Obama explains his policy on national borders

Paradox: Venezuela failing "despite" government having absolute control

The Atlantic analyzes Venezuela and is puzzled by Hugo Chavez's disastrous legacy:

Venezuela is now the world champion of inflation, homicide, insecurity, and shortages of essential goods—from milk for children to insulin for diabetics and all kinds of indispensable products. All this despite having the greatest oil reserves in the world and a government with absolute control of all state institutions and levers of power. 

So, Venezuela is a disaster "despite" having "a government with absolute control"?

PREVIOUSLY on the paradoxes that vex the minds of liberals/journalists:
•Paradox: Those most knowledgeable about science are least likely to believe climate alarmists
•Paradox: Those who support Obamacare don't  understand it
•Paradox: Rather than work, people accept free money!
•Paradox: Higher taxes yield less revenue
•Paradox: Price high despite shortage;  Also: despite homeowners protecting themselves, crime is down.
•Paradox: "Despite" having the most generous benefits for homelessness, homeless flock to San Francisco
•Paradox: Gun sales up despite politicians' threats to ban gun sales
•Paradox: Student test scores improve despite school funding decrease
•News report: Gun crime down "despite" increase in gun sales
•It's a paradox: Congress unpopular "despite record"
•"Ironically," conservatives and their children are happier
•It's a paradox!: Crime down when criminals are in jail.
•Paradox: Crime is down despite criminals being in prison
•Paradox: Few fraudulent voters if voters are required to have IDs

Is Obama an evil genius?

The Washington Post reviews the competence of recent Obama diplomatic appointments:

The nominee for ambassador to Norway, for example, prompted outrage in Oslo by characterizing one of the nation’s ruling parties as extremist. A soap-opera producer slated for Hungary appeared to have little knowledge of the country she would be living in. A prominent Obama bundler nominated to be ambassador to Argentina acknowledged that he had never set foot in the country and doesn’t speak Spanish.

 Even former senator Max Baucus (D-Mont.), the new U.S. ambassador in Beijing, managed to raise eyebrows during his confirmation hearing by acknowledging, “I’m no real expert on China.” . . . . 

The troubles began last month, when million-dollar bundler and Chartwell Hotels chief executive George Tsunis testified at his confirmation hearing to be ambassador to Norway. Tsunis admitted he had never been to the Scandinavian country and suggested, among other things, that the nation’s Progress Party was part of a discounted “fringe.” It is actually part of Norway’s center-right ruling coalition.

Mamet was asked during his own confirmation hearing this month if he had ever been to Argentina, where he would be ambassador. “I haven’t had the opportunity yet to be there,” said Mamet, who raised more than $500,000 for Obama’s reelection.

During the same hearing, Robert C. Barber, who raised more than $1.6 million for Obama in 2012 and has been nominated to serve as ambassador to Iceland, said he had never visited the Nordic nation.

Then there is Colleen Bell, the nominee for ambassador to Hungary and the Hollywood producer behind “The Bold and The Beautiful” soap opera, who raised or contributed about $800,000 to Obama in the last election. She stammered her way through testimony about U.S. strategic interests in the country, which is the focus of growing international alarm over its far-right government’s treatment of Jews and other minorities.  [Emph. added]

Add to these examples, such Obama cabinet appointments as John Kerry and Chuck Hagel, and one has a distinct pattern of incompetence:  Obama surrounds himself with fools.  This is not something that smart people do.  As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle observed:

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.

Obama is mediocrity. He may do evil (forcing people into Obamacare, enabling Iranian nukes, etc) but these are the acts of a fool, not a genius.

ASIDE: Note that the wide variation in the cost of ambassadorships.  Mamet raised a mere $500,000 while getting Argentina while Barber raised over $1.6 million and merely got Iceland.

How much does it cost to buy a mayor?

Ray Nagin

A jury has found former New Orleans mayor Ray "school bus" Nagin guilty of 20 counts of corruption.  CNN reports:

A January 2013 indictment detailed more than $200,000 in bribes to the mayor, and his family members allegedly received a vacation in Hawaii; first-class airfare to Jamaica; private jet travel and a limousine for New York City; and cellular phone service. In exchange, businesses that coughed up for Nagin and his family won more than $5 million in city contracts, according to the January 2013 indictment.

$200,00 in bribes generated over $5 million in contracts: that is a 25-to-1 return on investment.

Mayor Nagin is also well known for his open racism, having declared that he wanted New Orleans to be a "chocolate" city:

It's time for us to come together. It's time for us to rebuild a New Orleans, the one that should be, a chocolate New Orleans. And I don't care what people are saying uptown or wherever they are. This city will be chocolate at the end of the day.

PREVIOUSLY on the cost of buying government:
•Kickbacks and the LA Coliseum
•How to buy a congressman
•How to buy a judge
•Speaker Pelosi and Sen. Feinstein: how their husbands benefit from government contracts 
•How to buy a vote (they're cheap: $10)

The decline of American colleges

College students today work half as hard as students used to, according to George Will who was citing a study by Brink Lindsay of  Cato Institute:

Lindsey reported that in 1961, full-time college students reported studying 25 hours a week on average; by 2003, average studying time had fallen to 13 hours. Half of today’s students take no courses requiring more than 20 pages of writing in a semester. Given the role of practice in developing expertise, “the conclusion that college students are learning less than they used to seems unavoidable.” Small wonder those with college degrees occupying jobs that do not require a high school diploma include 1.4 million retail salespeople and cashiers, half a million waiters, bartenders and janitors, and many more.

While students are learning less and benefitting less, college costs (green line) have been rising faster than inflation (blue) , even faster than medical costs (red):

Colleges may be dominated by left-wing radicals, but that doesn't mean that they aren't in it for the money, as evidenced by the over 42 college presidents make over a million dollars a year.

PREVIOUSLY on the subject of education:
•University history prof, specializing in Reagan, has no clue
•A failing school substitutes liberal indoctrination in place of teaching •Prioritizing gimmicks over education
•Are public schools succeeding?
•Paradox: student test scores improve after school budgets are cut
•The great minds of the Ivy League
•Study: teacher's unions are bad for education
•Study: sexist women teachers stunt learning of girl students
•Black students, harassed for "acting white," get $150,000
•Teaching self-esteem backfires
•Education in Korea vs. the US: does "self-esteem" backfire?
•LA pays teachers not to teach
•What teachers learn in teacher's ed.
•Obama promises to throw money at schools
•How to get a job teaching in California even if you are illiterate
•Affirmative action backfire
•California offers student tutoring but only for students belonging to the right races
•High school implements race-based punishments for misbehavior

Dept of Justice investigation of IRS scandal exposed as phony

From the Washington Times:

The Justice Department selected an avowed political supporter of President Obama to lead the criminal probe into the IRS targeting of tea party groups, according to top Republicans who said Wednesday that the move has ruined the entire investigation.

Not surprisingly, the MSM is ignoring this:

So far ABC, CBS and NBC have yet to mention what Darrell Issa called “a startling conflict of interest.” In fact the Big Three networks have almost completely stopped covering the IRS scandal investigation altogether.

 For comparison:

In less than 24 hours, the big three networks have devoted 17 times more coverage to a traffic scandal involving Chris Christie than they've allowed in the last six months to Barack Obama's Internal Revenue Service controversy

Liberal prophesies in review

Democrats are perpetually outraged at how some conservative policy will inevitably lead to disaster.  So, it is occasionally useful to review their predictions as Steven Hayward has done here regarding Reagan's decontrol of oil prices in 1981:

Liberals reacted with horror, predicting the price of gasoline—then about $1.40 a gallon—would soar. Sen. Don Riegle of Michigan said that “It will hurt our people within a matter of days.” Sen. Dale Bumpers of Arkansas predicted that “without rationing, gasoline will soon go to $3 a gallon.” Congressman (now Senator) Ed Markey said “I believe that decontrol as a cure will prove to be worse than the disease of oil addiction.” Sen. George Mitchell said “Every citizen and every family will find their living standards reduced by this decision.” What actually happened? Sure enough, oil prices started falling immediately, with gasoline drifting down to 89 cents a gallon by 1986. The liberal prophecies disappeared down a memory hole.

Obama thinks you're a fool

This is the latest email from  the Orwellian-named "truth team" at BarackObama.com:

Here's an Obamacare number that's hard to argue with:

1.2 million.

That's how many Americans have signed up for coverage so far since October, according to new data released this week.

This is exactly why people like us fought so hard for reform for so long -- to actually help people get better, more affordable care. These are results worth writing home, or at least on Facebook and Twitter, about.

Share this number far and wide today....

The anti-Obamacare crowd might have more money than our side does, but they don't have numbers like this. This is great news, and shows we're definitely moving in the right direction -- but we're not done yet. So while they keep running their messaging wars with deception and scare tactics, there's nothing better than fighting back with facts like this.

Share the news about these 1.2 million Americans with your friends and family on Facebook....

They don't mention that 5 million people have lost their health insurance (and millions more in the future) because of Obamacare.  Yet only, even if we unwisely accept their number at face value, 1.2M have "signed up."  That is a net loss, so far, of 3.8 million insurance policies.

Who buys "designer" brands?

According to a marketing consultant, it is the insecure who overpay for status:

“There is a direct correlation between lack of self-esteem and the brands you buy," says marketing consultant Martin Lindstrom. "The less self-esteem, the more brands you wrap yourself in.”

For more, see the full article on Bloomberg.com.

The president has a plan

From IOwnTheWorld:

This year's turkey

From Nate Beeler:

A Drudgetaposition

As I write, the top three headlines on Drudge are:

Harkin calls for more rule changes...
Venezuelan president tries out new emergency powers...
White House blocks press access to more Obama events...

His message is clear.

Obama updates the Gettysburg Address

From always excellent Michael Ramirez:

The education of Barack Obama

Peter Berkowitz, of the Hoover Institution, has written an excellent article which collected some of Obama's statements admitting that the world is different from what he expected:

• On the failure of the Obamacare website: “What we’re also discovering is that insurance is complicated to buy.” 


• On the failure of his Palestine-Israel peace initiatives: “I think that we overestimated our ability to persuade them to do so when their politics ran contrary to that.” And: “I think it is absolutely true that what we did this year didn't produce the kind of breakthrough that we wanted, and if we had anticipated some of these political problems on both sides earlier, we might not have raised expectations as high.” 


• On the failure of the budget-busting "shovel-ready" stimulus package: “shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected.”

Columbia and Harvard owe America an apology for letting a man so uninformed graduate from their universities.

People who put their personal information on public social media have no idea that their personal information is public

Low-information voters that we often discuss are likely low-information about many other subjects as well.

Obama discovers that business is complicated and government is incompetent

Many have noticed the contrast between the technological mastery of Obama's presidential campaigns and Obamacare's IT disaster.  In yesterday's press conference (full transcript here), Pres. Obama explains some lessons learned:

[O]ur IT systems, how we purchase technology in the federal government is cumbersome, complicated and outdated. And so this isn’t a situation where — on my campaign, I could simply say, who are the best folks out there, let’s get them around a table, let’s figure out what we’re doing and we’re just going to continue to improve it and refine it and work on our goals.

If you’re doing it at the federal government level, you know, you’re going through, you know, 40 pages of specs and this and that and the other and there’s all kinds of law involved. And it makes it more difficult — it’s part of the reason why chronically federal IT programs are overbudget, behind schedule.

Obama discovers that the Federal government is a big non-functional bureaucracy bound up in red tape.  Surprise!  One might have thought that this is the kind of thing he should have considered putting 1/6th of the US economy under the control of a website to be built by the same Federal IT people who he now knows are "chronically" "overbudget" and "behind schedule."

Separate from IT, Obama discovered something about the health insurance:

What we’re discovering is that part of the problem has been technology, hardware and software, and that’s being upgraded. But even if we get the — the hardware and software working exactly the way it’s supposed to with relatively minor glitches, what we’re also discovering is that insurance is complicated to buy. And another mistake that we made, I think, was underestimating the difficulties of people purchasing insurance online and shopping for a lot of options with a lot of costs and lot of different benefits and plans and — and somehow expecting that that would be very smooth, and then they’ve also got to try to apply for tax credits on the website.

Obama has discovered that health insurance is complicated, maybe too complicated to fit into a website. Who would have thought so?  As a candidate, Obama promised to slow "the rise of the oceans" and to heal "the planet."  Five years later, he has discovered that a mere website to sell insurance is beyond his skills.

The politics of liberalism is founded on naivety and Obama excels at it.

Romney's Uncanny Predictions

Romney may have been a mediocre candidate but he certainly had a better handle on what Obama was about than the legacy media:

Hat tip: Instapundit.

A liberal's inability to distinguish reality and fantasy

In the Abilene TX Reporter-News (hat tip: BoTW), Ann McFeatters writes about global warming.  Her otherwise predictable column ("science is right, the burning of fossil fuels ... already is causing extreme weather...") does have one interesting sentence:

We have seen enough science fiction movies to know how fragile our ecosystem is.

Apparently, when she writes that the global warming "science is right," she means the science fiction.

A similar confusion was demonstrated in this news article from the San Francisco Chronicle that ran soon after Arnold Schwarzenegger began his run for governor in 2003.  At the time, Schwarzenegger was an unknown so the newspaper attempted to determine the candidate's political views by quoting lines said by the fictional characters that he played in movies.

When talking about public policy, we conservatives may cite Locke or Hayek.  We should recognize that, to liberals, such sources are inconsequential compared to what they saw in the latest Hollywood movie.

Obama celebrates

From A. F. Branco:

Occupy Protester convicted of arson

On Friday, a Jury convicted Occupy Fort Collins activist Benjamin Gilmore of arson.  The Coloradoan reports:

Gilmore was an active member of the Occupy demonstration amid nationwide protests against social and economic inequality, and he spoke of the movement with media and at Fort Collins City Council meetings before his arrest. The fire was a block from the protest site.

According to prosecutors, the fire caused an estimated $10 million in damage and threatened 21 people’s lives,  Gilmore was also charged with attempted murder but the jury did not convict. (Hat tip: IOwnTheWorld.)

Separately in July, Occupy protester Aaron Greene pleaded guilty to explosives possession charges. He was sentenced to seven years in prison for his plan to bomb the Washington Arch.  He partner and ex-girlfriend, Morgan Gliedman,copped a plea and will not be serving jail time.

PREVIOUSLY on the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement:
•Occupy Wall Street activist arrested with guns, explosives
•OWS opposes "the mere existence of private property"
•NYPD identifies suspect in Occupy Wall Street rape
•Occupy Portland explains its rape policy
•Photos from Occupy San Francisco: the "general strike" that wasn't
•Occupiers trash San Francisco restaurant
•OWS: liberally anti-Semitic
•Occupy Portland mob smashes windows
•Occupy movement demands banks provide free money
•OccupyFail: Corporations as people
•Occupy Oakland: the devolution