Catallaxy Files

Back in March, not so long ago, there was made mention how the American President had misspoken about one of his predecessors, Rutherford B. Hayes. About this incident, which was discussed on all good blog sites at the time, this was the conclusion to the post I wrote about it then:

“It has taken more than three years for the ridicule of what has been a truly ridiculous presidency to begin. The man who drove the American economy into a debt as far as the eye can see and has mishandled every foreign policy issue he has been asked to deal with is finally getting the recognition he deserves.”

But in thinking about this since, I can see that it hasn’t quite worked out that way at all. We on our side don’t really go in for these kinds of incidentals but tend to think about policy. It is the left, who still cannot get enough of Dan Quayle spelling potato with an “e” who seem to indulge in this kind of politics. Partly it is that cupboard containing the left’s agenda remains completely empty, specially after they have emptied every hollow log they can think of to raid for more money. Making fun of other people from their lofty superiority to everyone else seems to be one of the few things they have left with which to trade. And of course, the ability to raid everyone else’s incomes to support their own indulgences (see HSU for a recent shameless and disgusting example).

So it is with this business about “Julia”. OK, it’s ridiculous and you could make fun of it from now till the end of time. The problem is that no one will. It is a one day/two day wonder and then will stop being any kind of issue at all. Meanwhile, the point that others keep trying to make, that pretending that it is ridiculous to say that the government is required to shepherd a woman through her manless life, is a point for which anyone who thinks in leftist terms is totally impervious to. You have to be on this side of politics already to see what is so ridiculous about that ad. I mean, really, do you think there is the slightest chance that Julia Gillard, Christine Milne or Bob Brown would understand any of it.

Which brings me back to the media. The White House Correspondents Dinner was surrounded by jokes about the American President eating dogs. Even the President made jokes about it. Yet the oddest part was that anyone totally dependent for one’s news on the mainstream media would not have understood what the point of it was at all. Here on the right side of the page, everyone was telling Obama-ate-a-dog jokes. On the other side, there was almost no appreciation that this was going on. But apparently Gail Collins in the New York times had mentioned that Romney had put a dog into a box on the top of his car fifty times. Fifty times is a lot of times to mention an inconsequential story but never mentioned the Obama story. And when you think that Dan Quayle stopped being Vice President in 1992 – that’s twenty years ago –  you really must ask how and why some things remain part of the conversation, and some things don’t.

Whether or not inspired by meeting with our Prime Minister, Obama’s first set of election ads for the coming campaign stars a woman named Julia who is shown going through life supported by a host of government programs that would, according to the ad, all be under threat from a Romney presidency.

It emphasises that one of the constituencies that matters to Obama is the female half of the population, particularly amongst the unmarried, who are wedded to the various government expenditure outlays. The known vulnerability of the Republicans is that in trying to bring some kind of fiscal sanity back to the US, that they will have to cut various government programs. Thus the ads, and very effective they will be. The ad itself is a series of rudimentary drawings which I cannot reproduce. This, however, is the message that comes with the ad:

Hey –

From cracking down on gender discrimination in health care costs to fighting for equal pay, President Obama is standing up for women throughout their lives.

Take a look at how President Obama’s policies help Julia during her lifetime — and how Mitt Romney would change her story.

You can watch the lot here: http://www.barackobama.com/life-of-julia/

There are now a set of parodies and caricatures making their rounds of which the following is one. What these show is just how difficult it is to really make fun of such things since the aim of the Republican Party is not to end the welfare state but somehow bring the level of spending back to around where it was in the bad old days of 2007. The advantage of the parody below is that it includes the actual slides of the Obama ad.

Update: I’ve seen this mentioned only once in some blog comment but it is a captivating thought. Julia was also the name of Winston Smith’s girlfriend in Orwell’s 1984. I don’t exactly know why it’s relevant but it does seem somehow oddly appropriate.

Further Update: And now Iowahawk has put up his own parody of the Julia story which is not to be missed. Picked up by Abu Chowdah in the comments.

From The Australian:

THE Reserve Bank has warned of the risk that budget spending cutbacks could push up unemployment as all parts of the Australian economy, except for mining, get weaker.

I cannot imagine to whom this warning is addressed. If the Government does not know that cutting back on spending and balancing the budget will have as its initial effect a fall in jobs, then they are even more clueless than I already think they are. But they know it as do we all.

They, of course, have no one to blame but themselves. They have been the authors of their own folly. It is the “stimulus” that has been the direct cause of the depths of the problem, in Australia as well as everywhere else it was tried. Fixing the problem will be a very tough business.

Government spending not only requires the production of some end product but sets up a supply chain all along the way. Once there is a fall in the demand for whatever it has been that government has chosen to waste our money on there is also an almost simultaneous fall in the demand for all of the inputs into these products. And then a further fall in demand for the inputs into these other inputs and so on and so forth round the economy.

We are therefore so much worse off today than we would have been had not a dollar of stimulus been spent. Had it all gone on tax cuts to business, or even half of it and the rest just left unspent, the economy would be a lot further forward than it is. Instead we have this, and it will certainly be felt in the labour market. The RBA apparently has some bleakish views:

The Reserve believes conditions in the labour market are weaker than shown by the 5.2 per cent unemployment rate. Its liaison program with individual companies shows many are cautious about hiring new staff because of weak sales.

‘In the parts of the economy most adversely affected by the forces of structural change, many firms have reduced employment to contain costs and improve productivity,’ the bank said.

But if the cuts to spending are properly targeted at non value adding forms of expenditure (and by this I do not mean defence), and they make some genuine changes in how markets are regulated as in introducing real flexibility and less regulation, the turnaround should be relatively rapid. If business does genuinely become confident about the future, it is astonishing how rapidly economic conditions improve.

As for the budget, I will assume they will announce a surplus; can they possibly do anything else? It will be how it is done and not that it was done that will matter most.

The following is the text of a letter from Mitt Romney to Barack Obama. To me it is pitch perfect and sounds the theme for the next six months.

Dear Mr. President,

Welcome to Ohio. I have a simple question for you: Where are the jobs?

As we enter the fourth year of your term, unemployment is over 8 percent and has been for your entire term. Nearly 23 million men and women are unemployed, underemployed or are no longer even looking for work. In the face of such challenges, many Americans have simply given up hope.

I recognize, of course, as do all Americans, that you inherited an economic crisis. But you’ve now had three years to turn things around. The record of those three years is clear. Your policies have failed, not only in Ohio, but across the nation.

The results are a continuing tragedy for millions upon millions of people. Everywhere I go, I meet Americans who are tired of being tired, and many of those who are fortunate enough to have a job are working harder for less. This is not the way it is supposed to be in America. This is not the way it needs to be.

Mr. President, forgive me for being blunt, but when it comes to economic affairs, you’re out of your depth. Unlike you, I am not a career politician. Unlike you, I’ve spent more than two decades working in the private sector, starting new businesses and turning around failing ones. Undoing the damage you’ve done will be a daunting challenge. But I’ve learned a thing or two about how government policies can kill private investment and stifle job creation and I have a plan to get government out of the way.

Mr. President, while campaigning for the presidency nearly four years ago, you declared that you were “absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

Mr. President, the American people are tired of the grandiose promises. And they are even more tired of the paltry results.

Mr. President, your promises now ring hollow. If you have brought new ideas to Ohio for creating jobs, why have you waited three years to unveil them? Have you suddenly had a revelation, or is it because 2012 is an election year? Whatever the case, what you are offering Ohio now is too little, too late.

What Ohio needs — what the country needs — is not four more years of economic mismanagement and failed leadership. It needs a fundamental change in direction that, by returning the country to the principles of limited government and free enterprise, would unleash the potential of the American people.

I have a path forward to accomplish that. I have spent much of my life in business, turning around troubled enterprises. I can do the same for the most troubled of all enterprises: our federal government.

Our taxes are too high, and our government is too big. I will cut individual tax rates by 20 percent across the board to jump-start job creation, grow the economy and help Americans keep more of their hard-earned dollars. I will reform a corporate tax system that drives American jobs overseas. I will slash the needless regulations that crimp our energy supply and inhibit so many different kinds of businesses. In the year I was born, unemployment was 3.9 percent. When I turned 21, it was 3.6 percent. We can do so much better than we have been doing.

But we need proper leadership.

So once again, Mr. President, welcome to Ohio, and welcome to the campaign. We need a great debate about how best to get our country working again. We can’t afford four more years of failure. I believe in unleashing America’s potential. That is what my own campaign for the presidency is all about.

Sincerely,

Mitt Romney

[Via Powerline]

Well, who would have thought it. From Breitbart:

Today, Vanity Fair released an excerpt from a new biography of Barack Obama by David Maraniss. The excerpt discusses Barack Obama’s first love affair, with a white Australian woman named Genevieve Cook. It’s a telling examination of who Obama was as a young man — and it shows a self-absorbed ‘internationalist’ with delusions of grandeur.

Since the book where the original story is found is from the mainstream press, there is no guaranteeing that it is not another stitched up tale as found throughout the Bill Ayers’ written Dreams from My Father. Yet for all we know, Genevieve Cook may still walk amongst us. The conclusion to the piece from Breitbart is nevertheless quite to the point:

The most telling part of this expose, however, lies in Obama’s friends and actions. All of Obama’s friends were Pakistani – Hasan Chandoo, Wahid Hamid, Sohale Siddiqi, Beenu Mahmood. As Mahmood described to Maraniss:

He could see Obama slowly but carefully distancing himself as a necessary step in establishing his political identity as an American. For years when Barack was around them, he seemed to share their attitudes as sophisticated outsiders who looked at politics from an international perspective. He was one of them, in that sense. But to get to where he wanted to go he had to change.

In other words, Obama embraced his quasi-Americanism not because he believed it, but because it was a tool to the fulfillment of his political aspirations. Obama, while he made noises about discarding leftist radicalism, continued to associate with groups like the far-left New York Public Interest Research Group.

The major takeaway from the Maraniss piece has nothing to do with Obama, however. It has to do with the media. Only after years of urging the media to vet Obama has anyone in the mainstream media begun to do it – and only after Andrew Breitbart called out the media for failing to vet him.

In the end, what we find out about Obama is what we already suspected: he was deeply narcissistic, pretentious, and in his own mind, an outsider to America. His relationship with Genevieve underscores all of that. Unfortunately, Obama doesn’t seem to have changed since those halcyon days in New York.

 

But the fun stuff also begins. See Twitchy1and Twitchy2.

Interesting addition to the story: Turns out that Obama’s girlfriend in his ghost written memoire was, according to Obama himself, a composite. In relation to incidents in Dreams, Obama now says:

“None of this happened with Genevieve,” Maraniss writes. “She remembered going to the theater only once with Barack, and it was not to see a work by a black playwright. When asked about this decades later, during a White House interview, Obama acknowledged that the scene did not happen with Genevieve. “It is an incident that happened,” he said. But not with her. He would not be more specific, but the likelihood is that it happened later, when he lived in Chicago. “That was not her,” he said. “That was an example of compression I was very sensitive in my book not to write about my girlfriends, partly out of respect for them. So that was a consideration. I thought that [the anecdote involving the reaction of a white girlfriend to the angry black play] was a useful theme to make about sort of the interactions that I had in the relationships with white girlfriends. And so, that occupies, what, two paragraphs in the book? My attitude was it would be dishonest for me not to touch on that at all … so that was an example of sort of editorially how do I figure that out?””

Time we saw his university transcripts, don’t you think?

[From Breitbart and Twitchy via Powerline]

Came across this as a marginal ad on some website I was reading. The American election will be partly one of policy and ideas, but it will also be one of satire and ridicule. As The American Thinker points out:

The Obama team is eagerly collecting Romney’s alleged gaffes, and has begun running a ‘greatest hits’ video that includes Romney’s out-of-context half-sentence, ‘I’m not concerned about the very poor…’ They also plan to highlight the most damaging moments of the GOP debates.

But as the above marginal ad shows, Romney, those who surround him and those more distant who support his presidency, well understand the nature of the struggle at hand. The good part is that there is much more in Obama’s past that is open to serious ridicule than in Romney’s. But, and it is the major but in this campaign, the bad part is the media who are out to re-elect the president. I do not think this exaggerates the case in the slightest:

Romney faces the added challenge of a media whose devotion to Obama cannot be overstated. As we learned from the 2010 revelation of the JournoList email forum, members of the activist left media (Media Matters, Mother Jones, Moveon.org, the UK’s Guardian, Alternet, Salon, Center for American Progress, and others) colluded with journalists from media outlets trusted by many as mainstream (Washington Post, Politico, Chicago Tribune, Slate, Newsweek, Time, New York Times, Boston Globe, etc.) on ways to cover up unwanted news such as the Reverend Wright story. Obama’s election was celebrated by the New York Times and by NBC, which sold ‘Yes We Did’ t-shirts.

ln company with the media, as the ad above suggests, will be the Hollywood one percent with whatever impetus they can bring, which is far from zero.

Niles Gardiner in the UK Daily Telegraph takes on the The New York Times’ Paul Krugman over austerity, Keynesian economics and the depressed economies of Europe. Krugman has tried to explain the downturn in Europe on the cuts to public spending and the attempts to return economies to a sound fiscal position. However.

There is of course a major problem with Krugman’s analysis – deep-seated austerity measures have barely been implemented across most of Europe, including in Britain. The reality that Krugman ignores is that real austerity has yet to be introduced in most European countries, whose governments are still in the process of drawing up plans for budget cuts – Spain, with an unemployment rate of nearly 25 percent after years of ruinous socialist rule, is a case in point.

There is a growing consensus across much of Europe that Keynesian-style stimulus measures don’t work.

The getting of wisdom but at such tremendous cost. These government types are, no doubt, reluctant to have to give up on these Keynesian theories that give them a warrant to spend almost without limit. But give up those policies they must do. Here is how things will be fixed, as in the only way they can be fixed:

Europe has no solution to its current massive debt crisis other than cutting levels of government spending. And nor does the United States. But austerity measures both in Europe and in America must be combined with lower personal and corporate taxes, labour market deregulation, eliminating red tape for businesses, large-scale entitlement and welfare reform, and a firm commitment to free trade. Big government prescriptions have been tried and tested on both sides of the Atlantic and have significantly failed to create jobs and generate wealth. The Krugman approach of ever greater levels of public spending is the wrong prescription for Europe and would condemn the continent to decades of economic decline. It would also be hugely damaging for the United States, which is now going down the same path of profligate debt and overspending that has become Europe’s ruin.

Reversing decades of misdirected expenditure will not come without its pain. But while we’re at it, the Krugmans of the world should be put in formaldehyde and preserved for future generations as a reminder of just how out of touch with reality anyone must be who could argue on behalf of Keynesian policies in the depressed and debt ridden economies those very Keynesian policies have caused.

The Democrat running against Senator Scott Brown in Massachusetts is Elizabeth Warren, a dyed in the wool leftist and professor at Harvard, a law professor. Her problem, however, is this:

The Democratic candidate is facing questions about her heritage following the revelation on Friday that she described herself as a Native American minority in professional law school directories during the 1980s and ’90s.

In fact, she used to say, but no longer does, that she was descended from the Cherokee and Delaware tribes. It is in all her profiles at every university she taught at before her present one. This is in spite of the fact, as noted by James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal, that she “is as white as a polar bear’s ghost after a dental bleaching in a snowstorm.” It may surprise you to find that in spite of what he said, thus far James Taranto has not been sued by Elizabeth Warren.

And it may further surprise you to find that having such Native American ancestry can give you some kind of momentum in certain kinds of hiring situations. Trouble is, up until now she has had no evidence of any such ancestry. As she is running for the Senate, it has become a major political issue. But it seems it may be all right now:

Desperately scrambling to validate Democrat Elizabeth Warren’s Native American heritage amid questions about whether she used her minority status to further her career, the Harvard Law professor’s campaign last night finally came up with what they claim is a Cherokee connection — her great-great-great-grandmother.

‘She would be 1 ⁄32nd of Elizabeth Warren’s total ancestry,’ noted genealogist Christopher Child said, referring to the candidate’s great-great-great-grandmother, O.C. Sarah Smith, who is listed on an Oklahoma marriage certificate as Cherokee. Smith is an ancestor on Warren’s mother’s side, Child said.

It therefore seems that if five generations back one of your ancestors was a Native American that’s good enough to get you into Harvard and elsewhere as a minority hire. Given how important it is to assist disadvantged minorities, I cannot for myself see how anyone could object. And the same for her children, their children and their children after that.

You have to wonder what the RBA knows that we don’t. Since it must know as a matter of theory that lower rates do not encourage growth but are instead a reflection of an excess supply of savings, it can only be thinking that the Australian economy is very weak and private investment is expected to fall away. Either that, or we have found some hitherto unknown source of saving that can be tapped by those who wish to invest. Or maybe, worst of all, the RBA Board is under new Keynesian management and believes this is the way to stimulate growth.

A strange decision.

It’s unfortunate that President Obama would prefer to use what was a good day for all Americans as a cheap political ploy. President Obama’s feckless foreign policy has emboldened our adversaries, weakened our allies, and threatens to break faith with our military. While the Obama administration has naively stated that ‘the war on terror is over,’ Gov. Romney has always understood we need a comprehensive plan to deal with the myriad of threats America faces.

The American President has exactly one foreign policy success he can point to, the decision to kill Osama bin Laden when his location was finally discovered. He now uses it as a wedge in the election campaign, arguing that had Romney been president, he would not have given the order to take bin Laden out.

Romney, as the reporter notes in her question to the president, has already said that anyone would have made the call, even Jimmy Carter. The Romney campaign has now continued with the above response [via Drudge]. This, like the “war on women” and the “battle of the dogs”, is yet another losing front for Obama. He would really be best to shut up about foreign policy since from the “reset” with Russia to the disastrous outcomes in the Middle East, he has overseen the retreat of American interests, our interests. The world is less free and more hostile.

The story notes the smirky smug self-satisfied response Obama gave to the question he was asked. It really is extraordinary that someone of such little accomplishment can have such incredible self belief in his own genius.