It seems that it’s not only Barack Obama’s position of football spiking that has taken a turn in an election year. Apparently the enthusiasm that resulted in huge stadiums full of adoring fans in 2008 has also changed quite a bit. From the Columbus Dispatch : The Romney campaign kept a close eye on the proceedings. Romney’s national press secretary, Ryan Williams, found his way to a seat in the arena and later characterized the speech as “a retread, a cut-and-paste job of President Obama’s 2008 campaign rhetoric. “Unfortunately,” Williams continued, “for him this time around he has a record to defend, a record of exploding deficits, job losses and fiscal mismanagement in Washington.” Twitter was abuzz with photos and comments about vast areas of empty seats in the arena’s upper deck. Noting that the Obama campaign had predicted an “overflow crowd,” Williams said, “This arena was not full so the president failed to meet the bar his campaign set.” So were the empty rows as bad as reported? Luckily for us, twitter exists. This seems as good a time as any to repost a video of mine from 2 years ago to prove that I knew this eventual disappointment was coming. Follow @BenHowe
See the article here:
Obama Launches Reelection Campaign. Throngs of Adoring Fans Apparently Stuck in Traffic.
Tuesday I awakened to hear my wife walking around the house at about eight in the morning. This is extremely early for her and I mean EXTREMELY. I asked her what the matter was and she said, as expected, that it was G., a very close family member who is suffering from a serious mental illness. This is someone who was always problematic, but has now gotten what his doctors describe as a paranoid psychosis of the schizophrenic variety. This is a matter of his suspecting that his food is poisoned, that his meds are poisoned, that snipers are setting up perches to kill him near his home, that cars filled with assassins are circling him in his car. He is really, really sick. God bless Big Pharma. They have drugs that could straighten him out but he won’t take them, and the reason that my wife is up so early is that she’s getting called by another family member about how oddly G. is acting. Genuinely scary stuff. Threatening stuff. We made a flurry of calls to the doctors who attend G., but while they are eager to help they can do nothing if G. never shows up for his appointments. So, my wife and I are frantic. I swam for a long time, then worked on some bills, then took my wife out for lunch at our golf club, Morningside. There was only one other person at lunch, a distinguished-looking older woman. She shared with us that she had just lost her husband of forty years. What a blow that is. How does a mate go on living after that? I don’t even have any idea. It must be harrowing. Back at home, I had a blizzard of texts from a dear friend in New York who is having a wild fight with her husband, or maybe it’s her ex-husband, about their children. She called for me to help her get a hotel room in Manhattan so she could go there and cry all night. This woman is in her late 30s and has no credit card. How is that possible? Anyway, I arranged it, and off she went to cry. Then more calls from a family member about G not showing up for doctors’ appointments, and then time for a long nap in my guest room, where I feel fairly protected. It’s the shadiest room in the house and neat as a pin. I slept for two hours and then went outside to say farewell to a crew who had been putting in a new, incredibly pricey air conditioning unit in a wing of the house. “Are you sure it works?” I asked them. “Oh, yes, it works great,” they said and it seemed to be keeping my bedroom cool. I lay down and in half an hour, the darned thing simply stopped working altogether. Many calls to the a/c man later, he showed up and said the problem had been some small part and I never needed that whole unit after all. Of course, he has to charge me for it anyway. Meanwhile, the unit is still not working. Then, a call from a lawyer in a case in which I am a plaintiff, or The Plaintiff. We have a ruling against us on an issue so insane that only a trial lawyer could have thought of it. I can easily appeal, but I am sick of the whole thing. Litigation is a pure nightmare. I really feel sad for people who do it for a living. Painful. More texts about G., more texts from the friend in New York whose husband or ex-husband is mistreating her, and new texts from a woman whom I help to hide from her anxieties, and then a text from a woman I met at an airport in Miami ten years ago who saw me on TV and wants to marry me. She wants me to take her away from her fears about money. Ha! Little does she know. Alex and I took the dogs for a walk. Above us, jet planes crossed the sky high above the oleander and the palm trees. “I wish we could ride away on a contrail,” my wife said. My life is filled with other people’s problems. Russ Ferguson said that about me and it’s true. I need yet another nap and I need to change my focus. Fifty years ago this summer, my pal, Marvin Goldberg, put the car radio in his little blue Triumph sports car on a local Virginia station that played “folk songs.” The station was WAVA. “There’s this really great singer they play a lot,” he said. “Name’s Bob Dylan.” As we sped through the Fairfax, Virginia night, on the then empty Dulles Access Highway, sure enough, the next song to come up was Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” an anti-love song that lit my brains on fire. Dylan’s raspy voice said that he was not going to be totally devoted, that he was no one’s love slave, that he was his own man. And he was angry that the question even came up. From then on, he was my hero. It wasn’t because he was the voice of my generation — anti-segregation, anti-war, questioning, mocking. It was that for the first time I had ever heard, a popular musician expressed the most basic of human emotions — anger, poetically and unsparingly. His song about the wrongful death of a poor black hotel worker, Hattie Carroll, because she was hit with a cane by a wealthy landowner’s son at a Baltimore hotel society gathering, has many of its facts wrong… but the emotions of outrage he expresses at what whites could do to blacks in my home state of Maryland fifty years ago were searingly on target. He was not content to be a folk singer. He became an electric guitarist and rock star with the best rock song of all time, “Like a rolling stone.” I still don’t know what it means, but then I don’t know what a sunset means either and I love them both. For more than fifty years, Bob Dylan has been giving us songs of genius that no one else even touches. This little boy from the Mesabi Range in Minnesota has come to be — to many of us — the greatest poet — by far — of the postwar era. Now, he is getting the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama. He deserves it. No singer that I am aware of ever hit the notes of what life really is, what humans really are, better than Dylan. I have spent more hours listening to him than to all other human beings on the planet put together and it will never be enough. Well done, Mr. President. Well done, Bob. I have not spoken to Marvin in forty years. I don’t know why. By the way, Mr. President, I caught your speech about Afghanistan tonight. It is EXACTLY the same as Nixon’s speeches about Vietnamizing the Vietnam war some forty years ago. I suspect it will work out about as well. Can Mr. Obama really be that ignorant of history and reality? Yes, he can.
The rest is here:
Bad Day in Rancho Mirage
Surprisingly, his “Truth Team” left out the words “appalling and offensive” even though they were quoting that portion of his speech. From this post last night: “If you don’t like it, the governor of Pennsylvania said you can ‘close your eyes,’” Obama said of Republican Gov. Tom Corbett, who has backed a mandatory ultrasound bill.
Go here to see the original:
Obama’s “Truth Team” Touts Speech Where He Called Pro-Life Views “Appalling And Offensive”…
[Posted by Karl] As usual, you are positively encouraged to engage in sockpuppetry in this thread. The usual rules apply. Please, be sure to switch back to your regular handle when commenting on other threads. I have made that mistake myself. Sockpuppet comments about the Republican primary race are strictly prohibited . If you wish to use sockpuppets for that purpose, confine your comments to this thread . Same goes for any discussion that is not funny where people want to get angry at each other. Offending comments will be summarily deleted and the violators flogged. And remember: the worst sin you can commit on this thread is not being funny. — Jodi Kantor, who writes for rome wingnut rag called The New York Times , also wrote a book about The Obamas. NRO’s Jim Geraghty has been excerpting choice bits, including this nugget about the Sun King losing faith in his subjects : Later in the first term, there were points where the American public seemed to be giving up on Barack Obama. But the relationship went both ways, and there were many times the president seemed to be giving up on the public, too, convinced Americans would never understand his point of view… …Being in the White House seemed to intensify one of his best traits, his natural seriousness, along with one of his worst, his conviction that he was more serious than anyone else. There was a gap between the way Obama consumed information — in orderly, high-level briefings — and the way nearly everyone else in the country did, and it could often turn him derisive. Geraghty then shows that at times, Obama has seemed quite incorrect in his assessment of how other Americans consume information, perhaps because Obama seems to consume his from MSNBC. Next up, the president’s trip to Oslo to collect the Nobel Peace Prize: But amid the bad news and pressures of late 2009, the trip unexpectedly passed like a brief, happy fantasy for the president, a Nordic alternate reality where citizens were learned and pensive, discussions were thoughtful, and everyone was a fan. “It wasn’t hero worship,” said one adviser who accompanied them. “Okay, it was.” For one day, the Obamas lived in the dream version of his presidency instead of the depressing reality. At meals and receptions, they mingled with the members of the Royal Academy — government officials, academics . . . [In his speech, the president] laid out standards that he privately must have known he would not reach. “The United States of America must remain a standard-bearer in the conduct of war,” he said. “That is why I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed. And that is why I have reaffirmed America’s commitment to abide by the Geneva Conventions.” He did not acknowledge that the effort to close Guantanamo was failing or ddress the questions of whether his detention policies violated those guidelines . “We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals we fight to defend,” he said. It was as if he had pressed some sort of rewind button to 2008. The trip spurred a thought the Obamas and their friends would voice to each other again and again as the president’s popularity continued to decline: the American public just did not appreciate their exceptional leader. The president “could get 70 or 80 percent of the vote anywhere but the U.S.” [President Obama's old friend] Marty Nesbitt told [another old friend of Obama] Eric Whitaker indignantly. (Emphases added) Again, a mixture of hubris and a failure to spot the gap between that hubris and the reality of his polices. In fact, it’s even worse than the book suggests. According to Gallup , U.S. leadership had a 49% approval rate in Europe in 2009 — a marked improvement over the final Bush years, but 49% was approximately Obama’s low mark for approval in America. Lastly, Obama’s assessment of his political skills : Obama had always had a high estimation of his ability to cast and run his operation. When David Plouffe, his campaign manager, first interviewed for a job with him in 2006, the senator gave him a warning: “I think I could probably do every job on the campaign better than the people I’ll hire to do it,” he said. “It’s hard to give up control when that’s all I’ve known.” Obama said nearly the same thing to Patrick Gaspard, whom he hired to be the campaign’s political director. “I think I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” Obama told him. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.” This would go a long way toward explaining the frequent tone-deafness of the Obama administration. A secure leader tries to surround himself or herself with people who are as smart or smarter than they are who will challenge them. Instead, Obama’s post-presidency may feature a staging of “ Barry, Get Your Teleprompter .” –Karl
See the article here:
Sockpuppet Friday (Jodi Kantor’s The Obamas edition)
(H/T Instapundit ) Let me show you this picture: it’s from House Ways/Means [Budget**] chair Paul Ryan’s speech this morning (04/26/2012) at Georgetown. Specifically, it’s the protest at Georgetown: Picture via John McCormack (via Twitchy ): John is also noting that there weren’t many protesters inside, either, and that things went off without a hitch. Which is, of course, the way that these things should go; and I have no serious quibbles with the people who showed up with their signs and their long, hysterically demented, giant typewriter ribbon of protest and their pet news media van. They’re entitled to do it; and, hey, they showed up. So where’s the rest of them? Twitchy went into this point a bit , but let’s unpack it a bit more. The Democrats supposedly think (warning: FDL link) that Paul Ryan’s budget plan is a hideous liability for the Republicans – that is, those Democrats that actually know what the word ‘budget’ even means , which apparently excludes the entire Senate Democratic caucus* – so you would think that this speech by Ryan would and should have been a media circus. Watch the speech : in it Ryan went into how his own Catholic faith informs his fiscal conservatism (Georgetown, remember?), and how his current proposals are not in fact contrary to the Church’s principles when it comes to helping the poor. Given that this is genuinely subversive of the remaining links between American progressives and the Roman Catholic church hierarchy, it seems amazing that progressives weren’t trying their best to, well, at least show up. Or did they? Moe Lane ( crosspost ) PS: This is not 2007. We now know what a populist movement looks like; in late April 2010 the Tea Party was putting thousands in the streets in protests on a regular basis . I count… twelve?… in that above picture. PS: Admittedly, the more people that showed up for a counter-protest, the more likely it would have been that said counter-protesters would have ended up acting badly. Heck, twelve was probably pushing it, at that. So there’s that. *But don’t bring that up, or Debbie Wasserman Schultz will be mad at you . Note: not ‘get mad;’ there are days where DWS seems… frayed. [**Arrgh! I was deep in Ways & Means stuff this morning, and it carried over. Thanks to @ Jake_W for catching that.]
Continued here:
Where was the push-back on the Paul Ryan Georgetown speech?
