(There's a FAQ for this series.)
Today's Morning Briefing is pretty large (8 items plus a hidden bonus item), and I think the editorial focus is definitely the subtitles. When composing the Morning Briefing, Erick Erickson picks the "best" (scare quotes mandatory) stories from the previous day, and excerpts them in a digest. He also adds a subtitle, usually something snarky and "clever" (again, quotes required).
I'm going to include a the subtitles from today's Briefing because they are just too precious.
How Many Americans Will Die Because of Barack Obama’s Weak National Security Leadership?
Ah, the reliable "Democrats are weak on defense" canard. The keep harping on this despite Bush failing to prevent 9/11 and despite the fact that we're still fighting the two wars that Bush started early in his term (and repeatedly claimed we had won).
How are they dressing it up today?
Barack Obama is playing a dangerous game; a game that will probably see many of us killed. And we should not be shy about saying so. ALTERNATE SUBTITLE: Had we not water boarded KSM, Janeane Garofalo might have been killed by terrorists. Seriously.
Seriously?
Because the American people might realize just how effective and the enhanced interrogation techniques were. For example, water boarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed revealed enough data to prevent a second wave attack against Los Angeles, California.
In March of 2003, KSM was tortured on nearly two hundred occasions. This worked so well that he confessed to being involved in pretty much everything that's ever happened. This included an alleged plot to fly a plane into a building in Los Angeles in December of 2002. So, you see, water-boarding is so effective it helped prevent a terrorist attack from happening months before the alleged perpetrator was even in custody. That's more than effective, that's fucking magic.
I now know how these people sleep at night: they are too stupid to realize how evil they are.
(Ugh... there's eight more of these to go.)
Obama gives Holder the green light for the left’s long-sought show trials
Show trial: a trial (as of political opponents) in which the verdict is rigged and a public confession is often extracted — Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary
The sneering contempt for the rule of law shows just how un-American these people are.
President Obama was presented with another opportunity to rule out political retribution dressed up as investigations of the looney left-wing’s fanciful allegations of Bush administration war-crimes.
Blah blah blah. Yeah, we in the "looney left" just make stuff up like how we lied about WMD in Iraq and lied about torture and now make humorous-if-they-weren't-scary claims about how water-boarding can prevent terrorist attacks in the past. Whatever.
BONUS: Obama's Interrogation Cop Out
Weird. There's an item that is excerpted and linked to, but there's no title or subtitle. So that means there are nine items today. Now how much would you pay? Order now and you get this:
Do we choose presidents on the basis of their ability to dodge tough questions? Obama clearly thinks so. It seems that going back months, every time Barack Obama gets asked about this, he prattles on about a desire ‘to look forward, not backward.’ While that’s not an answer, at least it seems similar to ‘no.’ So what happened today? Did the teleprompter betray him?
Yes! The teleprompter is back. Obama is being bashed here for:
- Focusing on getting the country out of the mess Bush left it in
- Letting the Justice Department do its job
What a terrible president.
Mercedes Marquez: The latest corrupt Barack Obama Appointee
Barack Obama not only embraces the Culture of Corruption, he fills up his cabinet with it, fondles it, and cops a good feel of it every few hours just so the corruption knows how much he loves it.
Ew. And this coming from someone who thought "teabagging" was a swell image for a protest.
According to a letter written by a Los Angeles County Housing Department employee obtained by RedState, "Mercedes hired Norma and after the training was paid for Mercedes became a Priestess. After the next training, Mercedes was elevanted to High Priestess. The whole purpose of the Zen training was to elevate Mercedes’ stature in the Buddhist Temple. After a half hour, the building management sent security guards out to the parking lot to stop the spectacle."
The letter reads like the typical rantings of a disgruntled employee. The supposed whistleblower is conveniently anonymous — there's not even any indication how he or she would be in a position to know any of this information, nor is there any way to confirm it. Perhaps someone with connections to the L.A. city government can shed some light on these allegations. If this smear has any legs, expect Glenn Beck and "Fox and Friends" to be citing these claims as established fact.
And to think they considered RFK Jr. for EPA head.
That would have been one fascinating Cabinet meeting. Up to the point where RFK Jr screamed ‘TRAITOR!’ and tried to murder the President. That wasn’t a joke.
Good thing it wasn't a joke, because it wasn't funny... or clever... or interesting, for that matter.
"Clean coal is a dirty lie," says environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who calls President Barack Obama and other politicians who commit taxpayer money to develop it "indentured servants" of the coal industry.
Let us stop here, for a moment. This isn’t about clean coal, per se. That debate is actually irrelevant to this post. Also irrelevant - for this post - is whether Kennedy meant anything racial by use of the term ‘indentured servant.’ You can decide for yourself whether that was a code phrase for ’slave.’ But what we have to establish here is that Robert F Kennedy referred to the President of the United States as an indentured servant to the coal industry. So conceded that it happened?
Fail. The clean coal debate is the only thing relevant here. RFK Jr. would probably have been an excellent head of the EPA and his disagreements with Obama on clean coal would have helped ensure a substantive debate on the topic at the highest levels of government.
This post is much like a playground taunt, "Ooooh! He called you an 'indentured servant' which is like a slave! You gonna take that? Fight! Fight! Fight!"
Pathetic.
Barack Obama Thinks You Can’t Count
And Erick Erickson thinks we don't understand that March 2003 came after December 2002, so who is he to cast stones?
The Audacity of Budget Math Only Dr. Evil Could Love
Dr. Evil? Really?
If ever a public policy proposal deserved universal ridicule, it has to be President Obama’s effort to convince the public that [cue Dr. Evil voice] 100 million dollars in spending cuts are a significant dent in federal spending. Since Obama looked the nation in the eye and made that read-my-lips promise of a net spending cut in those two debates, we have sat and watched as he signed into law a colossal $787 billion ’stimulus’ bill, proposed a $634 billion fund to begin offsetting the projected trillion-dollar cost of his health care plans, and unveiled a ".6 trillion budget that’s projected to consume 26% of GDP, the biggest share for federal spending since World War II (it hasn’t been above 21% since the last budget before the Republicans took control of Congress in 1994).
Undoubtedly, some of this is bullshit, but Obama did kinda set himself up for this by touting a measly $100mm budget cut. John Cole had a characteristically pragmatic reaction to this: Seriously, Is This a Joke?.
You Know What We Needed? More, Cheaper Subprime Loans! And Maybe Cheaper Hookers, Too.
Why Eliot Spitzer Should Not Come Back
Hookers? Really? When just Monday they were heralding the work of Diaper Dave Vitter? They went there? Really? Oh, and Spitzer had nothing to do with the financial crisis.
First of all, Spitzer should never be entrusted with any sort of executive authority ever again. The reasons for this are too numerous to recount here, but let’s start with the obvious: the man held the State’s top two law enforcement positions (Attorney General and Governor) while pursuing a lengthy and illegal prostitution habit, which he surrendered (so far as we know) only when exposed by a federal investigation. Yes, some politicians have survived hookers and other sex-and-crime scandals before: Barney Frank is still in Congress two decades after paying for an affair with a prostitute who operated a brothel out of Frank’s apartment; David Vitter is running for re-election in the Senate after being exposed as a former client of the DC Madam; Gerry Studds kept a commitee chairmanship in the House after an affair with an underage Congressional page; Ted Kennedy is still in the Senate four decades after leaving a woman to drown in his car, an event that in a just world would have resulted in a charge of second-degree murder. But bad as our tolerance for such scandals in legislators may be, they are another thing entirely when you are talking about a man who was charged not only with casting votes and writing laws but with taking care that the laws be faithfully, fairly and uniformly enforced while he was creeping around choking hookers.
The essay makes predictable cheap shots at Frank and Kennedy, but point taken; I can't really disagree with the underlying conclusion. Spitzer distinguished himself as a dishonest hypocrite. I forgive him for being a flawed human being, but that doesn't mean I'd be interested in seeing him take a position of public trust again. Maybe politics is all he knows how to do at this point, but that's hardly anyone's fault by his.
Financial crisis has been good for Senator Feinstein (D-CA)
Another Corrupt Democrat to Watch
Oh now what?
From the Washington Times:
On the day the new Congress convened this year, Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation to route $25 billion in taxpayer money to a government agency that had just awarded her husband’s real estate firm a lucrative contract to sell foreclosed properties at compensation rates higher than the industry norms.
Mrs. Feinstein’s intervention on behalf of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was unusual: the California Democrat isn’t a member of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs with jurisdiction over FDIC; and the agency is supposed to operate from money it raises from bank-paid insurance payments - not direct federal dollars.
That doesn't sound good. I'm interested in seeing what a legitimate news organization — and I would include Comedy Central before the Washington Times — has to say about this. This wouldn't be the first time that allegations of misdeeds concerning Feinstein's legislation and her husbands real estate business have surfaced and on the previous occasion, they were debunked pretty quickly. Any DiFi fans who want to take this one, please do.
Dems Have Permanent Majority ... at Least Until the Next Election [Link is 404]
Predictions of electoral locks are appealing in their simplicity and particularly persuasive in the aftermath of a one-sided election. But, like all analyses based on sample sizes of one or two elections, they’re essentially worthless.
This is good news for John McCain.
The link to this article returns a "404 - Not Found" response (I guess they're that proud of this item), so I'm going to quote the entire thing:
Since November, I’ve become accustomed to predictions that the Republican Party is on its way to irrelevance. Nonetheless, I was disappointed to hear that sentiment voiced by University of Virginia professor and pundit Larry Sabato, who generally tries to provide a relatively objective analysis. On MSNBC’s Hardball today, Sabato opined that "we’re on our way from being a two-party system to being a party-and-a-half system. And the Republicans are the half a party." Here’s Sabato’s analysis followed by my thoughts on why such predictions are silly.
Essentially, it boils down to this. Minorities are going to be the majority by 2042. It could even be by the 2030s. Young people 18 to 29, they voted more than two to one for Obama, and their turnout is going to go up with each additional year as they age. The same with people with graduate degrees, who used to vote Republican on fiscal issues. Now they’re so turned off to Republicans because of [conservative rhetoric] and the social issues, they turned Democratic. Hey, you can`t just win with white male voters in the South, and that’s what the Republicans have left.
This sort of analysis sounds quite logical but is reminiscent of what the pundits said following the re-election of both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. After the 1984 election, expert after expert explained why the shift of population and thus electoral votes to the Sun Belt had given the Republicans a "lock on the Electoral College." Despite my youthful eagerness for a GOP presidential monopoly, this electoral analysis struck me as too sweeping and simplistic to be correct. Unfortunately, I was right.
Following the 2004 election, the message from the experts was the same, though the explanation had changed. Now the Democrats had little chance of winning presidential elections because they were only competing in states that accounted for barely half of the 538 electoral votes. It was a seductive argument, but again it was too simplistic and backward-looking to be true.
Predictions of electoral locks are appealing in their simplicity and particularly persuasive in the aftermath of a one-sided election. But, like all analyses based on sample sizes of one or two elections, they’re essentially worthless, if only because the news headlines and candidates that await us are unknowable Although it’s much less fun and won’t get you a guest appearance on MSNBC or FOX, the only honest analysis is admitting that you haven’t got a clue about what’s going to happen in future elections.
It's nice to know that Curt Levey was right about something once in his life. He's basically right that the pendulum could swing back to favor Republicans. Unless the Republican Party completely collapses (it could happen), we'll almost certainly see another — hopefully less disastrous — Republican President in the future. The problem is that it won't be the foreseeable future; not only have the Republicans turned themselves into a fringe party, but they seem hell bent on staying one.