Nemesis Is Clearly Off Getting A Mani/Pedi

Of the list of people who are not allowed to complain about President Obama’s “executive overreach” in yesterday’s directive involving undocumented students being allowed to apply to work permits, the absolute top of that list consists of two, maybe three people.  One of them is former Dubya legal “ace” John “Of Course We Can Waterboard” Yoo, who promptly calls down the wrath of Nemesis herself upon his doomed soul with this observation over at NRO.

President Obama’s claim that he can refuse to deport 800,000 aliens here in the country illegally illustrates the unprecedented stretching of the Constitution and the rule of law. He is laying claim to presidential power that goes even beyond that claimed by the Bush administration, in which I served. There is a world of difference in refusing to enforce laws that violate the Constitution (Bush) and refusing to enforce laws because of disagreements over policy (Obama).

This is pretty much the equivalent of the Mouth of Sauron proclaiming that Gondor is violating Middle Earth’s OSHA laws by having all those dangerous, pointy swords everywhere, and won’t somebody please think of the children.  I’m hoping dark Nemesis has some pretty sturdy Doc Martens, because certain asses are in dire need of having boots inserted in them and rotation will probably be necessary.  Yoo’s own theories on the plenary executive are phenomenally daft, but claiming that the President has the authority to declare unending bloody war on tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan citizens but doesn’t have the authority to direct enforcement procedures of executive branch agencies is so absolutely douchetronic that Yoo probably needs to waterboard himself for a while just to balance the scales of the universe.

And yet, Nemesis is off getting an all-day mani/pedi or something because Yoo continues on without several million Olympian arrows magically appearing in his chest.

Imagine the precedent this claim would create. President Romney could lower tax rates simply by saying he will not use enforcement resources to prosecute anyone who refuses to pay capital-gains tax. He could repeal Obamacare simply by refusing to fine or prosecute anyone who violates it.

The funny part is everyone at NRO who read this sentence said “Shut!  The Front!  Door!   That’s a brilliant idea!  We’ll just refuse to enforce the crap we don’t like!  John Yoo, you’re a genius!”  Because that’s exactly what President Romney would do, simply stop enforcing things.  Hell, it’s what Bush did with Wall Street.  It’s not like the Bush-era Securities and Exchange Commission or the Food and Drug Administration or practically any other government regulatory body in the executive branch actually enforced laws.  They decided their job was not in fact regulation but to help the industries they were supposed to be checks upon get around regulation.  Yoo had no problem with that, or the whole “Hey, Congress Schmongress!” thing with Afghanistan, Iraq, and detainees getting fake drowned and all that jazz either.  Using the executive’s enforcement directives to not deport kids?  That’s worth putting POTUS in the dock, yo.

Yoo’s big finish:

So what we have here is a president who is refusing to carry out federal law simply because he disagrees with Congress’s policy choices. That is an exercise of executive power that even the most stalwart defenders of an energetic executive — not to mention the Framers — cannot support.

How his hands were able to type that sentence without automatically wrapping themselves around his own throat only proves that I need more psionic training.

And then Alberto Gonzales chimes in proving that after getting her nails done, Nemesis is getting sloshed on Caramel Appletinis at Chili's rather than making with the whole justice thing.

“To half through executive order the deportation of some undocumented immigrants looks like a political calculation to win Hispanic votes,” Gonzales told the crowd at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference in Washington, D.C. Saturday, “and subjects him to criticism that he is violating his oath of office by selectively failing to enforce the law.”

These guys are trolling.  Period.

This Week In Village Idiocy

It was Eleanor Clift, in the Daily Beast, with the candlestick.  She's standing over the beaten corpse of political journalism with a really confused look on her face, too, like she's not quite sure if she was moving her arms to cave in the skull, or the candlestick moved on its own accord.  She stands surrounded by a focus group of independent voters.

Listening to these voters for over two hours, it was clear that their assessment of the economy is not as bleak as one would suppose, given their disaffection from Obama. They generally agree that the economy is improving, but Obama doesn’t get credit for a recovery that, while slow, is moving in the right direction—the core of his message for a second term. A few cited what they called “little things” Obama has done for the economy, like reining in credit-card companies, but no one could cite major accomplishments that would measure up to the expectations aroused by Obama as a candidate who promised to bring about transformative change.

This Denver group was sponsored by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, and Hart’s findings add to a growing chorus of concern among Democrats not directly aligned with the Obama campaign that the president is not connecting with the voters he needs to win. Asked if he was feeling the heat from his allies in the Obama camp, Hart told The Daily Beast, “They know who I am, and that I’m a straight-shooter, and I’m totally in their corner. Sometimes being in their corner means telling them the truth.”

Whether it’s a failure of policy or of communications is debatable, but the sense of disillusionment with Obama’s performance is real. “He set up expectations that began 46 months ago, and they only grew over time,” says Hart. He singled out Jeffrey, a 31-year-old Web designer and home remodeler, as the voter Obama most needs and might not get. Jeffrey voted for Obama last time.

“The whole platform was hope—I don’t feel any more hope today,” he said. Pressed by Hart as to which candidate he was leaning toward, Jeffrey said the tenor of the campaign turned him off, that he felt like he was in the middle of a weird argument between a husband and wife, and all he wanted to do was leave the room. “I don’t even know if I’m going to vote this time,” he said glumly.

And the bolded clues there are for Eleanor's benefit.  There's something that they all have in common, demonstrated most aptly by a woman with a weekly political op-ed column seemingly baffled by why voters apparently know nothing about Mitt Romney's time at Bain Capital.  All they know is that OBAMA FAILED THEM and that they don't really know anything about the other guy.

If only there were a group of Americans whose job it was to disseminate information and report on political developments with the intent of having a robust, informed electorate.  Sadly, I can't think of anyone like that and if such a group of "reporters" did exist, Eleanor Clift wouldn't know one from a 26-pound wheel of Gorgonzola cheese.

It's possible she may have cacked one of these "reporters", but the independent voters apparently saw nothing, so they don't feel any particular need to engage right now in the whole political process anyway.

It remains a total mystery as to why, of course.

Oops! Hitchhiker Shot Himself

On Monday, Ray Dolin of West Virginia grabbed national headlines when he claimed that he was hiking on Highway 2 in Montana — gathering stories for a memoir about how nice people are — when a man in a pickup truck pulled over and then shot him in the arm. What a story! Police even arrested a 52-year-old man under suspicion of assault, but he was cleared after a search of his truck turned up zero evidence. Under more interrogation, Dolin admitted to police on Thursday that he made the story up and he actually shot himself in the arm. Whether he lied to cover for his own foolishness or simply to grab attention we still don't know, but we do know that America is slightly less kind when people try to get other people in trouble for fake shootings. Police say the case in still under investigation, though there may be charges for Dolin in the work

Sorry, guys.  I manage to dodge most of these, but it seemed just ironic enough to be true.  I think he'll be plenty sorry that he tried to pull off this stunt.   I also hope the poor man who was arrested wasn't too rattled.  How terrifying that must have been when you're innocent.

Octogenarian Shocked By Police Treatment

St. George Police Chief Anthony L. Britt said that an officer who tased a nude 80-year-old woman was justified  because the woman could have hurt police officers and EMS crews with her metal walking cane which she was swinging at officers.

"We just felt that was the best way to apprehend her and not let her hurt anybody or herself," Britt said on Friday. "There was no other way to get her to come down from where she was at that point."

On May 21, a lieutenant with the St. George Police Department contacted emergency dispatch regarding noises he heard near his home. A police officer responded and said he found a nude elderly woman in front of a home on Gavin Street banging her walking cane on the rail of the steps.

"Officers made contact with her. She was non responsive and quoting scriptures from the Bible," Britt said.

Britt says he and another officer arrived shortly after and attempted to talk to the woman. Some time later, a lieutenant with the police department and EMS crews arrived.

According to Britt, police and EMS personnel attempted to talk to the woman with negative results. Police say they attempted to get the cane away from the woman which almost got officers injured.

"She swung the cane several times at different officers as they were trying to approach her," Britt said. "One of the officers that came from behind almost got hit in the head with the cane. At that point, I just told the officers,'She's in a safe position, just go ahead and tase her so we can prevent anybody from getting hurt.'"

"Almost" getting injured by an old woman who feels threatened is not an excuse to use a taser on an elderly person.  She was clearly confused and unable to make decisions.  However, she deserved compassion and kindness instead of the treatment she received.  I have to say, maybe her assessment of the officers was spot on.

Too Long, Didn't Listen

For months now the Village has pushed the idea that President Obama is in over his head, that he needs more substance, that he needs to lay out his differences with Mitt Romney, that he needs to do more to reach the American people.  In short, he needs to follow the advice of the pundits who know better than he does.  Just yesterday morning Chuck Todd at the crew at MSNBC had this advice:

After he conducted a focus group of swing voters in Colorado, pollster Peter Hart -- the Democratic half of the NBC/WSJ poll -- had this advice for Team Obama in an interview with NBC News: “Our focus groups show that voters see a lot of glamour and glitz from the Obama administration; they're wondering where the vision, where the valor is going to be.” More from Hart: “[Obama] is missing the mark on the middle class. He needs to get down there. It is not just rallies; he needs to be out there feeling what they are feeling, a lot of pain, a lot of hurt, a lot of uncertainty.” And: “[The public] need a sense of a vision, they need a sense of hope, they need to be able to see that it’s not just the old Obama giving them the charisma and the cool. They need to see substance over style.” We know there are many folks in Obamaland who semi-dismiss the criticism coming from Greenberg/Carville. But the ex-Clinton folks apparently are not alone.

And what did the Village make of the President's major speech in Cleveland where he did just that?  We don't know, since apparently the speech was too long and had too much substance for our pundit class to be able to handle.

Prior to President Barack Obama’s marathon 54 minute speech in Ohio today, the Obama campaign sent our several statements promising the speech would be a major address framing the campaign going forward. Despite the hype, the speech was mainly a rehash of themes and ideas from the president’s recent stump speeches and his remarks were widely panned as overly long by the political press corps.

The President was hit from the left, center, and right by the Village for a speech that was "too long", "dull", "boring", a "lecture" and had "nothing new" in its 54 minutes.  NewsBeast's Jonathan Alter was particularly brutal.

"I thought this honestly was one of the least successful speeches I've seen Barack Obama give," Jonathan Alter, the Bloomberg View columnist who is close to the White House, said on MSNBC. He suggested the speech lacked memorable lines and "lost the audience by the end."

Perhaps Obama has only himself to blame. He's dug out of quite a few holes with masterful speeches in the past -- most notably when he was forced to explain the heated rhetoric of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, in April 2008 -- and so now has an extremely high bar to live up to.

But this one probably won't go down in the history books, even if the campaign made clear it considered this a key moment, distributing praise for the speech and the president's approach to the economy from a litany of elected officials across the country.

Remember, this is the same Alter who complained last week that the President needed to have a long and serious talk with the electorate about jobs and the economy.

In an economy headed in the wrong direction, comparison campaigning is necessary but not sufficient. It might not matter much to frustrated voters that we’ve tried the Republican recipe for growth (tax cuts and deregulation) in the 2000s and it failed, or that Romney was 47th out of 50 governors when it came to job creation in his state. The tie -- two failed job creators -- goes to the challenger.

That means Obama must match his focus on the choice with more work on the referendum side -- more affirmative reasons to vote for him. He has begun reminding voters of the American Jobs Act he pushed last fall that would help small business and create a million new jobs, his 2012 State of the Union “Built to Last” long-term investment agenda, and last month’s congressional “To- Do List.” The problem is, they all blur together.

So he does that, and of course now he's too cerebral, too nerdy, too substantive to the point of being lecturing, boring, and dull.  But remember, our "liberal media" is "in the tank for Obama".

My ass it is.

Marketing For Dummies (And We're The Dummies) 101

If you've not dropped by the new (old and new) Angry Black Lady Chronicles yet, do so.  Bon and I will often throw up pieces over there that we don't post here (our better stuff that we'd like to share) and we're both grateful to have the opportunity to get some wider audiences on our stuff.  There's an excellent crew of bloggers over there and it's a solid group effort.

The newest member of the Angry Black Borg is Leo Soderman, a photographer, dad, blogger, and a genuinely neat dude.  He's got some excellent advice on why the Left struggles with message, and why the Right is so good at it.

Marketing.

For example, let’s look at the ACA. Why, when the individual parts of the ACA are supported by the majority, is the ACA still not overwhelmingly supported by the average American? Because they haven’t been shown why it’s good for them. Piss poor job of marketing, frankly. The ACA allows kids to stay on their parents insurance much longer. And that’s where the conversation usually stops, with the assumption that everyone knows this is good. But this is where the conversation needs to start.

Explain why staying on the insurance is good for them. Explain that keeping kids on longer actually reduces healthcare costs because you will pay the same premiums and the risk pool is bigger, with younger adults that usually don’t need care. Explain that it allows their kids to go to school and not have to worry about getting sick. Explain that if they aren’t covered, they likely will not seek insurance, making the pool smaller, and that means more people that use the insurance are in the pool. Which drives rates up. In the end, being able to keep their kids on the insurance means more people covered while helping control costs. That’s more money in their pockets in the long run and better health for themselves and their kids. That’s what it does for them.

And that’s just one small aspect of ACA.

Do read the whole thing...and yes, I'm guilty of that myself.  I assume that the reasoning behind voting for President Obama is self-evident, and while I do explain various minutiae of the many individual reasons, the whole 30,000 foot level question of  "What's in it for me?" doesn't get answered as much as I'd like to.

I'm going to try to address that more as we head into the heart of the election season.

New tag:  But What Does It Do For Me?

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• Egyptian voters go to the polls starting this weekend for the country's first free presidential elections, but not everyone is happy with the two candidates.
• Iowa Republican Steve King says he plans to take President Obama to court to stop his "Dream Act lite" directive involving undocumented students, announced yesterday.
• Mexican President Felipe Calderon has canceled a $2 billion resort development project in Baja California ahead of this weekend's G-20 summit of world leaders.
• Greek candidates made their final pitches before voters there go to the polls this weekend to select a new government and to determine if Greece stays in the eurozone.
• More game companies are looking to tap into the market for Linux games, including major gaming giants like Electronic Arts and Valve.

Last Call

So yes, it turns out that President Obama can do something about deportation, the DREAM act, and undocumented students.

President Obama will announce a new immigration policy this morning that will allow some undocumented students to avoid deportation and receive work authorization. 

Under the president’s “deferred action” executive order, students in the U.S. who are already in deportation proceedings or those who qualify for the DREAM Act and have yet to come forward to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials, will not be deported and will be allowed to work in the United States.

An estimated 1 million young people could benefit from the deferral. To be eligible, applicants have to be between 15 and 30 years old, live in the U.S. for five years, and maintain continuous U.S. residency. People who have one felony, one serious misdemeanor, or three minor misdemeanors will be ineligible to apply. “Deferred action” will last for two years and can be renewed.

The Associated Press is already using terms like “immunity” and “amnesty”.  Republicans are expected to explode in 5…4…3…  Yep, Malkin and Co. throwing a fit according to Memeorandum.  And yes, the downside of executive branch action?  This program dies screaming the instant Mitt Romney should take office.  Might want to keep this in mind.

More on the announcement from MSNBC:

The Department of Homeland Security said that, effective immediately, the government would no longer seek the deportation of illegal immigrants who were brought to the United States as children, and would allow them to apply for work permits if they meet certain criteria.

“Our nation’s immigration laws must be enforced in a firm and sensible manner,” said Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano in a statement Friday.

A senior administration official said in a conference call with reporters that as many as 800,000 undocumented immigrants stand to benefit from this change. Napolitano said that the shift represented neither immunity nor amnesty—buzzwords for conservatives who oppose illegal immigration—but instead represented an instance of “prosecutorial discretion” in which the government had re-evaluated its priorities in enforcing the law.

Echoing the comments of several today, “Your move, Mittens”.

In Which Zandar Answers Your Burning Questions

Austin Frakt over at Political Animal points out:

On Tuesday, in Florida, Mitt Romney said,

Well right now, most people get their insurance through their employer and the reason they do that is because their employer gets a tax deduction when they buy insurance for you. But if you’re a very small-business person—let’s say a one-person business—you don’t get a tax deduction for buying insurance. And if you’re an individual that’s not employed, you don’t get a tax deduction for buying your own insurance.

Right. And, so, most economists and many policy wonks, as well as deficit hawks, advocate eliminating or phasing out the tax deductibility of employer-sponsored health insurance. Doing so would increase tax revenue by about $250 billion per year (pdf). It would also discourage overly generous health care benefits. Seems like a good idea to dump this tax subsidy. But, it looks like Romney is leaning the other way, because his next sentence was:

What I would do is level the playing field and say individuals can buy insurance on the same tax advantage basis that businesses can buy insurance. [Emphasis added.]

He then asks the following:

Can anyone tell me why Romney wants to expand the tax preferred status of health insurance? Doesn’t he believe we overspend on health care? Doesn’t he believe in the incentive effects of taxation? Isn’t he interested in reducing the deficit and/or cutting marginal tax rates? Why, then, would he want to create an even bigger tax expenditure?

Short answer?  Because Mitt Romney doesn't care about reducing the deficit, he wants to get elected.

In order to get elected, he's trying to sell the employer tax deduction phase-out as a (lightning, scary organ music) MASSIVE TAX INCREASE ON SMALL BUSINESS OWNERS.  What he wants is to sell the same tax subsidy to individuals so that people will vote for him.  It's a moronic plan with no real application in a broader picture of responsible health-care cost controlling in America.  It sounds neat in a 10 second sound bite however.

Mitt Romney, if you haven't noticed, lies so much that everyone is suffering from obfuscation fatigue.  He's already said that he'll repeal Obamacare on "Day One" of his Presidency.

A Little Chin Music In This Slate Pitch

Matt Yglesias goes there on the latest Gallup poll on who gets the blame for the economy right now, Bush or Obama.  68% find Dubya to be at fault, wholly or partially, compared to 52% for President Obama, and Yggy haz a sad.

George W Bush was a bad president and I hate to defend him, but the fact that when asked 68 percent of the American public say he bears responsibility for the bad economy (compared to 52 percent for Barack Obama) is a bit puzzling to me.

Wait for it...

Blaming Obama is, I think, simplistic. The 111th Congress didn't do as much fiscal stimulus as he wanted. The 112th Congress has done basically nothing that he wanted. The GOP blocked confirmation of Obama's appointee to the Federal Housing Finance Administration, undermining his ability to direct national housing policy. They stymied appointments to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Guys like the heads of the Minneapolis, Dallas, and Richmond Federal Reserve banks have influenced policy in a way that was beyond Obama's control. Which is just to say that in terms of people who've been directing American public policy since 2009 there's plenty of blame to go around and no reason to just pin it all on Obama.

I said wait for it goddammit.

But not only did Bush face many of the same constraints on his authority (particularly in 2007-2008) but he hasn't been in office in years.

Consummation! Exeunt.

You know, it's entirely possible that if Bush hadn't had those constraints on the economy then we'd be even worse off then we are right now.  The minimum wage would still be $5.15, for instance, because the GOP sure as hell wouldn't have touched it.  And let's remember Bush spent the last two years bypassing Nancy Pelosi in the House and going through the "plenary executive" anyway, so this argument is about as hollow as they come.

Blaming Obama really is simplistic, he's right about that.  It;s equally simplistic to give Bush a pass.

Looking Out For Kids: Doing It Right

Without the concern and action of witnesses, this couple could have driven away with their two youngest children bound and blindfolded.  Yes, you read that right.

Police in Lawrence, Kan., arrested a suburban Chicago couple after two of their five children were found blindfolded and bound in a Walmart parking lot, according to news reports.

Adolfo Gomez Jr., 52, and Deborah Martha Gomez, 43, of Northlake, Ill., were due in court this afternoon on charges of child abuse and endangerment. Aldofo Gomez is also charged with obstruction after an officer said he used a Taser to subdue Gomez in the lot Wednesday morning.

An officer found a blindfolded 5-year-old boy sitting on the ground beside an older Chevrolet Suburban with his hands tied behind his back and his legs bound. Inside, he saw a 7-year-old girl also bound and blindfolded.

A woman notified police of what she saw, and could have saved lives in the process.  Anyone who would do such a thing cannot be trusted.  Their judgment, ethics and intelligence are all in question.  All kids are in protective custody while authorities sort this out.  The cops admit at this time they still don't know the reason for restraining the kids.  If they tell us, I'll follow up.  My curiosity will make me check.

Woman Robs Store Three Times In 24 Hours

It's hard to feel sorry for someone who robs a business three times in a 24-hour period.  That's exactly what this woman did.  The police were surprised when the second robbery took place, and pulled all the stops when the third one was reported.

Not to mention she has a prior.  For robbing the same damn store in April.

Latasha Singletary, 30, is charged with two counts of armed robbery and one count of robbery while masked. And Singletary was on pre-trial probation involving an armed robbery in April 2011 at the same store. 

Investigators say that Singletary went inside Anna's Liquors at 4 p.m. Tuesday with a knife and T-shirt pulled over her head and demanded that the 52-year-old clerk give her money. 

Police were unable to find her after a search. 

Singletary then returned the next day at 10 a.m. to rob the store again, police said. This time in addition to money, cigarettes, lottery tickets and liquor bottles were also taken. While police were typing up the incident report for the morning robbery, they received a call at 2 p.m. that Singletary was robbing the store again.

London Calling To The Imitation Zone

More and more, Britain is looking for the exits from the European Union roller coaster.

Half of Britons want an immediate say on the country's relationship with the European Union, while 81 percent believe a vote should be held "in the next few years", according to a poll published Monday.

Economic woes within the eurozone have recently brought Britain's EU membership into focus, and 49 percent of those polled for the Populus survey said an immediate referendum was needed.

The poll, taken on behalf of the Times newspaper, found that a third of Britons wanted to be part of a single market in a wider European community, with 40 percent opposed.

Only 13 percent said a vote was not necessary "in the foreseeable future".

Considering Britain is now already fully in a recession and Spain/Italy/Greece hasn't crashed yet, you can see why they don't feel the particular urge to mill smartly about in the center of the impact zone when this elevator hits the bottom floor after the cables are cut.   The British are bailing out...of the EU.

Now things get interesting.  PM David Cameron won't be able to hold off the back-benchers for long over this.

He Was A Good Fella

Henry Hill, the man behind one of Hollywood's most famous mobsters, has passed at age 69.

Henry Hill, a former member of the Lucchese family of mobsters, died Tuesday in a Los Angeles hospital, according to a statement on his website.

Hill passed away one day after his 69th birthday. The cause of Hill's death has not yet been released.

The self-proclaimed mobster first came onto the media scene in the nonfiction book "Wiseguy," by journalist Nicholas Pileggi, detailing the "never-before-revealed day-to-day life of a working mobster -- his violence, his wild spending sprees, his wife, his mistresses, his code of honor," according to the book's back cover.

The 1990 film, "Goodfellas," depicted the rock-n-roll lifestyle of New York City mobsters -- everything from wealth and women to drugs and death.

"You never rat on your friends and you always keep your mouth shut," Hill's character, played by Ray Liotta, was told in the movie.

However, when Hill became worried his mob associates were out to kill him he became a police informant and "ratted out" scores of other gangsters.

As the New York Times reported, the largest crime in which Hill participated was a theft at New York's Kennedy International Airport, when the clan stole $5 million in cash and another $1 million in jewels from a Lufthansa cargo terminal.

Hill testified against his compatriots and was not prosecuted for the crime.

Cops haven't released the cause of death yet as you can see, so I have to wonder.  I think "death by cement overcoat" would have been kind of obvious, but as they say, there are old mobsters and bold mobsters, but very few old, bold mobsters.

Only in America, right?

StupidiNews!

• A ruling by Egypt's highest court dissolving parliament ahead of Presidential elections is being seen as a coup to allow the military to retake power and could reignite revolution.
• Britain's Home Office is proposing new legislation that would record and track nearly all internet activity for 60 million citizens in a huge national database.
• The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is looking into financial fraud scams targeting America's elderly, saying billions are lost each year.
• The latest victim of Europe's financial turmoil is a California hedge fund worth nearly half a billion dollars.
• A new economic study on bank security measures also finds that British bank robbers get about 20 grand a piece for knocking over a bank, a "rubbish return".