Predictable: White House Runs Away, Throws Specter Under Bus

It's a tight election in Pennsylvania as Specter battles it out with Sestak. Will they even remember poor Arlen's name come Wednesday morning? Meanwhile, the last time Obama appeared to campaign with Specter was in... September 2009. Oh dear. And Biden could have made a last minute appearance for the senator on Sunday if he so desired, they were in the same town for crying out loud, but even Biden had the sense to run away from this dead duck. Most polls show that even if Specter wins the primary, he's duck soup in the general election come November. Clearly, it's time to distance yourself if you're Obama.


From the Pittsburgh-Tribune Review:

The White House is seeking to distance President Barack Obama from longtime Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter as the Democrat faces shaky election prospects in Tuesday's Pennsylvania primary.

On the eve of the election, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said that while the president was following the Pennsylvania race — as well as primaries in Arkansas and Kentucky — he wasn't watching that closely.

That's a far cry from a year ago, when Obama said Specter would have his "full support" after the Republican lawmaker switched to the Democratic party. The president appeared with Specter at a rally in Pennsylvania in September, telling the crowd that Specter came to Washington "to fight for the working men and women of Pennsylvania."

That rally would be the last time Obama would make a personal appearance for Specter's campaign. Though there were reports that Specter aides asked Obama to make an 11th-hour trip to Pennsylvania, the White House made it clear last week that wouldn't be happening.

Obama aides had been hoping to avoid a repeat of the Massachusetts Senate race earlier this year, when Obama made a last minute trip to campaign for Democrat Martha Coakley, who would go on to lose the seat by Sen. Edward Kennedy.

With these kind of friends, who needs enemies? Poor Specter should have expected as much from a president who wasn't ashamed to throw his grandmother and spiritual mentor for 20 years under the bus. Is it too late to switch parties again and make Obama's year hell by filibustering Kagan, not to mention holding up cap-and-tax legislation? What's payback for um, not getting paid back?

Finally, I leave you with this video which sums up the White House political strategy quite clearly.

UPDATE: Fox News is calling the race for Sestak. Epic fail.

Sioux City Video Redefines Cool

Today we take a break from politics to celebrate flyover country. I get the feeling a lot of elites would rather be caught dead than in Sioux City, Iowa doing anything, let alone lip syncing a Jefferson Starship song. That's a shame.


If you haven't seen this gem yet, prepare yourself for the greatest feast of Chamber of Commerce cheese whiz any town could come up, "We Built Sioux City." I've argued before that "We Built This City" is perhaps the lamest, whitest rock n roll song ever written. And yet somehow the good-natured people of Sioux City have made themselves seem even whiter and lamer in comparison. I'm not exactly sure what the message is here. That it would have been great to live in Sioux City during the 1980s or that Sioux City is 20 years behind the times? One thing's for certain watching this video. Sioux City was definitely not built on rock n' roll. Soft country and Weird Al Yankovic maybe.



The lack of pretense in this town is admirable, and I would gladly join these Iowans for a meal at the Chili's, Appleby's, or Arby's of their choosing. I'd also like to see some other mid-size American cities step up to the plate and try to top this with a cheesier song. I'm thinking something like "You Ain't Seen Tulsa Yet" or "Keep on Rockin' in Fort Wayne." Any other suggestions?

Ragin' Kagan

We should have known the day Obama said the words "Joe Biden for vice-president" that his supreme court nominees were going to be unqualified train wrecks. True, Elena "Softball-playing-but-not-a-lesbian" Kagan is more qualified for the job she seeks than the president was when he ran for office, but he at least went out and fooled an electorate. SCOTUS nominees are supposed to earn this honor. As it now stands, Kagan will instead try to fool 51 senators.

Question: Has Obama made a confidence-inspiring appointment to any government position yet? Joe Biden notwithstanding. Let's run through some of the names. There's Hillary Clinton, who botched a reset button so badly that it galvanized Putin to pursue all Old Russia's wildest dreams. There's Tim Geithner, who couldn't figure out his own taxes but is supposed to figure out how to regulate the complicated derivatives market on Wall Street. There's Anita Dunn, who admitted her favorite political philosopher was a Communist mass murderer. And let's not forget Robert Gibbs, who might be the most childish, antagonistic, and immature man to ever "answer" questions at the White House.

I could go on. Valerie Jarrett spearheaded an effort to bring the Olympics here that somehow managed to finish last among five finalist countries. Janet Napolitano thinks every time a terrorist fails to improperly set off a bomb it is evidence that the system worked and our government thwarted an attack. Tom Daschel, scratch that, he never made it past confirmation. And Obama's Secretary of Interior was whitewater rafting the week after the BP oil spill occurred and made no effort to rush to the scene.

Anyway, you get the idea. These picks leave a lot to be desired. The SCOTUS must have been especially shocked when Obama's first appointment, Sonia Sotomayor, was tapped just after her lower court ruling was rebuked and overturned by the justices in Ricci v. DeStefano. And now Barack the Magnificent brings us Ragin' Kagan, the Harriet Miers of the Left.

Kagan seems nice enough and I understand she bats clean-up at the annual Harvard student-faculty softball game. But for a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land, I'd like to think we ask for a little more than dean credentials and a .300 lifetime batting average. While President Obama's other unfortunate appointments will expire, the justices don't go away with the rest of the ideologues when voters tire of their incompetence. We're stuck with Sotomayor and Kagan forever should she win confirmation.

Let's make this simple. Elena Kagan is not even close to the most qualified candidate for this position. She's just the closest idealogue in Obama's circle that he thinks he can get away with hiring. No paper trail. No difficult to explain decisions or worrisome socialist-leaning legal papers (well not more than one). She's as blank a slate as Obama was when he ran for president. Which is exactly why she should be rejected.

Once upon a time in a different America not that far away, the most qualified judges and attorneys had to spend decades developing a legal philosophy, writing papers, and making valued constitutional decisions before appearing on a short list to be considered for the supreme court. Today, it's more like a short bus list. John Roberts was extremely qualified and shined during his Senate confirmation, but since then ideology has prevailed over jurisprudence and experience.

I doubt many would argue that there aren't at least two hundred more deserving legal minds in this country who are better prepared for this and some of those surely lean to the Left. The president should be looking to them and not trying to round out the court with a non-judicial, consensus-building professor with a disdain for military recruiting.

I'm not just being partisan here. I actually see a sliver of moderation in Kagan based on her work during the Clinton years, although it's hard to tell if she wasn't making political decisions so much as legal ones. I get the feeling that her criteria for deciding the former is much different than the latter, and she's certainly holding the latter close to the vest. But if I'm making a hire for life, and that's the bottom line here, if I'm Warren Buffet and I'm selecting the executive to run my financial empire for the next 30 years without any recourse to fire them, I'm looking for someone with more experience other than just academia. Of course, academia is the only non-government experience our president has ever known. Which is probably why everyone he hires has the feel of a nutty professor.


UPDATE: For a different perspective, you might want to read Prof. Volokh's assessment of Kagan's four major articles. He seems to think she might be the best we can get out of this president.  Crooked Timber disagrees, and one astute commenter notes an alarming statement Kagan made about free speech as Solicitor General, or at least one alarming enough to raise the eyebrows of eight of the justices in U.S. v. Stevens.

Moms Rule

They sacrifice for us more than we'll ever sacrifice for them. And it's not for want of trying. They are just so much better at it and why not? It's in the job description. So Happy Mother's Day to all the bland, nit-picking, "Dancing With the Stars" watching moms out there who only seem uninteresting because they have so much interest in us, their children. What could be duller than that?

I leave you with this hilarious ode to Mother's Day by Garrison Keller. Yes, he's a liberal, but I allow myself to be entertained by all political persuasions so long as they don't insult me politically in their work. Garrison rarely does, whereas I don't care if I ever see another James Cameron or Oliver Stone film again. Click to listen.

PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION: MOTHER'S DAY CALL

Tea Partier Calls for Revolution in United States

Oh wait. My bad. Turns out it's not a tea partier, but a UCLA professor and member of La Raza calling for a Mexican revolution against the "frail, racist white people" in Arizona. Bet you won't hear about this kind of hate in the mainstream media. They're too busy painting law-abiding American citizens who want to protect their lives and property along the border as the bad guys in Obama's bizarro world.

Here are the "highlights" of the professor's speech. I'm betting he teaches chicano studies or something equally ridiculous:

"The land we stand on is stolen, occupied Mexico...Viva Castro! Viva Hugo Chavez!... We will no longer fall for these lies called borders... We see ourselves as the northern front of a Latin American revolutionary movement. There's 40 million potential revolutionaries north of the border, inside the belly of the beast... Our enemy is capitalism and U.S. imperialism."

Let me get this straight. If you're living in poverty and thinking of coming to the United States for a better life, this idiot Communist professor is asking you to revolt against the very system that is going to afford you the best opportunities to succeed? Leave Mexico to make the U.S. more like Latin America? That sounds like a wasted trip. Don't they teach logic anymore at UCLA? Someone see if this guy is related to Ward Churchill.

Hat tip: Gateway Pundit

UPDATE: The video may be from 2007. That doesn't change the content or the hatred behind the message, but it does mean that this was not a response to Arizona's new law. Also, the speaker is apparently a public high school teacher, not a UCLA professor.

Obama Would Buy Newsweek Except He Already Owns Them

Who needs Pravda when you've got Newsweek? The relationship is so cozy, the president has even written stories for them. Too bad they could go the way of Woolworth's. Anybody want to buy a 76-year-old weekly magazine in the age of the internet? If so, please contact the Suckers Dept. of the Washington Post Company.

This is the news magazine that ran a serious cover story on "Why Joe Biden Is No Joke." And that was only a couple years after running a false story about a Koran being flushed down a toilet at Gitmo. Then there was the scathing expose of all those racist babies. Now we learn they lost $30 million last year, and that was with Barack the Magnificent on the cover every other week. No wonder they're all socialists now. They've been running the place like a government agency for years. But don't feel too bad for their favorite cover model if Newsweek folds. Barry has a knack for talking their most obnoxious, liberal reporters into writing praise-filled books of fluff about him (see Richard Wolffe). Or just joining his communications staff.

Of Muslims, Christians, and Tea Parties

Turns out Faisal Shahzad is not a tea partier. Who knew? Certainly not the kos kids. Neal Boortz commented on this Daily Kos poll from a few days ago, which has to be seen to be believed:

THE TIMES SQUARE BOMBER WILL END UP BEING:

An al Qaeda terrorist  ---4%
An American sympathetic to al Qaeda ---5%
A militia wackjob  ---30%
A teapartier ---32%
A religious wackjob (making an anti-abortion statement) ---9%

As usual, the kos kids were 180 degrees away from being right, but it illustrates perfectly the delusional, head-in-the-sand behavior of the Left. Sadly, the Obama administration, Hollywood elites, and the mainstream media all subscribe to this same line of bizarro world thinking. 

That translates into roughly 71% of Olbermann viewers predicting the terror suspect is more likely to be a conservative "wackjob" than an al Qaeda terrorist (who for some reason isn't listed as a wackjob). These are the same progressive Democrats who were some of Barack Obama's biggest supporters for president. Any questions?

There hasn't been one act of violence let alone an arrest at the hundreds of Tea Party protests attended by millions of Americans, while there is an unquestionable and overwhelming history of attacks against our country by Islamic extremists. But if you were an alien who just landed on earth yesterday, you would have never heard of a Muslim terrorist and would probably be trying to figure out why our government is at war with Tea Partiers. What does it say about a society, and in particular the Democratic Party, when perception is so far from reality?

Remember these headlines from a month ago?

Christian Militia Taken Down

Agent Infiltrated Christian Militia

Christian Militia Suspects Ordered Jailed

Group Target of FBI Raids is Christian Militia

Christian Militia Accused of Plotting to Kill Cops

Geez, I wonder which word stands out the most. Nevermind I had never even heard of a Christian militia before, and I live in a state that proudly clings to its guns and religion. These arrested individuals have little in common with Christianity, but the way the media reported it, you would have thought there were thousands of these radical groups springing up overnight and Christianity was turning some dark corner. Not hardly.

Now let's look at the headlines about Shahzad, the failed Times Square bomber:

Accused New York Bomber Appears to Act Alone

Times Square Bomber Charged in Terror Plot

Pakistan Native Admits to Times Square Bomb

Times Square Bomber Motive is a Mystery

Pakistan Emigre in Connecticut Arrested as Times Square Bomber

Broker: NY Bomb Suspect Didn't Like Bush

Notice anything missing? Just like the case of Major Nadal Hasan, we have a Muslim fanatic with ties to the Taliban practicing jihad against America. Yet none of these media outlets dares to mention his religious affiliation. "Oh no!" one thinks upon reading this. What's going on in our beloved Connecticut that is feeding extremism? Or is it Bush again, up to his old man tricks? The media and the Left continue to go out of their way to make excuses for the predictable behavior of an Islamic terrorist, and one CNN anchor even wondered if the foreclosure of the suspect's house might have triggered the event. Are you kidding me?!

It's now official. You have a better chance of seeing a Sasquatch than the word Muslim in any report of terrorism by the mainstream media. But the word isn't just missing from the headline of these stories. It's missing from the entire texts. It's been voluntarily omitted by all the biggest news providers. This is as bad or worse than the South Park episode where Comedy Central censored out every mention of Mohammad for fear of violent retaliation by... who exactly? Surely not Muslim extremists. According to the mainstream media, they don't exist.

Are progressives so uncomfortable with evil that they prefer to ignore it altogether? Or are they so bigoted and brainwashed that they think it only exists in white Christians who own guns? We have a complete disconnect here with the Left fixated on their own imaginary boogieman while political correctness whitewashes the real culprit of extremism out of existence.

Who needs Pravda? We seem to be doing just fine hypnotizing ourselves.

Mainstream Media Magically Discovers Constitution Now That Minorities Involved

I'm sure everything I'm about to write is politically incorrect. So be it. After all, we have freedom of speech so that citizens don't feel pressured into silence by the mob or the accepted conventional wisdom. I remind you that Galileo was ostracized and imprisoned by the ruling institution of his day, the Roman Catholic Church, for supporting Copernicus' theory that the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around. I'm making no such groundbreaking claims here. And perhaps that's what is saddest of all. I am merely pointing out the obvious, but pointing out the obvious has increasingly become taboo.

The mainstream media spent over a year covering ObamaCare. There were protests and tea parties and town hall meetings where the debate often got heated. The majority of the population opposed the bill (and still opposes the bill). Citizens expressed outrage over the potential consequences of a law giving the government the power to ration health care, not to mention the requirement that everyone purchase health insurance from private companies or go to jail. During this time not once did I hear any analyst on CNN or NBC or at the New York Times question the constitutionality of the law. Not once did any of these pundits ask if the government was overreaching. Even after ObamaCare passed and governors and attorney generals responded with lawsuits to block the legislation on the grounds of enumerated powers and the tenth amendment, their political motivation was questioned rather than the merits of the law.

Fast forward one month. Arizona passes an immigration bill that practically mimics the federal immigration law, and the next thing you know you can't watch cable news without Colombian Shakira, Canadian Steve Nash, Major League Baseball, and every other yahoo pretending to be a constitutional lawyer. What changed? Well pardon me for noticing, but I believe it's the color of the protesters skin. The majority of tea party demonstrators, as it's been pointed out a thousand times by the mainstream media, tend to be white. The majority of protesters against Arizona's law? Hispanic. As one columnist for Latino USA exaggerated, Arizona's law means it's "open season for hunting brown people." I think that outdoes any rhetoric Sarah Palin has come close to using, but you won't hear a peep about this comment from the elites.

Overnight, the same brain dead TV personalities and politicians who never questioned ObamaCare suddenly had no problem questioning the motives of Arizona, some going so far as to suggest a boycott of the state. Overnight, Nazi comparisons went from outrageous and incendiary right wing rhetoric to totally acceptable grievances from the Left. Overnight, showing your papers (to prove you had health insurance) went from no big deal to a very big deal (if you have to prove your citizenship).

While I support Arizona's new law as a common sense measure aimed at protecting the lives and property of US citizens who live along the border, I also support the rights of the protesters and understand the hesitation some Hispanics might have about how the law is enforced. Fortunately, the lawmakers had this in mind when they crafted the bill, and it goes out of its way to prevent law enforcement from stopping someone based just on their race.

If Leftist groups want to question the constitutionality of this bill, fine. Unlike liberals who passed ObamaCare, I welcome the debate. That's what this country is all about. But enough with the race baiting. I still haven't heard a great legal argument for the court not to uphold the Arizona law. It's an attempt to step in and fill the void left from the federal government's refusal to enforce and protect the border. Meanwhile, the hyperbole against the bill has been way over-the-top. Actually, that might be the biggest understatement I've ever made.

Legal Insurrection, which is one of my favorite blogs and received recognition from none other than Rush Limbaugh last week, has a great piece about the Arizona race card and wonders why the Left is so afraid to just come out in favor of the open-border policy they clearly support. Probably for the same reason they are afraid to acknowledge their continued support of socialism and wealth redistribution. Better to attack the compassion and motives of their opponent than discuss an issue head-on.

We are either a nation of laws or a nation of men. Either questions of constitutionality matter for every individual regardless of group identity and skin color, or special interest groups and cultural diversity trump the rule of law. It appears Obama favors the latter given his previous statements about "police acting stupidly" and the appointment of Sonia "Wise Latina Women Make Better Judges" Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. That's a shame.

If we are going to have comprehensive immigration reform on a federal level and grant more temporary work visas, how are we supposed to know who is here legally and who is here illegally without having the right to check papers? Doesn't the point of calling them undocumented workers, as the president prefers, back up the need to check their status? Why even go through the trouble of reform if we aren't going to enforce the law? The state of Arizona seems to be taking a rational, deliberate step in the right direction.

Exit Question: Given the expired visas (and illegal alien status) of some of the 9/11 hijackers, would it have been okay to check their papers or would that have also been a "question of fairness" that "went too far"?