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Chris Christie's Questionable Response Of Overpraising Obama

We will rebuild
Fox News probably does the best job of putting Governor Chris Christie's problem into perspective. I cannot do a better presentation than this video. However, the price that has to be paid for government cooperation, it seems to me, is appearing with President Obama on a political tour of the New Jersey devastation.  The Hill puts the problem into vivid focus:
President Obama will tour damage from the hurricane in New Jersey on Wednesday with Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican and Mitt Romney ally who gave the keynote address at this year's GOP convention.
The trip is not avowedly political, but images of Obama and Christie walking the New Jersey boardwalk side by side will inevitably be seen through the prism of the presidential election that will take place just six days afterward.
They also could pay political dividends for Obama —especially at a time when TV commercials from Romney have talked up his abilities to reach across the aisle, drawing a clear if implicit contrast with Obama.
President Obama has no valid reason to visit New Jersey.  The destruction wrought by Hurricane Sandy was much worse in New York City, just minutes north of his New Jersey destination. Wherever the President goes in the next few days will bring the distraction of his entourage, especially his security team.  Relief, recovery and rebuilding efforts will come to a halt on Wednesday wherever the Presidential party descends.  No good to the NJ community will be imparted  - and Governor Christie is quite good at playing leader without Obama's help. Here is a look at the situation from the standpoint of the U.K. Daily Mail:
While a 'surprise' visit to a disaster area in the coming hours is no doubt a strong possibility, Obama's advisers know there are risks in a high-profile visit, especially if it brought claims of diverting manpower from relief efforts.
There was doubtless a gnashing of teeth inside Romney's Boston headquarters on when Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey took to the airwaves on Tuesday morning to state that the "federal government's response has been great" and "the president has been outstanding in this".
Some senior Romney aides have always been suspicious of Christie, believing he is positioning himself for a presidential run, which would only be possible if Obama win's re-election next week. Whatever his motivations for going out of his way to praise Obama's handling of Sandy, Christie has done Romney no favours.
Let us hope that Chris Christie is sincere in his desire to lead New Jersey from the wrath of a devil storm.


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Expect Hurricane Sandy To Help Republicans

Its all over the internet: "Hurricane Sandy is the October Surprise." PJ Media's "Weather Nerd," Brendon Loy seems to have first floated the idea just after noon on Wednesday, 10/24/12.

If Sandy strikes the northeast a week before the election, and causes massive, widespread and long-lasting power outages, as well as enormous damage to trees and such — not to mention crippling snow over the Appalachians (and parts of Ohio???) — it might affect more than campaign travel. We could well see depressed voter turnout throughout the affected region, if the infrastructural damage is still being significantly felt a week later, which seems possible. That might not affect the outcome of the presidential race (unless Ohio really is hard-hit), but, as my father points out via e-mail, it could harm President Obama’s popular vote totals, if folks in Democratic strongholds — particularly New York — don’t vote because the storm’s aftermath makes it too inconvenient (and besides, they know they are not in a swing state, so why go to all the extra trouble?). There’s been a lot of talk about Obama winning the electoral vote but losing the popular vote, like Bush in 2000; in a worst-case scenario, Sandy’s effects could made that more likely. Sandy could also impact some key congressional races, notably the U.S. Senate battles in Connecticut and Massachusetts.
The Democratic strongholds not mentioned by Loy that could be the hit by the strongest winds include Washington, DC and Philadelphia, where electric companies are fearing massive power outages for up to  a week. Trains and subway traffic will halt, traffic lights won't work, and neither will the electronic voting machines.

There is also the potential problem that the government, led by Obama, can royally screw up the handling of the weather emergency which would be the last straw (and hopefully last Obama straw man) after Benghazi.

We could soon hear the Fat Lady (RIP Willie) singing "Turn Out The Lights, The Party's Over."

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Firing Up The Catholic Vote


Here is the background for this viral video.

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Whatshisname Versus Mitt Romney


From American Enterprise Institute we learn that all during the Vice Presidential Debate between Joe Biden and Paul Ryan, Vice President Biden only mentioned President Obama's name once  - and he waited until the next-to-last question with about five minutes left in the debate to utter aloud that supposedly hallowed name.

Moderator Martha Raddatz asked :
I recently spoke to a highly decorated soldier who said that this presidential campaign has left him dismayed. He told me, quote, "the ads are so negative and they are all tearing down each other rather than building up the country."
What would you say to that American hero about this campaign? And at the end of the day, are you ever embarrassed by the tone?
Vice President Biden?
The meat of Joe Biden's answer was as follows:
I would also tell him that there are things that have occurred in this campaign and occur in every campaign that I'm sure both of us regret anyone having said, particularly in these -- these special new groups that can go out there, raise all the money they want, not have to identify themselves, who say the most scurrilous things about the other candidate. It's -- it's an abomination.
But the bottom line here is I'd ask that hero you referenced to take a look  at whether or not Governor Romney or President Obama has the conviction to help lift up the middle class, restore them to where they were before this great recession hit and they got wiped out. Or whether or not he's going to continue to focus on taking care of only the very wealthy, not asking them to make -- pay any part of the deal to bring -- bring back the middle class and the economy of this country.
I'd ask him to take a look at whether the president of the United States has acted wisely in the use of force and whether or not the slipshod comments being made by my -- my -- or by Governor Romney serve -- serve our interests very well.
But there are things that have been said in campaigns that I -- I find not very appealing.
Note that even in his acknowledgement of unappealing negative advertising, the sitting vice president first took shots at political interest groups (as if they should bear the blame) and then he took two negative shots at Governor Romney ( He likely would have included Paul Ryan also, if he could have remembered the congressman's name).

Rounding out the statistics, "Obama" or "Obamacare" were used 30 times during the 90-minute debate. Biden once, Martha Raddatz six times and the other 23 uses were from Paul Ryan.  Mitt Romney's name came up 54 times  - 26 of those references by VP Biden.

AEI probably hit upon the reason for what had to be a deliberate debate tactic devised between Biden and Obama's top political adviser David Axelrod, who assisted in debate preparation in order to assure that Obama's proclamation of  "Joe just needs to be Joe" was attained. The conservative economics organization, after listening to Paul Ryan quoting Barack Obama  from his 2008 DNC nomination acceptance speech,  opined that Barry himself,  may well have inadvertently described the Biden strategy well in advance of its execution.
If you don’t have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare voters. If you don’t have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from. You make a big election about small things.

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Upcoming Obama-Romney Town Hall Debate: All About Gallup's Undecided Voters



The "town hall " debate format implies that debates are constructed to mimic the town meetings that actually are used, even today, in some small New England communities to conduct government business democratically by opening the floor to members of the community to speak about and to vote on the issues put before the public. The first town meeting was held in Dorchester, MA in 1633.

The debate format called "town hall" that is used for political campaigning  is a mockery of its namesake. Questions to candidates for political office are often confrontational and filled with hyperbole in order to embarrass or befuddle the targeted campaigner.  Anyone old enough to recall the 1992 presidential campaign debates remembers Ponytail Guy.
"Ponytail Guy" is the term some in political circles used to refer to Denton Walthall, who asked a question in the second presidential debate in 1992. A domestic mediator who worked with children, Walthall scolded President George H.W. Bush [although he did not address the president by name] for running a mudslinging, character-based campaign against Bill Clinton in 1992. Referring to voters as "symbolically the children of the future president," he asked how voters could expect the candidates "to meet our needs, the needs in housing and in crime and you name it, as opposed to the wants of your political spin doctors and your political parties. ... Could we cross our hearts? It sounds silly here but could we make a commitment? You know, we're not under oath at this point, but could you make a commitment to the citizens of the U.S. to meet our needs—and we have many—and not yours again?"
So the people who read "Poppy" Bush's lips, who believed the issue was "the economy, stupid" and who heard Ponytail Guy's plea, put Bill and Hillary and Whitewater and all the "Gates" in play in 1993 - but Clinton's misogyny is now his legacy. George H.W. Bush has never gotten credit for being right about character.

The value and fairness of the debates is certainly questionable. It is interesting to note that these debates were conducted by the League of Women Voters until 1988 when the organization withdrew with this statement:
The League of Women Voters is withdrawing sponsorship of the presidential debates...because the demands of the two campaign organizations would perpetrate a fraud on the American voter. It has become clear to us that the candidates' organizations aim to add debates to their list of campaign-trail charades devoid of substance, spontaneity and answers to tough questions. The League has no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public.
The League is correct that the controlled formats have (up until the first Obama Romney debate last week) resulted in downright phony questions asked, and have severely limited the subjects covered.  Moderators have always been liberal Democrat anchors from network news organizations.  Jim Lehrer from PBS has served more often than anyone else as debate moderator and he finally, after all these years, backed down from controlling the discussions in the last week's first debate (thank you, Jim).

The the town hall format is tricky because it requires the Gallup organization to find undecided voters that their polls track, solicit questions from them, then select the individuals to attend the debate and ask the questions that Gallup considered neutral and unlike that of any other questioner. If Ponytail Guy is any indication, they found neither an undecided voter nor a voter with a pertinent question applicable to both candidates (and for that matter a question mature enough for the gravity of the election). If rules take the same form as last election, the questioner cannot followup and the candidates cannot query the questioners.

Finally there is always the question of the moral integrity of the organizations charged with honest presentations to the voting public.  In 2007, a debate between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton involved finding questioners without political motives.  CNN managed to present not ordinary citizens but questioners with political ties and the network even provided some of the questions (I wonder who wrote them?).

When the town hall event happens next week, it is likely to have little effect the election.  I agree with Bruce McQuain over at Q&O:
The 1st debate was the critical debate. That is where the undecided went to decide. Mitt Romney got to talk with them unfiltered by the media. And of course, the media then had to deny that was the “real” Mitt Romney because they had spent so much time over the intervening weeks building a different one in their narrative.
As for likely subjects that will not see the light of day, the deadly Fast and Furious (aka Gunwalker) operations traceable all the way to General Holder and his Justice Department (and maybe even Obama himself ) will be absent along with the Benghazi consulate murders, Iran's nuclear bomb, the administration's abandoning of Israel, and the Syrian riots.

I do not intend to watch Obama lie, so I am done with the debates - except for the Biden - Ryan fun-fest.
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The New Yorker Does a "Clint Eastwood"

"One on One" Debate

It seems like only yesterday when one of my first blog posts covered Obama and The New Yorker.

We can only conclude Mitt may have learned quite a bit from Clint Eastwood's visit to the Republican National Convention dais.

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Smirker-in-Chief

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The Magic Negro's Racist Dialect



In March 2007, David Ehrenstein wrote piece in the LA Times entitled "Obama the Magic Negro." The gist of the article is captured in this quotation:
The Magic Negro is a figure of postmodern folk culture, coined by snarky 20th century sociologists, to explain a cultural figure who emerged in the wake of Brown vs. Board of Education. "He has no past, he simply appears one day to help the white protagonist," reads the description on Wikipedia.
He's there to assuage white "guilt" (i.e., the minimal discomfort they feel) over the role of slavery and racial segregation in American history, while replacing stereotypes of a dangerous, highly sexualized black man with a benign figure for whom interracial sexual congress holds no interest.
Five years after this off-the-wall editorial (made famous by Rush Limbaugh who commissioned and played Paul Shanklin's parody), liberal columnist Jonathan Chait explained Obama's political strategy of separating himself from the supposed white-held stereotypes toward blacks. However, Chait also notes in his narrative of explaining away Obama's damaging "You Didn't Build That" speech that when Barack gets angry, his personal racism surfaces:
The key thing is that Obama is angry, and he’s talking not in his normal voice but in a “black dialect.” This strikes at the core of Obama’s entire political identity: a soft-spoken, reasonable African-American with a Kansas accent. From the moment he stepped onto the national stage, Obama’s deepest political fear was being seen as a “traditional” black politician, one who was demanding redistribution from white America on behalf of his fellow African-Americans.
Jonathan Chait goes on to quote a piece by Kim Strassel in the Wall Street Journal:
The Obama campaign's bigger problem, both sides are now realizing, is that his words go beyond politics and are more devastating than the Romney complaints that Mr. Obama is too big-government oriented or has mishandled the economy. They raise the far more potent issue of national identity and feed the suspicion that Mr. Obama is actively hostile to American ideals and aspirations. Republicans are doing their own voter surveys, and they note that Mr. Obama's problem is that his words cause an emotional response, and that they disturb voters in nearly every demographic.
Another example of President Obama's racism surfaced on October 2, 2012 when The Daily Caller (hyped by Drudge and Sean Hannity) decided it was time to re-look at a speech Senator (and Presidential candidate) Barack Obama  delivered to black ministers at Hampton University in June 2007.  It was a speech about the Senator's perceived  injustices against blacks and it was a speech that fully displayed Obama's pervasive narcissism. It was a speech that highlighted Obama's view that white America was responsible for the Watts riots in the summer of 1965 and culpable for the devastation of the black community in New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina struck that city on August 25, 2005. It was an angry speech delivered in his best black dialect.

Focusing on New Orleans and Katrina, here is what Obama said:
Look at what happened in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast when Katrina hit. People ask me whether I thought race was the reason the response was so slow. I said, "No. This Administration was colorblind in its incompetence." But everyone here knows the disaster and the poverty happened long before that hurricane hit. All the hurricane did was make bare what we ignore each and every day which is that there are whole sets of communities that are impoverished, that don't have meaningful opportunity, that don't have hope and they are forgotten. This disaster was a powerful metaphor for what's gone on for generations.
Of course, the federal response after Katrina was similar to the response after the riots in Los Angeles. People in Washington wake up and are surprised that there's poverty in our midst, and that others were frustrated and angry. Then there are panels and there are hearings. There are commissions. There are reports. Aid dollars are approved but they can't seem to get to the people. And then nothing really changes except the news coverage quiets down.
What really happened in New Orleans? Popular Mechanics spent four months finding out - and the realities are not Obama's racist perceptions.
No one should have been surprised. 
Not the federal agencies tasked with preparing for catastrophes. Not the local officials responsible for aging levees and vulnerable populations. Least of all the residents themselves, who had been warned for decades that they lived on vulnerable terrain. But when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, 2005, it seemed as though the whole country was caught unawares. Accusations began to fly even before flood waters receded. But facts take longer to surface. In the months since the storm, many of the first impressions conveyed by the media have turned out to be mistaken.
With some tragic exceptions, New Orleans was completely evacuated (of all willing evacuees) in just 38 hours - thanks to reversing the interstate highway traffic flows to all-outbound. As for the Federal government response and assistance to those who stayed to wait out the storm:
[T]he response to Hurricane Katrina was by far the largest--and fastest-rescue effort in U.S. history, with nearly 100,000 emergency personnel arriving on the scene within three days of the storm's landfall. Dozens of National Guard and Coast Guard helicopters flew rescue operations that first day--some just 2 hours after Katrina hit the coast. Hoist-less Army helicopters improvised rescues, carefully hovering on rooftops to pick up survivors. On the ground, "guardsmen had to chop their way through, moving trees and recreating roadways," . . . . By the end of the week, 50,000 National Guard troops in the Gulf Coast region had saved 17,000 people; 4000 Coast Guard personnel saved more than 33,000.
President Bush summarized the Katrina tragedy on the first anniversary of the hurricane:
In Mississippi, the storm wiped out virtually everything along an 80-mile stretch of the coast, flattening homes and destroying entire communities. In Louisiana, flooding left 80 percent of the city of New Orleans underwater. The human costs were even more terrible. More than a thousand people died, countless families lost their homes and livelihoods, and tens of thousands of men, women, and children were forced to flee the region and leave behind everything they knew.
During the storm and in the days that followed, Americans responded with heroism and compassion. Coast Guard and other personnel rescued people stranded in flooded neighborhoods and brought them to high ground. Doctors and nurses stayed behind to care for their patients, and some even went without food so their patients could eat. Many of the first-responders risking their lives to help others were victims themselves -- wounded healers, with a sense of duty greater than their own suffering. And across our great land, the armies of compassion rallied to bring food and water and hope to fellow citizens who had lost everything. In these and countless other selfless acts, we saw the spirit of America at its best.
Unfortunately, Katrina also revealed that federal, state, and local governments were unprepared to respond to such an extraordinary disaster. And the flood waters exposed a deep-seated poverty that has cut people off from the opportunities of our country.
Truth be told, no government will likely ever be prepared to withstand such unimaginable force of this magnitude from nature. But that fact, in and of itself, highlights the dishonesty of Obama's racist bilge. He actually implies to his black audience that minorities, specifically blacks, were the only victims of this unstoppable storm.

The outpouring of government assistance immediately following Hurricanes Katrina, Wilma and Rita in 2005 included mass relocation of tens of thousands of people to Houston and San Antonio.  Most of these refugees never elected to return to the Crescent City (NOLA population decreased 28%) although 180,000 properties were eventually repaired or rebuilt and millions of tons of debris removed.  New non-earthen levees were constructed and newfangled pumps were installed, but the low-lying land where the city stands will flood again and again.

Tens of thousands of  mobile trailers were purchased to provide cost-free temporary housing for several years. Everyone who applied got renewable debit cards to insure that the basic needs of storm victims were met.

We can clearly see here that our government only knows how to throw money at a problem  - to the delight of those oriented toward welfare dependency and, of course, to the gratitude of the rent-seeking contractors all cozied-up to our politicians.  Unfortunately, money does not solve stupidity and greed - and racists will be racists for their own profit.   

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