Author: Papa Giorgio

Petraeus v. Democrats Blowhards

Published by Papa Giorgio

The following is with much thanks to Abu Wabu, to which there is much more there to read… but this is the bottom line:

More from WABU:

With all the commentary that will follow from the MSM about the splendor of Obama’s decision, let’s remember all the baseless, despicable scorn, lies, character assassination and slanders Obama and his fellow Senate Democrats heaped on General Petraeus during the hearings on the Surge, a plan they all said wouldn’t work and for which they called him a liar for even suggesting it would.

Rather than burnishing Barack Hussein Obama’s presidential cred – he has none – all this whole affair has done, at this point, is prove once again what a bunch of lying sacks of shit the Democrats were in their attacks on Petraeaus and the military at the outset of the final surge and rescue of Iraq. Obama, Durbin, Reid, Biden, Clinton, Kennedy, Dodd, Kerry, Feinstein, Boxer, Pelosi, Levin, Schumer, Frank, all of them, from top to bottom. It had failed before it had even begun, they said; the war was lost, and only a lying Bush military lackey like Petraeus would try to suggest otherwise. And today it is proven once and for all that it was all politics, for nothing but their own benefit, regardless of the cost to the country, its military and its image around the world, all of which they were prepared to sacrifice on the altar of political power.

[….]

Remember, for Obama, even the prospect of genocide in Iraq was not enough to merit taking down Saddam, and he proudly declared in the Surge hearings that he never supported the rescue of Iraq.

So Obama has never had any use for a genuine national hero like General Petraeus. Until now.

WIKI notes:

  • The MoveOn.org ad controversy began when the U.S. anti-war liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org published a full-page ad in The New York Times on September 10, 2007, accusing General David H. Petraeus of “cooking the books for the White House”. The ad also labeled him “General Betray Us”. The organization created the ad in response to Petraeus’ Report to Congress on the Situation in Iraq. MoveOn hosted pages on its website about the ad and their reasons behind it from 2007 to June 23, 2010. On June 23, 2010, after President Obama nominated General Petraeus to be the new top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan (taking over the position from retiring General Stanley McChrystal), MoveOn erased these webpages and any reference to them from its website.

Victor Davis Hanson via NATIONAL REVIEW:

  • It is one of the ironies of our present warped climate that Petraeus will face far less criticism from the media and politicians than during 2007–8 (there will be no more “General Betray Us” ads or “suspension of disbelief” ridicule), because his success this time will reflect well on Obama rather than George Bush. It is a further irony that Obama is surging with Petraeus despite not long ago declaring that such a strategy and such a commander were failures in Iraq. And it is an even further irony that he is now rightly calling for “common purpose” when — again not long ago, at a critical juncture in Iraq — Obama himself, for partisan purposes on the campaign trail, had no interest in the common purpose of military success in Iraq.

And George Will via NEW YORK POST:

…Less than three months after the Times excoriated the court for weakening issue-ad restrictions, the paper made a huge and patently illegal contribution to MoveOn’s issue-advocacy ad. The American Conservative Union filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, noting that the purchaser of the ad, MoveOn Political Action, is a registered multicandidate political committee regulated by the mare’s nest of federal laws and rules the multiplication of which has so gladdened the Times.

The Times, a media corporation that is a fountain of detailed editorial instructions about how the rest of the world should conduct its business, seems confused about how it conducts its own. The Times now says the appropriate rate for MoveOn’s full-page ad should have been $142,000, a far cry from the $65,000 the group paid. So the discount of $77,000 constitutes a large soft-money contribution to a federally regulated political committee. The Times’ horror of such contributions was expressed in its enthusiasm for McCain-Feingold.

FEC regulations state: “The provision of any goods or services without charge or at a charge that is less than the usual and normal charge for such goods or services is a contribution.” Individuals are limited to contributing $5,000 in a calendar year; corporations such as the Times can make no contributions.

MoveOn is going to send the Times a check for $77,000. The Times has apologized, which is sweet, but normally the FEC doesn’t accept apologies in lieu of fines. And often FEC fines are levied after intrusive investigations into motives and intentions. Will there be such an investigation of the Times? The FEC is not lenient when dealing with individuals who, less lawyered-up than The New York Times Co., fall afoul of regulations much more recondite than the bright line the Times ignored.

Bob Bauer, a Democratic lawyer specializing in laws regulating political speech, notes – not approvingly – that the Times supposedly has a policy of rejecting ads involving “personal attack” speech. But the Times accepted MoveOn’s ad accusing a soldier of betraying his country. According to the Times’ public editor, a Times official said the ad was “a comment on a public official’s management of his office.”….

IRAQ HEARINGS: Sen. Clinton Questions Gen. Petraeus

 

People Can Use Their EBT Cards At Casinos – I Suspect We Will Hear About This Tomorrow

Published by Papa Giorgio

This must be layed squarely at the feet of the Democrats. By the way, as much shite as us conservatives give the L.A. Times, this is an excellent article:

….The cards, provided by the Department of Social Services to help recipients feed and clothe their families, work in automated teller machines at 32 of 58 tribal casinos and 47 of 90 state-licensed poker rooms, the review found.

State officials said Wednesday they were working to determine how much money had been withdrawn from casino ATMs by people using the welfare debit cards.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who learned of the issue when asked to comment for this story, promised to take immediate action.

“We have instructed our vendors to prohibit these cards from being accepted at ATMs located in casinos and card rooms,” Schwarzenegger spokesman Aaron McLear said Wednesday. “It is reprehensible that anyone would use taxpayer money for anything other than its intended purpose.”

Administration officials said the social services agency contracts with a private ATM network to handle the electronic transfer of benefits to people on welfare, and hadn’t noticed that the taxpayer money was being withdrawn at gambling establishments.

McLear said the system of paying out welfare benefits via bank cards was created under Schwarzenegger’s predecessor, Democrat Gray Davis. Since the late 1990s most states have adopted this system, which is a viewed as a more efficient way of distributing and tracking government aid….

….The cash benefits, however, can be withdrawn and spent just about anywhere.

The Capitol Casino, which occupies a pair of small rooms a few blocks from the legislative chambers in Sacramento, appears on the social services website showing where clients can get money. Each room has an ATM: one is so close to a poker table that a player with long arms could lean back and withdraw cash without leaving his chair; the other is a few steps from the blackjack table.

At the Casino Royale on the outskirts of Sacramento, the first thing patrons pass as they walk to the gaming floor is the ATM with a sign next to it saying, “Exceed your ATM daily limit here!!”….

…(read more)…

Democrats Do Not Think About Their Actions and Consequences, What Thomas Sowell Calls “2nd Tier Thinking”

Published by Papa Giorgio

All three network news shows on Tuesday skipped a report that eight of 15 experts consulted by the Obama administration opposed the government’s plan to halt deepwater oil drilling for six months. Only Special Report With Bret Baier covered the story….

…(read more)…

Controlling Big Government AND Big Business – Rich Lowry (realclearpolitics.com)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Limiting Government–And Big Business
By Rich Lowry

The Brits are upset that Pres. Barack Obama has been referring to disgraced oil giant BP as “British Petroleum,” a name it shed long ago.

But what else should Obama call an enormous Britain-based petroleum company? To ask such an innocent question betrays ignorance of the ways of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research. The marketing gurus at the firm – led by über Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg – helped conceive and execute one of the most perverse rebrandings of all time for BP.

British? So yesterday. Petroleum? Not very green. A logo of a shield emblazoned with “BP”? Disturbingly martial. In 2000, newly christened BP ditched all these negative associations by adopting the slogan “Beyond Petroleum” and emblazoning itself with a sunflower-like logo that could be mistaken for the symbol of the Green party of Canada.

It worked so brilliantly, a Joe McGinniss of marketing should write a blow-by-blow account – The Selling of BP. Greenberg Quinlan Rosner bragged that its work for BP “included extensive testing of advertising and evaluating the global response toward pioneering positions on the environment, climate change, and energy efficiency.” The case study outlining this extraordinary marketing success has since been removed from the firm’s website. (Greenberg et al. are image-conscious people, after all.)

BP knew how to play the game. It repeated all the environmentally correct platitudes that tickle the fancy of “NGO leaders, journalists, political elites,” in the words of the case study. It supported the fashionable reform of the day, cap-and-trade, knowing that the system would favor the big and connected, like itself. And it showered campaign contributions on the candidate of Hope and Change (its employees gave Obama about twice as much in donations as they did John McCain in 2008).

BP couldn’t have been notionally greener if Al Gore were its CEO. The group chief executive of BP, Lord John Browne, warned of the dangers of hydrocarbons, a little like the city fathers of Newcastle in the 19th century inveighing against coal. In a speech at Stanford in 2007, Browne advocated an “international climate agency” that would entail “a move beyond the limitations of national sovereignty.”

This green one-worldism was awfully rich coming from an executive of an oil company that couldn’t even drill responsibly. Despite all the hokum, BP spent vastly more resources on fossil fuels than green energy. In so doing, it compiled an atrocious safety record that made the poor decision-making that led to the blowout in the Gulf unsurprising to industry insiders.

And now tens of thousands of barrels of petroleum a day are fouling the Gulf, courtesy of the corporation that spent so much convincing people it was “beyond” it.

Rep. Joe Barton’s quickly retracted apology to BP for the administration’s strong-arm tactics was horribly misconceived. Fundamentally, we don’t want a free market and a system of laws to protect corporations, but to protect us from both government and corporations, especially when the two are in league with each other. Corporations like BP tend to be craven, unprincipled, and willing to use government for their own ends – all qualities evident in BP’s spectacular green-marketing campaign.

The bigger and more complex government is, the more incentive corporations have to politicize themselves and get in bed with Washington. If they have resources to do it (not everyone can afford Stan Greenberg), they’ll protect themselves from the worst while disadvantaging their competitors. This accounts for the corporatist paradox of the Obama administration. The president is so arbitrarily anti-business that The Economist dubs him “Vladimir Obama,” yet the same industries he demonizes support key elements of his “reform” agenda.

White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel argues that Barton’s apology to BP is the sum total of Republican thought on the economy, and that the fall election is a choice between Obama-style hyperactive government or the depredations of the execrable BP. To which the only rational answer can be, “None of the above.”

Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.

Skimmer Watch (Obama’s Katrina)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Gateway Pundit… Crazy News:

…Last week Barack Obama told Politico that the BP oil spill was like 9-11–But, it’s been over 60 days since the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and he’s only sent 20 of 2,000 US oil skimmer boats to the coast of Florida.

Senator George LeMieux of Florida told the Shark Tank that there are only 20 skimmer boats off the coast of Florida out of 2,000 available skimmer boats in the United States. Lemieux says that Obama is afraid to move them to Florida because there won’t be any in place in case there is an oil leak somewhere else….

…(read more)…