From the very beginning of the Fort Hood shooting story the media went into Muslim Apologist Mode. After watching reporting on Fox News for a while, I tuned into World News Tonight and was treated to glaring examples, including Brian Ross’ need to pass along the claim that the shooter had been called a “camel jockey”. Over the course of the next 24 hours we all saw several other reporters lament (and then repeat) that they were sorry that the shooter’s name was not Smith. In the media’s desperate attempt to call it anything other than muslim-related terrorism we were even introduced to the preposterous notion that the shooter actually had Pre Traumatic Stress Syndrome.
As Stuart Smalley (the only funny thing that so-called comedian ever did) said, “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt”.
There is no shortage of people who immediately called this what it was: a terrorist attack. Lt. Col. Ralph Peters typically did not mince words in his analysis:
But to call this an act of terrorism, the White House would need an autographed photo of Osama bin Laden helping Hasan buy weapons in downtown Killeen, Texas. Even that might not suffice.
Islamist terrorists don’t all have al Qaeda union cards in their wallets. Terrorism’s increasingly the domain of entrepreneurs and independent contractors. Under Muslim jurisprudence, jihad’s an individual responsibility. Hasan was a self-appointed jihadi.
Yet we’re told he was just having a bad day.
But too many reporters immediately rushed to treat us all like adolescent potential KKKers. Proving the old adage about the acorn-finding blind squirrel, even NYT columnist David Brooks got this one right when he wrote of A Rush To Therapy:
Major Hasan was portrayed as a disturbed individual who was under a lot of stress. We learned about pre-traumatic stress syndrome, and secondary stress disorder, which one gets from hearing about other people’s stress. We heard the theory (unlikely in retrospect) that Hasan was so traumatized by the thought of going into a combat zone that he decided to take a gun and create one of his own.
…
There was a national rush to therapy. Hasan was a loner who had trouble finding a wife and socializing with his neighbors.
This response was understandable. It’s important to tamp down vengeful hatreds in moments of passion. But it was also patronizing. Public commentators assumed the air of kindergarten teachers who had to protect their children from thinking certain impermissible and intolerant thoughts. If public commentary wasn’t carefully policed, the assumption seemed to be, then the great mass of unwashed yahoos in Middle America would go off on a racist rampage.
That patronizing attitude seems to be par for the course from the American media. But that is not the point that needs making, which is simply that this level of feel-good political correctness has no place in the US Army. Col. Peters also points out some disturbing affirmative action programs in the Army that could have played a role in this officer’s promotions in the face of obvious problems and bad reviews.
A dirty big secret in our Army has been that officers’ promotion boards have quotas for minorities. We don’t call them quotas, of course. But if a board doesn’t hit the floor numbers, its results are held up until the list has been corrected. It’s almost impossible for the Army’s politically correct promotion system to pass over a Muslim physician.
From Reuters
But the public statement that shocked me the most and has stayed in my mind came straight from the mouth of Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey, who actually said “what happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here”. Seriously, he actually said that the deaths of 13 people would be less of a tragedy than damage to the beloved D-word.
“what happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here.” – Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey
Both articles close with indictments. Brooks says of America’s initial reaction:
It denied, before the evidence was in, the possibility of evil. It sought to reduce a heinous act to social maladjustment. It wasn’t the reaction of a morally or politically serious nation.
And Peters is even more blunt:
Just as we’d expect the Army to get rid of a disruptive white supremacist, we need to cashier anyone who espouses violent Islamist extremism — as Maj. Hasan did, again and again.
We won’t. Because Islamist terrorism doesn’t exist. Just ignore the dead and ask our president.
UPDATE: Brent Bozell wrote a good article on this as well, reminding me of Bob Schieffer’s attempt at drawing moral equivalency between this act and some nameless Christian “nuts”. Read Bozell’s take on it here.
It would appear that a good crowd showed up for Michele Bachman’s call for a House Call to the House to protest Speaker Pelosi’s horrible health care bill. I have managed to snarf some initial pictures from Twitter and will post more as I get them.
First, it seems obvious that the Speaker of the House has control of the Capitol Web Camera:
Does Pelosi control this, perhaps?
A short video taken from the steps. Can you hear the crowd chanting “Nancy”?
Yeah … that’s when the voters elected Barack Obama. If you’ve been scanning the Internet you’ve seen no shortage of news stories about disappointed – and sometimes disgusted – voters who actually thought they were voting for some type of wonderful change in Washington.
I think the retrospective on Obama’s first year should really be saved until the one-year mark from his coronation, not the election. I will say this … Obama has been far worse than I would have ever imagined. Any promises he made about transparency and bipartisanship in Washington have turned out to be a complete joke. He has shown absolutely no understanding of the role of capitalism and our free markets in the creation of our amazing standard of living in America. He has treated the Constitution as a nuisance rather than a blueprint for governance.
For many years I’ve been talking about politicians who believe that America’s greatness comes from government. Obama is the embodiment of that principal.
Others have said this .. but Obama is completely in over his head. This is a job he was simply not prepared to handle. He became president not on the basis of accomplishment, but on the basis of charisma and a well-orchestrated campaign. His election was a crowning achievement of our system of government education. He certainly has the potential of destroying this country as we know it. The ballot box still works … for now. I truly believe that 2010 may be the last chance we have to save our Republic from the likes of Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Frank, Rangel, Waxman, Hoyer and the rest of the statist crowd.
I agree with Neal. I knew that it would be bad, but I was thinking Bill Clinton in 1993 bad, not Russia in 1917 bad. I was naively hopeful in a post that I did on inauguration day, knowing that he would be a leftist but hoping that he would gain some sense. Instead, Mr. Obama has simply shown himself to be an empty suit charlatan blinded by his slave-to-the-state ideology.
A good measure of a conservative is how much they are despised by the hard left, and Michele Bachmann is one of those who the Kos crowd loves to hate. In this video, Bachmann calls on Americans to come to D.C. to protest Pelosi’s just-released health care bill.
We need you here, you need to come to the nation’s capital. We’re going to have a house call on Congress and the members of Congress need to see the whites of your eyes and you need to see the whites of the eyes of your member of Congress. Talk to your member of Congress and talk to your Senators. We’re going to have a house call and a big party out on the national mall and we are going to tell Congress what they can do with their health care bill.
“This is socialization of America if this bill goes through, and after next Friday it will be too late to talk to your member of Congress.”
For someone who has been observing politics for a while it’s hysterical to listen to Democrat politicans rail against the “special interests” that they claim run the opposing party. They even try to paint a picture of some sinister Special Interests behind the August push-back at the myriad of Town Hall meetings across the US when in fact the organized astroturfing in those conflicts came as a union-goon response from the Left.
Their accusations of special interests behind any opposition to their plans are ridiculous because the Democrats are owned lock, stock, and barrell, by some Very Special Interests. Between the bolshevik labor unions and the American Trial Lawyers Association the Democrat Party marionettes have very little wiggle room. Americans saw union influence actually override bankruptcy law in the case of [forever dead to me] GM and Chrysler and we perennially see union special interests further destroy the American education system. More obvious in the current debate about socialized medicine is the 300 pound gorilla in the living room of tort reform.
The health care bill recently unveiled by Speaker Nancy Pelosi is over 1,900 pages for a reason. It is much easier to dispense goodies to favored interest groups if they are surrounded by a lot of legislative legalese. For example, check out this juicy morsel to the trial lawyers (page 1431-1433 of the bill):
Section 2531, entitled “Medical Liability Alternatives,” establishes an incentive program for states to adopt and implement alternatives to medical liability litigation. [But]…… a state is not eligible for the incentive payments if that state puts a law on the books that limits attorneys’ fees or imposes caps on damages.
So, you can’t try to seek alternatives to lawsuits if you’ve actually done something to implement alternatives to lawsuits. Brilliant! The trial lawyers must be very happy today!
While there is debate over the details, it is clear that medical malpractive lawsuits have some impact on driving health care costs higher. There are likely a number of procedures that are done simply as a defense against future possible litigation. Recall this from the Washington Post:
“Lawmakers could save as much as $54 billion over the next decade by imposing an array of new limits on medical malpractice lawsuits, congressional budget analysts said today — a substantial sum that could help cover the cost of President Obama’s overhaul of the nation’s health system. New research shows that legal reforms would not only lower malpractice insurance premiums for medical providers, but would also spur providers to save money by ordering fewer tests and procedures aimed primarily at defending their decisions in court, Douglas Elmendorf, director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, wrote in a letter to Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah).”
Stay tuned. There are certainly many more terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad provisions in this massive bill.
One could argue that if the American media was a watchdog rather than a lapdog they would point out the truly sinister special interests that manipulate and control most of the agenda of the American Left.
In a short post over at CATO@Liberty, Daniel Mitchell comments on a new KPMG global survey of corporate taxes, pointing out the obvious fact that it punishes American companies for keeping jobs in America.
KPMG has released its annual global survey of corporate tax systems. For the 10th consecutive year, the average corporate tax rate fell, and it is now down to 25.5 percent — and just 23.2 percent in the European Union!
In the United States, unfortunately, the corporate tax rates remains stuck at about 40 percent. Only one developed nation, Japan, has a more punitive regime.
That’s something to keep in mind the next time a politician complains that jobs are going to China, where the corporate tax rate is 25 percent.
Take a look at the KPMG survey data here. It is interesting to contrast what some other countries are doing compared to the US. From the KPMG survey:
Country
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
US
40
40
40
40
40
40
40
UK
30
30
30
30
30
28
28
Russia
24
24
24
24
24
24
20
Germany
39.58
38.29
38.31
38.34
38.36
29.51
29.44
Canada
36.6
36.1
36.1
36.1
36.1
33.5
33
India
36.75
35.875
36.5925
33.66
33.99
33.99
33.99
Note the far more sensible response to the economic downturn from countries like the UK, Russia, and Germany.
Corporate taxes are simply indirect taxes on individuals, essentially hiding the staggering scale of the cost of government by building it into the cost of goods and services. When you hear politicians in the US talk of a possible Value Added Tax they are looking for more of the same, dishonestly hiding the costs of government in the prices that consumers pay for the items that they buy every day.
Clearly the best thing that could happen for American taxpayers would be the abolition of corporate taxes and the income tax, replacing them with something like the FairTax.
[Hat tip to Hot Air for the link to the Washington Examiner story]
Writing in the Washington Examiner Byron York comments on strategist Frank Luntz’ recently released memo Health Reform Language Highlights. You may be familar with Luntz as the pollster who gives a group of people hand-held controllers and monitors their real time reaction to statements, showing a live graph typically broken up by party affiliation.
Luntz begins by pointing out, presumably for the under-40 crowd, the repeat of history that we are seeing.
I was there in 1994. I saw what happened when a once-popular president tried to push healthcare legislation that Americans didn’t want or appreciate. I witnessed the electoral implications when his administration tried to expand the role of government against the wishes of, well, almost everyone. And it’s happening once again.
At face value it seems really stupid for President Obama to repeat this a mere 15 years later but after observing his first nine months in office it is clear that this is just par for the course for Barack Obama. Like Luntz, I was there for the 1993/1994 Clinton overreach and was a vocal part of the crowd that pushed back in the 1994 (and subsequent) elections but I came away from it being impressed by the realistic response by Clinton, who was pushed to the center and made the best of it. Based upon that still recent political history I expected a more thoughtful approach from the allegedly-brilliant new President. I was disappointed.
There is a certain flavor of individual who will always act like history started the moment that he stepped up to the scene.
It is clear that Barack Obama possesses a sincerely held belief in his own magnificence and truly does act like history started the moment that he stepped up, implicitly rejecting the attempts and results of those who have come before. We see this demonstrated with the bulk of his foreign policy decisions and foreign speeches as well as his “government is the only answer” response to every domestic issue. Perhaps this attitude is related to the general attitude that many of Mr Obama’s socialist fellow travelers have about world implementations of their nice little theoretical systems. Sure, they have all sucked so far, dude, but we haven’t had our crack at it yet!
Beyond a lot of good points by Luntz in terms of how to best debate the issue, including his announcement that it is okay to criticize the president now, I liked the look of this graph and you will too:
Politico is reporting that Dede Scozzafava has dropped out of the NY-23 special election race, clearing the way for real conservative Doug Hoffman to take the race from Democrat Bill Owens.
We could have a sweep on Tuesday.
New Jersey Senate Race: Chris Christie versus incumbent John Corzine
Republican Chris Christie continues to hold a three-point advantage over incumbent Democrat Jon Corzine in New Jersey’s down-to-the-wire race for governor.
The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey in the state, conducted Thursday night, shows Christie with 46% of the vote and Corzine with 43%. Those numbers are unchanged from earlier in the week and little changed from polling conducted the week before.
The Real Clear Politics average of polls in this race calls it a tie. I always lean towards Rasmussen because of his clear record of past accuracy.
If Corzine survives in New Jersey it will only be because he has spent tens of millions of dollars of his own money in the race.
Virginia Governor Race: Bob McDonnell versus Creigh Deeds
The Real Clear Politics average of polls has McDonnell leading Deeds by an impressive 14.3%!
Ney York 23 Special Election: Doug Hoffman versus Bill Owens
Doug Hoffman has to feel good about his chances here. From the Watertown Daily Times:
Ms. Scozzafava told the Watertown Daily Times that Siena Research Institute poll numbers show her too far behind to catch up – and she lacks enough money to spend on advertising in the last three days to make a difference. Mr. Owens has support from 36 percent of likely voters in the poll, with Mr. Hoffman garnering 35 percent support. Ms. Scozzafava has support from 20 percent of those polled.
One has to assume that the majority of Scozzafava’s supporters will support the truly-conservative Hoffman. I hope that the GOP is listening to this… and I think that Newt may have really damaged himself with his support for Scozzafava in this race.
It will be somewhat entertaining to watch the spin attempts by people like Robert Gibbs and Charles Gibson on Wednesday.
News Items: Carl Sagan Day, Nutt Job, Dystonia after Flu Shot, Spontaneous Human Combustion Case; Interview with Michael Goldstein - starting a local skeptical group; Rebecca reports from TAM London with Phil Plait, Chris French, and Christina Martin; Science or Fiction; Who's That Noisy
In the final episode of the horror story that is the Eastern Front the tale descends into unimaginable darkness as vengeance is called down on Germany. This graphic episode is not for young ears.
Dan is fascinated with the idea of genius. In this show he wonders why we don't seem to have as many geniuses in politics and statecraft as we should have. Also: What is Common Sense about?
Watch videos at Vodpod and other videos from this collection.
What others had to say
"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other peoples' money." Margaret Thatcher
"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of misery." Winston Churchill
But to call this an act of terrorism, the White House would need an autographed photo of Osama bin Laden helping Hasan buy weapons in downtown Killeen, Texas. Even that might not suffice.
Major Hasan was portrayed as a disturbed individual who was under a lot of stress. We learned about pre-traumatic stress syndrome, and secondary stress disorder, which one gets from hearing about other people’s stress. We heard the theory (unlikely in retrospect) that Hasan was so traumatized by the thought of going into a combat zone that he decided to take a gun and create one of his own.
UPDATE: Brent Bozell wrote a good article on this as well, reminding me of Bob Schieffer’s attempt at drawing moral equivalency between this act and some nameless Christian “nuts”. Read Bozell’s take on it here.
Yeah … that’s when the voters elected Barack Obama. If you’ve been scanning the Internet you’ve seen no shortage of news stories about disappointed – and sometimes disgusted – voters who actually thought they were voting for some type of wonderful change in Washington.
There is a certain flavor of individual who will always act like history started the moment that he stepped up to the scene.
