"He now keeps track of them all on an Excel spreadsheet."

Mark Steyn, in this excellent interview with Chuck Colson, touches on the story of a man whose "donated" sperm has "fathered," at last count, 150 children. The whole interview is worth a listen but discussion of the deterioration of the family starts at about 14 minutes in:



Mark :

The idea, for a start, that this man, who left a smidgeonette of genetic material that he gave to this particular girl and to 149 other boys and girls, is a father, and that that's what a father is, you know, a few fluid ounces in a test tube; to read that story for anyone who had come from mid 20th century America . . . he would think he'd landed on Planet of the Apes, he was in some alternative universe.

Brave new world indeed. For the children and for society, anonymous sperm "donation" creates complications which would have been apparent to anyone willing to spend five minutes thinking about it. From the NYT article:

Now, there is growing concern among parents, donors and medical experts about potential negative consequences of having so many children fathered by the same donors, including the possibility that genes for rare diseases could be spread more widely through the population. Some experts are even calling attention to the increased odds of accidental incest between half sisters and half brothers, who often live close to one another.

“My daughter knows her donor’s number for this very reason,” said the mother of a teenager conceived via sperm donation in California who asked that her name be withheld to protect her daughter’s privacy. “She’s been in school with numerous kids who were born through donors. She’s had crushes on boys who are donor children. It’s become part of sex education” for her.

Critics say that fertility clinics and sperm banks are earning huge profits by allowing too many children to be conceived with sperm from popular donors, and that families should be given more information on the health of donors and the children conceived with their sperm. They are also calling for legal limits on the number of children conceived using the same donor’s sperm and a re-examination of the anonymity that cloaks many donors.

Some "donors" are feeling exploited. To be honest, it's hard for me to work up a lot of sympathy for a guy who masturbates into a cup for money, and without a care for what happens afterwards. It doesn't strike me as a manly way to behave. But anyway:

Sperm donors, too, are becoming concerned. “When I asked specifically how many children might result, I was told nobody knows for sure but that five would be a safe estimate,” said a sperm donor in Texas who asked that his name be withheld because of privacy concerns. “I was told that it would be very rare for a donor to have more than 10 children.”

He later discovered in the Donor Sibling Registry that some donors had dozens of children listed. “It was all about whatever they could get away with,” he said of the sperm bank to which he donated. “It is unfair and reprehensible to the donor families, donors and donor children.”

Ms. Kramer, the registry’s founder, said that one sperm donor on her site learned that he had 70 children. He now keeps track of them all on an Excel spreadsheet. “Every once in a while he gets a new kid or twins,” she said. “It’s overwhelming, and not what he signed up for. He was promised low numbers of children.”

Perhaps the article is referring to the subject of the story linked to by Ann Althouse. Ben Seisler, a law student at the time of his many "donations," professes not to have thought it through. He looks back and says, "I dunno. I guess I was dumb." His fiancee thinks he was selfish. Click for video.

The NYT article ends with some good questions:

Experts are not certain what it means to a child to discover that he or she is but one of 50 children — or even more. “Experts don’t talk about this when they counsel people dealing with infertility,” Ms. Kramer said. “How do you make connections with so many siblings? What does family mean to these children?”

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Coffin, meet nails

I'm sensing a theme here:

- Instapundit: PRESIDENT IMPOTENT: Durbin says Democrats don’t currently have the votes for Obama jobs bill.

- Tina Brown: Obama "wasn't ready, it turns out, really."

- Roger Kimball:

So please, Barack, don’t tell us that America has “gone soft” or “lost its competitive edge” when it’s you and your policies that are as soft and edgeless as a freshly shucked oyster.

- UPI: Obama's Wall Street donors look elsewhere

- FOX: Latino Support for Obama Below 50 Pct. a Year Before Election

- US News: Obama is Finding it Tough to Engage Core Constituencies

- The Troglopundit: President Obama: marked down!  

- Krauthammer: Landslide

- New Orleans sign: "Change Me. I stink."

I was going to end with that, but this just in:

- Even Warren Buffett isn't entirely on board with Obama's "jobs bill." If you filter out the qualifiers from Buffett's answers there isn't much left. Something tells me this won't improve the royal disposition, already "testy" and "frustrated." Yes, it's  pathetic.

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Another strike against Romney: David Brooks likes the "tall, well-groomed brunette"

David Brooks, self-confessed sap, is falling for a new fella:

That’s the night I noticed Romney was the best candidate in the field. Since then I’ve noticed that he has given three debate performances that are better than any Barack Obama has given in his life. (Obama’s a better speechmaker, but Romney’s a better debater.) So now I’m settling into the idea that Romney might well be president. This will be interesting because he has a tendency to hire people who look vaguely like him, so I’m picturing a White House filled with tall, well-groomed brunettes.

Am I the only one cringing at the word "brunette?" It's almost as bad as Brooks's  s-less "pant." Nobody else talks like that. As to pant creases, we aren't told whether Romney's are razor-sharp (let's just assume they are), or whether he can dazzle on Niebuhr for twenty-minute stretches, but he has a zombie-like talent for selecting campaign help:

I spend a lot of time looking at whom the candidates are choosing as their advisers. Romney clearly has the best group. He’s harvested some of the best brains in the G.O.P.

If that rings a bell, it's because Brooks said the same thing about Barack Obama:

"He's phenomenally good at surrounding himself with a team," Brooks said. "I disagree with them on most issues, but I am given a lot of comfort by the fact that the people he's chosen are exactly the people I think most of us would want to choose if we were in his shoes. So again, I have doubts about him just because he was such a mediocre senator, but his capacity to pick staff is impressive."

It's impressive all right. Obama's picks (some of whom are no longer part of the awesomest dream team ever) constitute a rogues gallery of corruptocrats, bullies, charlatans, marxists, and worse. Partial list: Joe Biden, Eric Holder, Tim Geithner, Valerie Jarrett, Anita Dunn, John Holdren, Van Jones, Kevin Jennings.

Isn't it funny that people are still paying David Brooks to provide us with his opinions?

Husband continues to be deeply embarrassed that Brooks attended his alma mater, the University of Chicago.

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Obama blames Fast and Furious on "lack of resources"

More damaging allegations are emerging about the Obama administration's lethal gun-running operation. Michael Walsh reports:

This just might be the smoking gun we’ve been waiting for to break the festering “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal wide open: the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives apparently ordered one of its own agents to purchase firearms with taxpayer money, and sell them directly to a Mexican drug cartel.

Let that sink in: After months of pretending that “Fast and Furious” was a botched surveillance operation of illegal gun-running spearheaded by the ATF and the US attorney’s office in Phoenix, it turns out that the government itself was selling guns to the bad guys.

Mr. Walsh has a couple of theories on what was really going on here, so read the rest. Bottom line:

People were killed with Fast and Furious weapons, including at least two American agents and hundreds of Mexicans. And the taxpayers picked up the bill.

So where’s the outrage?

Ask the liberal media about that. They're quite adept at stirring it up when the other party is in power:

Watergate didn’t have a body count.  Gunwalker has hundreds.

How does President Obama explain why federal agents sold guns to drug cartels?

Obama blamed budget problems, in part, for what some see as ATF’s incompetence. “Part of the problem is budgetary [and] … we are going to have to figure out ways to operate smarter and more efficiently in investigations without a huge expansion of resources  because those resources are aren’t there.”

Oh. Right. That makes a lot of sense. Bring on the special prosecutor.

(H/t: Instapundit)

Many thanks to Michelle Malkin for the link.

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Why Obama can't help unemployed blacks

It's the ideology, stupid. It won't allow him to do anything that will boost the economy. All he can do is make it worse. Victor Davis Hanson calls it Obama's racial crisis:

Unspoken, of course, is the truth that Obama’s statism, deficits, interferences in the private sector, and spread-the-wealth rhetoric have frightened business owners into stasis -- and the resulting slowdown hurts blacks most of all. But in this fantasy world of racial spoils, Obama’s profligate spending and borrowing can be faulted only for not being profligate enough. To suggest any other diagnosis would be to call into question the entire federal racial industry of the last 50 years -- and those who have benefited the most by administering it.

I clumsily tried to express something like that the other day:

The truly discouraging aspect of Obama's conflicts with the CBC is that neither he nor they would ever advocate any policy that would promote real opportunity for poor, entitlement-dependent blacks. All they've got to offer are more government programs. The CBC's only complaint is that Obama hasn't been able to expand entitlements even more than he has. But the sad truth is that his alleged jobs bill won't create jobs, nor do anything else to improve the lot of poor black Americans. This turgid drama is really a farce.

I can but try. More from VDH:

Indeed, there is something curious in the liberal argument that Obama, once deified as the ideal megaphone for progressive agendas, is now to be faulted for the current unpopularity of liberalism, given that he remains a far more effective advocate than Jimmy Carter and a far more doctrinaire leftist than Bill Clinton. It is almost as if liberal scapegoating of Obama is an attempt to shift responsibility for progressive failure from the message onto the hapless messenger — an unfairness that a [Morgan] Freeman would never discuss.

Or understand, I daresay. In this clip, Freeman strikes me as a very naive man. Maybe if I slogged through the entire interview I'd conclude he was something other than a useful idiot but I haven't got time for the pain. (Others aren't quite so cynical.)

Back to Prof. Hanson, who penetrates more layers of reality than Morgan Freeman or Barack Obama will ever dream of in their dim, narrow philosophies:

To criticize Obama endangers the historical nexus between government entitlements and those who ensure them. So powerful and lucrative is this relationship that whites who question both its utility and its intent, and blacks who are vocal about its unintended destructiveness, are labeled respectively racists and Uncle Toms. Indeed, that paradox is at the heart of Obama’s racial crisis: It is his own orthodox leftist agenda that has stalled the recovery and decimated black America. Yet for those who are invested in a crumbling Great Society, the remedy of unleashing the private sector and downsizing government would be worse than the recessionary malady itself. [emphasis added]

Yes, indeed. Doing the right thing by the economy would exact too high a price from the left. Obama's ideology makes any positive economic move on his part a virtual impossibility. He and his fellow statists can do nothing other than run the country into the ground. It's who and what they are. Anything else would be heresy.

More from Prof. Hanson:

The paradoxes of race have even stranger contours. In the case of a Harry Reid or a Joe Biden in 2008, there was an almost gushing relief that a black candidate for president did not sound or act “black.” With Obama, they at last could square the circle of publicly prizing their close associations with a black presidential candidate while (almost) privately being relieved that he sounded indistinguishable from themselves.

In contrast, white tea-party conservatives, to my knowledge, have not expressed any worry that the accent or cadence of a Herman Cain (or of, say, a Clarence Thomas) was different from their own. They apparently are less apt to equate talent or aptitude with a predetermined brand of diction or mannerism, far more ready to appreciate authenticity and candor that accrue from practical experience in the workplace. To a conservative, someone who fought in the fierce arena of private commerce deserves respect in a way that someone establishing race as essential rather than incidental to his character, in hopes of garnering state advantage, does not.

Who, then, in the Tea Party, cares that the businessman Cain does not sound like a Yale academic, or that the crease in his pants might be not so straight, or that he cannot excite tics in cable anchormen’s legs? For tea-partiers, race is irrelevant: Being a Godfather’s Pizza CEO apparently is proof of greater accomplishment than a long political career, an Ivy League degree, or a distinguished tenure on Wall Street.

Just so. But the left needs to spin the Tea Party as a racist entity, for all the reasons mentioned above. Read the whole thing and pass it on. Truth is a powerful weapon.

Thanks to Michelle Malkin for the Buzzworthy link.
Thanks also to Doug Ross.
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About that "investment" in government schools

Mark Steyn comments on Christian Schneider's defense of in-state tuition rates for illegal aliens (bracketed insertion is Steyn's):

By the time an undocumented [sic!] child makes it from first grade to graduating high school, taxpayers have already sunk over $100,000 into that child’s education. To pull the plug on those children because of the actions of their parents would be unfair, and would nullify the investment taxpayers have already made in the kid. …

So while they’re here, our state would be better off giving these kids the chance to make our country better, rather than sentencing them to a second-class existence.

Steyn:

Good grief. First, the fact that 12 years of American education costs over a hundred grand ought to be an outrage, not an initial down-payment: We spend more per pupil than any advanced nation other than Luxembourg, and at least the Luxembourgers have something to show for it.

Second, the idea that government spending is an “investment” as opposed to prudent budgeting for necessary responsibilities is a classic all-purpose leftist euphemism for statism without end that no conservative should have any truck with: Why, to end our “investment” in “these kids”  after a mere 12 years is to “sentence” people to a “second-class existence”! (And incidentally, how many taxpayers willingly chose this particular investment for their portfolio?)

Right. Choice has nothing to do with it. Husband and I educate (on a good day) our kids at home. We pay for all the books and the teacher donates her time. With no principals, vice principals, teaching assistants, clerical workers, curriculum experts, guidance counselors, psychologists, nurses, reading specialists, disciplinarians, security guards, hall monitors, lunch ladies, or janitors (if only!) to siphon off our money, it's pretty affordable. But, of course, we pay a lot more for our county schools (which we neither use nor support in principle) through our property taxes, payment of which is definitely not optional.

Regular readers are familiar with my anti-government school rants. Home education, among its many other virtues, is exponentially cheaper and more effective than state schools.

Sometimes it's fun to fantasize about the field trips our family might have taken with our seven students, given a mere $10K per child (some districts spend a lot more) every year from grade 1 through 12. Our memorization of all the US capitals might have included a visit to each one. Okay, maybe the kids wouldn't appreciate a grand tour of Lansing, Hartford, or Jackson. How about a little walkabout in the Australian Outback instead of a trip to the zoo? A first-hand look at the pyramids would nicely supplement the study of ancient Egypt. And a modest junket to see the Grand Canyon would make our unit on geology really come alive. My three older girls might have enjoyed a bit of opera in Milan, or at least a season subscription to the Met or the Lyric. Or both! With $840,000K to blow, we could think big.

Anyway, read the rest of Steyn's post. I think it's safe to say that some conservatives have a blind spot when it comes to government schools and the value of the "education" acquired therein. Many graduates from "excellent" school systems, replete with taxpayer dollars and great reputations, can't pass community college placement tests in basic math or English. They then enroll in remedial classes which often don't help them, either. So much for the $100,000K "investment" in that child's "education."

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Gen-lost

In case you haven't already seen this terribly depressing census report from last week, here are a few excerpts (emphasis added):

Opting to stay put, roughly 5.9 million Americans 25-34 last year lived with their parents, an increase of 25 percent from before the recession. Driven by a record 1 in 5 young men who doubled up in households, men are now nearly twice as likely as women to live with their parents.

Marriages fell to a record low last year of just 51.4 percent among adults 18 and over, compared with 57 percent in 2000. Among young adults 25-34, marriage was at 44.2 percent, also a new low.

Broken down by race and ethnicity, 31 percent of young black men lived in their parents' homes, compared with 21 percent of young Latino men and 15 percent of young white men. At the state level, New York had the highest share of young men living with their parents at 21 percent, followed by New Jersey and Hawaii, all states with higher costs of living. Most of the cities with low percentages of young adults living at home were in the Midwest.

Younger women across all race and ethnic groups had fewer children compared with 2008. Births declined 6 percent among 20-34 year-olds over the two-year period even though the number of women in this group increased by more than 1 million, according to an analysis of census data by Kenneth Johnson, sociology professor and senior demographer at the University of New Hampshire. Never before has such a drop in births occurred when the population of young adults increased in at least 15 years.

Six percent.

Call it perpetual adolescence, or the death (or is it only dormancy?) of the survival instinct, or whatever.The whole point of parenting is to produce an independent individual. A healthy society would support that goal. When young men and young women aren't interested in or able to take their turns as grown-ups in the circle of life, we've all got a problem.

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Obama's sound and fury [updated]

Obama worked himself into a lather in his speech to the Congressional Black Caucus the other night, winding it up with some push-back against Rep. Maxine Waters and others who have openly complained that he hasn't done enough for blacks hit hard by his lousy economy:

So I don’t know about you, CBC, but the future rewards those who press on. With patient and firm determination, I am gonna press on for jobs.  I'm gonna press on for equality. I'm gonna press on for the sake of our children. I'm gonna press on for the sake of all those families who are struggling right now. I don’t have time to feel sorry for myself. I don’t have time to complain. I am gonna press on.

I expect all of you to march with me and press on. Take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes. Shake it off. Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying. We are gonna press on. We’ve got work to do, CBC.

God bless you, and God bless the United States of America. 

At that point he gives the podium a smack for emphasis and stalks across the stage. Watch the last few minutes of the video to get the full effect.
 
The truly discouraging aspect of Obama's conflicts with the CBC is that neither he nor they would ever advocate any policy that would promote real opportunity for poor, entitlement-dependent blacks. All they've got to offer are more government programs. The CBC's only complaint is that Obama hasn't been able to expand entitlements even more than he has. But the sad truth is that his alleged jobs bill won't create jobs, nor do anything else to improve the lot of poor black Americans. This turgid drama is really a farce.

Joel Gehrke comments on the religious overtones of Obama's speech:

President Obama made an appeal to the religious faith of black voters at a Congressional Black Caucus rally, likening Biblical prophets who had faith in God -- and so refused to worship an idol -- to the black voters who "keep the faith" by supporting him and his policies - and, he hopes, his reelection campaign.

Faced with growing doubt among the faithful, the angry would-be messiah insists that, contrary to their own lying eyes, he really is bringing them to the promised land. I'm not sure calling them crying, grumbling, complaining quitters will renew their faith in him, but surely Obama knows best. He, at least, got pumped up from his sermon.

Query: Was the AP "racist" for accurately reporting Obama's dropped g's? Mark Smith, who did the transcription for the AP, explains:

Normally, I lean toward the clean-it-up school of quote transcribing – for everyone. But in this case, the President appeared to be making such a point of dropping Gs, and doing so in a rhythmic fashion, that for me to insert them would run clearly counter to his meaning. I believe I was respecting his intent in this. Certainly disrespect was the last thing I intended.

Decide for yourself. Video of the speech here and here. Whitehouse.gov transcript here.

President Obama mentions above some things he doesn't have time for. But he manages to make time, and quite a bit of it, for what's really important to him. Yesterday he put on his own marchin' shoes and played four hours of golf with Bill Clinton, followed by some serious fundraisin' for his reelection (emphasis mine):

After Barack Obama played a round of golf with Bill Clinton yesterday, the Fundraiser In Chief headed out to the West Coast for a 3-day, 3-state tour to hold seven fund raisers for the DNC and himself. These include some pricy affairs with former Microsoft execs at $35,000 a plate, as well as the usual Hollywood and San Francisco wing-dings for dummies with too much money. Obama is expected to raise some $8 million dollars during this fund raising tour. But since he will also give the occasional speech about his defunct jobs bill, the taxpayers will foot the expenses for this trip, costing us well more than $8 million dollars.

That's called "pressin' on," y'all.

***

Oh dear. Lady Gaga attended one of the fundraisers in a get-up that made her eight feet tall. Sorry, can't find a photo.

***

Conservative Black Chick finds Obama's CBC speech insulting:

The implications here that ALL Blacks are waiting for a government handout ; all Blacks wear bedroom slippers and/or are sitting on the couch not working is despicable and demonstrates how out of touch the nation’s first BLACK president really is. Why would the nation’s first Black president make such an incendiary statement telling blacks to “take off their bedroom slippers,” which conjures up a stereotypical image of Blacks being lazy.  Can you imagine Obama saying the same thing to an all white crowd in Iowa?

Blacks will stop complaining when the 16.7% black jobless rate, the highest in 25 years declines and when Obama is voted out of office. Liberal or Conservative, blacks should be horrified by Obama’s speech. Blacks have “equality” Mr. President what they need along with the rest of Americans is jobs.  This is the most insulting rhetoric I’ve heard in a long time.

Read the rest. Hat tip to Doug Ross.

Thanks to Michelle Malkin for the Buzzworthy link.

***

Go pop some corn. Maxine Waters has responded:

“I don’t know who he was talking to, because we’re certainly not complaining,” said Waters, who has been critical of Obama in the past. “We are working. We support him and we are protecting that base because we want people to be enthusiastic about him when that election rolls around.”

Obama told the audience at the annual gala to “take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes. Shake it off. Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying. We are going to press on. We’ve got work to do, CBC.”

Waters said she found some of the language Obama used “not appropriate” and said it “surprised me a little bit.”

“I found that language a bit curious because the president spoke to the Hispanic Caucus and certainly they are pushing him on immigration and despite the fact that he's appointed [Justice Sonia] Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, he has an office for excellence in Hispanic education right in the White House, they’re still pushing him and he certainly didn’t tell them to stop complaining,” she said.

“And he never would say that to the gay and lesbian community who really pushed him on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Or even in a speech to AIPAC, he would never say to the Jewish community ‘stop complaining’ about Israel.”

I'm not so sure about that. 

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Today's must-read

Andy McCarthy has an excellent article up at NRO: Can We Tell the Truth?

No one I know, least of all me, is arguing that we need to repeal compassion or common decency. I acknowledge thinking that the Republican intelligentsia’s apparent fondness for — or at least acceptance of — the entitlement state is redolent of the Left’s lack of faith in American individualism and our cultural inheritance. If Leviathan collapsed tomorrow, the states and the American people would instantly develop private and public welfare programs for the truly needy. They would spend billions on education, science, and technology, the only difference being that, with Americans making their own choices rather than allowing Big Government to usurp them, those dollars would chase real value rather than line the pockets of the regime’s union cronies and campaign bundlers.

But let us assume for argument’s sake that due deference for stability requires that we yield to the purported need for a federal welfare state. Why on earth should that require preserving the ruinous, duplicative, dysfunctional edifice that fills this role so miserably today? If what we really need is honest, transparent, means-tested welfare for those who truly cannot fend for themselves, why have we decided we are too incompetent to convince the country that we can have such a thing without failed and unsustainable programs such as Social Security and Medicare?

Read the whole thing. And don't forget your Steyn. Just a bit:

As its own contribution to the end of the world as we know it, the Obama administration has just released a document called “Living Within Our Means and Investing in the Future: The President’s Plan for Economic Growth and Deficit Reduction.” If you’re curious about the first part of the title — “Living Within Our Means” — Veronique de Rugy pointed out at National Review that under this plan debt held by the public will grow from just over $10 trillion to $17.7 trillion by 2021. In other words, the president’s definition of “Living Within Our Means” is to burn through the equivalent of the entire German, French, and British economies in new debt between now and the end of the decade. You can try this yourself next time your bank manager politely suggests you should try “living within your means”: Tell him you’ve got an ingenious plan to get your spending under control by near doubling your present debt in the course of a mere decade. He’s sure to be impressed.

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Perry's "cheap talking points"

Mark Steyn on Rick Perry's insulting illegal immigration shtick:



The debate clip is here. "I don't think you have a heart" comes a bit after the three minute mark.

In an earlier debate, Perry said this:

"The bottom line is it doesn't make any difference what the sound of your last name is. That is the American way," Perry said. "I'm proud that we are having those individuals be contributing members of our society rather than telling them, you go be on the government dole."

I think this might bug me even more than Perry's executive overreach on Gardasil. In fairness, he tries to justify the tuition policy with a bit of rational argument. But only after playing the race card. Not only is it offensive for him to imply that anyone who disagrees with him on this is a racist and a meanie who doesn't care about children; it also reveals a surprising degree of cluelessness in a veteran conservative. My fourteen year-old rolls her eyes at this kind of demonization, and she can tell you why. Where has Perry been that he doesn't recognize it as (in Steyn's words) the "cheap Democrat talking point" that it is? Does he really believe his opponents on this issue are racist and/or heartless? Or is it just his normal m. o.? Either way, I don't like it.

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Romney or Perry?

As reported before the first debate, Gov. Rick Perry is a poor debater. Politico, Sept. 6:

“In 2006, most people agreed that he showed up prepared and did fine,” Bell told POLITICO. “Then you fast forward to the Republican primary debate in 2010, and most people thought that was a really poor performance. If that Rick Perry shows up, he could be in a lot of trouble and do a lot of damage to his campaign.”

Prophetic words. I couldn't watch the debate last night but after reading analysis from Michelle Malkin (here and here) and Philip Klein ("Perry is blowing it") I'm a bit discouraged. Because if Rick Perry, my 70% solution, can't rise to the occasion, what we're left with is Mitt Romney. He may be a great family man and a very able businessman, but I can't believe he's a true conservative. I have trouble believing him, period.

His positions are tailored to whichever office he's currently running for. His horrible stance on abortion as a candidate for governor in 2002 -- "I don't accept either label, pro-life or pro-choice. Instead, I make it clear that I will preserve and protect a woman's right to choose." (conveniently jettisoned when he ran for president last time) -- is a disqualifier for me. Toss in Romneycare (a sufficient disqualifier all by itself), his granny-scaring tactics on Social Security, his accusations that Perry is too conservative, and his general all-round RINO-ness, and he drops below 20%. Smooth debate performances can't change any of that.

Perry has his glaring negatives, too: charges of crony capitalism, his weak stand on illegal immigration (which he defends with lame, insulting rhetoric about "compassion" and "last names" taken directly from the left), and his disturbing  mandate on Gardasil. But I have hopes that Perry possesses the three most important qualifications needed in the next president: He sees the extreme urgency of the mess we're in; he sincerely believes that monster government is the problem, not the solution; and he's willing to engage in the fight to beat it back.

Romney has never been a courageous politician. Philip Klein on that:

Some of Romney's many policy reversals have been overlooked in this campaign as old news, so I'll just provide a brief refresher. Romney ran for statewide office in the Massachusetts twice, in 1994 and 2002, as a pro-choice candidate, only to become publicly pro-life in 2005, just as he was gearing up to seek the GOP presidential nomination instead of seeking a second term as governor of the liberal state. During the 2008 campaign he attacked various opponents for being for gun control, amnesty and campaign finance reform. Yet at earlier points in his career, Romney supported the federal "assault weapons" ban (and signed a state ban as governor in 2004), called the McCain-Kennedy immigration reform "reasonable" and "quite different from amnesty" and supported campaign finance reform measures far more draconian than anything in McCain-Feingold. During this campaign, he's spent the last few weeks attacking his opponent Texas Gov. Rick Perry for criticizing Social Security too harshly, because he says it's politically damaging to do so.

Romney, in short, has displayed zero political courage during his career. He has held opposite positions on nearly every issue, with one obvious exception. He still hasn't disavowed the health care law he designed, campaigned for, and signed with a smiling Ted Kennedy at his side. And it happens to be  the forerunner to Obamacare. There's no reason to believe as cautious and calculating of a figure as Mitt Romney would stake the crucial first months of his presidency getting into a bruising political battle to repeal a law, when he still clings to its underlying policy ideas.

And remember, New Deal era programs weren't firmly enshrined in this country by Democrats, but becuase Republicans, once in power, stopped making the case against them and their leader, President Eisenhower, did nothing to unravel them. Thus, the damage that a President Romney could do to the cause of limited government simply by inaction on Obamacare is incalculable.

Read the whole thing.

Bluntness, obstinacy, and fearlessness can be political liabilities. They can make it hard to get elected. But they're assets our next president will need if he's going to swim against the tide of big government. Does anyone really see Mitt Romney as a man who will enthusiastically take on the status quo? He accuses Perry of being too radical. But we need a radical, in the sense of someone who's willing to deal with our problems at root level. Who is more likely to do that, Romney or Perry?

***

Many thanks to Michelle Malkin for the Buzzworthy link.

***

On Romney, husband noted: "When he attacks, he instinctively attacks from the left." He did it in 2002 and he's doing it with Perry. That should worry genuine conservatives.

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Double dip

Quote of the day:

And by doing “just about everything in his power to make matters worse,” President Obama has actively courted a double-dip, says University of Maryland economist Peter Morici.

While the massive $700 billion trade imbalance continues to drag down the U.S. economy, “this time there is no housing boom to offset it,” notes Morici, the former director of the Office of Economics at the U.S. International Trade Commission. Full employment under such conditions, he says, is “the economic equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.”

Morici blames “incompetence in Washington and arrogance on Wall Street” for the dire situation. But too-big-to-fail Wall Street firms would not be nearly as reckless and arrogant if they didn’t think Obama had their backs. So it really comes down to White House incompetence.

At this writing, the stock market has dropped 400 points today.

But at least Obama and the Mrs. are having a good time.

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Polls: Obama liked less, blamed more

One thing President Obama has held onto throughout his long descent in the polls is his likability. News stories always took pains to point out that, though Americans believed he was performing abysmally on the economy, etc., they still, for unfathomable reasons, found him personally appealing.

Now, according to this Washington Post-ABC News poll, the president's mysterious charms have worn thin. Back in April, when asked whether they had favorable or unfavorable impressions of Obama, 33% of those polled had strongly favorable feelings and 32% had strongly unfavorable feelings. Now, to borrow a phrase from Mr. Eloquent, a "whole buncha folks" like him a whole bunch less: 22% strongly favorable, 31% strongly unfavorable.

Maybe they've gotten tired of his angry, hectoring demeanor.

From another poll, more bad news for Obama:

For the first time since President Barack Obama took office, a majority of Americans believe he deserves at least some blame for the country’s economic troubles, a new poll Wednesday shows.

According to the USA Today/Gallup survey, 24 percent of Americans say Obama deserves “a great deal of blame” for the state of the economy – a 10 point jump since 2009. A majority of Americans, including six out of 10 independents, think the president deserves “a great deal or moderate” amount of blame.

Well, he did say, "Give it to me!"

Hat tip: Gateway Pundit
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Video: Powerful Perry ad

The little boy holding up the toy airplane as the jets fly overhead is pure genius.  Charlies Spiering says the ad "makes Tim Pawlenty's ads look like a Disney movie." I think it's devastating, hammering home the sad irony that the president of Hope-and-Change has brought so much failure and despair.

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Steyn stuff

SteynOnline has gotten a makeover. Its clean new look is more pleasing to the eye and a lot more functional. I like the way the newest content is highlighted. Go try it out by reading Mark's latest Happy Warrior column:

Suppose, for the sake of argument, you share the goal of Osama bin Laden and his surviving lieutenants: In other words, you desire to see the world dominated by a new caliphate. Is it really that helpful to have the livelier lads flying planes into skyscrapers?

As we saw a decade ago, even the most somnolent superpower will feel obliged to respond, and your great warrior sheikh will find himself scuttling over the mountains to hole up in a succession of cramped malodorous "safe houses" with too many child brides, unable to place a phone call or do anything except issue periodic cassette monologues of warmed-over Michael Moore talking points. And one day, eventually, however long it takes, you're watching infidel porn on your grainy 14" TV and the door gets kicked in and Seal Team Six are ready for your close-up before you've had a chance to dunk your beard in knock-off Grecian Formula.

That sort of counter-jihad America does well.

On every other front, it does incredibly badly.

Read the rest.

More Steyn stuff to catch up on: Chatting with Hugh Hewitt last week, Mark talked about the 70% rule as applied to Rick Perry. On Gardasil:

MS: Well, I think [Bachmann is] right on the facts of this case. I mean, I think the government can, I think the government at the state has an interest if you’re going around with communicable diseases. I think it’s a little different when the state is assuming, basically, that your grade school daughter is a slut, and assumes the right, or at least a potential slut, and assumes the right to jab a needle in her and make that compulsory. I’m with her on that. And I don’t want to get into, I think you’ve got to be careful there that you don’t become a kind of anti-science, anti-medicine, Jenny McCarthy type on it. But I think it’s interesting that Perry is on the defensive about some of these issues. I still don’t know why he did it. I still don’t know why he did it. And the worrying thing is if he assumes that the state can simply supplant parental wishes in those circumstances, on that issue, what can’t it do? So I don’t think this is a trivial thing. We still don’t know. Rick Perry is basically, you know, you and I might get into a disagreement on this, but I think one of the things the last couple of weeks has taught us is that Mitt Romney’s numbers are soft, and there’s a wish among the Republican electorate for an ‘insert name here’ candidate. And Rick Perry came into the race, and was the ‘insert name here’ candidate. And as more and more things about him become known, there will be a wish for another ‘insert name here’ candidate. That’s just the nature of it. But he’s not responding well as his record opens up, I don’t think.

On immigration:

I’m not looking for perfection in these candidates, and I expect to disagree with them on key issues, and to a certain extent, for these to be 70% alliances. But what I found bothersome about Rick Perry on the immigration issue, for example, when he was asked about in-state tuition for illegal immigrants, and he had some line about how he didn’t think whether you were entitled to state funds should depend on how your name is pronounced. And I thought that was a cheap line. That’s like when Obama kept going on about what an unusual name he had, and the implication being that if you question Rick Perry’s decision on this, you’re some kind of racist, white supremacist with some WASPy surname who can’t handle the fact that those fellows called Jose wandering around in the country these days. And so you can have honorable differences of opinion on these issues. But that kind of cheap, tacky demonization, if you want a glib line, I mean, his glib lines died. His glib line on, you know, that you can’t buy him for $5,000 bucks died. And the glib line about people with funny sounding surnames died.

HH: Sure.

MS: He needs some better lines.

My emphasis added. I like Rick Perry but Mark is exactly right on those points.

One more thing: the latest Song of the Week is a beauty. Take it away, Frank:




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Bitterly clinging to taxes and teleprompter

If you've been longing for another deceptive, nagging lecture from President Obama, you're in luck! Yesterday he delivered a twenty-minute finger-wagging harangue from the Rose Garden, working himself up into a lather over those who aren't "doing their fair share" to feed a level of government spending that can't be described without resorting to the language of astrophysics.

Whom does he think he's pleasing with these prompter-enabled diatribes? Could he really believe this is the way to win the hearts and minds of Americans? It's like a charm offensive but without the charm, just the offense. He comes across as bitter, angry, and hectoring. Polls supposedly show that people are dissatisfied with his job performance but still like him as a person. Why?

He's got a nerve quoting George Washington (18 minutes in), who could hardly have imagined the obscene profligacy of the federal government in the 20th and 21st centuries.

As for Obama's deficit-reduction plan, it doesn't cut spending and won't control the deficit. We've become accustomed to accounting tricks posing as cuts and in this regard Obama does not disappoint. And like the rest of his ideas, we've seen them before. Andrew Stiles has the details:

Today President Obama’s released a deficit-reduction proposal that was actually written down on paper, the first time he has done so since introducing his laughable 2012 budget back in February (the Senate voted it down 97 to 0). The White House claims that the president’s plan represents a “balanced approach” that, relative to its current policy baseline, will increase the federal deficit initially by $300 billion in fiscal year 2012 (to pay for his “jobs plan“), but will reduce deficits by $3.2 trillion over the next decade. The claim is outrageously misleading. In fact, when you strip away the budgetary gimmicks, Obama’s plan achieves less than half the overall deficit reduction he is claiming, and is as wildly unbalanced as his February budget proposal.

In order to come up with that $3.2 trillion figure, the White House employs the following gimmicks to achieve a phony $1.8 trillion in deficit reduction that should not be counted as such: (1) claiming the inevitable reduction in spending — about $1.1 trillion — on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as “savings,” (2) including in its baseline $293 billion in funding for the Medicare “Doc Fix” to restore Medicare payments to physicians, spending that does not reflect current law and ought to be offset, (3) counting as “savings” the subsequent reduction in interest payments on the debt, which does not constitute a “policy” and should not be scored as one.

When that $1.8 billion is removed from the equation, the true nature of the president’s “deficit-reduction” “plan” is laid bare: $1.4 trillion in net deficit reduction consisting of $150 billion in spending increases combined with $1.6 trillion in tax increases.

But wait -- there's more:

So, because of the additional spending Obama has proposed as part of his “jobs plan,” tax increases actually account for more than 100 percent of the deficit-reduction he can accurately claim. In his speech at the White House this morning, the president’s said his plan “cuts $2 for every dollar in new revenues.” In reality, it reduces the deficit by cutting $0, spending $1 and raising taxes by $11.

Despite this massive tax increase, however, the president’s plan still fails to get deficits under control. Annuals deficits reach decline to $476 billion in 2014, but rise to $565 billion in 2021. Over the 10-year budget window, the plan adds to the deficit by a total of $6.4 trillion by 2021, and gross federal debt reaches nearly $25 trillion, more than 100 percent of the national GDP.

Read the whole thing. Obama's plan is a fraud. But that doesn't prevent him from assuming the moral high ground and shaking his finger at the rest of us. As I watched him become increasingly agitated, I wondered again whether he believes his own rhetoric, and to what degree. At some point duplicity and self-deception cross the line into delusion.   

Linked at CMR Reader -- thanks!
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Obama's limited repertoire

It consists of spending, borrowing, taxing, demagoguing, and dividing. His Pass-It-Yesterday jobs bill (so urgent that the Senate might look at it next month) and his new debt-reduction plan to raise taxes by $1.5 trillion are reelection tactics, not serious ideas for boosting the economy. He knows Congress won't pass either one. And when they don't, he'll run around the country accusing the GOP of protecting the "rich" (a.k.a., small business owners who create jobs and wealth) and trying to stick it to him personally, even if it hurts struggling Americans. In Ohio last week, he gave us a foretaste of the next fourteen months as he led the brain-dead faithful in chant:


 
Shameful. Back in the world of light and reason, we have Rep. Paul Ryan commenting on Obama's terrible policies and divisive political games:

So, I guess what he's saying he's going to raise on capital at ordinary income tax rate, raising capital gains and dividends. Look, if you tax something more, Chris, you get less. If you tax job creators more, you get less job creation. If you tax investment more, you get less investment.

At a time when experts are telling us, including, I said the fiscal commission, we should lower tax rates on investment and job creation by getting rid of all of the loopholes so we can create economic growth. So, we think this is going in the wrong direction. Let's not forget that under the current law that the president has already passed, the top tax rate on individual and small businesses in 2013 goes to about 44.8 percent.

So, we have employers in Wisconsin that pay that tax rate are competing against countries that are taxing their businesses from 16 percent in Canada, almost 21 percent going in England, 25 percent in China. The world taxes their businesses at about 25 percent and he's saying we're going to tax these job creators at above 45 percent with this new tax. What it does is it adds further instability to our system, more uncertainty and it punishes job creation and those people who create jobs.

Class warfare, Chris, may make for really good politics but it makes a rotten economics. We don't need a system that seeks to divide people. We don't need a system that seeks prey on people's fear, envy and anxiety. We need a system that creates job and innovation, and removes these barriers for entrepreneurs to go out and rehire people. I'm afraid these kinds of tax increases don't work.

Read the rest here.

Sen. Mitch McConnell:

He criticized Obama for “doing all of the wrong things.”

“If you look at the stimulus bill, what did we get out of that? Turtle tunnels and Solyndra. Solyndra. More money was lost on Solyndra than came to my state to fix roads and bridges out of the entire stimulus package last year, and now he’s asking us to do it again,” McConnell said.

Ed Morrissey calls it a "nakedly political act." The home alone presidency has little else to offer.

***

Hang on. The problem with Obama (according to Obama) is that he's just too wonky. Er, seriously? This from the guy who can't be bothered with details and is allergic to putting anything in writing? Karl Rove:

“President Obama has himself backwards,” Rove says. “His problem is not that he was a policy wonk: it’s that he wasn’t.  He refused to get his hands dirty writing a good stimulus bill, drafting bipartisan health-care reform, or negotiating with Republicans.  He found it easier to tell them ‘I won, so get lost.’”

“The president is comfortable with a technocratic approach because he is an imperious, arrogant, know-it-all left wing technocrat who leaves the details to his congressional Democratic allies, like Congressman Dave Obey with the stimulus bill,” Rove adds. “He is content to check the box on his list of achievements and tour the country with his teleprompter giving speeches.”

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Music break: Love is the Sweetest Thing

:)

***

Also by songwriter Ray Noble: I Hadn't Anyone Till You and [drumroll] The Very Thought of You.

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Obama's hostility not confined to women in the White House

In his new book about the inner workings of the Obama White House, author Ron Suskind quotes insiders who accuse President Obama of being "hostile to women":

It says that women occupied many of the West Wing’s senior positions, but felt outgunned and outmaneuvered by male colleagues such as former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Summers.

“I felt like a piece of meat,” Christina Romer, former head of the Council of Economic Advisers, said of one meeting in which Suskind writes she was “boxed out” by Summers. [. . .]

“The president has a real woman problem,” an unnamed high-ranking female official told Suskind. “ The idea of the boys’ club being just Larry and Rahm isn’t really fair. He [Obama] was just as responsible himself.” [. . .]

According to the book, female staffers, like Dunn and Romer, felt sidelined. In November 2009, female aides complained to the president about being left out of meetings, or ignored.

Dunn said in the interview that her husband, now-White House lawyer Bob Bauer, was “surprised to see me as someone who could be talked over in meetings.” [. . .]

Obama, according to the book published by Harper Collins, failed to call on Romer after asking her male colleagues for their opinions. The snub prompted Romer to pass a note to Summers where she threatened to walk out of the dinner, according to the book.

Try to imagine Margaret Thatcher, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Condoleezza Rice, Liz Cheney, or even Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann complaining that the boys didn't give them a turn to speak at a meeting.

But Romer, Dunn, and company were skipped over and talked over, and according to the rules of political correctness, that's a foul. The women apparently couldn't hold their own at meetings, or were perceived as having little of value to offer, and consequently felt "outgunned," "outmaneuvered," "sidelined," "ignored," and "left out." Somehow, these good liberal men forgot to pay proper obeisance to the wimmen in the room, giving them the chopped-liver treatment instead. Oh, the humanity. 

Moe Lane saw it coming: QotD, I TOLD YOU Obama Was A Male Chauvinist Pig edition.

I told people back in 2008 that then-Senator Obama didn’t like to hire women; didn’t like to promote women; and definitely didn’t like to pay women more than 82 cents to the male-equivalent dollar.

You mean these guys are hypocrites? Yeah, and condescending, too:



But we already knew that. For the record, Romer and Dunn have since qualified or denied their claims of no fairsies. Allahpundit on that:

Dunn evidently thought better of her “hostility” accusation after making it to Ron Suskind, the book’s author, because when the Post contacted her to follow-up for this story, she insisted she’d never said it and that Obama totally “values having strong women around him” or whatever. Uh huh. And so it came to be that another left-wing feminist, forced to choose between party and cause, bit her lip for the team. It is, after all, an election year. 

Sometimes it's hard for lefties to remember which way to posture themselves.

But really, it's a bit difficult to accuse Obama of disliking "strong" (read leftist/feminist) women, since he chose one to be his bride. Or, at least, he was chosen by one. The courtship of Barry and Michelle was perhaps as much power-struggle as romance, if this 2008 Washington Post feature is to be believed:

After Barack went back to Harvard, the couple had a long-distance romance. In interviews, Michelle is fond of recounting how, during this period, she began to pressure Barack to get married, and how Barack put her off, arguing that marriage was a meaningless institution and that the only thing that mattered was how they felt about each other. Michelle, whose parents had been married for some 30 years, wasn't buying it.

Then, one night in 1991, he took her to Gordon, an expensive Chicago restaurant, and she started to press him again. He went into his usual tirade against marriage, a dissertation that went on until they ordered dessert. When it came, the plate had a box on it, and in the box was an engagement ring.

"'That kind of shuts you up, doesn't it?'" Michelle remembers Barack telling her. She acknowledged to a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times that she doesn't remember what the dessert was, or whether she ate it. "I was so shocked and a little embarrassed because he did sort of shut me up." 

But not for long.

But we digress. I'm more interested in Obama's real hostility toward humanity in general than in some failure to give White House feminists the ego-stroking they think their gender demands. The Bookworm on that:

No surprise to Bookworm that the White House is hostile to women

Back in September 2009, I posted about Obama’s obsession with getting women into burqas which is, to my mind, a very misogynistic approach to women.  I’m therefore entirely unsurprised to learn that those women who have worked in the White House claim that it’s a hostile environment to women, and that this hostility comes from the top.

Click on the link in bold. Worrying about human rights and defense of the persecuted has never been Obama's thing. Look at his attitude and political stand toward the most defenseless among us. Or his taste in music. Feminists might find a way to complain about some of that, instead of wringing their hands over being "ignored" at meetings.

Linked at MichelleMalkin.com -- thanks!

***

I was in the middle of making a minor edit to this post when someone came to the door. Apparently I hit "save as draft" instead of "publish" and accidentally removed it from the interwebs. Sorry about that.

***

Thanks also to Doug Ross for linking!

***

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What's new on Planet Obama

Everything's looking pretty rosy, except for that national emergency thing.

Optimistic Obama:

At a private fundraiser last night, Obama said his proposal would create 1.9 millions jobs, while reducing the 9.1% unemployment rate by a percentage point; he also said it would add two percentage points to the Gross Domestic Product.

Wow. That's a big one.

Confident Obama:

“Over the last couple of months there have been Democrats who voiced concerns and nervousness about, well, in this kind of economy, isn’t this just — aren’t these just huge headwinds in terms of your reelection?” Obama said.

“And I just have to remind people that, here’s one thing I know for certain: the odds of me being reelected are much higher than the odds of me being elected in the first place.”

Imagine shelling out $35,800 and hearing that. I'd be calling the bank to put a stop on the check.

Angry Obama:

“I get fed up with that kind of game plan, and we’ve been seeing it for too long. Too long. We’re in a national emergency. We’ve been grappling with a crisis for three years, and instead of getting folks to rise up above partisanship in a spirit that says we’re all in this together, we got folks who are purposely dividing, purposely thinking just in terms of how does this play out just in terms of this election.”

Setting aside the deep irony of that last sentence, you've got to wonder what he thinks he's accomplishing here. Doesn't he see how ineffectual this makes him appear? He's been in charge for thirty-two months, including twenty-four with majorities in both houses, yet he has made no headway, despite all of his self-proclaimed "grappling," with this National Emergency? The logical response from voters is to agree that he's in way over his head and give the job to someone else.

Icky Obama:

"If you love me, you’ve got to help me pass this bill.”

I guess they don't, because the calls and emails he's been nagging and begging for without pause just aren't happening.

His party is getting tired of him and John Fund wonders aloud whether they might ask him to please go away quietly.


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Public enemy

Attack Watch, the comedy smash-hit of the political season, wasted no time in  recognizing Mark Steyn as an enemy of the regime.

Steyn and Hugh Hewitt:

HH: (laughing) But it’s got to be good for, it’s got to be good for sales of After America, don’t you think?

MS: Oh, absolutely. I hope that, you know, I don’t care, really, where it gets to on the New York Times list. But if it were to get to, like, top 5 on the Obama enemies list, I’d be thrilled.

Demon Steyn (What, no horns?)

(Speaking of Steyn Derangement Syndrome, some of Mark's readers have got it bad and that ain't good.)

Enjoy AW while you can. It's too good to last.

Inevitable: Hitler reacts.

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Presidential nag-a-thon continues

What a silly, tiresome man. Does he hope to win us over by browbeating and boring us to death? Obama Makes Plea to ‘Pass This Bill’ 100-Plus Times

In six speeches during the course of seven days, President Obama has hammered home his call for Congress to act on his $447 billion jobs plan, saying some version of the phrase “pass this bill” more than 100 times.

The president repeated the rallying cry 18 times in his speech to Congress, another 18 times at his stop in Richmond, Va., 12 times in his Rose Garden address, 18 times in Columbus, Ohio., 24 times in Raleigh, N.C.,  and 12 times at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute Gala in Washington, D.C., for a grand total of (drum roll, please) 102. 

At times the nag-offensive descends into . . . I don't quite know what to call this:



But the real punchline is that he knows it can't possibly become law. It's just a campaign ploy to shift blame for the high unemployment rate to the GOP.

And by the way:

(Bloomberg) — Applications for U.S. unemployment benefits unexpectedly rose last week to the highest level since the end of June, underscoring the risk of further weakness in the labor market.
Jobless claims climbed by 11,000 to 428,000 in the week ended Sept. 10 that included the Labor Day holiday, figures from the Labor Department showed today in Washington. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg News projected a drop in claims to 411,000, according to the median forecast.

Even his own party has had enough:

President Obama under attack -- from Democrats
Carville: I’d like to see some panic at the White House right about now

I trust the fine folks at AttackWatch have been notified of these smears.

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Rebuked, routed, and rejected

Weiner's seat goes red:

Don’t believe any spin you read out of the White House or the DNC. This is huge. It is a complete rejection of the president, and I guarantee you his campaign is as worried as a lamb at a kabob shop. [. . .]

Turner framed the race as a referendum on President Obama. Exit interviews suggest voters were intent on sending a message to Obama about the economy.

Turner also appealed to the district’s heavily Jewish population to make a statement as well on Obama’s poor treatment of Israel. Turner is Catholic while Weprin is Jewish, suggesting clearly that voters had Obama on their mind – they couldn’t really have been concerned about a Jewish congressman’s votes on Israel.

In 2010, a bad year for Democrats, Weiner defeated Turner by 20 points. The wave of anger at the president and his policies that brought about Republican control of the House seems even more intense today.

Rep. Pete Sessioon: "a clear rebuke of President Obama’s policies "

Michael Barone: "a stunning repudiation of Chuck Schumer"

Jim Geraghty: "eye-popping" and "ominous"

Steven Hayward: Panic time?

Meanwhile, in Obamaland, life goes on as if in a time-loop. See the drones attending this Ohio campaign rally chant "Pass this bill!" (about 7 minutes in):



Weird and sad.

Clearly, Obama's "quiver is empty":

In truth, Obama is out of arrows. His quiver is bare, because he came into office as a rhetorical president without much experience or any ideas other than growing even bigger a tired big government. And now the public realizes that both the speeches and the big spending do not work. The result is that we collectively know what the president cannot any longer say — and it proves far greater than what he can say. He is well past the point of Jerry Ford’s WIN buttons or Jimmy Carter’s fist-pounding malaise speech.

RTR.

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Romney and Bachmann vs. Perry

Like most of America, I missed the debate last night but I get the general impression that they're going after Rick Perry tooth and nail. Some commentary and a clip:

Michelle Malkin:

Rick Perry lost big-time as he tried to do the Texas two-step on the Gardasil executive order and earned a wave of boos from the grass-roots Tea Party crowd on the Texas DREAM Act illegal alien student bailout.

Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul, and Rick Santorum effectively refuted Perry’s “err on the side of life” cop-out and offered powerful defense of parental sovereignty. Bachmann also astutely pointed out the Merck conflict of interest and Santorum emphasized the difference between vaccines for traditional communicable diseases vs. HPV. Watch the exchange here. Perry’s press team immediately sent out a rehashed press release “setting the record straight” within minutes of the exchange, prompting debate watchers to jibe that that’s what the debates are for.

What Santorum said:

I believe your policy is wrong.  Why — ladies and gentlemen, why do we inoculate people with vaccines in public schools?  Because we’re afraid of those diseases being communicable between people at school. And therefore, to protect the rest of the people at school, we have vaccinations to protect those children.

Unless Texas has a very progressive way of communicating diseases in their school by way of their curriculum, then there is no government purpose served for having little girls inoculated at the force and compulsion of the government.  This is big government run amok.  It is bad policy, and it should not have been done.

Correct. I agree with Michelle and Michele that Perry's Gardasil power-play was flat-out wrong. (Earlier post on that here.) But I don't think most people care much about that. They care a lot more about jobs, Social Security, and our sinking fiscal ship. For some reason I can't embed the jobs clip, but you can find it here. On Social Security:



Truth is, everyone and his brother has called it a Ponzi scheme. Allahpundit:

While we wait, here’s a snippet of Rush Limbaugh’s long monologue today warning Romney and Bachmann not to demagogue the “Ponzi scheme” point lest their own past rhetoric to that effect be used against them. True enough: Bachmann called Social Security a “tremendous fraud” just last year and Romney’s new best friend, Tim Pawlenty, explicitly described it as a “Ponzi scheme” — twice! — on CNBC in December 2009.

Et cetera. I wish Perry had gone after Romney harder on the latter's reprehensible use of the "granny card" in Florida. Steyn on that:

First, in a two-party system, there ought to be room for one party that doesn’t reflexively accuse anyone who wants to discuss Social Security honestly of wanting to push Gran’ma off the cliff.

Second, this was a foolish tactic by Mitt, since whatever short-term advantage it gains him it reinforces his chief defect in the eyes of the base — and the reason his numbers are so soft: The suspicion that he’s an opportunist with no coherent worldview. His attack on Perry for saying something little different to what he said last year has just added an entirely new topic to the old flipflopper critique, and an entirely new policy area on which, as with health care, Barack Obama will be able to say that he and his opponent are in basic agreement.

Third, the “granny card” is especially contemptible.

RTR.

Post script: Rich Lowry on Huntsman:

Huntsman is becoming more confident on the stage, which means even more annoying. He’s a smart ass who isn’t funny.

***

Another post script from a friend who likes Perry:

I have to say, Perry did not do well...he looks half asleep up there and not up for a fight at all... And his HPV answer was awful...Michele Bachmann was actually great.

**

Linked at MichelleMalkin.com -- many thanks.

***

Good. Grief. Michele Bachmann goes to a very stupid place.

***
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Passthisbill II: This time with props

Halloween comes early (again) to the White House:



What, no labcoats?

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Romney tries to scare older Florida voters

Just for the record, Gov. Rick Perry never said he wanted to take Social Security benefits away from your grandma. From Freedom's Lighthouse:

Romney knows that’s not true because he was standing beside Rick Perry during the recent GOP Debate when Perry said if you are a current retiree or nearing retirement – “you have nothing to worry about.” He knows Perry wants to reform the program so that younger workers don’t get ripped off in the end.

But that's not stopping Romney from pandering to and scaring older voters in Florida:



This flier may not be as monstrous a lie as Social Security, but it's certainly a lie. How can we trust Romney, a mealymouthed equivocator on abortion, and creator of MassCare?  

Philip Klein:

Romney's decision to pile on suggests that he's willing to play the "granny card" against Perry if it will help him get elected, a tactic more becoming of the likes of DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz than a potential Republican nominee.

Exactly. This is straight out of the left's playbook: lie about the opponent's positions and play on voters' fears. It's repugnant, the polar opposite of what I'm looking for in a candidate. Just say no to Mitt.

Perry:

"For people who are on Social Security now, like my folks, and people who are approaching Social Security, like me, it's going to be there," Perry said.

But, he added, where is the transition? At what point will eligibility have to be raised because funds simply aren't there?

"People are tired of scare tactics," Perry said. "They're looking for a leader who will tell them the truth but also find solutions."

H/t: Hot Air

Perry today:

The first step to fixing a problem is honestly admitting there is a problem. America's goal must be to fix Social Security by making it more financially sound and sustainable for the long term. But Americans deserve a frank and honest discussion of the dire financial challenges facing the nearly 80-year-old program.

As I said at the Reagan Library recently, Social Security benefits for current recipients and those nearing retirement must be protected. For younger workers, we must consider reforms to make Social Security financially viable.

These are the hard facts: Social Security's unfunded liability is calculated in the trillions of dollars. Last year, annual Social Security outlays exceeded annual revenues for the first time since 1983. The Congressional Budget Office projects that outlays will be roughly 5% greater than revenues over the next five years, worsening as more and more Baby Boomers retire.

By 2037, retirees will only get roughly 76 cents back for every dollar that is put into Social Security unless reforms are implemented. Imagine how long a traditional retirement or investment plan could survive if it projected investors would lose 24% of their money?

I am going to be honest with the American people. Our elected leaders must have the strength to speak frankly about entitlement reform if we are to right our nation's financial course and get the USA working again.

For too long, politicians have been afraid to speak honestly about Social Security. We must have the guts to talk about its financial condition if we are to fix Social Security and make it financially viable for generations to come.

Americans must come together and agree to address the problems so today's beneficiaries and tomorrow's retirees really can count on Social Security for the long haul.

We must have a frank, honest national conversation about fixing Social Security to protect benefits for those at or near retirement while keeping faith with younger generations, who are being asked to pay.

There's a debate tonight in Florida. Stay tuned.

Linked by Michelle Malkin -- thanks!
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