Last Call For Respect For The Office

And Weekly Standard's P.J. O'Rourke goes there on President Obama, spending about 1000 words calling him stupid (both figuratively and literally using the term stupid to describe Barack Obama) in one of the outright nastiest pieces I think I've ever read about any President.  In fact, the piece goes on to complain that pundits don't call this President "stupid" often enough.

What brought on this awful tirade?  The fact that President Obama wants to end the Warren Terrah, of course.  Putting an end to perpetual, mindless killing based solely on religion is "stupid."

That's a hell of a thing to say on Memorial Day, I would think.

It's almost, well...you know.

Diary Of A Soldier

Now here's a hell of a Memorial Day story that you won't soon forget:  90-year-old Laura Mae Davis visited the National World War II museum in New Orleans recently, searching for a possible mention of her former high school sweetheart killed in battle.  What she found was more than she could possibly hope for in his actual diary from seventy years ago, sitting on display.

“I figured I’d see pictures of him and the fellows he’d served with and articles about where he served,” Laura Mae Davis Burlingame told The Associated Press.

Instead, she ran face-to-face with Cpl. Thomas “Cotton” Jones’s handwriting, and the original telegraph informing his parents that he was killed by enemy fire.

In his last entry, Jones describes winning money gambling and suggests that he would like to wire it to Laura for Christmas. There were also numerous entries about how he wished he’d married her before leaving for the war, and a note asking that the diary be turned over to Laura if it were lost.
Nearly 70 years since Jones was killed by an enemy sniper, Laura was stunned to see the 22-year-old’s diary in the case before her.

When she told museum staff that she and Jones were both graduates of the class of 1941 and dated in high school, they opened the book up to look inside, making their astonishing discovery.

Amazing.  America suffered more than 400,000 troop casualties, 22 million troops casualties worldwide,  half of them Soviet, and a total death toll of some 70 million people...more than 3% of the earth's population at the time.

And now the last people who fought in and survived that war are dying or in their 80's and 90's.  Those numbers would be incomprehensible today and yet it was reality for four grueling, blood-soaked years.

Now, one of those casualties got to say goodbye, 70 years later.

Just amazing.

What Did News Corporation Know...

...and well, the "when did they know it?" part about James Rosen, the FOX News reporter currently neck-deep in a DoJ investigation for passing classified info to the North Koreans, turns out to be May 2010...three years ago.

The parent company of Fox News was aware years ago that the Justice Department was targeting one of its reporters in a leak investigation, sources said Saturday.

One law enforcement source said the Justice Department notified a media organization three years ago of a subpoena for detailed telephone records, and a second told CNN that organization was Fox News.

After that news broke, a Fox News executive said the Justice Department notified Fox's parent company News Corporation of the subpoena in May 2010. But Fox News itself apparently never got the word.

The subpoena came as the Justice Department was investigating Stephen Kim, a former State Department worker accused of the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive information to James Rosen, a Fox News reporter.

It is standard procedure for Justice Department officials to notify news organizations when they subpoena an outlet or its reporters.

So FOX News sat on this info for three years and only told everyone when it was convenient to add on to a "scandal."  Funny how that works.

So reporter types, why don't we start asking questions about why FOX sat on this for three years, and didn't use this to hit POTUS during the election?  Could it be that FOX didn't want to draw attention to it at the time for some reason, like, say, A) it was an ongoing investigation and B) James Rosen may have actually broken the law?

Makes a guy wonder.  Of course, now FOX News is denying it was every told.

News Corporation said on Sunday that it had no record of being notified by the Justice Department nearly three years ago of a subpoena for the telephone records of a reporter at its Fox News cable channel.

The company’s chief legal counsel at the time also said that he had never seen material from the government related to the subpoena. 

The Justice Department has signaled that it notified News Corporation on Aug. 27, 2010, that it had seized the phone records of a Fox News reporter — who turned out to be the Washington correspondent James Rosen — after one of his articles had included details of a secret United States report on North Korea.

So you either believe FOX News is lying, or the DoJ is.  If you want to know why FOX sat on this for three years the answer is "they did until they could build up enough anti-Obama paranoia among viewers and the press so they could get away with it."  Now both conservatives and our "liberal media" continue to call for Holder's resignation for doing his job, and chasing down national security leaks like Republicans have been telling him to do on a number of occasions.

Pay attention to the "liberals" siding with FOX over the Obama administration here.  Here's a hint:  they're not liberals, and they never were.

StupidiNews, Memorial Day Edition!

• Three are dead near San Antonio as massive flash flooding in south Texas swamped streets and knocked out power to 15,000.
• Scientists believe minerals on the moon's surface may have survived intact from asteroid collisions rather than being broken open from the inside of the moon.
• The Assad regime will allow Iraqi "tourists" into the country as a cover for guerrilla fighters as the regime says it will attend peace talks.
• Google faces yet another antitrust probe over its display ad business, with the FTC investigating if the company is illegally stifling competition.
• A new study finds "tunnel vision" focus may correlate to higher IQ scores in tests, but it may also mean people with higher IQs have problems focusing on the bigger picture.

Last Call For Bob Dole, Bob Dole, Bob Dole

Cry not for Robert J. Dole, who says (correctly) that neither he nor Reagan would make it in today's TeaGOP, talking to FOX on Sunday.

WALLACE: What do you think of your party, the Republicans today?

DOLE: I think they ought to put a sign on the national committee doors that says “closed for repairs” until New Year’s Day next year — and spend that time going over ideas and positive agendas.

WALLACE: You describe the GOP of your generation as Eisenhower Republicans, moderate Republicans. Could people like you, even Ronald Reagan — could you make it in today’s Republican Party.

DOLE: I doubt it. Reagan couldn’t have made it. Certainly Nixon couldn’t have made it, cause he had ideas. We might have made it, but I doubt it.

As Steve M. reminds us, you can thank Bob Dole for the permanent GOP filibuster in the Senate.

It was on Election Night 1992, not very far into the evening, that the Senate minority leader, Bob Dole, hinted at the way his party planned to conduct itself in the months ahead: it would filibuster any significant legislation the new Democratic President proposed, forcing him to obtain 60 votes for Senate passage.

This was a form of scorched-earth partisan warfare unprecedented in modern political life. Congress is supposed to operate by majority vote. It is true that the filibuster has a long and disreputable Senate history and that, over the years, it has been used more by Democrats than by Republicans. But only after 1992 did it become the centerpiece of opposition conduct toward an elected President. What the Republicans did in the Senate in 1993 amounted to an unreported constitutional usurpation. It should have been denounced as such at the time, but it wasn't. The punditocracy chose not to notice.

In any case, it worked. Little that the President proposed became law in the two years that he operated with Democratic majorities. There was no health care reform, no economic stimulus package.

Sound familiar?   Bob Dole made the 60 vote threshold for Democrats permanent.  He's the reason why health care reform died 20 years ago and the reason we didn't get single-payer and the public option now.

So no, I don't feel like shedding a single tear for Bob Dole's lament.  He helped create the Tea Party beast that now slouches towards Washington.

Suffering From Moral Decay

The goalposts for President Obama got moved in a big way Sunday by Sen. Rand Paul, all but calling for Obama's resignation by claiming that POTUS is in danger of "losing the moral authority" to remain in office.

Paul, appearing on ABC’s “This Week,” said that the IRS and other recent controversies “really takes away from the president's moral authority to lead the nation.”

“Nobody questions his legal authority, but I think he's really losing the moral authority to lead this nation,” Paul added.

“And he really needs to put a stop to this. I don't care whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, nobody likes to see the opposite party punishing you for your political beliefs.”

And of course the arbiter of the President's moral authority is Rand Paul, as he spouts weasel words to suggest that maybe the President shouldn't be President anymore...

“I think there needs to be a speedy resolution to this,” Paul said. “And I think the president is in danger of losing his moral authority to lead the nation if we don't get to a resolution.”

Not an impeachable offense of course.  But he should resign anyway.  We'll see how many of Rand's cohorts in the Senate follow this message and hop in Rand Paul's quasi-"I'm not racist but..." clown car.

Winning The Battles, Losing The War

Liberalism and the Democrats are losing, folks.  You have to look no further than formerly "purple" state of North Carolina, my home for nearly 30 years, where I grew up, went to school and college, now that it has been completely taken over by the Republicans, the final Southern state to fall to the darkness.  Make no mistake:  the GOP plan in North Carolina is the GOP plan for America. The GOP has achieved complete victory in the Old North State:

Those victories were capped last year when Republican Pat McCrory was elected governor, giving the party control of all levers of state government for the first time since 1870.

The victories were aided by the strong financial support of Art Pope, a multimillionaire who spent heavily in support of the state’s GOP candidates. The Institute for Southern Studies, a North Carolina-based research organization, said Pope’s advocacy network spent $2.2 million on 22 legislative races, winning 18. Overall, conservative organizations largely supported by Pope accounted for three-fourths of the outside money spent in North Carolina legislative races in 2010, according to the institute.

One of McCrory’s first acts after being elected governor was to install Pope, a former legislator, as the state budget chief. (The governor’s office declined to make Pope available for an interview.) And now, GOP lawmakers are moving swiftly to enact a long list of legislation they say is largely aimed at limiting government debt and snapping the state’s economy out of a years-long malaise.

Art Pope bought my home state.  He is now in control of the budget for the 10th most populous state in the Union, and the state is growing fast, challenging Michigan for 9th and Georgia for 8th.   The goal is simple:  massive austerity and the race to the bottom.

Legislators have slashed jobless benefits. They have also repealed a tax credit that supplemented the wages of low-income people, while moving to eliminate the estate tax. They have voted against expanding Medicaid to comply with the 2010 federal health-care law. The expansion would have added 500,000 poor North Carolinians to the Medicaid rolls.

“Before considering Medicaid expansion, we must reform the current system to make sure people currently enrolled receive the services they need and more taxpayer dollars are not put at risk,” McCrory said in a written statement after signing a bill blocking the expansion.

Lawmakers are also considering proposals to reduce and flatten income tax rates while expanding the sales tax, perhaps to even include groceries and prescription drugs — which some advocates see as a first step toward eliminating the state income tax.

“North Carolina is a high-income-tax state, and we’re suffering the consequences,” said Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berge (R). “Our unemployment rate is the fifth worst in the country, and our high tax rates are hindering economic growth and pushing jobs to our neighbors.”

And so eliminating the state's estate, corporate, and income taxes will drop the burden on the poorest, those who spend their paychecks every two weeks to buy food, clothing, and shelter.  The plan is to crush them with consumption taxes until they demand relief -- and the GOP will provide it by getting rid of state programs for the poor.

The plan of course is to drive those poor to other states, as it always is with the GOP race to the bottom.  Not our problem if they leave, not our burden to support.  So get ready, North Carolina.  You voted them into power.

You're going to get what you deserve for a while.

Podcast: Been A Long TIme Coming

Bon and I are back for a Memorial Day weekend podcast as we cover scandals, Obamacare, collapsing bridges, crap-ass media and living in Tornado Country.

Listen to internet radio with Zandar Versus The Stupid on BlogTalkRadio

Give us a listen, as hopefully we'll be getting back into the podcast for you more regularly.

StupidiNews, Memorial Day Weekend Edition!

• At the commencement address at the Army's West Point, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel called sexual assault a "scourge that must be stamped out."
• A federal judge has ruled against Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, finding that his office has indeed committed racial profiling of suspects based on being Latino.
• An Israeli reassessment of the Syrian civil war finds that Bashar al-Assad will remain in power "for some time", a fact that observers believe could lead to an escalation of Israeli military action.
• A big land grab by billionaires to create a bison reserve in Montana has cattle ranchers across the state riled up.
• Ohio is going after internet cafes that offer sweepstakes and electronic slots, what the state is calling "unregulated" and untaxed gambling.

Last Call For The Gang Of Eight

Theory:  The GOP's relentless pursuit of "scandals" give them what they believe is perfect political cover to refuse to pass any more legislation whatsoever, including immigration reform.  Democrats can see this coming a mile away, so they're wisely calling them out now.

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said Friday that the “Gang of Eight” immigration bill doesn’t have enough votes to pass the Senate.

The bill won approval from the Senate Judiciary Committee in a 13-5 vote, but Menendez said it lacks the 60 votes necessary to clear the Senate — despite the bill's four Republican co-sponsors.

“We don’t currently have 60 votes identified in the Senate,” Menendez said in an interview with Univision. “We need to add more votes on the floor. That means that the community in your state, in every state, should be contacting your state’s two U.S. Senators saying that they want comprehensive immigration reform, that they are going to judge their political future based on this vote.”

Supporters of the bill are pushing for a strong bipartisan vote of 70 or more to put pressure on the House to take up the legislation.

70 votes is a pipe dream.  Tea Party Republicans are going to overplay their hand and murder this bill in the Senate.  The few smarter political heads may or may not be worried about Harry Reid's nuclear option as reprisal, but they are damn worried about Latino voters in 2014, just as they found out the hard way in 2006, 2008, and 2012.

If Republicans burn this bridge now, they're done and they know it.  And the Tea Party Hate Machine will make sure that bridge goes up in flames...and along with it the GOP in 2014 and 2016.

Drones, Gitmo, And Goalposts

President Obama's speech on Guantanamo and the use of drones on Thursday was folded into a larger and much more vital larger picture:  the end of Warren Terrah.  Greg Sargent:

In the national security speech Obama delivered this afternoon, the President himself defined the challenge we face as this: How do we balance the need to do all we can to protect our citizens with the need to adhere to our values and ideals as a free society? The speech was the most ambitious and detailed effort to answer this question that he has yet attempted.

His answer to the question was that, at a time when the nature of the terror threat is changing — over a decade after the 9/11 attacks led to a massive buildup of our national security apparatus that strayed into massive overreach – we must acknowledge the cost of all of that excess, and give more priority to American values and the rule of law than we have been giving. However, in policy terms, he offered mainly incremental, though welcome, moves in that direction.

Indeed, the upshot of the speech is that Obama defined his own role — that of commander in chief — as one that requires him to ultimately compromise core values and principles if he deems it necessary to maintain security. While the speech did offer some steps that civil libertarians will welcome, it also fell short of the wholesale commitment to rule of law they had hoped for — indeed, forthrightly so.

And that bolded point is the most important.  There are times where national security issues arise, where the loud purity pundits are not going to have all the information.  President Obama admits that this will always be true.

“The president is clearly aware that his current policies are falling short of the mark constitutionally,” Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, told me. “While these are important and welcome steps, they are incremental changes that pale in the face of the constitutional questions confronting the administration.”

Obama might agree to some degree with that assessment, with a qualifier. Indeed, the speech seemed quite forthright in defining the role of commander in chief as one that requires him to ultimately prioritize security over strict rule of law where he deems it necessary — even as he implicitly asked us to trust that he’s doing his best to get the balance as close to right as he can.

So now, we've moved the goalposts again, from "You need to explain yourself" to "This is unconstitutional!"  That's a pretty nice excuse, because now we've moved responsibility from the legislative and executive to the judicial.  There's literally nothing POTUS can do to satisfy the purity patrol because what's constitutional or not cannot be determined by the executive, only the judicial.

Conveniently, this goalpost shuffling extends the argument against Obama infinitely, so the cottage industry of fundraising while attacking Obama from the left can keep going in perpetuity.  How convenient...

More Of The Steep Lerner Curve

A day after her bizarre combination of opening statement and pleading the Fifth on everything else, IRS director Lois Lerner has been put on "administrative leave" after she was asked to resign and refused to do so.

Lois Lerner, the IRS staffer who is under fire for her role in the agency’s targeting of conservative groups, has been placed on administrative leave, according to congressional aides.

She will still be paid while on leave, a congressional aide said, as required under civil service rules.

Lerner, who heads an IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups, first disclosed the extra scrutiny the agency gave to Tea Party groups almost two weeks ago when answering a planted question at a Washington legal conference.

Since then, lawmakers from across the political spectrum have said that they believe Lerner misled them and called for her dismissal.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (Iowa), a senior Republican on the Finance Committee, said in a Thursday statement that the new acting IRS commissioner, Danny Werfel, had asked Lerner to resign – and that Lerner was only placed on leave after she declined that request. Aides on Capitol Hill confirmed that Lerner had refused to resign.

Now civil service rules do prevent people getting fired willy nilly.  It's to prevent, you know, a massive purge every time a new administration comes to power (not that the Bushies didn't try their hardest, especially in the DoJ).  But I predicted yesterday morning that Lerner would be canned, and I was right.

We'll see what happens from here on out, but the one guarantee I can make now is that Lerner's departure and replacement will not satisfy Republicans, who will not stop until Lerner somehow implicates every member of the Obama family, including Bo, and the IRS is shut down.

StupidiNews!

• The Boy Scouts of America will allow gay scouts but not gay leaders in its ranks in a move that disappointed LGBTQ activists and infuriated conservative groups.
• The Senate unanimously approved Sri Srinivasan to the DC Court of Appeals, making him the first federal judge of South Asian descent and a leading SCOTUS candidate.
• A section of the Interstate 5 bridge over the Skagit River in western Washington State has collapsed after a truck hit the bridge, sending several people to the hospital.
• Congress finds that dozens of power companies remain vulnerable to cyber-attack, but industry groups counter that standards would be obsolete by the time Congress passed them.
• Doctors have used a custom 3-D printed plastic device to save a baby's life by using the tube to the child's airway open after his trachea collapsed.

Last Call For Recess

George F. Will on President Obama's "unprecedented" recess appointments:

So the D.C. court said those three appointees were not rightfully in office. The NLRB said it “respectfully” disagreed with the court and went its merry way, without a quorum. Absent the perfunctory expression of respect, this was pretty much what George Wallace did 50 years ago this year when he stood in the door of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama to prevent two young blacks from registering as students.

Yes, because the word "recess" is pretty similar to the word "racist" so this comparison is totally apt.  Even though every other President in the last several generations made recess appointments, suddenly for some unfathomable reason I can't put my finger on, when Barack Obama does it, it's "lawlessness".  Bonus verbatim derpage:

Courts defeated Wallace’s lawlessness. Presumably the Supreme Court will defeat Obama’s by telling the NLRB that the D.C. court was right about recess appointments. By such judicial vigilance against the excesses of elected officials, democracy is disciplined and progressivism’s agenda — unchecked executive power — is understood to be unconstitutional.

Yeah, and during the last administration you cheered on every iota of that executive power as not only necessary but vital to a functioning democracy, Georgie.  Bite me.

Tancredo Junction

Back in 2010, Tea Party nutjob and anti-immigrant racist Tom Tancredo ran for Colorado Governor as an independent, got some 35% of the vote, and handed a 20 point victory to Democrat John Hickenlooper.  Apparently for an encore, Tancredo's going to try again in 2014.

Former U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, known for his strong stances on immigration, said late Wednesday night he plans to formally announce a run for governor on a conservative talk radio show Thursday.

“This Dunlap thing is the last straw,” said Tancredo in a message.

Tancredo, a Republican, referred to Gov. John Hickenlooper’s decision on Wednesday to grant a temporary reprieve on the execution of death row inmate Nathan Dunlap. Dunlap was convicted of killing four people at an Aurora Chuck E. Cheese in 1993.

Several Republicans castigated Hickenlooper on Wednesday for the move that halts Dunlap’s date with death that was scheduled for August. 

Now granted, we knew Hickenlooper was going to take a lot of flak for passing gun control laws after the Aurora theater shooting.  But Tancredo is a loser of a candidate and if his plan to win is to run to the right of where he was in 2010, all of a sudden Hickenlooper's re-election seems rather assured.

We'll see if Tancredo will go for a GOP primary bid or another independent run, but either way I fully expect him to alienate the hell out of most of Colorado.  This is a guy who tested the waters for a 2008 White House run by putting up an ad in Iowa depicting a fictional terrorist attack as assured if we didn't immediately militarize the borders.

Given Colorado's growing Latino population, Tancredo's virulently anti-immigration stance (not to mention his outright anti-Latino racism) will make it even harder for him to win in 2014.   Hickenlooper must be cheering this announcement on and for good reason...