional journalists?

Jim Geraghty:

CNN anchor Deb Feyerick to Bill Nye the Science Guy: “Talk about something else that’s falling from the sky and that is an asteroid. What’s coming our way? Is this an effect of, perhaps, of global warming or is this just some meteoric occasion?”

Asteroids! They’re attracted to our warming planet just like moths to a flame, I tell you!

She sounds as dim as the grocery bagger.

UPDATE:

Here’s the video. Before the asteroid, she blamed the blizzard (cold weather) on climate change, formerly known as global warming.

Just seeing the headline cracked me up. If you didn’t see the Superbowl ad, see it here.

Peggy Noonan on the ass-kisser, Steve Kroft:

…Which gets us to another story involving a media figure and a media institution. I refer to Steve Kroft’s interview, on “60 Minutes,” with Barack Obama and departing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. That made a big impression too. It didn’t remind us of a style or approach for which we feel nostalgia, but one about which we are feeling increased apprehension, and that is the mainstream media fawn-a-thon toward the current president.

The Kroft interview was a truly scandalous example of the genre. It was so soft, so dazzled, so supportive, so embarrassing. And it was that way from the beginning, when Mr. Kroft breathlessly noted, “The White House granted us 30 minutes.” Granted. Like kings.

What followed was a steady, targeted barrage of softballs. “Why did you want to do this together, a joint interview?” Because, said the president, she’s been one of the best secretaries of state ever, and theirs has been one of the greatest collaborations in history. Also, “I’m gonna miss her.” No reading of the tea leaves here, pressed Mr. Kroft. We don’t have tea here, Hillary laughed.

Throughout the president and the secretary sat closely, shoulder to shoulder, leaning into each other, nodding as the other spoke, praising each other in a way that praised themselves. I don’t blame them for doing propaganda—that’s what White Houses do. But it’s hard not blaming Mr. Kroft and “60 Minutes” for being part of it.

Why did you want her as secretary of state? Mr. Kroft asked. Because she’s so wonderful, the president more or less responded, and not unlike me in the profundity of her seriousness.

Mr. Kroft noted that she had to be talked into taking the job. Mrs. Clinton said yes, she’d exhausted herself selflessly working to elect Mr. Obama in ‘08, she wasn’t sure she wanted to take on a cabinet position. But he’s so persuasive!

The president nodded, smiling. He noted that Mrs. Clinton travelled around the world carrying his forceful yet calibrated message.

How would you characterize your relationship right now?” asked Mr. Kroft, the intrepid reporter. Hillary answered, “Very warm, close, I think there’s a sense of understanding that doesn’t even take words . . . a bond.”Mr. Kroft said he’d “spare you reading what was said” during the heated 2008 Democratic primary battles. And boy, did he spare them.

How did they overcome the tensions and hard words of that battle? “We’re professionals,” said Hillary.

“What do you think the biggest success has been, foreign-policy (more…)

Last week, the LA Times ran a story that said the growing national debt was no big deal, although they did allow that in 20 years we could have serious problems. (They never mentioned Obama’s debt commission once.)

20 years…no big deal, right? Unless you’re my children who will be middle-aged and my grandchildren who will be just entering adulthood. Who’ll get stuck with the tab and the economic malaise sure to come with it.

But forget about them. Spend, spend, spend.

WASHINGTON—A slowly improving economy and recently enacted tax increases will help bring down the federal deficit for the next few years, the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday, but it will take another $2 trillion in belt-tightening over the next decade to begin to move the federal debt closer to historic levels.

The updated CBO projections landed amid budget battles in Washington, underscoring not only the distance between the White House and Congressional Republicans on spending but also the gravity of the nation’s fiscal woes.

CBO projects that if Congress leaves current laws unchanged, the debt will be 77% by 2023, and it will be higher if across-the-board spending cuts are diluted or various expiring tax breaks extended. (The deficit is the difference between spending and revenues in a given year; the debt is the government’s total borrowing, or the sum of past deficits.)

Bullies eventually get their comeuppance.

Kirsten Powers, a self-described liberal, notes the ugly behavior of the White House:

There is no war on terror for the Obama White House, but there is one on Fox News.

In a recent interview with The New Republic, President Obama was back to his grousing about the one television news outlet in America that won’t fall in line and treat him as emperor. Discussing breaking Washington’s partisan gridlock, the president told TNR,”If a Republican member of Congress is not punished on Fox News…for working with a Democrat on a bill of common interest, then you’ll see more of them doing it.”

Alas, the president loves to whine about the media meanies at Fox News. To him, these are not people trying to do their jobs. No, they are out to get him. What other motive could a journalist have in holding a president accountable? Why oh why do Ed Henry and Chris Wallace insist on asking hard questions? Make them stop!

The president seems more comfortable talking to “real journalists” such as Chris Hughes, who asked the question in the TNR interview that elicited Obama’s reflexive Fox hatred. Hughes is the new owner of TNR and is a former major Obama campaign donor and organizer who was featured on the cover of Fast Company, with the headline, “The Kid Who Made Obama President.” You can’t make this stuff up.

This latest volley from the president is just one in a long line of comments from his White House as part of their campaign to silence any dissent they detect in the press corps.

Recently, the White House has kept Fox News off of conference calls dealing with the Benghazi attack, despite Fox News being the only outlet that was regularly reporting on it and despite Fox having top notch foreign policy reporters.

They have left Chris Wallace’s “Fox News Sunday” out of a round of interviews that included CNN, NBC, ABC and CBS for not being part of a “legitimate” news network. In October 2009, as part of an Obama administration onslaught against Fox News,White House senior adviser David Axelrod said on ABC’s “This Week” that the Fox News Channel is “not really a news station” and that much of the programming is “not really news.”…

Benghazi is two scandals: the negligence that led to the death of four Americans and the media’s failure to take this seriously.

Peter Kirsanow:

Bernard Goldberg

John Dickerson is the political director at CBS News. It’s an important and prestigious position because the political director’s observations – on the air and in internal conversations with correspondents and producers – influence how political events, like presidential elections, are covered. The political director at a mainstream news organization like CBS News has to be impartial, fair and objective.

But John Dickerson has another job. This one is at the liberal on-line magazine Slate, where his title “chief political correspondent.” In that role, he can write columns and offer opinions, which in the news business often masquerade as “analysis.” Whatever you call it, it’s not down the middle, just the facts ma’am reporting.

The other day Dickerson wrote a piece for Slate under the catchy headline, “Go for the Throat!” The sub-headline was more explicit. It read: “Why if he wants to transform American politics, Obama must declare war on the Republican Party.”

The headline was certainly provocative — aimed, as all headlines are, at drawing a crowd. But it was also an accurate description of Dickerson’s column. In it, he seems to be giving President Barack Obama advice on what he has to do in his second term if he wants to leave a lasting legacy.

Here’s part of what Dickerson wrote:

“Enhancing the president’s legacy requires something more than simply the clever application of predictable stratagems. Washington’s partisan rancor, the size of the problems facing government, and the limited amount of time before Obama is a lame duck all point to a single conclusion: The president who came into office speaking in lofty terms about bipartisanship and cooperation can only cement his legacy if he destroys the GOP. If he wants to transform American politics, he must go for the throat.”

It sounds like something David Axelrod, the president’s political hatchet man, would advise his boss. That should have been a warning bell to Dickerson. It wasn’t.

“Obama’s only remaining option is to pulverize,” he continued. “Whether he succeeds in passing legislation or not, given his ambitions, his goal should be to delegitimize his opponents. Through a series of clarifying (more…)

Okay, enough with the Jefferson Airplane reference.

Fact is, Fact Checker got it’s facts wrong. Mitt was right, they were wrong.

Last month, PolitiFact selected its “Lie of the Year.” Given PolitiFact’s dubious record of singling out Republicans for lying far more often than Democrats, you probably could have guessed the winner of this particular sweepstakes was a Mitt Romney campaign ad:

It was a lie told in the critical state of Ohio in the final days of a close campaign — that Jeep was moving its U.S. production to China. It originated with a conservative blogger, who twisted an accurate news story into a falsehood. Then it picked up steam when the Drudge Report ran with it. Even though Jeep’s parent company gave a quick and clear denial, Mitt Romney repeated it and his campaign turned it into a TV ad.

And they stood by the claim, even as the media and the public expressed collective outrage against something so obviously false.

“Public expressed collective outrage”? That’s essentially wishcasting on the part of PolitiFact, nor are they accurately representing what Mitt Romney said in the ad. In fact, here’s PolitiFact’s original “fact check” on the matter:

[Mitt Romney] Says Barack Obama “sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China” at the cost of American jobs.

Ok. Now here’s what the Reuters reported earlier this week:

Fiat (FIA.MI) and its U.S. unit Chrysler expect to roll out at least 100,000 Jeeps in China when production starts in 2014 as they seek to catch up with rivals in the world’s biggest car market. …

“We expect production of around 100,000 Jeeps per year which is expandable to 200,000,” [Chrysler CEO Sergio] Marchionne, who is also CEO of Chrysler, said on the sidelines of a conference, adding production could start in 18 months.

So, yes, it’s confirmed that Jeep will be producing cars in China. According to the Toledo Blade last November:

Currently, Jeeps sell in more than 120 countries around the world, including China. They’re nearly all built in factories in the United States.

By expanding Jeep production to China, instead of increasing Jeep production in the U.S., it’s safe to say Jeep (or more properly, Fiat, which now owns Chrysler) is choosing to create more jobs overseas instead of in America where taxpayers bailed the company out.

Even if they had been right, the Lie of the Year had to be Obama’s contention that “asking the rich to pay their fair share” could solve the massive spending problem.

Hide in plain sight, Big Baloney won’t notice.

Matthew Continetti in the Washington Free Beacon:

...ironic, isn’t it, that an association of organizations with combined revenue of more than a billion dollars is launching a campaign to get “big money out of politics.” Like all such campaigns, of course, the Democracy Initiative is less about getting money out of politics than it is about getting the wrong sort of money out of politics—in this case, the sort of money dispensed by industries and ideologues opposed to the progressive agenda.

Let’s pretend that in the spring of 2012 Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, John Engler of the Business Roundtable, Tim Phillips of Americans for Prosperity, and Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association began to organize an assembly of right-leaning groups.

Let’s pretend that in the months since there had been not one but two meetings where these luminaries joined with representatives of Christians United For Israel, the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Tea Party Express, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and the American Petroleum Institute to discuss strategy and promote a series of “structural reforms” that would make it easier for them to advance conservative goals in Congress.

Let’s pretend that by the time of the second meeting, which was held within sight of the White House, the coalition had grown to encompass some 36 different interest groups pledging millions of dollars.

How much press coverage would be devoted to this fictive cabal?

It is impossible to say. But is it not unreasonable to assume that our pretend meeting of the vast right-wing conspiracy would attract far more scrutiny than was devoted to the actual, real-life, believe-it-or-not inaugural meetings of the progressive “Democracy Initiative”? After all, no one seemed to know anything about those meetings, held in June and December 2012, until a writer for Mother Jones named Andy Kroll broke the story on Wednesday. As of this writing exactly two other people, a blogger for the Washington Monthlyand a blogger for The Ed Show, have picked up Kroll’s story.

The rest of what is too generously called the “mainstream media” has not said a word. Instead the campaign finance reporter of the New York Times, who used to work at the Washington Monthly, had a long investigative piece on the various conflicts-of-interest associated with advocates of pro-growth tax and entitlement reform. (Spoiler: They’re in it for themselves.) Slate meanwhile asked the pressing question, “Why Do the Rich and Famous Always Sunbathe Topless?” Other outlets were distracted by the glitzy baubles of nomination fights and gun control. About this major story of coordination and concerted spending among powerful lobbies, however, the press had little to say.

And it is a major story. The brainchild of Michael Brune, Phil Radford, Larry Cohen, and Ben Jealous, the Democracy Initiative, according to Mother Jones’s Kroll, is “the first time so many groups teamed up to work on multiple issues not tied to an election.”

These guys have pull. Brune is the executive director of the Sierra Club and former executive director of the more radical Rainforest Action Network. Radford runs Greenpeace. Cohen is the president of the 700,000-member Communications Workers of America, “the largest telecommunications union in the world.” Jealous is the president and chief executive officer of theNAACP. Their “conversations in recent years” about the malign influence of conservative donors in politics developed into the “invite-only and off-the-record” meetings in June and December, where representatives of “30 to 35 groups” pledged “a total of millions of dollars and dozens of organizers to form a united front” on the issues of “getting big money out of politics, expanding the voting rolls while fighting voter ID laws, and rewriting Senate rules to curb the use of the filibuster to block legislation.” The most recent meeting was held at the headquarters of the 3-million-strong National Education Association, which is less than half a dozen blocks north of where President Barack Obama works…

Ben Shapiro, a UCLA contemporary of my sons, makes a fool of Piers Morgan with logic and a cool head.

Michael Bloomberg defended his new policy that will limit pain killers in city run emergency rooms.

“Oh then maybe there won’t be enough painkillers for the poor who use the emergency rooms as their primary care doctor,’” the mayor said on his weekly radio show with John Gambling.

“Number one, there’s no evidence of that.

How could there be? The policy is brand new.

Number two, supposing it is really true so you didn’t get enough painkillers and you did have to suffer a little bit. The other side of the coin is people are dying and there’s nothing perfect… There’s nothing that you can possibly do where somebody isn’t going to suffer and it’s always the same group [claiming], ‘Everybody is heartless.’ Come on, this is a very big problem.”

By that reasoning, his gun control measures are foolish because they attempt to make perfect (no gun deaths) by imposing laws. And those very laws may actually cause more innocent people to die at the hands of criminals.

That’s not just heartless, it is stupid.

Fred Barnes

President Obama never disappoints. When the monthly unemployment rate fails to drop, forget it. What’s important is the number of jobs created. But when the rate actually does drop, forget the growth (or lack of it) in jobs. It’s the rate that matters. And don’t blame Obama for the persistence of slow economic growth and high joblessness. That’s the “new normal.” As for the millions of dropouts from the job market, that’s no big deal, hardly worth more than a passing mention.

Full credit is due Obama for his role in the overthrow of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. He was cleverly “leading from behind.” But the killing of the American ambassador to Libya and three others in Benghazi—the president bears no responsibility for that. Perish the thought.

Meanwhile, in the months before his reelection in November, Obama doled out government favors to Democratic interest groups like unions, Hispanics, teachers, and single women. This may have looked like shameless exploitation of his high office, but it really was unusually skillful politicking by a master of the game.

My drift here ought to be obvious. I’m referring to the way the media treat Obama. It’s not always adoring. It’s intermittently fair and even-handed. But overall, what’s distinctive about the press coverage of Obama is the absence of fault-finding, criticism, and dogged questioning. And when Obama makes excuses, as he often does, the media tend to echo them.

No president in my lifetime has been covered so favorably and so gingerly. Never has the press corps been so unwilling to pursue stories that might cast the president in an unflattering light. As a group, the media pride themselves on taking an adversarial approach to politicians and government officials. But in Obama’s case, the press acts like a helpmate.

Or kiss ass. Read it all.

“I have fired guns only once in my life, on a stag party to the Czech capital Prague a few years ago when part of the itinerary included a trip to an indoor shooting range. For three hours, our group were let loose on everything from Magnum 45 handguns and Glock pistols, to high-powered ‘sniper’ rifles and pump-action shotguns.

It was controlled, legal, safe and undeniably exciting. But it also showed me, quite demonstrably, that guns are killing machines.”

Imagine that.

And TV shows are for being rude, pompous and obnoxious.

A blogger who retaliated against a New York newspaper that came under fire for identifying people with gun licenses in its circulation area explained on Thursday why he published the names and home addresses of the paper’s employees.

“Well, I just thought they were being hypocrites,” said Christopher Fountain on CNN’s “Early Start.” “In the aftermath of Newtown, it was obviously one tragedy, but somehow they were conflating legal gun owners with some crazed tormented devil up in Newtown and putting the two together. And I was offended by that and I wondered how they would like it if their addresses were published.”

NYT:

The harshest judges of those in news media are often others in the news media, and, with the benefit of Twitter, that intrajournalistic watchdog role can be performed simultaneously with the journalism being criticized.

Case in point was the White House news conference on Wednesday afternoon, when President Obama made a forceful announcement in response to the massacre of children last week in Newtown, Conn. He said he was directing Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to lead an effort “to come up with a set of concrete proposals” about dealing with gun violence that he would submit to Congress no later than January.

Great, put a nitwit in charge of rushing through some legislation.

“We are going to need to work on making access to mental health care as easy as access to a gun,” Mr. Obama said. “We’re going to need to look more closely at a culture that all too often glorifies guns and violence.”

Oh, you mean Hollywood? Your financial backers?

His words, after five days of extensive news coverage and national debate, were intensely focused on gun violence. He addressed no other topics. Yet judging by the questions that followed his address, most of the members of the Washington press corps had other things on their minds.

The reporters blew off the gun subject and asked about the fiscal cliff, and that annoyed other media members who thought the press corps should stick to guns, guns, guns.

Hey, Obama is running $1 trillion annual deficits. No big deal. Medicare will go broke unless its finances get fixed. No big deal.

First we have to rush through some gun control legislation that will not work, just we can feel better.

One wonders, doesn’t the USA have enough pompous fools to host TV shows without importing them? Send Morgan back to jolly ole England and put some recent communications major in his place.

BTW, the murders committed with firearms was 8,775, not 12,000.

Progressives are, by and large, more emotional than conservatives, which muddies their thinking and promotes self-righteousness.

Everyone feels events like the Newton murders in their gut. Not everyone thinks laws should automatically follow or that the world can be made immune to tragedy.

Jonah Goldberg on the rush to “do something” after horrible events.

…one piece of advice you often hear in such situations is “don’t make any big decisions” in the immediate aftermath of a tragedy.

It’s sound advice that is routinely and predictably ignored in the political realm. Right now, people are talking about putting metal detectors and X-ray machines in every school. I’m open to the idea. But barely a decade past 9/11, how many people find the quick-started security system at airports reassuring and necessary? Imposing the equivalent of TSA screening at every elementary school in the country strikes me as the sort of idea people propose out of panic and despair.

But, again, that’s sort of the point for some. It’s really quite amazing. For 20 years, at least, we’ve been hearing about the dangers of “anger” in American politics. Angry white men are the scapegoats for all our problems, including several mass shootings that were perpetrated by the mentally ill. But now, in the wake of this shooting, anger isn’t the disease, it’s the cure. “We should mourn, but we should be angry,” insists E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post. He continues: “The horror in Newtown, Conn., should shake us out of the cowardice, the fear, the evasion and the opportunism that prevents our political system from acting to curb gun violence.”

Progressive anger is righteous. Conservative anger is retrograde and dangerous — at least that’s how Big Baloney plays it.

Except, our political system has acted to curb gun violence. Violent crime, gun violence and school violence have all dropped dramatically over the last 20 years, even as the number (and lethality) of guns in America has risen dramatically. It’s not even obvious that mass killings are on the rise. And according to economist John Lott, mass shootings almost always occur in locations where guns are banned.

It seems that Dionne and countless others want to use fear, evasion and opportunism in the wake of this tragedy to win an argument they couldn’t win when passion was in check.

Still, these sorts of rampages by the mentally ill are becoming all too frequent in recent years (though none, despite what you may have heard, involved automatic weapons, which are very hard to own and incredibly rare in gun crime cases).

A breakdown in our culture generally, and in our mental health system in particular, seems to be making this kind of nihilistic mayhem possible and attractive to sick young men. This is a point the media should keep in mind as they provide precisely the kind of saturation coverage such men find enticing.

But while guns are easy to scapegoat as talismans of evil, and the media are worthy of criticism, the mentally ill are different. Many of the “warning signs” for the Newtown killer could be leveled at millions of young men. Who among us doesn’t know someone who was a smart loner with poor social skills in high school or college?

I think we need better mental health screening and treatment for potential murderers, though I’m not sure how to implement it. What I am sure of is that we shouldn’t try while we’re still so angry, or mourning so deeply.

By Jim Geraghty

In the “you have got to be kidding me” category:

The White House Correspondents Association is strongly urging the Obama administration to allow press access to the president’s official swearing-in ceremony on Jan. 20, following indications from inauguration committee officials that the event could potentially be closed to the press.

“Mindful of the historic nature of this occasion, we expect the White House will continue the long tradition of opening the President’s official swearing-in to full press access, and we as an organization are looking forward to working with the administration to make that happen,” Ed Henry, the Fox News correspondent and president of the White House Correspondents Association, said in a statement.

Because inauguration day falls on a Sunday in 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts will officially administer the official oath of office in a private ceremony that day. The public inauguration on the Capitol Building’s West Front — at which Roberts will administer a second, symbolic oath of office — will take place the next day.

In early meetings with the inaugural committee, officials privately indicated to reporters that the Jan. 20 event could be closed to reporters and cameras, with an official photograph supplied to press by White House photographer Pete Souza, sources familiar with the meeting told POLITICO.

Let me guess, they’ll invite the top donors and bundlers?

“Call me shell-shocked. I’m stunned that this is even an issue; it boggles the mind,” NBC News White House correspondent Chuck Todd told POLITICO. “This is not their oath, this is the constitutional oath. It’s not for them. It’s for the public, the citizens of the United Sates. It just boggles the mind. How is this even a debate?”

Well, maybe this reflects a White House that certainly doesn’t fear bad press, doesn’t worry about it, thinks they’ve got the world on a string and that there is absolutely no tradition or unwritten rule that they need to heed. We’ve seen this type of behavior before, jumping up and down on the bed in the Lincoln Bedroom. Peggy Noonan back in 1998:

For seven months I have kept on my desk a picture from a tabloid. It is of two close friends of President Clinton, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason and the actress Markie Post. They are laughing and holding hands in joyous union as they jump up and down at where fate has put them down. It had put them in the Lincoln bedroom. They were jumping up and down on Lincoln’s bed.

It seemed to me emblematic of the Clinton White House, a place where opponents’ FBI files were read aloud over pizza and foreign contributors with cash invited in the back door. I thought: Something’s wrong with these people, they lack thought and dignity. But most of all they seemed to lack respect, a sense of awe—not the awe that can cripple you with a false sense of your smallness but the awe that makes you bigger, that makes you reach higher as if in tribute to some unseen greatness around you.

Politico’s Dylan Byers notes, “The last time a president was inaugurated on a Sunday was in 1985. Reagan’s White House allowed complete news coverage of the private ceremony, including three reporters, three still photographers, and one network television pool camera, according to a Los Angeles Times report from the time. ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN carried live broadcasts of the event.”

No, he had a GOP Congress that controlled spending.

Ed Morrissey

…We’re also seeing Clinton nostalgia in a more concrete sense as we barrel towards the fiscal cliff, which both parties set up in two previous rounds of negotiations over spending and tax policies.  Hearkening back to gauzy memories of prosperity in the late 1990s, Democrats have argued in the last few months that a return to Clinton-era tax rates won’t hurt the economy.

That isn’t exactly a new argument, but it is one that Democrats have used more frequently as Republicans argue that tax hikes will damage the currently stagnant economy and already-anemic job creation.  Bill Clinton raised taxes and the economy grew in the late 1990s – so why not do the same thing again?

That argument ignores a lot of the context in both the current economy and the economy of the 1990s.  As we approached the middle of the decade, the Internet’s economic potential began to explode – and investment followed, and the economy leaped into high gear.   So much capital flowed into this brand-new market that the trend became irrational, producing the dot-com bubble that popped as Clinton was leaving office.

This produced the recession of 2000-1, which became exacerbated by the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The Bush-era tax rates reversed the recession and produced solid economic growth for more than three years, as well as increases in federal income-tax revenue and decreases in the federal deficit, as this chart from Investors Business Daily based on White House data demonstrates:

…That bubble also started in the Clinton era, albeit with plenty of assistance from Republicans who wanted to be seen as promoting home ownership and fairness.  Congress under control of both parties gave Fannie and Freddie carte blanche to create mortgage-backed securities on bad loans in order to fund this bubble.    When housing prices inevitably snapped, after a ten-year holiday from their traditional linkage to the rate of inflation, vast sums of imaginary wealth disappeared nearly overnight.In other words, the prosperity of the Clinton years was in significant part a fiction based on irrational market behavior, boosted in one instance by significant distortion introduced by government policy.  That’s also true for a good part of the Bush-era prosperity, as the irrational housing valuations lured homeowners into the habit of treating their homes as ATMs to cash out on rapidly-rising equity, which crashed out in 2008.

But the deficit crisis didn’t come from a reduction in federal income-tax revenue from George Bush’s tax policies, as we can see above.  As far as relating it today, we have no new emerging market on the scale of the Internet on which to count for future economic growth, at least not at the moment, to balance out the constrictive impact of seizing more capital through tax hikes.

…he could’ve hurt someone.

Richard Morosi in the LA Times

Luis Ernesto Rodriguez eyed the metal door as he waited for his little girls. Now 6 and 5 years old, they were his only children, inseparable, with thick black hair and mischievous smiles that reminded people of little mermaids.

More than two years had passed since he had last seen them. What would they be like now? Would they recognize him? He had shed 20 pounds during the long journey north.

The door opened and his girls bounded into the tiny room. They shouted and laughed the same way they did when he used to carry one in each arm on the way to day care.

But their smiles melted away when they saw the thick wall of Plexiglas between them and their father, clothed in an orange jumpsuit worn by detainees at an immigration detention center in California’s Imperial Valley. There would be no hugs, no kisses.

Touching, right? Then. after you wade through the four feet of ink in this front page article you discover:

• “In 2007, social workers had taken his daughters from Rodriguez’s dirty, near-empty apartment in South Los Angeles. Rodriguez and his wife, Blanca, were cocaine users.”
• He was an illegal immigrant from El Salvador, whom the Mexican government caught twice trying to the USA sent back immediately. Note: Mexico is pretty tough on illegal immigrants.
• His daughters were eventually adopted by a family that would provide them a stable home.

The kicker about the headline reads: “Without a country.” He has a country, just not ours.

Ace of Spades

Obama was permitted by the media to claim, or at least strongly imply, that the painful cuts Romney was talking about (and Obama, the Great Leader, was not talking about) could be averted simply by levying a small tax on the “richest 1%.” It was a lie. It was further a lie the media assisted in. All those Fact Checks and not a single column noting that the central pillar of Barack Obama’s Re-Election Strategy was a baldfaced lie that only the uninformed or innumerate could possibly believe.

The media is strongly complicit in this lie.

If I were someone in power, I would make this connection vigorously, and lay the blame at the feet of the media, and inform the public the media lied to them, and if they’re about to get a unwelcome shock, they should write to ABC, CNN, NBC, and the rest of the clownshow and ask them why they chose not to report the actual numbers.

But I’m sure they won’t, because they’re stupid.*

At any rate, the public does believe this (and why shouldn’t they? The President told them the only fix that was needed was a tax hike on the rich and the media vouched for him).

Time to strip them of that misapprehension and force them to confront the actual choice.

* Also, why the hell didn’t Romney and Ryan pound this? Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Why not… give Obama his tax hike on the rich and the small cuts he’s willing to agree to — and then refuse to raise the debt ceiling any further?

Call him out. “You said you could balance things with these measures. So do so.”

Jonah Goldberg

Instapundit:

THE WASHINGTON POST FANS THE FLAMES OF RACISM AND SECESSION with this execrable editorial on the Susan Rice confirmation battle:

Could it be, as members of the Congressional Black Caucus are charging, that the signatories of the letter are targeting Ms. Rice because she is an African American woman? The signatories deny that, and we can’t know their hearts. What we do know is that more than 80 of the signatories are white males, and nearly half are from states of the former Confederacy.

Could it be that the Editorial Board of the Washington Post is a pack of pathetic political hacks who’ll engage in racial hate speech in order to advance the White House’s agenda?

Apparently, whole swathes of the electorate are illegitimate just because of their birth. If you really believe that, you’re doing more to promote division than anyone who signs a dumb White House petition for secession. Disgraceful.

Related: Remember When Condoleezza Rice Was Called a ‘House Nigga’?

Woe to the Mayans. Had they not offended Gaia with their industrial smokestacks, gas burning automobiles and coal burning power plants, they might still be here today.

Monte Morin in the LAT

Argument has raged for decades over what doomed the ancient Maya civilization and spurred its people to abandon their awe-inspiring temples and pyramids in the rain forests of Mexico and Central America. Warfare, disease, social unrest and over-farming have all been cited as potential factors in the decline of a culture that was scientifically and culturally advanced for 750 years.

A new study bolsters the theory that large-scale climate change was responsible for the society’s demise — and argues that changes in global weather patterns were also responsible for its rapid rise.

Using data from a 13,500-year-old stalagmite taken from the floor of a recently discovered cave in Belize, scientists said they were able to assemble a precise record of rainfall for the region going back 2,000 years.

…

By AD 700, that wet weather gave way to a “general drying trend that lasted four centuries and was punctuated by a series of major droughts,” he said. “That triggered a decline in agricultural productivity and contributed to societal fragmentation and political collapse. … Maya kings lost their power and influence.”

Researchers said the severe drought the Maya experienced was akin to the one that devastated Mexico in the 16th century and brought crop failure, famine and death. Kennett said such circumstances probably visited the Maya during their classic period, which lasted from AD 250 to 1000.

Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann could not be reached for comment.

So the FBI agent wasn’t pulling a Weiner after all — it was a joke.

Shirtless FBI agent: Photo was joke emailed to friends, reporter

This photograph shows FBI Special Agent Frederick W. Humphries posing with target dummies following a SWAT practice. This is the “shirtless image” that has been alluded to in the investigation into emails that led to the resignation of CIA Director David Petraeus. Humphries sent the 2010 photograph to many people, including Tampa socialite Jill Kelley and a reporter at The Seattle Times.

Kirstin Powers nails it:

Don’t pick on the little lady.

Wednesday, President Obama bizarrely cast the U.N. Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, as some delicate flower the boys should stop picking on for her dissembling claims on five Sunday talk shows following the killing of 4 Americans in Benghazi.  But, there is no damsel in distress and Obama’s paternalistic bravado in defense of a top administration official is going to come back to haunt him.

“If Sen. McCain and Sen. Graham and others want to go after somebody, they should go after me,” Obama intoned to the stenographers worshipping at his feet. The media had gathered for a rare “press conference” where Fox News’ Ed Henry and ABC’s Jake Tapper are usually the only ones who ever seem to ask a question that elicits anything other than filibustering presidential pabulum.  (One “journalist” actually congratulated the president on his win and gushed about how she has never seen him lose an election.)  Group hug!

Obviously caught up in his own silly yarn about meanie Senators and helpless U.N. Ambassadors, the President complained, “When they go after the U.N. ambassador apparently because they think she’s an easy target, then they’ve got a problem with me.”

Ooh, tough guy! But if you ask Obama about Benghazi, he deflects via some investigation that’s going on.

Imagine George Bush saying that people criticized John Bolton because he was an “easy target.” He wouldn’t.

It’s absurd and chauvinistic for Obama to talk about the woman he thinks should be Secretary of State of the United States as if she needs the big strong man to come to her defense because a couple of Senators are criticizing her.

Believe it or not, Rice isn’t the first potential Cabinet nominee to be opposed by members of Congress up on the Hill.  Obama also left out the inconvenient detail that there is another senator who has Rice in the crosshairs:  Sen. Kelly Ayotte.  But perhaps a female Senator holding Rice accountable didn’t sound menacing enough in the era of the “War on Women.”

But it gets much worse.

As the president expressed outrage over the atrocity of members of Congress holding administration officials accountable, he said, “I’m happy to have that discussion with them. But for them to go after the U.N. ambassador? Who had nothing to do with Benghazi?”

Feast on those words for a second:  The U.N. Ambassador had “nothing to do with Benghazi.” At this point, the White House press corps should have flown into a frenzy, demanding to know why a person who had nothing to do with Benghazi was put on five Sunday talk shows as…the face of Benghazi!

This was an issue that had people scratching their heads the day of the Rice interviews, and plenty of questions were asked as to where Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was, and why Rice was put out instead. The administration at the time acted as though there was nothing remarkable about it, even though there clearly was…

Apparently 42% of voters thought Obama’s handling of the Sandy aftermath qualified him for another four years.

Go figure.

New York Post

Is there a smaller, more unprincipled man in the national political debate than Chris Matthews of MSNBC?

No, there is not.

Bereft of decency and devoid of soul, what mattered most for Matthews is that his candidate — in this case, President Obama — somehow was boosted over the top.

And if millions of his fellow citizens encounter appalling deprivations along the way — well, to Matthews, they’re just eggs to be broken for the Obama omelet.

“I’m so glad we had that storm last week,” he said Tuesday.

By which he meant Hurricane Sandy, which sowed death and destruction all along the East Coast — especially in the New York metropolitan region.

“The storm brought in possibilities for good politics,” he added — referencing polls suggesting Sandy gave Obama a critical jolt.

Never mind the 100-plus deaths.

Never mind the destruction.

Never mind the tens of thousands still huddled without heat or power on Staten Island. Or Breezy Point. Or the Rockaways and Coney Island.

Matthews says he grew up on the Jersey Shore — as savagely hit by Sandy as any region along its devastating path.

Empathy?

From this pinched little man?

Hardly.

For he’s moved on.

Matthews lives in the very rich and overwhelmingly white Maryland township of Chevy Chase — which makes his pious sermonizing about GOP “elitism” just another bucket of moral bilge.

Reaction to Matthews’ vile outburst was predictable — prompting the little man to take to Twitter.

“Obviously, I wasn’t talking about the horror of the storm,” he wrote, but rather “the cooperation between the president and state officials.”

Obviously?

Obviously not.

“I’m so glad we had that storm last week” is what he said.

And reasonable — that is to say, decent — people understand that he meant precisely what he said.

The disgusting twit.