The London Olympics opened the Friday night, July 27th with a massive progressive homage to the modern miracle that is Britain's National Health Service.
To the tens of thousands of bored attendees at the Olympic Stadium, including the Royal Family, and the tens of millions more watching around the world, the British Olympic hosts spent an incredible amount of time equivocating the adoption of Britain's National Health Service (government managed healthcare) with the Industrial Revolution.
Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi film propagandist who was active in promoting Nazi Germany during the 1936 Berlin Olympics, would be quite proud of Danny Boyle's extravaganza. Granted, the ceremony did have a few high points - the appearance of the latest 'Bond Girl'....
as well as Rowan Atkinson' hilarious appearance with the London Symphony as his classic character, Mr. Bean.
The anti-Romney mainstream media in both Britain and the U.S. continue to focus on the candidate's 'Olympic gaffe' where he has apparently irreparably damaged the U.S. / British special relationship by pointing out that the London Olympic organizers are facing real challenges over their shortage of security personnel and the flap with large numbers of empty seats at supposedly sold out Olympic event venues.
The WaPoo continues to shill for the Obama campaign with their lead story on Saturday saying that Mitt Romney needs a 'breakout moment' during his visit to Israel to 'salvage' the 'campaign trip overseas'.
Romney’s missteps have drawn extensive mockery in Britain and public consternation from both Republicans and Democrats in the United States, and his campaign advisers were at a loss Friday to put a positive spin on the story — other than to look ahead to the next two stops on his tour.Missteps pointing out what British papers have been pointing out? Yes, I can understand the 'we can criticize ourselves, but how dare you criticize us' - but the main thrust of this meme is coming from the left leaning elements of the US / British press that oppose conservative ideals and candidates.
What's most ironic is the litany of insults and gaffes from President Barack Obama towards the British that are conveniently ignored by the 'objective' press...
- At a Buckingham Palace state dinner in his honor, President Barack Obama continues to speak after toasting Queen Elizabeth II - and the band begins to play 'God Save the Queen'.
- The iPod gift to Queen Elizabeth II - with the iPod loaded with photos and speeches by Barack Obama.
- Presents Prime Minister Gordon Brown with a boxed set of DVD's - that can't be played in Britain.
- 'The Hug' - First Lady Michelle Obama breaks protocol to 'hug' Queen Elizabeth II.
- Booting the bust of Sir Winston Churchill out of the Oval Office in January 2009 - and did Jake Carney and other Obama drones really have to lie about this?
- Avoiding a formal meeting with Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the President finally agreed to a very brief meeting in a kitchen...
- According to a U.S. State Department official in May 2009, there is no special relationship between the United States and Great Britain.
- Special Relationship II? 'We don't have a stronger friend and stronger ally than Nicolas Sarkozy and the French people.' - Barack Obama
- President Obama, in March 2009, was 'too tired' to host a state dinner and formal meeting with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown...British officials, meanwhile, admit that the White House and US State Department staff were utterly bemused by complaints that the Prime Minister should have been granted full-blown press conference and a formal dinner, as has been customary. They concede that Obama aides seemed unfamiliar with the expectations that surround a major visit by a British prime minister.
- Compromising British Intelligence - while leaking U.S. National Security secrets to make the President look good, the WH / Administration compromised both Britain's MI5 and MI6 agencies by exposing sources and methods for Obama's political gain.
Dishonorable mention - repeatedly siding with Argentina over that country's renewed claims to the British Falkland Islands.
Hey, WaPoo, is this one of those breakout moments? Or are you sputtering over the audacity of Mitt Romney?
Standing on Israeli soil, U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Sunday declared Jerusalem to be the capital of the Jewish state and said the United States has “a solemn duty and a moral imperative” to block Iran from achieving nuclear weapons capability.Did someone send a memo to WH Press Secretary Jay Carney that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel?
President Obama's Weekly Address....
... calls on the House GOP to approve the middle class 'tax cut' - as proposed by the President. You know, the tax cut that occurs when the House GOP votes to keep the 'middle class' tax rates at the same level as they have been since 2003 (avoiding their increase on January 1, 2013), while hiking income taxes on the top 5% of wage earners as well as hiking capital gains, dividend, and estate taxes.
He accuses the GOP of holding 'tax cuts' hostage....in more rampant rhetorical dishonesty.
A tax cut occurs when the current tax rates are decreased - resulting in people paying less in taxes. A spending cut occurs when new spending levels are reduced to below current spending levels.
Postponing a tax increase and keeping the current tax policy in place is not a cut. It's maintaining the status quo. Spending the same today as yesterday is not a spending cut, it's maintaining the status quo.
Permitting taxes to increase is a tax increase. Even if that increase over the current rates is less than what may happen or less than what one party proposes, it's still an increase over the current rate. Permitting spending to increase on a budget line item is a spending increase even if the amount of the increase is less than what would happen without action or is less than one party proposes.
This should not be that difficult to comprehend.
More rampant dishonesty? How about the President's history of promises to 'pay down the debt'...
The Wall Street Journal on Saturday highlighted the President's very serious problem around his economic program, you know, the one that is 'working' [Think Charlie Sheen and 'Winning'].... The 1.5% President -
ABC New's Jake Tapper wonders what would the 2004 Barack Obama, fresh off his Democratic National Convention Speech success, think of today's Barack Obama?
... calls on the House GOP to approve the middle class 'tax cut' - as proposed by the President. You know, the tax cut that occurs when the House GOP votes to keep the 'middle class' tax rates at the same level as they have been since 2003 (avoiding their increase on January 1, 2013), while hiking income taxes on the top 5% of wage earners as well as hiking capital gains, dividend, and estate taxes.
He accuses the GOP of holding 'tax cuts' hostage....in more rampant rhetorical dishonesty.
A tax cut occurs when the current tax rates are decreased - resulting in people paying less in taxes. A spending cut occurs when new spending levels are reduced to below current spending levels.
Postponing a tax increase and keeping the current tax policy in place is not a cut. It's maintaining the status quo. Spending the same today as yesterday is not a spending cut, it's maintaining the status quo.
Permitting taxes to increase is a tax increase. Even if that increase over the current rates is less than what may happen or less than what one party proposes, it's still an increase over the current rate. Permitting spending to increase on a budget line item is a spending increase even if the amount of the increase is less than what would happen without action or is less than one party proposes.
This should not be that difficult to comprehend.
More rampant dishonesty? How about the President's history of promises to 'pay down the debt'...
President Obama is currently running a campaign ad saying he has a plan to ‘pay down the debt in a balanced way.’ He has made this claim in public remarks as well. But his updated budget—submitted two weeks after the legal deadline—reveals just how dramatically false this claim is. These ads ought to be pulled down. His updated budget proposes a $10.6 trillion increase in gross debt through 2022, with debt remaining permanently above 100 percent of GDP. The picture in the out-years looks even bleaker. No change is proposed to our dangerously unsustainable debt course.
The President’s claim his tax hikes are for deficit reduction is shown to be false as well. His budget proposes to spend $46.2 trillion over ten years—an increase of nearly one-and-half trillion dollars above the current law baseline and a 57 percent increase above today’s spending levels. The President’s $1.8 trillion tax increase is not used to reduce the deficit but to fund this massive increase above what we are currently planning to spend.
The Wall Street Journal on Saturday highlighted the President's very serious problem around his economic program, you know, the one that is 'working' [Think Charlie Sheen and 'Winning'].... The 1.5% President -
It's important to understand how unusual this kind of weak recovery is. Deep recessions like the one from December 2007 to June 2009 are typically followed by stronger recoveries, as there is more lost ground to make up.
The most recent comparable recession occurred in 1981-1982. Yet as the nearby chart shows, the Reagan expansion exploded with a 9.3% quarter and kept up a robust pace for years. By the 12th quarter of expansion, growth popped up to 6.4.%. At this stage of the Reagan expansion, overall GDP was 18.5% higher versus 6.7% for the Obama recovery, according to Congress's Joint Economic Committee.
Even comparing this recovery with the average since the end of World War II, the Obama growth rate is well below the norm of 15.2%. The U.S. is running about $1.5 trillion of economic output behind where it should be.
This may sound like an abstraction, but it is the difference between a robust job market and lost opportunity for millions of Americans. It is the difference between a small federal budget deficit and more than $1 trillion for four straight years. It is the difference between a rising or falling poverty rate.
ABC New's Jake Tapper wonders what would the 2004 Barack Obama, fresh off his Democratic National Convention Speech success, think of today's Barack Obama?
TAPPER: Jay, eight years ago, I think you were there, and I was in the Democratic National Convention in Boston, Massachusetts. And I heard a fairly obscure state senator stand up and give a speech in which he talked about how, right then, there were spinmeisters and negative ad peddlers preparing to divide the country.WH Press Flack, Jay Carney, remains a deer in the headlights....or is this just a SNL parody with Baghdad Bob standing in as the WH Press Flack? It's getting to the point where I can't tell the difference.
Given that the vast, vast majority of the ads that are run these days — from both sides, both Governor Romney and President Obama — are negative — I think in one New York Times story it said all of the ones that ran in Richmond over a certain period were negative, not one positive ad; and then there was a study that showed in a two-week period, 89 percent of the president’s ads were negative; 94 percent of Mitt Romney’s ads were negative — what would that state senator think about the campaign being run right now by this president?
A WaPoo columnist, Jonathan Capehart, is up in arms because of a new Romney campaign ad. His deepest fear? That voters will think that it is okay to vote against Barack Obama and not be thought of as a racist.
I'm reminded of the line I heard last year - if you voted for Obama in 2008 to prove that you are not a racist, how about voting against Obama in 2012 to prove you are not an idiot.
Richard Fernandez of The Belmont Club offers another superb post - and one that should make you think.
In 'Making the Connection' he asks what is the common element behind these three people....
Interested in some conclusive proof of manmade global warming? From Ace of Spades....
Today Anthony Watts and coauthors released a paper quantifying the impact of station quality issues and NOAA data adjustments on the USHCN temperature records that are one of the most important books in the warmists' bible:
A reanalysis of U.S. surface station temperatures has been performed using the recently WMO-approved Siting Classification System devised by METEO-France’s Michel Leroy. The new siting classification more accurately characterizes the quality of the location in terms of monitoring long-term spatially representative surface temperature trends. The new analysis demonstrates that reported 1979-2008 U.S. temperature trends are spuriously doubled, with 92% of that over-estimation resulting from erroneous NOAA adjustments of well-sited stations upward. (emphasis added)Cutting to the chase (from the PowerPoint slides accompanying the release):
Instead of adjusting the poorly sited station trends downward to the levels of the well located stations, the well sited station trends are adjusted upward to match the poor station trends. The “official” trend data is higher even than that of the raw data for non-compliant stations.
No result is too ridiculous as long as it helps The Cause, I guess.
Watts included a handy graph of the impact that can be used to beat warmists over the head (metaphorically of course).
A Sunday cartoon from Day by Day for your enjoyment....
Today in History
28th
1868 - The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is officially adopted into the U.S. Constitution.
1914 - One month to the day of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo, Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia. This is recognized as the beginning of the First World War.
1943 - In just 43 minutes, British bombers drop 2,326 tons of bombs on Hamburg, Germany - igniting a firestorm that devastated 8 square miles of the city - and killing 42,000 German civilians.
1945 - A B-25 Mitchell twin-engine bomber crashes into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building in New York City during a very heavy fog. 14 people are killed in the crash, 26 are injured.
1945 - The U.S. Senate approves the charter establishing the United Nations.
1976 - A 7.8 magnitude earthquake strikes Tangshan, China killing an estimated 250,000 people.
29th
1588 - A British naval force under the command of Lord Charles Howard and Sir Francis Drake defeat the Spanish Armada off the coast of Gravelines, France - ending the threat of a Spanish invasion of England.
1909 - General Motors buys Cadillac.
1921 - Adolf Hitler becomes the leader of the National Socialist German Worker's (Nazi) Party.
1958 - U.S. Congress passes legislation establishing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a civilian agency responsible for coordinating America's activities in space.
1967 - A rocket accidently fired from a F-4 Phantom fighter bomber parked on the deck of the USS Forrestal preparing for an airstrike, starts a major fire that burned for nearly 24 hours. 134 sailors and pilots were killed in the fire, hundreds wounded, and more than 20 combat aircraft destroyed as the USS Forrestal suffers the worst loss of life on a U.S. warship since the end of World War II.
1972 - Far left and anti-American former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark visits North Vietnam as part of an international group investigating 'U.S. war crimes' against North Vietnam. No 'war crimes' were uncovered in the anti-U.S. propaganda mission which highlighted the damage being done to North Vietnam by US bombers.
1976 - The 'Son of Sam' murders his first victim, Donna Lauria, and seriously injures Jody Valenti of the Bronx as they sat talking in a car. The serial killer would terrorize New York City over the next year.
1981 - Prince Charles, the heir to the British throne, weds Lady Diana Spencer at St. Paul's Cathedral in London. The couple would divorce in August 1996. Diana, Princess of Wales would be killed in a car accident in August 1997.
No comments:
Post a Comment