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So Just how Far Out of the Mainstream are Harry Reid and Shelley Berkley?
Don’t take my word for it – just take a look at some of the stories today highlighting a new poll by a Democratic group showing voters prefer candidates talk about creating economic opportunity, not raising taxes.
- Christian Science Monitor – Buffett Rule: Could it backfire on Democrats? :The Buffett campaign has one simple mission – “embarrass Republicans” – says Stan Collender, a budget expert at Qorvis Communications in Washington. Yet polling suggests that taxing the rich might not be a winning issue for Obama in November.
- National Journal – The Fairness Agenda Divides Democrats. Seriously: But as President Obama and other Democrats ramp up for a Senate vote next week on the so-called Buffett rule, the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way is rudely interrupting the unity-fest with a warning that this is the wrong way to lock down wavering independents in swing states. These crucial voters prefer hearing candidates talk about opportunity, the group said. Just a tad off message, but perhaps an inconvenient truth.
- Obama Puts Taxes at Center of Campaign Fight: But Obama’s push on tax fairness may be falling on deaf ears in the swing states where the November 6 election will likely be decided. In 12 battleground states, 80 percent of independent voters lacking strong views on either Obama or Romney said they prefer a candidate who focuses on creating economic opportunity rather than reducing income inequality, according to a poll by the moderate Democratic group Third Way released on Monday…Obama’s renewed focus on tax rates comes as the White House stares down foreboding economic news elsewhere.
As if those weren’t enough to prove Harry Reid and Shelley Berkley are completely out of the mainstream, one should ask them exactly how many Nevada jobs the so-called Buffett Rule will create…
- The Buffett Rule Won’t Get You a Job: On the seventh and final page of its background report on the “Buffett Rule,” out this morning, the Obama administration finally dives into what it calls “the economic rationale” for imposing a new minimum tax rate on millionaires. If you’re an unemployed American, that placement should be your first red flag. The second should be the rationale itself. Once you read it, you’ll realize the Buffett Rule has nothing to do with helping you, or the 13 million other Americans looking for work as of March, find a job.
Today’s news further highlights that Harry Reid and Shelley Berkley are completely out of the mainstream of Nevada voters.
Under the Fedora: Closers, Reps and the Law of Unintended Consequences
April 9th in addition to the being the anniversary of the fall of Saddam marks the 24th Anniversary of one of the greatest lapses of judgment ever made by a beautiful intelligent woman…
…but enough about my wedding anniversary.
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I revisited the story of Tim Wakefield’s retirement from February and noticed this bit from it:
Wakefield had said toward the end of last season that he wanted to return for his 18th season with the Red Sox, but as the winter wore on it became clear he was not in Boston’s plans.
Right now the Red Sox bullpen has managed to blow three saves in three games, their acquisition from Houston has discovered that there is a difference closing games for an expected contender then for a team that is losing 100 game and their named closer in two appearance has yet to get a man out..
Think about it, Jonathan Papelbon has recorded more saves this season than the current Red Sox Closer has batters retired.
You know a rubber armed vet who throws a pitch that’s tough to hit might be very valuable right now.
On the bright side the Yankees haven’t won a game this season either.
Hey I’m a New Englander, the Red Sox are always going to be a lead story as far as I’m concerned.
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Last week I alluded briefly to the Masters tournament. For all the bluster from the left and the MSM this years Masters will be remembered by two impossible shots and those shots will have a lot more impact on the sponsors than anything the NYT prints over the next year.
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There is a lot of talk about Mike Wallace who died at 93 around the net and on TV. I’ve noticed that the clip of his interview with Ayatollah Khomeini is getting a lot of play.
Right up until the day he is buried this clip will be seen over and over but the same MSM playing that clip will ignore Khomenini’s vision of Islam that the Jews are the enemy has become the dominant vision of the religion worldwide will be totally ignored by the very media that plays the clip over and over.
Reality is staring them in the face and they can’t see it.
I suspect Mike Wallace’s interview with Margaret Sanger will not get a lot of play. It’s quite a sight.
It’s really different to see Wallace go on about the pleasures of smoking, talk about a different era.
I was shocked to hear Wallace died in a nursing home. He was not a poor man, I find it odd that he didn’t have a private/visiting nurse so he could live at home
I never knew there was a version of Coke that was Kosher until I read this post at Yid with Lid:
Kosher for Passover Coca Cola is a favorite of Jews and non-Jewish Coke aficionados. In 1980, Coke eliminated sugar from its recipe and substituted hi fructose corn syrup. Since corn is not Kosher for Passover for Ashkenazi Jews they go to an all sugar recipe during for the Passover season. While there are other changes, to the aficionado the holiday recipe comes closet to the taste of Coke they remember. Some Coca Cola fans have been known to purchase cases of the Passover version to last well beyond end of the holiday.
Apparently under California’s new rules Kosher Coke is not legal in the state.
One question, wouldn’t you want a Kosher version of Coke available year round or are there not enough observant Jews to support such a product?
You know for a fellow who has the GOP nomination all sewed up there are some very interesting things going on with the selection of delegates in some states:
I’d heard some talk about this: Evidently, the pro-Romney leadership of the North Dakota Republican Party rigged their state convention so that, despite the fact that Mitt Romney came in third in the March 6 caucuses, he got most of the delegates.
I’m no expert, but this doesn’t seem like the best way to unite a party behind you for a general election.
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For the first time in years I was able to attend all three of the big Easter Triduum services, Holy Thursday, Good Friday and the Easter Vigil where a neighbor of mine, an engineer and former atheist was baptized and received into the Catholic Church.
One of the great myths that is promulgated among secularists is the idea that religion is something for the ignorant, the reality is that the church has for centuries been the repository of great minds, the developers of great minds (remember the university system came from the church). To pretend the church is a repository of ignorance is to be ignorant of history.
I’d like to see our secular friends try to argue her ignorance.
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As an American of Sicilian descent I’ve found there is one very big advantage to all the business in the culture painting Sicilians as gangsters. When people find out you are Sicilian they are must less likely to give you grief. No matter how harmless you might seem in the back of their mind is: “Could that guy be connected?, does he have a relative who might be trouble if I give him grief?”
You won’t hear many Sicilian Americans say this out loud but, this is a form of power. A friend of mine jokes he doesn’t need a security system on his car beyond his “Proud to be a Sicilian” bumper sticker.
I thought of this because of this quote from Bill Cosby concerning the Trayvon Martin business:
“Without a gun, I don’t see Mr. Zimmerman approaching Trayvon by himself,” Mr. Cosby explained. “The power-of-the-gun mentality had him unafraid to confront someone. Even police call for backup in similar situations.
A lot of people are focusing on Cosby’s statement in terms of gun control but I found the most telling phrase to be this one:
The power-of-the-gun mentality had him unafraid to confront someone
Made him unafraid, Should the normal condition of a person in a confrontation be fear? To what degree did that fear because the basis of John Derbyshire’s now infamous rule #10? I wonder if black men see that gangsta business in the same way that a Sicilian might see the mafia business? Sort of like the LeRoy Brown from Crocodile Dundee 2
Speaking of Derbyshire , I’m really surprised that his firing of did not get more press, it meets every media template that the MSM likes to say about the right. Then again perhaps a lot of people in the news business might not want to risk being asked: “To what degree do you follow Derbyshire’s rule 10?”
Apparently Arby’s has decided that blocking Conservatives on Twitter is a bad more and has quietly started unblocking them. At least as quietly as Twitchy will allow:
That won’t be enough for conservatives who continue to have a beef with the company’s screw-up. Instead of hitting the drive-thru, the customers blocked by Arby’s are likely to drive on by.
Oh and Rush Limbaugh just sent out the following tweet:
After re-tweeting I added the following:
I don’t know who is in charge of Arby’s customer relations or social media but apparently they are being paid too much, presuming they still have a job.
Finally James’ O’Keefe has struck again, in the ultimate irony during his latest undercover votefraud sting his man was offered the the ballot of …Attorney General Eric “There is no need for Voter ID laws” Holder
The line of the day as O’Keefe’s man says leaves to get his ID saying he would feel more comfortable presenting it he says:
I’ll be back faster than you can say furious!
Classic, absolutely classic!
Political Compromise of Our Security
A troubling pattern of putting U.S. and allied security interests second to the Obama administration’s political priorities is now well-established. If allowed to continue, it will not only make the world more dangerous. It is going to get people killed – probably in large numbers and some of them may be Americans.
A prime example of the phenomenon was the disclosure of minute details of the 2011 raid by SEAL Team 6 withinhours of its successful liquidation of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. The revelation of special operations tradecraft horrified those in and out of the U.S. military who appreciate that safeguarding the secrecy of such techniques is essential toensuring their future utility, and the safety of those who employ them.
The really galling thing, though, was that such secrets were compromised for the transparent purpose of touting Mr. Obama’s decisiveness and competency as Commander-in-Chief. Regrettably, such qualities have not been much in evidence, either prior to or after that raid. For that matter, notwithstanding Vice President Joe Biden’s characteristically preposterous description of the operation as “the most audacious plan in 500 years,” it is not entirely clear what his boss’ role was in the execution, let alone the conception.
Still, given the importance now being attached to this narrative of vision and courage in the Obama reelection campaign, it is clear that the serial disclosure ofstate secrets by, most notably, the President’s counter-terrorism guru, Deputy National Security Advisor John Brennan, was in the service of a political cause. Call it the ends justifying the means.
More recently, “four senior diplomats and military intelligence officers” reportedly fed Foreign Policy Magazine contributor Mark Perry a salacious story about Israel enlisting Azerbaijan in its plans for staging aircraft in an attack on Iran. Perry claims that “a senior administration official told [him] in early February that ‘The Israelis have bought an airfield, and the airfield is called Azerbaijan.’”
If true, such a disclosure would fit the pattern of deliberate, concerted and damaging leaks of exceedingly sensitive information in order to advance Team Obama’s political agenda. In this instance, that agenda would be to prevent any strike on Iranian nuclear and perhaps other targets by the Jewish State before the November elections.
True or not, the revelation has had the desired effect: It put the Azeri government of President Ilham Aliyev on the spot and forced it to disavow any such collaboration with Israel. While some have questioned the integrity of the author and the logic of his thesis, the trouble is, it certainly sounds like the Obama administration to see such a stunt as a highly desirable two-fer: an opportunity to undermine Israel’s security, while effectively protecting Iran.
It seems that a similar calculation moved the Obama administration to divulge what appeared on the front page of theWashington Post’s Sunday editions: An article citing unnamed White House and intelligence sources – including “a senior U.S. official involved in high-level discussions about Iran policy” – that revealed details about the intelligence operations and capabilities the United States is said to have brought to bear lately against Iran.
The ostensible purpose of these initiatives has been the monitoring and disabling of the Iranian nuclear weapons program. Among the insights: the CIA has stood up and greatly expanded a unitdubbed “Persia House” for the purpose of monitoring and running covert actions against Iran.
In the article, much was made of the growth of this organization, its use of stealthy unmanned drones to collect signals and other intelligence deep in Iran and U.S. involvement in computer worms, assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists and explosions in certain sensitive facilities involved in Iran’s weapons program.
The point of these leaks of exceedingly sensitive activities – at least some of which could constitute acts of war, however, seemed once again to be cynically manipulative: It appears designed to show the American people that everything is under control. Team Obama is working the problem, skillfully employing intelligence assets to prevent Iran’s nuclear ambitions from being realized without using military force.
The Post story also served as a vehicle for reiterating the administration’s party line: The mullahs have not decided to acquire an actual weapon and are at least a year away from getting one. And, what’s more, we will know should that decision be taken in plenty of time to do something about it.
We would all wish these assurances to be accurate. Unfortunately, the problem with the Obama administration’s practice of playing fast-and-loose with information that is secret for a reason – it might be called “political compromise,” but that would be the only sense of the term this president seems to favor – is that it almost certainly will jeopardize our security, and that of other freedom-loving people.
Shameful Smear: Jon Bruning Shamefully Attacked his Opponent, Conservative Don Stenberg
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Five points on debunked Buffett Rule
Five quick points before today’s dog and pony show on the Buffett Rule:
1. The Associated Press completely, thoroughly debunked the premise behind the Buffett Rule in a fact-check last fall. From AP: “On average, the wealthiest people in America pay a lot more taxes than the middle class or the poor, according to private and government data. They pay at a higher rate, and as a group, they contribute a much larger share of the overall taxes collected by the federal government.”
2. Forbes magazine estimates that for the Buffett Secretary claim to be true, she would have to make between $200,000-500,000 per year — not unheard of for the secretary to the CEO of the world’s eighth largest company, but an amount that would make her a bit, ahem, uncomfortable in Zucotti Park.
3. This proposal is not a policy prescription to fix the deficit, but rather a political wedge Obama is exploiting to change the topic away from his mishandling of the economy. A CNN analysis of the Buffett rule proposal shows it would raise revenue by barely one percent of the federal budget
4. American Crossroads has launched a Facebook petition with targeted advertising behind it to urge Obama and Buffett to put their money where their mouth is and start voluntarily giving more money to the US Treasury.
5. Dessert: While Mr. Buffett is calling for higher taxes on his colleagues, one of his companies is embroiled in a series of lawsuits with the IRS over nearly a billion dollars of allegedly unpaid taxes. (LINK)
What Democrat campaign strategists in Washington are hoping you will overlook today….
- National Journal – The Fairness Agenda Divides Democrats. Seriously. But as President Obama and other Democrats ramp up for a Senate vote next week on the so-called Buffett rule, the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way is rudely interrupting the unity-fest with a warning that this is the wrong way to lock down wavering independents in swing states. These crucial voters prefer hearing candidates talk about opportunity, the group said. Just a tad off message, but perhaps an inconvenient truth.
- Christian Science Monitor – Buffett Rule: Could it backfire on Democrats? The Buffett campaign has one simple mission – “embarrass Republicans” – says Stan Collender, a budget expert at Qorvis Communications in Washington. Yet polling suggests that taxing the rich might not be a winning issue for Obama in November.
- Washington Post – Health-care law will add $340 billion to deficit, new study finds. President Obama’s landmark health-care initiative, long touted as a means to control costs, will actually add more than $340 billion to the nation’s budget woes over the next decade, according to a new study by a member of the board that oversees Medicare financing. The study is set to be released Tuesday by Charles Blahous, a conservative policy analyst whom Obama appointed in 2010 as one of two public trustees for Medicare and Social Security. His analysis challenges the conventional wisdom that the health-care law, which calls for an expensive expansion of coverage for the uninsured beginning in 2014, will nonetheless reduce deficits by raising taxes and cutting payments to Medicare providers.
- USA Today – Democratic senator won’t campaign with Obama. At least one Democratic senator won’t be appearing with President Obama this fall campaign season. “I’m not there to represent a president,” said Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., speaking on a Fort Smith television interview program.
SHOT….
- W.H.: Buffett rule not answer to debt. Introducing a minimum 30 percent income tax on millionaires ‘was never our plan to bring the deficit down and get the debt under control,’ Jason Furman, the principal deputy director of the White House National Economic Council, told reporters on a conference call Monday afternoon.
CHASER….
- In September 2011, Obama Said The Buffett Tax Was About “Stabilizing Our Debt And Deficits For The Next Decade.” And that basic principle of fairness, if applied to our tax code, could raise enough money that not only do we pay for our jobs bill, but we also stabilize our debt and deficits for the next decade. And as I said when I made the announcement, this is not politics; this is math.”
Club going up in Nebraska
From Politico:
The Club for Growth is taking flight in Nebraska Tuesday, marking their first foray into the GOP Senate primary there.
A campaign strategist who tracks advertising purchases relays that the anti-tax organization has placed a two-week buy in the Lincoln and Omaha markets totaling $151,500.
While the source did not have information about the content of the ad, the assumption is that it will include negative messaging against front-running Attorney General Jon Bruning, potentially about his record on taxes.
The Club is backing state treasurer Don Stenberg, who is lagging behind Bruning by double-digits five weeks before the May 15 primary.
Sen. Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund, another backer of Stenberg, is also expected to pour money into the state in the coming days and weeks.
Steelman gains support of former Reagan administration official
From the Springfield News-Leader:
Former State Treasurer Sarah Steelman is getting the support of a former Reagan administration official in her bid for the Republican U.S. Senate nod.
Robert “Bud” McFarlane, who served as President Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser, will announce his support for Steelman today during an appearance in Springfield.
McFarlane served as Reagan’s adviser from 1983 to 1985. He is credited with helping to develop the Strategic Defense Initiative, a missile defense system known commonly as “Star Wars.” McFarlane also pleaded guilty to misdemeanor counts of misleading Congress for his role in the Iran-Contra affair, a plan that involved selling arms to Iran to fund anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua.
Pete Hoekstra’s name recognition improves, Debbie Stabenow’s approval slips, poll shows
From MLive:
GRAND RAPIDS, MI – Michigan voters are becoming more familiar with Pete Hoekstra, the former nine-term West Michigan Congressman and frontrunner in the GOP race to challenge Sen. Debbie Stabenow.
That doesn’t translate to a better perception of the Holland Republican, a poll released today shows.
An EPIC-MRA survey of 600 voters shows Hoekstra gained name recognition, improving from 26 percent to 18 percent of respondents who knew him, but his favorability ratings didn’t follow suit.
Hoekstra’s popular perception slipped one percent, from 29 to 28, while his unfavorability ranking grew from 21 to 23 percent from a similar poll conducted in January.
The poll, completed between March 31 and April 3, also showed Stabenow failing to woo the electorate, losing seven percentage points in favorability, from 52 to 45. She suffered from growing dissatisfaction, going from 35 percent to 40 percent of those with an impression of her.
The unfavorable responses create a new high for Stabenow, who in three earlier polls topped out at 39 percent in November. She was as low as 35 percent in January, EPIC-MRA statistics show.
Church Leaders Give Blessing to Gadgets in the Pews
Church pews nationwide were lit up this Easter weekend, and not just by the glow of so many churchgoers making their once-a-year appearances — iPads and smartphones were on plenty of parishioners’ laps, helping people follow along with the ceremonies. Congregants are feeling increasingly comfortable with using gadgets in church, and priests and ministers are condoning it.
In Chicagoland, many congregations encourage the use of gadgets during church, as the Chicago Tribune reports. Worshippers are using Bible apps and web searches to find greater context behind the sermons they hear, and the preachers themselves are using the technology to get their messages out. As long as people are listening, maybe Googling Romans 6:8 and not playing Angry Birds, congregation leaders are glad to encourage the use of technology in the pews — a few even offer WiFi connections. Some churchgoers have even taken to Twitter during services to share the conversation. More
