Umbrellagate caption contest!

Leave your caption as a comment! (Caption rules still apply.)

If it was Obama, it might be worth more

1975 Presidential Umbrella Lt Col Robert Blake President Ford Press Photo | eBay:

Why was there no Umbrellagate then?

Remember when dissent was patriotic? Me, neither.

Welcome to NJ, Pro Gun Citizen Forcefully Removed From Hearing in the Middle of His Testimony:

Umbrella-Gate? Get a grip!

I posted about this on Thursday, but I never thought that "Umbrellagate" would become the meme that it has. (Update: The Umbrellagate Caption Contest!)

Talk about much ado about nothing, the Weekly Standard provides the latest example. During today's Rose Garden news conference with Turkey's prime minister, President Obama told  US Marine Corps NCOs on the White House staff to hold umbrellas over his and the PM's head when rain fell.

The laugh of the day goes to the Daily Caller:

Not even the President of the United States can request a Marine to carry an umbrella without the express consent of the Commandant of the Marine Corps, according to the Marine Corps Manual.

This is truly stupid, sorry. The president in the commander in chief of the armed forces. His orders ALWAYS supersede a mere regulation. Heck, the Commandant of the Marine Corps can order any Marine to carry an umbrella – a pink one if he wants, since the Commandant’s authority overwhelms a mere regulation. I mean, what part of "commander in chief" do they not understand?

The basic fact that must be considered here is that this was a state event and there are exacting protocols established by literally centuries of tradition. Prime Minister Erdogan was a peer visitor, head of state hosted by head of state.

So, those of you getting vapors over this, pick one of the following:

a. Obama just forgets about an umbrella and stands in the rain. Of course, the visiting head of state standing next to him also gets soaked. Yeah, that’s smart diplomacy!

b. Obama asks for an umbrella which he holds himself. A Marine hands one to the PM, too. More smart diplomacy! Help yourself, PM. I guarantee this would have ripped to shreds by domestic and Turkish media, and rightfully so.

c. Obama orders a Marine to hold an umbrella over the PM’s head but he does not use one himself. And that puts the PM on the spot – he will either have to refuse the umbrella or accept it and be shamed before his countrymen in Turkey’s media reporting.

d. Obama has a Marine hold an umbrella over the PM’s head but he holds his own umbrella. Not as bad a gaffe as (c) but still a gaffe.

ANY commentary on this event that fails to take into account that this event was alongside a visiting head of state is simply uninformed and unserious. In my first career I spent some time working with White House staff and I know there are protocols that are detailed. The PM was an equal-status visitor. When the rain began falling Obama could not treat the PM differently than himself.

(Although maybe the smartest move would have been for Obama to take an umbrella over the to PM's podium and personally hold it over both their heads.)

And Marines are not gods. Jeepers. But your hyperventilating sure does make them look fragile. OMG, a Marine is holding an umbrella! How can he stand it? I guess it’s now to onset of PTSD or something.

The whole non-issue is ridiculous.

And then there is this, sports fans:

Last word needs to be heeded:

And there are conservatives who just can’t understand why democrats and independent voters just don’t buy their narrative about how serious a scandal Benghazi/AP phones/IRS Target/Joe Slestak is. The funny thing is, they have nobody to blame but themselves. 

When every waking moment of Obama’s life is an outrage, nothing is an outrage.

Indeed.

Update: And just to inject a little humor into something that is almost beyond parody, perhaps there is a reason the Marines have to hold the umbrella, since Obama seems never to have mastered the skill:

But on this as so many other issues, Obama is merely continuing Bush's policies:

Another update: And that darn Ronald Reagan treated the military like crap:

Just how long has this been going on? Quite awhile!

The "President Schultz" meme grows

Boston Herald:

Has President Nixon been replaced by Sergeant Schultz? 

The “Smartest President Ever” has disappeared. The Barack Brain Trust long-touted by liberals is gone — replaced by hacks whose rallying cry is straight from Stalag 13—“I know nothing. Nothing!”

You know, like this:

I see nuttink! I hear nuttink! I know nuttink! 
I am only der president!

The BoHerald is right, though, in setting aside the Obama-as-Nixon meme. For all Nixon's faults, he was in charge of his administration. Nixon was a man in command and everybody knew it. Not 
like President IDK:

Mandating insurance coverage

A couple of headlines that seem self-explanatory:

Royal Oak Ordinance Requires $1 Million ‘Dangerous Dog’ Insurance Policy

D.C. Considers Mandatory $250K Insurance Policy for Gun Buyers

There is a difference other than the face amounts here - DC's proposed ordinance considers guns dangerous in themselves; to acquire or already own a gun would require immediate coverage. But the Royal Oak ordinance says,

[A] dog is deemed dangerous if it bites or attacks a person, or causes serious injury to another domestic animal. Exceptions include dogs protecting an owner or a homeowner’s property.

So a dog must be proven dangerous before the mandatory-insurance ordinance kicks in, but an inanimate firearm is automatically dangerous.

"They did WHAT?"

With "I don't know" video collage: "Eric Holder Just Doesn’t Know - The head of the DOJ is all like, 'idk, man.'”



You will note that the video is a collage of IDK clips from just one appearance before the Congressional committee.

Update: Over at American Digest, this video is juxtaposed with the "poetry" of Donald Rumsfeld, an actual quote from 2003:

The UnknownAs we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

Let's leave the last word to Jay Carney:

"We didn't know anything about anything until
we read it in the AP emails that we had wiretapped."

Obama Critics: Stick to the mountains, ignore the molehills

Obama Calls Over Marines to Shield Himself and Turkish PM from Rain | The Weekly Standard:

Talk about much ado about nothing, the Weekly Standard provides the latest example. During today's Rose Garden news conference with Turkey's prime minister, President Obama told  US Marine Corps NCOs on the White House staff to hold umbrellas over his and the PM's head when rain fell.



Hate to break it to them, but that's their job (among many other things). And to fail to extend this courtesy to a visiting head of state would have been a major gaffe. As you know, I find near-countless things to fault this president for, but this isn't one of them. Indeed, I see this as a simple act of statesmanlike courtesy.

There are plenty of mountains out there, Obama critics. Don't whittle away your credibility by trying to make another one out of molehills like this.

Do not fear me or will will get you!

And here is what Obama really did say to the class of 2009:

At his Arizona State University commencement speech last Wednesday, Mr. Obama noted that ASU had refused to grant him an honorary degree, citing his lack of experience, and the controversy this had caused. He then demonstrated ASU's point by remarking, "I really thought this was much ado about nothing, but I do think we all learned an important lesson. I learned never again to pick another team over the Sun Devils in my NCAA brackets. . . . President [Michael] Crowe and the Board of Regents will soon learn all about being audited by the IRS."

Here's the video:



No one is laughing now.

Yeah, that's how it works all right

My uncle, Prof. Rob Foy in Minnesota, died recently. A memorial was printed for him by his university, found online at "Please Remember Dr. Robert (Rob) C. Foy II in Your Prayers."

Rob was the husband of my mom's sister, Nancy. Rob was a "formidable landscape gardener," at which he labored with Nancy until her death in 2002:

The division of labor was simple: He did the work; his wife nodded her approval.

Yeah, most of us married guys have that arrangement.

Which explains democracy

Men who are physically strong are more likely to have right wing political views | Mail Online:

Men who are physically strong are more likely to take a right wing political stance, while weaker men are inclined to support the welfare state, according to a new study. 

Researchers discovered political motivations may have evolutionary links to physical strength.

It's an interesting article, but there is a political theory that democracy developed as a means of the weak to restrain and control the strong. It's been a long time since I read of it, so I won't try to develop it any further here. 

That theory is countermanded, though, by other hypotheses that democracy developed out of the "big man" more of tribal leadership in which the strong vied with one another for status based on how well they could provide staples such as food the for tribe as a whole. Anthropologist Marvin Harris described this in his book, Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Cultures, although he does not tie it to the development of democracy. 

Obama bubble popping, part 3

Chris Matthews sours on Obama, saying this on the air:

"What part of the presidency does Obama like? He doesn't like dealing with other politicians -- that means his own cabinet, that means members of the congress, either party. He doesn't particularly like the press.... He likes to write the speeches, likes to rewrite what Favreau and the others wrote for the first draft," Matthews said.

"So what part does he like? He likes going on the road, campaigning, visiting businesses like he does every couple days somewhere in Ohio or somewhere," Matthews continued. "But what part does he like? He doesn't like lobbying for the bills he cares about. He doesn't like selling to the press. He doesn't like giving orders or giving somebody the power to give orders. He doesn't seem to like being an executive.”

This is proceeding along the lines of market economic theory, just as I described.

Here's the video:



Heh!

I'm more convinced than ever that Chris Matthews is mentally ill. He opened his show yesterday advising the president to "...stop taking advice from sycophants who keep telling him that he's right..." Yes, Mr. Tingle up his leg had basically advised Obama to stop watching MSNBC. 

Higher education bubble bursting

Georgia Tech Takes MOOCs to the Next Level | Via Meadia:

Georgia Tech is going to offer a full graduate program in computer science for up to 10,000 students for only $7,000 each through MOOCs - Massively Open Online Courses, the internet, in other words. 

At $7,000 per student and with these kinds of enrollment numbers, this may be not just a boon for students but a good way of significantly widening Georgia Tech’s student base: 10,000 is a lot of students, and the open nature of MOOCs makes it relatively simple to scale up without dramatically expanding staff or administrative costs.

It's unclear from the article whether the 10,000-student figure is the maximum number per entering class or the maximum number that will be enrolled overall. Still, it's $70 million for the university with very little added overhead. That increases total student enrollment by almost 50 percent.

And of course, that's another 10,000 graduates added to the alumni-donor base. I wonder when other universities will figure that out.

The popping Obama bubble, part 2

A reporter states plainly the basis of the Obama bubble collapsing, in practice, which I explained here in theory.

Margery Eagan: Even Liberals Are Leaping Off The Bandwagon. “The same media types accused of covering Obama on bended knee — such as myself — are now turning our collective backs. And no wonder. What we’re learning about his administration has undermined our basic trust in government. Yet the president seems oblivious to how serious and unsettling these scandals are, and how much damage he’s done to his own agenda. And how he’s fed right into the fears of the tin-foil hat set who can point to these very scary power grabs and say, ‘See? He really is coming to get us.’”

Courtesy Instapundit.

As I wrote then, 

Of a sudden, media managers and reporters may be understanding that not only have they gotten nothing back in return that justifies their heavy investments, they almost certainly never will. So the investments have come to a scorching halt.  

Pop!

Assad is winning now

Six ways Assad has turned the tide in Syria

I maintain my longstanding position that intervening in Syria is not in America's interests.

The Obama bubble pops

Image by the author - no rights reserved.

We may be seeing the collapse of the Obama bubble.

In economics, a bubble is, 

trade in high volumes at prices that are considerably at variance with intrinsic values." It could also be described as a a situation in which asset prices appear to be based on implausible or inconsistent views about the future.

Economists know that bubbles always collapse. But none of them can say when a given bubble will collapse or just what will cause the bubble to pop. Long before the collapse of the housing-market bubble beginning in 2007, economists who studied that market knew real estate was in a bubble economy and some even warned of the risks beginning as early as 2004. But no one knew when the pop would come or what would make it.

Let's translate this concept into political terms. 

Obama has been a very heavy investment for the mainline American media, beginning in 2006 when he won his Senate seat (if not in 2004 when he spoke to the Democrat National Convention). They have invested a lot of money into promoting his campaigns with biased coverage, but more important to them than that is the time and efforts. And at the pinnacle of their investment has been their reputations. 

Politico points out,

Obama’s aloof mien and holier-than-thou rhetoric have left him with little reservoir of good will, even among Democrats. And the press, after years of being accused of being soft on Obama while being berated by West Wing aides on matters big and small, now has every incentive to be as ruthless as can be.

Of a sudden, media managers and reporters may be understanding that not only have they gotten nothing back in return that justifies their heavy investments, they almost certainly never will. So the investments have come to a scorching halt. 

Pop!

Stock brokerages like to rate stocks as "buy," "hold" or, "sell," meanings which should be self explanatory. The media have been in buy mode for many years. They are not selling  - yet. But on the whole they are definitely holding. 

If the media ever start selling their Obama stock, it will certainly not be as overt or blatant as their buys were. We will knows they are selling when their political coverage starts to focus less and less on Obama himself as the comings months go by. They will still cover politics, of course, it's just that their coverage won't be centered on Obama as much as it has been. 

We'll definitely know that the media are selling fast if, before the 2014 mid-term elections, NBC,  CNN et al. are talking more about which Democrat will be Obama's successor than Obama or his governance. 

However, there is no upside for the Republicans for the media's newfound sense of actual journalism. For the media have certainly not become conservative, they are just as leftwing as ever. Their narrative will later transition to salvaging the Democrat party from its Obama-made wreckage. And to salvage the Democrats, they will savage the Republicans. 

Off the rails

Sure, it's shopped, but still:

NBC pulls the curtain back - a little

NBC News' reporter Lisa Myers says bluntly that the White House "has a history" of intimidation of reporters and their sources inside the administration "because there is such a focus on keeping the story line and the narrative the way the administration wants it. And sometimes these efforts can become excessive."

Washington Post on "President Passerby"

The President Barack Schultz meme is catching on. Now Dana Milbank take a shot:

President Passerby needs urgently to become a participant in his presidency. 

Late Monday came the breathtaking news of a full-frontal assault on the First Amendment by his administration: word that the Justice Department had gone on a fishing expedition through months of phone records of Associated Press reporters. 

And yet President Obama reacted much as he did to the equally astonishing revelation on Friday that the IRS had targeted conservative groups based on their ideology: He responded as though he were just some bloke on a bar stool, getting his information from the evening news. 

In the phone-snooping case, Obama didn’t even stir from his stool. Instead, he had his press secretary, former Time magazine journalist Jay Carney, go before an incensed press corps Tuesday afternoon and explain why the president will not be involving himself in his Justice Department’s trampling of press freedoms.

"President Passerby" does have a better alliterative ring to it. 

Update: 

President Barack Schultz

I see nuttink! I hear nuttink! I know nuttink!
I am only der president!

In 1965 a comedy show about American POWs in Nazi Germany (think that one through) premiered on CBS. Called Hogan's Heroes, one of the main players was John Banner as Hauptfeldwebel (Senior Master Sergeant) Hans Schultz, a

... bumbling, highly unmilitary 300-pound Sergeant of the Guard. Schultz is a basically good-hearted man who, when confronted by evidence of the prisoners' covert activities, will simply look the other way, repeating "I hear nothing, I see nothing, I know nothing!" (or, more commonly as the series went on, simply "I see nothing–NOTHING!") to avoid being blamed for allowing things to have gotten as far as they already had ... . This eventually became one of the main catchphrase's of the series and probably the most widely used by fans of the show.

Gee, who does that remind us of now?

When the Fast And Furious gunwalking scandal broke, following the deaths of border agent Brian Terry and a few hundred Mexicans, President Obama said he didn't know anything about it. Attorney General Eric Holder said he didn't know anything about it either, even though records proved that Holder's immediate underlings at Justice knew about it. Subsequently, it was discovered that Holder lied to Congress about his knowledge of Fast And Furious (in spite of that, he is STILL Obama's Attorney General. Go figure).

When the Benghazi talking points were scrubbed of references to an al-Qaeda affiliated group being behind the attack, and also scrubbed of the CIA's warnings about a coming attack at Benghazi, President Obama said he had nothing to do with it. He didn't know anything about it, even though the talking points were changed 12 times, and even though CIA chief David Petraeus said the altered talking points were "essentially useless" and were the White House's call. Obama also claimed to know nothing about requests for increased security at Benghazi being denied.

When it was discovered that the IRS had been improperly targeting conservative political groups for a couple years, President Obama said he didn't know anything about it. Obama said he just found out about the IRS's nefarious activities last friday, even though Obama's own Press Secretary, Jay Carney, said White House lawyers knew about the IRS investigation in April. It has also been learned that senior IRS officials knew about the targeting long ago

The presidential training film:



(Image and idea ripped off from Nonsensible Shoes.)

Jon Stewart skewers Obama

It ain't pretty. (Warning, language alert, which is why I didn't just embed the video here.)

Nope, no bias here!

Top CBS, ABC, CNN execs all have relatives working as advisors for White House:

Not just any execs and not just any advisors, either. Watch as Ric Grenell floats a possible explanation for some of the Benghazi coverage, especially vis-a-vis rumors that CBS is unhappy with Sharyl Attkisson’s dogged reporting. Would the media reaction really be different without the sibling/spouse conflicts of interest, though? Half of me thinks the blood ties between the White House and media VIPs deserve lots of publicity and half of me thinks that publicizing it inadvertently lets them off the hook. They’re not in the tank out of family loyalty, they’re in the tank out of ideological loyalty. Replace the leadership at CBS, ABC, and CNN and you’ll get the same results. But Grenell’s not arguing to the contrary: The point here is simply to show that our government leadership and our media leadership are so chummy that, not infrequently, they've literally lived in the same house. It’s an especially vivid illustration of a wider problem.

And that problem can be pretty darned wide.

Video at the link.

Transparency!

Justice Department Responds To Freedom Of Information Act Request On Online Snooping With 100% Blacked-Out Document

The South has the best professors

25 Universities with the Worst Professors

No university in the American South is listed here. Most of the schools with the worst-ranked professors are technical schools. Leading the pack is the US Merchant Marine Academy, with the Coast Guard Academy third. All the worst-six are technological schools.

I don't read a lot into the rankings for that reason. Having been a humanities major, the prospect of majoring in one of the hard sciences or engineering garners my admiration. My daughter, for example, just finished her first year at Tennessee Tech, where she is already listed as a junior because of all the AP-course credits she earned (almost all fives on the AP exams), mainly the humanities courses.

She is majoring in chemical engineering, and these were her courses for the just-completed semester, all in the honors college:

• Calculus 2
• Calculus-based physics
• Chemistry 2
• Chemical engineering 2
• and lab or two thrown in

It was daunting - and my daughter is extremely smart (no brag, just fact, a 34 on her ACT). I think that a lot of students drop out of technical courses because unlike the liberal arts courses, the STEMs get harder and harder every term. I mean, a senior course in Kantian philosophy is not more difficult than a sophomore course in Aristotelian philosophy. But you better believe that fourth year chemical engineering is magnitudes harder than in the second year.

Do some students blame the professors rather than recognize their own inability or lack of academic preparation? Probably.

But the South still has the best professors.

And once again, engineering grads lead the way in salary, with graduates averaging more than $62,000 out the gate (for all engineering degrees). Once again, petroleum engineers start out making  more money than any other major, $93,500. Chemical engineers are third at $67,600. None of the top 10 are humanities.

Our march into subjugation continues

Biometric Database of All Adult Americans Hidden in Immigration Reform

The immigration reform measure the Senate began debating yesterday would create a national biometric database of virtually every adult in the U.S., in what privacy groups fear could be the first step to a ubiquitous national identification system. 

Buried in the more than 800 pages of the bipartisan legislation (.pdf)  is language mandating the creation of the innocuously-named “photo tool,” a massive federal database administered by the Department of Homeland Security and containing names, ages, Social Security numbers and photographs of everyone in the country with a driver’s license or other state-issued photo ID. 

Employers would be obliged to look up every new hire in the database to verify that they match their photo. 

This piece of the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act is aimed at curbing employment of undocumented immigrants. But privacy advocates fear the inevitable mission creep, ending with the proof of self being required at polling places, to rent a house, buy a gun, open a bank account, acquire credit, board a plane or even attend a sporting event or log on the internet. Think of it as a government version of Foursquare, with Big Brother cataloging every check-in. 

“It starts to change the relationship between the citizen and state, you do have to get permission to do things,” said Chris Calabrese, a congressional lobbyist with the American Civil Liberties Union.

Read it all, and weep. 

Then there is this: 

Obamacare: Taxpayers Must Report Personal Health ID Info to IRS
When Obamacare’s individual mandate takes effect in 2014, all Americans who file income tax returns must complete an additional IRS tax form.

Barack Milhous Obamixon

Joe Klein at Time.com on the IRS's intensive, targeted auditing of conservative political organizations:

I don’t think Obama ever wanted to be on the same page as Richard Nixon. In this specific case, he now is.

"Way to go, Barack! You've outdone even me!"

But Nixon was a beginner compared to Obama, which we already knew back in 2009:

Back in the day, when a president wanted to compile a list of his enemies, he had to do it not much differently than the ancient scribes - laboriously by hand, only a little faster because of typewriters and memeograph machines. Tricky Dick Nixon, poor fellow, started off with a paltry 30 names, but through dint of studious devotion to enemy-identifying and intensive risk of writer's cramp, his staff was able finally to identify 30,000 enemies by name.

Beginners. Pikers. Rank amateurs.

Thanks to the blessings of modern technology, the White House can now compile an enemies list of millions of names - nay, tens of millions - simply by publishing a web page asking for electronic submissions to the list.

Even the Washington Post knew the White House was keeping an enemies list, and called it by that name in 2011.

The president’s order would force anyone seeking a federal contract to declare whether they are a friend or an enemy — excuse me, “opponent” — of the Obama White House. Worse still, it would set up a central database listing those contributions at a federal government Web site — creating what amounts to an electronic, searchable “enemies list.” ... 

In other words, this effort isn’t about improving the integrity of federal contracting; it’s about Nixonian political intimidation. But with one crucial difference: Even Richard Nixon didn’t create his enemies list by executive order.

But Obama did create it by personal, signed order. 

Update: The real question is whether this will matter to enough Americans to bring about actual, substantive change in Washington. I think the answer is no, for the same reason that Benghazi doesn't matter.

The vast mass of Americans have been brainwashed into believing that there is really nothing to be done about the regime that governs most aspects of their lives. The regime does everything it can to encourage this belief. All this given, I conclude that the most likely outcome is not that Americans will overthrow the regime, but that the regime itself will commit suicide, as an unintended consequence of its worldview and the gross errors that worldview includes.

Update: Hey, Joe Klein, nice JournoList journalist gig ya got going there. Be a shame if something happened to it.

Update: Glenn Reynolds has a huge roundup, including of Massachusetts Democrats openly calling for Congressional investigations.

Outraged Bay State Democrats are blasting President Obama for exhibiting a Nixonian abuse of power after the stunning news that the Department of Justice secretly obtained Associated Press phone records and the IRS targeted conservative groups — new scandals emerging against the backdrop of heightened Benghazi criticism.

“There’s no way in the world I’m going to defend that. Hell, I spent my youth vilifying the Nixon administration for doing the same thing. If they did that, there should be hell to pay,” U.S. Rep. Michael E. Capuano (D-Somerville) said about the IRS scandal. “Not only is it bad government and bad to society, it is horrendous politics. The worst thing you can do is give your opponent an easy hammer with which to hit you.”

No, actually the worst thing you can do is commit the abuse of power in the first place. That it gives your opponents a hammer to hit you with is collaterally bad, not centrally.

Update: "Mistakes were made" - a little history lesson

But we can trust them with health care management

A short roundup of the IRS scandal