Being able to read and add are probably good things!
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Now for some new bumper stickers!
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Kim writes about Obama and Reid's war on women. But how can that be? It is Republicans who brow beat women, it is Republicans who have contempt for women. All you have to do is ask women who have been brain washed and are brain dead just like Liberal Jews and Black Americans.
Democrats have done an effective snow job and shame on Kim for ripping the mask off their myth!
More shame upon women for allowing themselves to be duped. Hopefully they will awake from their intellectual torpor before November! (See 2 below.)
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Dick
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1)Trouble in threes: Scandals hamper Obama's message
By JIM KUHNHENN
It isn't Mitt Romney who's giving Barack Obama fits as the president moves into re-election mode. It's those federal bureaucrats carousing in Las Vegas, the Secret Service consorting with Colombian prostitutes and U.S. soldiers posing with bloody enemy corpses.
The scandals are taking a toll. They are distracting embarrassments that are dominating public attention while Obama seeks to focus on difficulties abroad and jobs at home. And they are giving Republicans an opportunity to question his competence and leadership, an opening for Romney in a race so close that any advantage might make a difference.
Even if the Democratic president escapes being defined by these flare-ups, they still feed a story line that can erode public confidence in Washington institutions, fuel a perception of federal excess and frustrate Obama's argument that government can be a force for good.
The White House response has been textbook — a mix of outrage and deflection.
"The president has been crystal clear since he was a candidate about the standards that he insists be met by those who work for the federal government and on behalf of the American people and for the American people," says White House spokesman Jay Carney.
But taken altogether, the events have overwhelmed the president's agenda. The Secret Service scandal broke while Obama was in Cartagena last weekend for a Summit of the Americas with more than 30 Western hemisphere leaders. Back home the headlines and the news anchors were hardly focusing on the summit, instead playing up the fact that 11 Secret Service agents and uniformed officers had been sent home on accusations of misconduct.
By the time the president got home, General Services Administration officials were appearing before congressional committees about a lavish Las Vegas conference and junkets to resorts, and more evidence of excess was beginning to emerge. Obama's attempts to draw attention to his efforts against oil market manipulation on Tuesday and to help the economy on Wednesday were drowned out by further Secret Service revelations and by the publication of gruesome photos depicting GIs with the bodies of Afghan insurgents.
"Even though you may not be losing ground because it's not the White House taking the hits, you're no longer gaining ground because the White House doesn't get its message out," said Ari Fleischer a former spokesman for President George W. Bush.
Obama quickly tried to put distance between himself and the accounts of misbehavior. White House spokesmen avoided getting into specifics, instead citing investigations under way and referring reporters to the Secret Service or the GSA or the Pentagon.
"If it's at an agency, White Houses do their best to keep it arms' length and let the agency take the hits and deal with it," Fleischer said. "I think that's what's going on here."
Yet, the president can't turn his back on the problems, either, and is ultimately held responsible for restoring the reputations of troubled agencies.
"Part of the president's job is to protect the institutions of government," said Paul Light, an expert on government bureaucracies and professor of public service at New York University. "He is administrator in chief whether he likes it or not."
Some Republicans were folding the Secret Service and GSA episodes together with Solyndra, a solar firm that received a half-billion dollar federal loan and was touted by the Obama administration before declaring bankruptcy last year.
"Presidents are to be held responsible," Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., said Thursday. "They also need to be responsible for insisting that from the top to the lowest employee that not one single dollar will be wasted in this government," he added. "I don't sense that this president has shown that kind of managerial leadership."
What's more, each the recent events also works in its own corrosive way.
The GSA's $823,000 Las Vegas conference, complete with gourmet food, clown and mind reader, have given Republicans ammunition to attack government bloat. And for that, there is a ready audience.
"If he could see what I see on a daily basis, how some of the money is being spent, he would want to throw up," said Linda Heck, a Ford Motor Co. retiree protesting in Elyria, Ohio, Wednesday not far from where Obama was speaking to a community college crowd.
"I'm sitting in focus groups right this minute where it just came up," said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. "It's an example — talking about the GSA — of what's wrong with government. It gives them some ammunition and something to talk about."
Romney this week called the GSA "embarrassing" to the Obama administration and made a point of stressing that leadership is set at the top.
Still, his criticism seemed aimed more at painting a bloated government than as a direct shot at Obama.
"It damages this president indirectly because he is being portrayed as the president of big government," Light said.
As governor of Massachusetts from 2003 through 2006, Romney encountered his own troubles, including fights with the head of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority over management and construction problems with Boston's "Big Dig" highway project.
Romney this week was more nuanced about the Secret Service, which is also providing security for him on the campaign trail. He urged firing Secret Service employees caught in the incident involving prostitutes but said he had confidence in the response by agency Director Mark Sullivan, whose swift action on the agents and uniformed officers suspected of wrongdoing won praise from other Republicans.
As a result, the Secret Service scandal is not, at this point, seeming to hit the White House.
But it has damaged an institution whose public image has been upright and heroic
Mellman said such falls from grace increase public cynicism, which itself can be damaging in a democracy.
"What it does do is contributes to the very low confidence that people have in all of our institutions," he said.
For Obama, the photographs that purport to show U.S. soldiers with the bodies of Afghan insurgents feeds an on-and-off image of American warriors over the last 10 years that was most notoriously damaged by pictures from Abu Ghraib, an Iraqi prison where U.S. military police photographed themselves abusing detainees.
In recent months, American troops have been caught up in controversies over burning Muslim holy books, urinating on Afghan corpses, an alleged massacre of 17 Afghan villagers and other misdeeds.
Those images and accounts come as public support for continuing the U.S. combat presence in Afghanistan is waning and as Obama works to negotiate an exit strategy with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Karzai is calling for a quicker withdrawal of international forces.
1a)
Noonan: America's Crisis of Character
The nation seems to be on the wrong track, and not just economically.
People in politics talk about the right track/wrong track numbers as an indicator of public mood. This week Gallup had a poll showing only 24% of Americans feel we're on the right track as a nation. That's a historic low. Political professionals tend, understandably, to think it's all about the economy—unemployment, foreclosures, we're going in the wrong direction. I've long thought that public dissatisfaction is about more than the economy, that it's also about our culture, or rather the flat, brute, highly sexualized thing we call our culture.
Now I'd go a step beyond that. I think more and more people are worried about the American character—who we are and what kind of adults we are raising.
Every story that has broken through the past few weeks has been about who we are as a people. And they are all disturbing.
A tourist is beaten in Baltimore. Young people surround him and laugh. He's pummeled, stripped and robbed. No one helps. They're too busy taping it on their smartphones. That's how we heard their laughter. The video is on YouTube along with the latest McDonalds beat-down and the latest store surveillance tapes of flash mobs. Groups of teenagers swarm into stores, rob everything they can, and run out. The phenomenon is on the rise across the country. Police now have a nickname for it: "flash robs."
That's just the young, you say. Juvenile delinquency is as old as history.
Let's turn to adults.
David Gothard
Also starring on YouTube this week was the sobbing woman. She's the poor traveler who began to cry great heaving sobs when a Transportation Security Administration agent at the Madison, Wis., airport either patted her down or felt her up, depending on your viewpoint and experience. Jim Hoft of TheGatewayPundit.com recorded it, and like all the rest of the videos it hurts to watch. When the TSA agent—an adult, a middle aged woman—was done, she just walked away, leaving the passenger alone and uncomforted, like a tourist in Baltimore.
There is the General Services Administration scandal. An agency devoted to efficiency is outed as an agency of mindless bread-and-circuses indulgence. They had a four-day regional conference in Las Vegas, with clowns and mind readers.
The reason the story is news, and actually upsetting, is not that a government agency wasted money. That is not news. The reason it's news is that the people involved thought what they were doing was funny, and appropriate. In the past, bureaucratic misuse of taxpayer money was quiet. You needed investigators to find it, trace it, expose it. Now it's a big public joke. They held an awards show. They sang songs about the perks of a government job: "Brand new computer and underground parking and a corner office. . . . Love to the taxpayer. . . . I'll never be under OIG investigation." At the show, the singer was made Commissioner for a Day. "The hotel would like to talk to you about paying for the party that was held in the commissioner's suite last night" the emcee said. It got a big laugh.
On the "red carpet" leading into the event, GSA chief Jeffrey Neely said: "I am wearing an Armani." One worker said, "I have a talent for drinking Margarita. . . . It all began with the introduction of performance measures." That got a big laugh too.
All the workers looked affluent, satisfied. Only a generation ago, earnest, tidy government bureaucrats were spoofed as drudges and drones. Not anymore. Now they're way cool. Immature, selfish and vain, but way cool.
Their leaders didn't even pretend to have a sense of mission and responsibility. They reminded me of the story a year ago of the dizzy captain of a U.S. Navy ship who made off-color videos and played them for his crew. He wasn't interested in the burdens of leadership—the need to be the adult, the uncool one, the one who maintains standards. No one at GSA seemed interested in playing the part of the grown-up, either.
Why? Why did they think this is OK? They seemed mildly decadent. Or proudly decadent. In contrast to you, low, toiling taxpayer that you are, poor drudges and drones.
There is the Secret Service scandal. That one broke through too, and you know the facts: overseas to guard the president, sent home for drinking, partying, picking up prostitutes.
What's terrible about this story is that for anyone who's ever seen the Secret Service up close it's impossible to believe. The Secret Service are the best of the best. That has been their reputation because that has been their reality. They have always been tough, disciplined and mature. They are men, and they have the most extraordinary job: take the bullet.
Remember when Reagan was shot? That was Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy who stood there like a stone wall, and took one right in the gut. Jerry Parr pushed Reagan into the car, and Mr. Parr was one steely-eyed agent. Reagan coughed up a little blood, and Mr. Parr immediately saw its color was a little too dark. He barked the order to change direction and get to the hospital, not the White House, and saved Reagan's life. From Robert Caro's "Passage of Power," on Secret Service agent Rufus Youngblood, Nov. 22, 1963: "there was a sharp, cracking sound," and Youngblood, "whirling in his seat," grabbed Vice President Lyndon Johnson and threw him to the floor of the car, "shielding his body with his own."
In any presidential party, the Secret Service guys are the ones who are mature, who you can count on, who'll keep their heads. They have judgment, they're by the book unless they have to rewrite it on a second's notice. And they wore suits, like adults.
This week I saw a picture of agents in Colombia. They were in T-shirts, wrinkled khakis and sneakers. They looked like a bunch of mooks, like slobs, like children with muscles.
Special thanks to the person who invented casual Friday. Now it's casual everyday in America. But when you lower standards people In New York the past week a big story has been about 16 public school teachers who can't be fired even though they've acted unprofessionally. What does "unprofessionally" mean in New York? Sex with students, stalking students, and, in one case, a standing behind a kid, simulating sex, and saying, "I'll show you what gay is."
The kids in the flash mobs: These are their teachers.
Finally, as this column goes to press, the journalistic story of the week, the Los Angeles Times's decision to publish pictures of U.S. troops in Afghanistan who smilingly posed with the bloody body parts of suicide bombers. The soldier who brought the pictures to the Times told their veteran war correspondent, David Zucchino, that he was, in Zucchino's words, "very concerned about what he said was a breakdown in . . . discipline and professionalism" among the troops.
In isolation, these stories may sound like the usual sins and scandals, but in the aggregate they seem like something more disturbing, more laden with implication, don't they? And again, these are only from the past week.
The leveling or deterioration of public behavior has got to be worrying people who have enough years on them to judge with some perspective.
Something seems to be going terribly wrong.
Maybe we have to stop and think about this.
1b)
The Obama Administration Looks To Be Close To A Breakdown
Administration meltdowns are hardly novel. In almost every presidency there comes a moment when sheer chaos takes hold, whether self-induced or as a result of an outside crisis.
Vietnam had effectively destroyed Lyndon Johnson by 1967. Watergate unraveled the Richard Nixon administration, as the disgraced president resigned in the face of certain impeachment.
Gerald Ford could not whip inflation and was not re-elected. One-termer Jimmy Carter was undone by the Iranian hostage crisis and skyrocketing oil prices.
For a time, it seemed that Ronald Reagan's second term might not survive the Iran-Contra scandal. George H.W. Bush could not be re-elected after he broke his promise not to raise taxes and Ross Perot entered the 1992 race.
The popular Bill Clinton was impeached over the Monica Lewinsky affair and limped out of office tainted. The insurgency in Iraq and fallout from Hurricane Katrina crashed for good the once-high poll ratings of George W. Bush.
The Obama administration over the last month has seemed on the verge of one of these presidential meltdowns.
An open mike caught the president promising Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he would be more flexible after the election — as if Obama might grant concessions that would be unpalatable if known to the general public before November.
That embarrassment followed an earlier hot-mike put-down of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year.
The president also unwisely attacked the Supreme Court as it deliberated the constitutionality of ObamaCare. He needlessly referred to the justices as "unelected" and wrongly claimed that that they had little precedent to overturn laws that dealt with commerce.
The gaffe about the court and its history was doubly embarrassing because Obama has often reminded the public that he used to teach constitutional law.
Democrats unwisely went after the Catholic Church and religious conservatives on the grounds that they did not support federal subsidies for contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs. Another gratuitous scrap soon escalated into an unnecessary fight with Catholic bishops.
To widen the controversy further, Vice President Joe Biden and Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz alleged that the contraceptive fight was part of a wider Republican "war on women."
But that new psychodrama also blew up in the administration's face when a zealous Democratic consultant, Hilary Rosen, claimed that Ann Romney, wife of presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, had "never worked a day in her life." In fact, the affable Mrs. Romney had raised five children and had survived both multiple sclerosis and breast cancer.
That silly offensive got worse when, at almost the same time, news leaked that women working at the Obama White House, on average, made 18% less than their male counterparts there. Meanwhile, 11 Secret Service agents assigned to the president's trip to Colombia were sent home for soliciting prostitutes — and then haggling over the cost.
Not long before, the General Services Administration was caught wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars on a junket in Las Vegas — leading to the resignation of the GSA administrator, a political appointee.
Then there was the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin shooting. After Obama's disastrous 2009 commentary about the detention of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates — when the president alleged that police acted "stupidly" — he might have been wise to keep quiet about another explosive racial controversy.
Instead, he foolishly plunged in with a puzzling comment that if he had a son, he would have looked like the deceased Trayvon Martin. That editorializing served no purpose except to remind the nation of the racial tensions simmering around the shooting.
The president also went after the rich with the "Buffett Rule," which would ensure that millionaires like his friend, Warren Buffett, paid at least 30% in income taxes. But Obama and his wife, Michelle, paid just over 20% in federal taxes on the $790,000 they earned in 2011. And even if the bill passed, the Obama Treasury would only get new revenue amounting to less than half of 1% of what it borrows every year.
The effect of all these unnecessary missteps was to make the Obama administration appear inept — at precisely the time Republicans were unifying around Romney and ending their long, suicidal primary fights. Some polls even showed Romney suddenly ahead in the presidential race.
So why is the president rashly picking these stupid fights? Apparently his team wishes to divert attention from generally bleak economic news. The economy still suffers from a dramatic spike in gas prices, chronically high 8% plus unemployment, sluggish growth and serial $1 trillion annual deficits that have sent the debt soaring to $16 trillion.
These perfect storms often either destroy presidents or turn them into unpopular lame ducks. Obama should learn from the fates of his predecessors: There are enough forces in the world to destroy a presidency without needlessly creating more on his own.
1c)Farewell, the New Frontier
By Charles Krauthammer
As the space shuttle Discovery flew three times around Washington, a final salute before landing at Dulles airport for retirement in a museum, thousands on the ground gazed upward with marvel and pride. Yet what they were witnessing, for all its elegance, was a funeral march.
The shuttle was being carried — its pallbearer, a 747 — because it cannot fly, nor will it ever again. It was being sent for interment. Above ground, to be sure. But just as surely embalmed as Lenin in Red Square.
Is there a better symbol of willed American decline? The pity is not Discovery’s retirement — beautiful as it was, the shuttle proved too expensive and risky to operate — but that it died without a successor. The planned follow-on — the Constellation rocket-capsule program to take humans back into orbit and from there to the moon — was suddenly canceled in 2010. And with that, control of manned spaceflight was gratuitously ceded to Russia and China.
Russia went for the cash, doubling its price for carrying an astronaut into orbit to $55.8 million. (Return included. Thank you, Boris.)
China goes for the glory. Having already mastered launch and rendezvous, the Chinese plan to land on the moon by 2025. They understand well the value of symbols. And nothing could better symbolize China overtaking America than its taking our place on the moon, walking over footprints first laid down, then casually abandoned, by us.
Who cares, you say? What is national greatness, scientific prestige or inspiring the young — legacies of NASA — when we are in economic distress? Okay. But if we’re talking jobs and growth, science and technology, R&D and innovation — what President Obama insists are the keys to “an economy built to last” — why on earth cancel an incomparably sophisticated, uniquely American technological enterprise?
We lament the decline of American manufacturing, yet we stop production of the most complex machine ever made by man — and cancel the successor meant to return us to orbit. The result? Abolition of thousands of the most highly advanced aerospace jobs anywhere — its workforce abruptly unemployed and drifting away from space flight, never to be reconstituted.
Well, you say, we can’t afford all that in a time of massive deficits.
There are always excuses for putting off strenuous national endeavors: deficits, joblessness, poverty, whatever. But they shall always be with us. We’ve had exactly five balanced budgets since Alan Shepard rode Freedom 7 in 1961. If we had put off space exploration until these earthbound social and economic conundrums were solved, our rocketry would be about where North Korea’s is today.
Moreover, today’s deficits are not inevitable, nor even structural. They are partly the result of the 2008 financial panic and recession. Those are over now. The rest is the result of a massive three-year expansion of federal spending.
But there is no reason the federal government has to keep spending 24 percent of GDP. The historical postwar average is just over 20 percent — and those budgets sustained a robust manned space program.
NASA will tell you that it’s got a new program to go way beyond low-Earth orbit and, as per Obama’s instructions, land on an asteroid by the mid-2020s. Considering that Constellation did not last even five years between birth and cancellation, don’t hold your breath for the asteroid landing.
Nor for the private sector to get us back into orbit, as Obama assumes it will. True, hauling MREs up and trash back down could be done by private vehicles. But manned flight is infinitely more complex and risky, requiring massive redundancy and inevitably larger expenditures. Can private entities really handle that? And within the next lost decade or two?
Neil Armstrong, James Lovell and Gene Cernan are deeply skeptical. “Commercial transport to orbit,” they wrote in a 2010 open letter, “is likely to take substantially longer and be more expensive than we would hope.” They called Obama’s cancellation of Constellation a “devastating” decision that “destines our nation to become one of second or even third rate stature.”
“Without the skill and experience that actual spacecraft operation provides,” they warned, “the USA is far too likely to be on a long downhill slide to mediocrity.” This, from “the leading space faring nation for nearly half a century.”
Which is why museum visits to the embalmed Discovery will be sad indeed. America rarely retreats from a new frontier. Yet today we can’t even do what John Glenn did in 1962, let alone fly a circa-1980 shuttle.
At least Discovery won’t suffer the fate of the Temeraire, the British warship tenderly rendered in Turner’s famous painting “The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up, 1838.” Too beautiful for the scrapheap, Discovery will lie intact, a magnificent and melancholy rebuke to constricted horizons.
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2)
The Democratic War on One Woman
Politics trumps civility for Senators Boxer, Lautenberg and Reid.
There is the war on women that isn't real, but that Democrats keep talking about. Then there is the Democratic war on one woman, which says a lot about how that party operates.
Ask Kristine Svinicki, a commissioner on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Ms. Svinicki is a respected nuclear engineer who was unanimously confirmed to the NRC in 2008, and whose term is up in June. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is now actively waging war to keep Ms. Svinicki from being renominated, as punishment for her role in exposing the behavior of Mr. Reid's pet appointee to the NRC, Gregory Jaczko. For Ms. Svinicki's efforts to protect female staffers, she has been attacked and slandered by Democrats.
After all, what is one woman, when measured against the left's greater policy goals? The White House and its party remain opposed to nuclear energy. The key to strangling nuclear progress is the NRC, which sets industry rules. This is why, in 2004, Mr. Reid took hostage dozens of Bush nominees, vowing they would never be confirmed until his own, pre-programmed adviser, Mr. Jaczko, was installed at the commission.
The Bush White House rolled, and Mr. Jaczko was sent to the NRC with two missions: strangle industry progress and kill the Yucca Mountain waste repository planned for Mr. Reid's home state of Nevada. Knowing an asset when he saw it, President Barack Obama elevated Mr. Jaczko to NRC chairman in 2009.
What Democrats did not foresee was the lengths Mr. Jaczko would go to carry out his orders. By the fall of last year, all four of the NRC's Republican and Democratic commissioners had revolted. With unprecedented unity, they sent a letter to the White House relating their "grave concerns" that the "erratic" Mr. Jaczko was running the place like a despot. He'd ordered staff to withhold information from them, intimidated personnel into altering recommendations, and overridden the will of the majority.
If that weren't enough, at a December House hearing the four commissioners went on to describe a man with a vicious management style. Ms. Svinicki told of Mr. Jaczko's "continued outbursts of abusive rage, directed at subordinates." Democratic Commissioner George Apostolakis described Mr. Jaczko's "bullying and intimidating behavior toward NRC's career staff."
But it was William Magwood, Mr. Jaczko's other fellow Democrat, who related the chairman's penchant for going after women. He spoke of women staffers who had been "reduced to tears" by "the chairman's extreme behavior" and of his "raging verbal assaults." One woman, said Mr. Magwood, "couldn't stop shaking after her experience" and had to talk to a supervisor until "she could calm down enough to drive home." These were "tough, smart women who have succeeded in a male-dominated environment," said Mr. Magwood, and to be humiliated in such a fashion was "painful."
But not to Democrats—those valiant defenders of women. Worried her party might lose its NRC weapon, Sen. Barbara Boxer held her own December hearing to smear all four commissioners as incompetent and to leap to Mr. Jaczko's defense. The Californian—who recently praised Georgetown student Sandra Fluke for "standing up to be heard" on contraception—lambasted the commissioners for speaking out. This "issue of the treatment of women" at the NRC, she said, reminded her of "Joe McCarthy" days, and was a "witch hunt." How dare Ms. Sivincki engage in "outrageous character assassination" against a man whom the nation "was fortunate to have sitting" in the chairman's seat?
Vermont's Bernie Sanders, last heard railing about GOP men who "roll back" women's rights, informed the commissioners that it was normal to occasionally "hurt people's feelings" and that Mr. Jaczko was just "aggressively trying to do his job." New Jersey's Frank Lautenberg—who coined the term "maleogarchy" to describe Republicans—praised Mr. Jaczko: "One of the most intemperate people we had was General Patton. And guess what? He got it done."
The White House's response to these accusations of abuse and intimidation—delivered under oath by both Republican and Democratic commissioners, and backed up by staffers, former employees, and an inspector general report—was to do nothing. Mr. Jaczko, after all, has claimed he's never "intentionally" bullied anyone. And so he remains in his job, while Ms. Svinicki is now teed up for retribution. Women's groups like to call this "blaming the victim," though that is apparently encouraged when the victim is a Republican.
Mr. Reid has been trashing the only female NRC commissioner, falsely accusing Ms. Svinicki of being soft on safety and having "lied" to Congress in past testimony. The White House, having looked initially to back Mr. Reid, has since sniffed political danger and late this week said it would send up her nomination papers.
That's for the good, though this is hardly a happy story. Whatever the truth of the allegations against Mr. Jaczko, the fact that Democrats were unwilling to even investigate them speaks volumes. The next time Mr. Obama or Mr. Reid or Ms. Boxer dare to suggest a GOP "war on women," remember Kristine Svinicki.
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