South Capitol Street

The State of the Union self-promotion circus is in overdrive.

On the left side of the aisle, here are your tax dollars at work hyping the Making of the State of The Union Address, featuring Team Obama’s p.r. and speechwriting blowhards patting each other and their boss on the back for their creativity, hard work, and historic stature:

Soon to come: A taxpayer-subsidized documentary behind the scenes of The Making of the Making of The Making of the State of the Union Address!

On the right side of the aisle, this:

I call it GOP Rock Star Syndrome. Conservatives get into unwise pre-SOTU frenzies over the next hot young thing — only to trash them when they fail to meet inflated expectations (see Bobby Jindal).

Rep. Paul Ryan may have “established himself as a leading conservative thinker on federal spending,” as the Wall Street Journal put it, but grass-roots conservatives who remember how he VOTED over the past two years on fiscal issues will wisely take his thoughts and words tonight with a grain of salt.

Flashback April 2009:

Reader Ryan e-mails:

I doubt you’ll even get this with how busy you must be, but I am so disheartened I had to write the only person I really respect as always sticking to her conservative principles. My wife and I are signed up to go to the tea party in Madison, WI on April 15. I was very excited to finally get off the couch and make my voice heard. Then last week, I got an email from www.fightbackwisconsin.com saying that the Republican Party of Wisconsin had decided to sponsor the event by providing free parking and shuttle service. In addition (and probably as a condition of the free parking), Rep. Paul Ryan would be speaking. This, the same Paul Ryan that voted yes on the 700 billion dollar tarp bill. I like Paul Ryan and I think he’s a decent representative, but he is part of the problem. How can somebody who voted to spend 700 billion be addressing an anti-tax tea party?

In addition to voting for TARP, GOP Rep. Ryan — billed as a Republican rising star- voted for the auto bailout and the AIG 90 percent confiscatory bonus tax. Crikey. How many strikes do “Republican rising stars” get?

Another Wisconsin voter here highlights Paul Ryan’s troubling votes and flip-flopping:

So now all of a sudden, picking winners and losers in the market is bad policy? But a couple month ago, when Paul Ryan was arguing to give funds to the failing auto companies, that somehow wasn’t “neo-industrial policy” and wasn’t “picking winners and losers”? We weren’t taxing Toyota to save GM then? And now Paul is suddenly concerned about executive control over funding, when he said not one word after President Bush unilaterally, and illegally used TARP funds to bail out the auto industry? He’s concerned about keeping the Fed focused on the financial industry, but he had no problem with the car czar that he proposed in his earlier legislation?

Look, I’m all for cutting off these funds, and perhaps I’m being stupid to continue to go after Paul Ryan like this. But when reading these releases, you’d think that he was against these things the entire time! But only now that a Democratic President is in office, is he all of a sudden for a more reasonable fiscal policy that didn’t bailout industrial concerns.

Well you know what, that’s what a straight partisan hack does. He ought to be apologizing for his previous votes, not pretending he was being responsible the entire time, but I don’t see one bit of regret for what he did previously. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to let him get away with it.

If you have a GOP representative attending your tea party, be sure to look up his/her record on these and other key fiscal votes before you get to the event. Did the congressional reps speaking at your tea party vote for the $ 6 billion GIVE/SERVE national service boondoggle?

Did they fall for the Chicken Little scenarios plied by Paulson et al.? Ryan did.

I’ve dug up a reminder from the CSPAN archives of Ryan’s “We can’t do nothing!” House floor speech during the crap sandwich vote:

GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann, who kept her head on her shoulders and voted against TARP when push came to shove, will deliver her own SOTU response.

Hey, the more the merrier!

***

Be sure to check out Caleb Howe’s terrific parody of the SOTU lovefest: CongressionalMatch.com!

***

And one more item from ABC News: President Obama to Propose Budget Freeze and Earmark Ban Tonight

Yes, it’s Talk Like a Republican Day at the White House.

Words, just words.

Michelle Malkin

Rahm Emanuel is trying to avoid becoming the Susan Bysiewicz of Chicago.

Like Bysiewicz, Emanuel is now facing a court ruling that will keep him off the ballot in Chicago’s mayoral race on Tuesday, February 22.

In a 2 to 1 ruling, an appellate court said today that Emanuel did not meet the residency rule in Chicago – meaning that a person must live in the city during the year before running for office.

Emanuel immediately said he would appeal the ruling to the Illinois Supreme Court in order to have his name placed on the ballot next month.

Capitol Watch

Reuters

For the past two years we've heard a lot about how much the Jets feel like … New York Post They've talked about how they are accountable to each other and have each other's backs regardless of circumstance. Those are easy things to say when a season is going well and optimism is high. But now that the Jets have crash-landed in the AFC … Solomon: On the field, Steelers' Big Ben has few equalsHouston Chronicle Jets clean out lockers at Florham Park, NJ, facilityDailyrecord.com True grit under centerWashington Post Dallas Morning News –New York Times –NorthJersey.com all 6,755 news articles »

Sports – Google News

-By Warner Todd Huston

The inch deep analysis that we get from the illiterati in the left-media shows that they have agendas, sure, but no grasp of history, logic, or facts. No better example of the facile nature of the Old Media can be had than Christiane Amanpour and on ABC News she strutted her imbecilic excuse for historical analysis once again.

In a January 20 interview with the sister of John F. Kennedy, Amanpour attempted to equate the “political atmosphere” of today with that of 1963 when President Kennedy was murdered as well as 1968 when his brother Bobby was shot. But her empty attempt to analyze either era does not rise to the level of common sense much less a serious political discussion.

Over some video clips of JFK and Bobby Kennedy and the funerals for both, Amanpour sonorously tried to say that today is somehow “just like” the “political atmosphere” of those days decades ago. Simply put, nothing could be further from the truth.

John F. Kennedy was assassinated less than three years after his inauguration in November 1963. His brother Bobby in 1968. Two acts of political violence so traumatic that the country has never fully recovered.

It’s an episode eerily relevant today in the wake of the assassination attempt against Gabrielle Giffords less than two weeks ago.

Immediately thereafter, in a question put to Jean Kennedy Smith, Amanpour said:

A congresswoman was targeted. No matter what the reason, how would you describe the atmosphere, the political atmosphere today in the country?

Fortunately, Smith did not take Amanpour’s bait and said that the criminal action of the man that killed her brother was just that of “an individual,” and not a result of some great sickness of society as Amanpour was attempting to lead her to say. Smith sensibly told Amanpour, “I don’t think we should blame a whole group of people for it.”

Amanpour must have been sorely disappointed in this reply. Caught up in the Old Media’s attempt to blame the political right, she was obviously hoping to make the Giffords shooting “just like” that of JFK and RFK. Of course, the attempt by Amanpour to make today just like 1963 is foolish and completely empty of any real in depth analysis. Today’s political climate is nothing like that of 1963 or better yet 1968 when RFK was killed.

Let us recall what was going on, especially during 1968. We were involved in a war going badly in Vietnam, one that saw massive riots in protest. The Watts Race Riot had occurred in 1965 and by 1968 nearly a dozen others had occurred. JFK was killed, then RFK and Martin Luther King, Jr. and others. They don’t call them “the turbulent 60s” for nothing.

By comparison, today we have relative calm in our political climate. Sure people are active, many even upset. But the Tea Party has been orderly, determined yet interestingly calm compared to the chaos that reigned in the 60s. For that matter, as violent as their rhetoric had been, even the late not-so-lamented anti-war rallies of the early 2000s were orderly compared to the turbulent era they pretended at emulating.

Further, unlike the JFK and RFK assassinations, the attempt on Giffords’ life had nothing at all to do with politics as far as anyone can tell. Giffords’ shooter does not seem to have had any traditional political ideology. Granted, with his trutherism, his vague paper money allusions, and his anti-Bush influences, he took his ideas mostly from the extreme American left, but he did not seem to espouse their actual political goals at all. He just had some mushy notion that only he knew what was really going on even as he didn’t seem to articulate it cogently anywhere. He simply is not part of any greater movement.

Unlike Lee Harvey Oswald, who was a commie, or Sirhan Sirhan, who was a radical Islamist, Jared Loughner is just a whack job with no ties to any real political movement that intends social upheaval. Loughner more resembles Charles J. Guiteau, the assassin of President James Garfield, than he does Oswald. Guiteau was a psycho that was mad about not getting a job at the Post Office and thought God had told him to kill Garfield. He was a lone actor not connected to either reality or any greater movement. Oswald, on the other hand, was a communist that wanted to topple the USA , wanted to turn it communist, and he was connected to a greater ideological movement. Loughner definitely is more like a Guiteau than an Oswald.

In any case, today’s “political atmosphere” is nothing at all like that of the 1960s. But even if it were it wouldn’t make political assassins something unusual in the United States. We’ve had repeated attempts — many successful — to murder politicians in this country at least since the presidency of Andrew Jackson, himself a victim of an attempt on his life.

A large number of the presidents in the 20th century had attempts made on their lives, mayors, senators, congressmen, governors, politicians of every stripe, all have been attacked in this country and many killed in those attacks. Sometimes attacks were made during times of social unrest, other times not. But they have been relatively steady occurrences for nearly two hundred years.

The fact is, Amanpour’s weak attempt to shore up the victim status for her own political ideology (leftism and the Democrat Party) is a pretty thin veneer of partisan hackery. It is even worse “journalism.” But in her groundless claims lies her bias and that of her contemporaries who earnestly nod their heads at her nonsense and imagine she has hit on a central fact of today’s political climate.

One thing here, though, does happen to be “just like” the JFK assassination. Before the blood in the street was dry in Dallas in 1963, the chattering classes in the Old Media were blaming the assassination on Republicans, conservatives, and the political right. The first “theory” that the leftists in the media floated for the assassination of Kennedy was that the violent rhetoric of the radical right in Texas is what caused the shooting. Turned out that the assassin was a commie and had precisely nothing to do with the American right. Similarly before anyone even knew if Giffords would live through her attack and before anyone even knew her [would be] assassin’s name the same Old Media was again blaming the political right for the violence. So, maybe in this small way, today’s political climate is just like that of the 1960s. We still have a far left-wing media spreading its agenda despite the actual facts on the ground.

It’s no wonder that Amanpour figured prominently in my top ten most left-biased journalists.

(Originally posted at BigJournalism.com)

Stop The ACLU

It was to be expected that MSNBC commentators would publicly wish Keith Olbermann well after his surprise exit last Friday.

But the nonsense that spewed out of Lawrence O'Donnell's mouth Monday evening – "He invented op-ed TV…For eight years…No one in television history has ever done anything like it" – was so sycophantic and factually bereft it was almost sick-making (video follows with transcript and commentary):

LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: Consider what Keith [Olbermann] invented and taught us to do: Op-ed TV. The incomparable Maureen Dowd is a friend of mine. I know if I told her I want her to do five op-ed columns in a week, she would tell me that is impossible and ask me if I know how hard it is to do even one. I do know. I've done a few, very few.

That's why I marveled, as any writer must, at what Keith was doing – five op-eds a week, each of them much, much longer than the standard 800 words. This is the only place in television where people are surprised if you leave after eight years. In the entertainment division of this company, if a show like, say, "The West Wing" wins every possible award and runs for seven years, everyone just applauds an extraordinary show for an extraordinary run. I saw — I saw exactly how exhausted the great Aaron Sorkin was after delivering 22 episodes a year of “The West Wing.”

Well, Keith delivered 20 a month. 20 A month. Hundreds of episodes a year. Hundreds of op-eds a year. Year in and year out. For eight years. I have no idea how he did it. None of us do. No one in television history has ever done anything like it. No one knew it could be done before he did it.

So Dowd thinks it's tough to do one 800-word op-ed a week? Maybe that's why her stuff is such garbage.

With the advent of the internet, there are hundreds nay thousands of writers today publishing numerous pieces every twenty four hours.

Without dislocating my shoulder to pat myself on the back, folks like Ed Morrissey and me typically write three pieces a day, seven days a week. If Dowd's feeling challenged producing her two columns every seven days, maybe it's a sign she really has become a dinosaur.

As for O'Donnell's awe concerning Olbermann having an eight-year run, does he know that "Meet the Press" is now in its 64th year? Or that there are 25 television shows that have run for forty years or more?

O'Donnell also seems to forget that the man largely responsible for creating this television genre, Larry King, ended his run on CNN last month after 25 years.

Yet O'Donnell went gaga over Olbermann's almost eight?

Also preposterous was crediting the "Countdown" host with inventing the concept of op-ed television as history will certainly bestow this honor on David Brinkley whose nightly commentaries on the renowned "Huntley-Brinkley Report" were the thing of legend.

As for soloists in this genre, Fox News's Bill O'Reilly was doing op-ed TV more than five years before "Countdown" started and is now in his fifteenth season.

This ignores the many talk radio hosts in our nation that are on the air for three hours a day, five days a week offering their opinions to audiences O'Donnell and Olbermann can only dream of.

Rush Limbaugh, for example, is now in his 23rd year, and I say with great confidence that what folks like him do is far more demanding than what Olbermann did.

Add it all up, and O'Donnell's gooey sentiment though understandable given his esteem for his colleague was as factually-challenged as, well, most of his reports on virtually any subject.

So I guess we shouldn't be too surprised.

NewsBusters.org – Exposing Liberal Media Bias

It was to be expected that MSNBC commentators would publicly wish Keith Olbermann well after his surprise exit last Friday.

But the nonsense that spewed out of Lawrence O'Donnell's mouth Monday evening – "He invented op-ed TV…For eight years…No one in television history has ever done anything like it" – was so sycophantic and factually bereft it was almost sick-making (video follows with transcript and commentary):

LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: Consider what Keith [Olbermann] invented and taught us to do: Op-ed TV. The incomparable Maureen Dowd is a friend of mine. I know if I told her I want her to do five op-ed columns in a week, she would tell me that is impossible and ask me if I know how hard it is to do even one. I do know. I've done a few, very few.

That's why I marveled, as any writer must, at what Keith was doing – five op-eds a week, each of them much, much longer than the standard 800 words. This is the only place in television where people are surprised if you leave after eight years. In the entertainment division of this company, if a show like, say, "The West Wing" wins every possible award and runs for seven years, everyone just applauds an extraordinary show for an extraordinary run. I saw — I saw exactly how exhausted the great Aaron Sorkin was after delivering 22 episodes a year of “The West Wing.”

Well, Keith delivered 20 a month. 20 A month. Hundreds of episodes a year. Hundreds of op-eds a year. Year in and year out. For eight years. I have no idea how he did it. None of us do. No one in television history has ever done anything like it. No one knew it could be done before he did it.

So Dowd thinks it's tough to do one 800-word op-ed a week? Maybe that's why her stuff is such garbage.

With the advent of the internet, there are hundreds nay thousands of writers today publishing numerous pieces every twenty four hours.

Without dislocating my shoulder to pat myself on the back, folks like Ed Morrissey and me typically write three pieces a day, seven days a week. If Dowd's feeling challenged producing her two columns every seven day, maybe it's a sign she really has become a dinosaur.

As for O'Donnell's awe concerning Olbermann having an eight-year run, does he know that "Meet the Press" is now in its 64th year? Or that there are 25 television shows that have run for forty years or more?

O'Donnell also seems to forget that the man largely responsible for creating this television genre, Larry King, ended his run on CNN last month after 25 years.

Yet O'Donnell went gaga over Olbermann's almost eight?

Also preposterous was crediting the "Countdown" host with inventing the concept of op-ed television as history will certainly bestow this honor on David Brinkley whose nightly commentaries on the renowned "Huntley-Brinkley Report" were the thing of legend.

As for soloists in this genre, Fox News's Bill O'Reilly was doing op-ed TV more than five years before "Countdown" started and is now in his fifteenth season.

This ignores the many talk radio hosts in our nation that are on the air for three hours a day, five days a week offering their opinions to audiences O'Donnell and Olbermann can only dream of.

Rush Limbaugh, for example, is now in his 23rd year, and I say with great confidence that what folks like him do is far more demanding than what Olbermann did.

Add it all up, and O'Donnell's gooey sentiment though understandable given his esteem for his colleague was as factually-challenged as, well, most of his reports on virtually any subject.

So I guess we shouldn't be too surprised.

NewsBusters.org – Exposing Liberal Media Bias

It was to be expected that MSNBC commentators would publicly wish Keith Olbermann well after his surprise exit last Friday.

But the nonsense that spewed out of Lawrence O'Donnell's mouth Monday evening – "He invented op-ed TV…For eight years…No one in television history has ever done anything like it" – was so sycophantic and factually bereft it was almost sick-making (video follows with transcript and commentary):

LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: Consider what Keith [Olbermann] invented and taught us to do: Op-ed TV. The incomparable Maureen Dowd is a friend of mine. I know if I told her I want her to do five op-ed columns in a week, she would tell me that is impossible and ask me if I know how hard it is to do even one. I do know. I've done a few, very few.

That's why I marveled, as any writer must, at what Keith was doing – five op-eds a week, each of them much, much longer than the standard 800 words. This is the only place in television where people are surprised if you leave after eight years. In the entertainment division of this company, if a show like, say, "The West Wing" wins every possible award and runs for seven years, everyone just applauds an extraordinary show for an extraordinary run. I saw — I saw exactly how exhausted the great Aaron Sorkin was after delivering 22 episodes a year of “The West Wing.”

Well, Keith delivered 20 a month. 20 A month. Hundreds of episodes a year. Hundreds of op-eds a year. Year in and year out. For eight years. I have no idea how he did it. None of us do. No one in television history has ever done anything like it. No one knew it could be done before he did it.

So Dowd thinks it's tough to do one 800-word op-ed a week? Maybe that's why her stuff is such garbage.

With the advent of the internet, there are hundreds nay thousands of writers today publishing numerous pieces every twenty four hours.

Without dislocating my shoulder to pat myself on the back, folks like Ed Morrissey and me typically write three pieces a day, seven days a week. If Dowd's feeling challenged producing her two columns every seven day, maybe it's a sign she really has become a dinosaur.

As for O'Donnell's awe concerning Olbermann having an eight-year run, does he know that "Meet the Press" is now in its 64th year? Or that there are 25 television shows that have run for forty years or more?

O'Donnell also seems to forget that the man largely responsible for creating this television genre, Larry King, ended his run on CNN last month after 25 years.

Yet O'Donnell went gaga over Olbermann's almost eight?

Also preposterous was crediting the "Countdown" host with inventing the concept of op-ed television as history will certainly bestow this honor on David Brinkley whose nightly commentaries on the renowned "Huntley-Brinkley Report" were the thing of legend.

As for soloists in this genre, Fox News's Bill O'Reilly was doing op-ed TV more than five years before "Countdown" started and is now in his fifteenth season.

This ignores the many talk radio hosts in our nation that are on the air for three hours a day, five days a week offering their opinions to audiences O'Donnell and Olbermann can only dream of.

Rush Limbaugh, for example, is now in his 23rd year, and I say with great confidence that what folks like him do is far more demanding than what Olbermann did.

Add it all up, and O'Donnell's gooey sentiment though understandable given his esteem for his colleague was as factually-challenged as, well, most of his reports on virtually any subject.

So I guess we shouldn't be too surprised.

NewsBusters.org – Exposing Liberal Media Bias

It was to be expected that MSNBC commentators would publicly wish Keith Olbermann well after his surprise exit last Friday.

But the nonsense that spewed out of Lawrence O'Donnell's mouth Monday evening – "He invented op-ed TV…For eight years…No one in television history has ever done anything like it" – was so sycophantic and factually bereft it was almost sick-making (video follows with transcript and commentary):

LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: Consider what Keith [Olbermann] invented and taught us to do: Op-ed TV. The incomparable Maureen Dowd is a friend of mine. I know if I told her I want her to do five op-ed columns in a week, she would tell me that is impossible and ask me if I know how hard it is to do even one. I do know. I've done a few, very few.

That's why I marveled, as any writer must, at what Keith was doing – five op-eds a week, each of them much, much longer than the standard 800 words. This is the only place in television where people are surprised if you leave after eight years. In the entertainment division of this company, if a show like, say, "The West Wing" wins every possible award and runs for seven years, everyone just applauds an extraordinary show for an extraordinary run. I saw — I saw exactly how exhausted the great Aaron Sorkin was after delivering 22 episodes a year of “The West Wing.”

Well, Keith delivered 20 a month. 20 A month. Hundreds of episodes a year. Hundreds of op-eds a year. Year in and year out. For eight years. I have no idea how he did it. None of us do. No one in television history has ever done anything like it. No one knew it could be done before he did it.

So Dowd thinks it's tough to do one 800-word op-ed a week? Maybe that's why her stuff is such garbage.

With the advent of the internet, there are hundreds nay thousands of writers today publishing numerous pieces every twenty four hours.

Without dislocating my shoulder to pat myself on the back, folks like Ed Morrissey and me typically write three pieces a day, seven days a week. If Dowd's feeling challenged producing her two columns every seven day, maybe it's a sign she really has become a dinosaur.

As for O'Donnell's awe concerning Olbermann having an eight-year run, does he know that "Meet the Press" is now in its 64th year? Or that there are 25 television shows that have run for forty years or more?

O'Donnell also seems to forget that the man largely responsible for creating this television genre, Larry King, ended his run on CNN last month after 25 years.

Yet O'Donnell went gaga over Olbermann's almost eight?

Also preposterous was crediting the "Countdown" host with inventing the concept of op-ed television as history will certainly bestow this honor on David Brinkley whose nightly commentaries on the renowned "Huntley-Brinkley Report" were the thing of legend.

As for soloists in this genre, Fox News's Bill O'Reilly was doing op-ed TV more than five years before "Countdown" started and is now in his fifteenth season.

This ignores the many talk radio hosts in our nation that are on the air for three hours a day, five days a week offering their opinions to audiences O'Donnell and Olbermann can only dream of.

Rush Limbaugh, for example, is now in his 23rd year, and I say with great confidence that what folks like him do is far more demanding than what Olbermann did.

Add it all up, and O'Donnell's gooey sentiment though understandable given his esteem for his colleague was as factually-challenged as, well, most of his reports on virtually any subject.

So I guess we shouldn't be too surprised.

NewsBusters.org – Exposing Liberal Media Bias

Never mind the fact that Rep. Peter King’s hearings have already been sanitized of almost all potential criticism of Islamic teachings, and that the deliberate exclusion of controversial points of view will doom them to be a pointlessly ritualistic display of Congress looking busy.

Even so, standard operating procedures are kicking in among King’s Muslim constituents. We see this every time Islam comes under scrutiny, particularly in the wake of an attempted act of jihad. The aim is to deflect any criticism of Islam or attention to conduct by Muslims that brings bad publicity by shifting the focus and casting Muslims as victims or potential victims of “Islamophobia.”

The implication is that all criticism of Islam that can’t be neutralized with a little one-way “dialogue” can only be motivated by hate. Seething, bilious, irrational, and unstable hatred, that makes speaking ill of Islam tantamount to incitement. It is an emotional ploy to silence legitimate and well substantiated concerns about jihad, immigration, and Sharia law.

“Long Island Muslims fear their congressman’s hearings could flame [sic] Islamophobia,” by William Wan for the Washington Post, January 24:

WESTBURY, N.Y. – They called it a summit to teach Muslims how to fight prejudice and fear. But all day long, fear was inescapable in the fluorescent-lit meeting hall of the Long Island mosque.

One begins to wonder if there isn’t a stock, Mad-Libs sort of template for these stories on the hard drives of major news organizations. Just fill in the names, places, and the grievance du jour.

The top issue on everyone’s mind this month at the Islamic Center of Long Island was this: What could be done to stop planned congressional hearings on alleged hidden radicalism among American Muslims and mosques?

The House hearings, scheduled to begin next month, have touched off a wave of panic throughout the U.S. Muslim community, which has spent much of the past year battling what it sees as a rising tide of Islamophobia. Conference calls, strategy sessions and letter-writing campaigns have been launched. Angry op-eds have compared the congressional inquiry to McCarthyism and the World War II persecution of Japanese Americans.

But for those who gathered at the Long Island mosque, the coming hearings represented not just a political issue, but a personal one. For the man organizing the hearings was the very lawmaker who was supposed to represent them in Washington – Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.). Long before he had become their enemy, he had been one of their community’s closest friends.

“He used to come to our weddings. He ate dinner in our homes,” said the mosque’s chairman, Habeeb Ahmed, a short medical technologist with graying hair sitting near the front. “Everything just changed suddenly after 9/11, and now he’s holding hearings to say that people like us are radical extremists. I don’t understand it.” […]

On the contrary, it looks like he’s bending over backwards to exclude the most substantive criticism of Islam at its primary sources.

Although no member of the Islamic Center has ever been accused of terrorism, King has singled out the mosque as a hotbed of “radical Islam” and called its leaders extremists who should be put under surveillance. He maintains that most Muslim leaders in this country aren’t cooperating with authorities, even as arrests of homegrown terrorists are rising greatly.

Now, as the new chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, King said he is finally in a position to do something about it.

“My first goal is just to have people even acknowledge this as a real issue,” King said. “This politically correct nonsense has kept us from debating and discussing what is one of this country’s most vital issues. We are under siege by Muslim terrorists.”

Steve Emerson and Robert Spencer would be happy to help “acknowledge this as a real issue.” They’ve been doing it for years.

Anyway, cue the violins:

For years, such statements by King have provoked anger among Muslims in his district, but with the hearings looming, there is also a sense of shame and regret. Long Island Muslims worry that what began long ago as a broken relationship between them and their congressman could soon pose a threat to the entire U.S. Muslim community.…

And there you have it. Criticism = incitement = danger: Q.E.D.

Jihad Watch

by Zoe Pollock

Ed Yong gleans a larger lesson about teaching from a new study by Elizabeth Bonawitz:

Through two experiments with pre-schoolers, Bonawitz has found that teaching can be a “double-edge sword”. When teachers provided specific instructions about a new toy, children learned how to play with it more efficiently. But the lessons also curtailed their exploratory streak. They were less likely to play with the toy in new ways. Ultimately, they failed to find all of its secrets. …

Context clearly matters. When the apparently knowledgeable teachers in the experiments provide a seemingly complete lesson about the toy, the children deduce that there is no more to learn. If the lesson is interrupted, or if the instructor seems like a novice, the child deduces that there is more to discover. Bonawitz thinks that these abilities start from a very early age, when children are still in pre-school or kindergarten.

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Look forward.

Like Sarah Palin, I came of age in the era of Ronald Reagan, although for me, that process began more in 1976 as a 13-year-old fascinated by national politics than four years later as a high-school graduate wondering if I’d get the same opportunities as previous generations.  By that time, we had experienced a lost […]

Read this post »

Hot Air » Top Picks

Responding to Sen. Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) promise that there will be a vote in the Senate to repeal the health care law, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) outlined the Democratic response on Face the Nation.

Said Schumer: “Mitch McConnell has the right to offer an amendment. If he does — if the Republicans offer an amendment on the floor, then we will require them to vote on the individual protections in the bill that are very popular and that even some of the new Republican House members have said they support.”

He added: “So in the end, their repeal bill is going to be so full of holes it looks like Swiss cheese.”
Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire

In light of not even the lefty Governor of Hawaii being able to produce a birth certificate for the Manchurian Moonbat, now might be a good time to have another look at the Bitter Half’s visit to Sesame Street:

On a tip from X101ABNDevil.

Moonbattery

The inch deep analysis that we get from the illiterati in the left-media shows that they have agendas, sure, but no grasp of history, logic, or facts. No better example of the facile nature of the Old Media can be had than Christiane Amanpour and on ABC News she strutted her imbecilic excuse for historical analysis once again.

In a January 20 interview with the sister of John F. Kennedy, Amanpour attempted to equate the “political atmosphere” of today with that of 1963 when President Kennedy was murdered as well as 1968 when his brother Bobby was shot. But her empty attempt to analyze either era does not rise to the level of common sense much less a serious political discussion.

Over some video clips of JFK and Bobby Kennedy and the funerals for both, Amanpour sonorously tried to say that today is somehow “just like” the “political atmosphere” of those days decades ago. Simply put, nothing could be further from the truth.

John F. Kennedy was assassinated less than three years after his inauguration in November 1963. His brother Bobby in 1968. Two acts of political violence so traumatic that the country has never fully recovered.

It’s an episode eerily relevant today in the wake of the assassination attempt against Gabrielle Giffords less than two weeks ago.

Immediately thereafter, in a question put to Jean Kennedy Smith, Amanpour said:

A congresswoman was targeted. No matter what the reason, how would you describe the atmosphere, the political atmosphere today in the country?

Fortunately, Smith did not take Amanpour’s bait and said that the criminal action of the man that killed her brother was just that of “an individual,” and not a result of some great sickness of society as Amanpour was attempting to lead her to say. Smith sensibly told Amanpour, “I don’t think we should blame a whole group of people for it.”

Amanpour must have been sorely disappointed in this reply. Caught up in the Old Media’s attempt to blame the political right, she was obviously hoping to make the Giffords shooting “just like” that of JFK and RFK. Of course, the attempt by Amanpour to make today just like 1963 is foolish and completely empty of any real in depth analysis. Today’s political climate is nothing like that of 1963 or better yet 1968 when RFK was killed.

Let us recall what was going on, especially during 1968. We were involved in a war going badly in Vietnam, one that saw massive riots in protest. The Watts Race Riot had occurred in 1965 and by 1968 nearly a dozen others had occurred. JFK was killed, then RFK and Martin Luther King, Jr. and others. They don’t call them “the turbulent 60s” for nothing.

By comparison, today we have relative calm in our political climate. Sure people are active, many even upset. But the Tea Party has been orderly, determined yet interestingly calm compared to the chaos that reigned in the 60s. For that matter, as violent as their rhetoric had been, even the late not-so-lamented anti-war rallies of the early 2000s were orderly compared to the turbulent era they pretended at emulating.

Further, unlike the JFK and RFK assassinations, the attempt on Giffords’ life had nothing at all to do with politics as far as anyone can tell. Giffords’ shooter does not seem to have had any traditional political ideology. Granted, with his trutherism, his vague paper money allusions, and his anti-Bush influences, he took his ideas mostly from the extreme American left, but he did not seem to espouse their actual political goals at all. He just had some mushy notion that only he knew what was really going on even as he didn’t seem to articulate it cogently anywhere. He simply is not part of any greater movement.

Unlike Lee Harvey Oswald, who was a commie, or Sirhan Sirhan, who was a radical Islamist, Jared Loughner is just a whack job with no ties to any real political movement that intends social upheaval. Loughner more resembles Charles J. Guiteau, the assassin of President James Garfield, than he does Oswald. Guiteau was a psycho that was mad that about not getting a job at the Post Office and thought God had told him to kill Garfield. He was a lone actor not connected to either reality or any greater movement. Oswald, on the other hand, was a communist that wanted to topple the USA , wanted to turn it communist, and he was connected to a greater ideological movement. Loughner definitely is more like a Guiteau than an Oswald.

In any case, today’s “political atmosphere” is nothing at all like that of the 1960s. But even if it were it wouldn’t make political assassins something unusual in the United States. We’ve had repeated attempts — many successful — to murder politicians in this country at least since the presidency of Andrew Jackson, himself a victim of an attempt on his life.

A large number of the presidents in the 20th century had attempts made on their lives, mayors, senators, congressmen, governors, politicians of every stripe, all have been attacked in this country and many killed in those attacks. Sometimes attacks were made during times of social unrest, other times not. But they have been relatively steady occurrences for nearly two hundred years.

The fact is, Amanpour’s weak attempt to shore up the victim status for her own political ideology (leftism and the Democrat Party) is a pretty thin veneer of partisan hackery. It is even worse “journalism.” But in her groundless claims lies her bias and that of her contemporaries who earnestly nod their heads at her nonsense and imagine she has hit on a central fact of today’s political climate.

One thing here, though, does happen to be “just like” the JFK assassination. Before the blood in the street was dry in Dallas in 1963, the chattering classes in the Old Media were blaming the assassination on Republicans, conservatives, and the political right. The first “theory” that the leftists in the media floated for the assassination of Kennedy was that the violent rhetoric of the radical right in Texas is what caused the shooting. Turned out that the assassin was a commie and had precisely nothing to do with the American right. Similarly before anyone even knew if Giffords would live through her attack and before anyone even knew her assassin’s name the same Old Media was again blaming the political right for the violence. So, maybe in this small way, today’s political climate is just like that of the 1960s. We still have a far left-wing media spreading its agenda despite the actual facts on the ground.

Big Journalism

With House Republicans having leverage over the budget process, Nate Silver wonders whether a showdown with President Obama — perhaps over raising the national debt limit — might once again lead to a government shutdown.

In 1995, the public “largely blamed Republicans for the mess rather than Bill Clinton, whose standing rose as a result; he went on to win re-election the following year.”

“There are no guarantees that the outcome would be the same this time around. Among many other variables, the personalities of both the president and the Republican leaders are significantly different now; the media environment has changed; and the Great Recession would color the debate in 2011 more than the recession of 1990-91 did in 1995, when it was well back in the rearview mirror.”


Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire