"the money game is not going as Team Obama wants… The White House’s new strategy is thus to delegitimize Mr. Romney (by attacking his donors) as it seeks to frighten others out of giving.” Obama has all the worst qualities of Carter, Clinton and Nixon but none of their good ones.".......Bonfire of the AbsurditiesRead About It Here.
The financial meltdown of 2008, and the government bailouts and mass joblessness that followed, led to the Tea Party backlash and a small-government drive among many Republicans. But they led Frum in the opposite direction.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page has denounced him as “the media’s go-to basher of fellow Republicans.” His sins have included denouncing Sarah Palin (“too irresponsible, reckless and crazy to be president”) as well as right-wing stars like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Andrew Breitbart on the day he died.
He rcently told the WSJ, “I was intellectually prepared, but I was not psychically prepared for the radicalism that took over the party."
Wednesday I received a Publishers Advance Readers Copy of his new novel "Patriots" due to be released next month, and spent a lazy afternoon inhaling it.
In this fictional work, Republicans are thinly disguised as “Constitutionalists” and Democrats as “Nationalists.” Gen. George Pulaski, a maverick moderate conservative war-hero president—think John McCain melded with Mitt Romney—has just been elected to replace a one-term black liberal president, Monroe Williams. The country is mired in economic malaise and a war with drug lords in Mexico. The conservative fundamentalists in the Constitutionalist party turn on the new president when he wants to raise taxes to cover budget shortfalls and pay for the war effort. “If Pulaski doesn’t keep the faith, I say, tear his heart out,” says the publisher of a Constitutionalist magazine. They use every tool at their disposal: corrupt think tanks, a manufactured “grassroots” protest movement, and a cynical conservative cable news channel run by a ruthless megalomaniac who beds his “on-air blondies” while plotting to bring the president to heel. The operatives are not above using private detectives and bankrolled bloggers to engage in blackmail and scandal-mongering.
In other words, Frum has channelled every liberal’s dystopic vision of a vast right-wing conspiracy. And he has infused it with the authenticity of someone who has been there, done that. The book is thick with insider type details, like the ample portions of steak cut into bite-sized pieces and served as “appetizers” at a lavish lobbyists’ reception—because serving steak that requires utensils would violate congressional ethics rules about free meals.
It sometime has a bite of a man shunned and with an axe to grind (just my person take).
Frum told the WSJ he doesn’t share the disdain of many Republicans for Obama, but would not vote for him. “Personally I find him a very sympathetic figure. I like his seriousness of mind." But he adds, “I think he is very, very liberal—more so than Clinton was, and more than he understands about himself.” *cough*
Frum had launched his own website and blog, FrumForum, but since January has moved his writing full-time to Tina Brown’s Daily Beast and Newsweek magazine (that in its self should tell you a lot). He also has a contract with CNN and writes elsewhere, including in the National Post.
"President Barack Obama’s political advisers are pressing labor unions to contribute to the Democratic convention in September to cover a fundraising shortfall resulting from their self-imposed ban on corporate donations, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Democratic officials gave representatives of the major U.S. unions, including the AFL-CIO, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the United Auto Workers, a tour of the convention sites in Charlotte, North Carolina, April 23 in advance of a request for donations, according to the two people, who requested anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss internal strategy......" Bloomberg
There’s nothing in this article that says these political advisers wore flack jackets while giving the AFL-CIO, the Teamsters and the UAW a tour of the stadium. Had they given the tour to the construction unions or engineer unions, they would’ve been well-advised to wear a flack jacket.
They’re the people Obama stiffed on the Keystone XL Pipeline project, and I can’t imagine that they’re happy with how Obama’s has treated them. I can imagine them being prepared for open revolt against Obama’s administration.
This is exceptionally telling since the DNC was trimmed from the customary 4 days down to 3 days, presumably to cut expenses. Now DNC officials are having difficulty raising the money needed to present a scaled-down version of a clown convention. This speaks to the Democrats’ lack of enthusiasm compared with 4 years ago and their inability to raise money, which is directly tied with the lack of enthusiasm for Democrats this cycle.
The polls are painting a modestly positive story for Obama and the Democrats. Stories like this paint a bleak picture for the Democrat Party's appearence.
When the polls finally tip, and they will, the Democrats won’t have a positive story to tell about their stewardship of the economy. They won’t have a positive story to tell about their not passing a budget in 1,092 and counting. They won’t have a positive story about how this administration’s EPA and NLRB have hurt families and small businesses through regulatory overreach.
The German state of Bavaria is preparing to publish Hitler's memoir, Mein Kampf, in 2015, before the book's copyright expires.
The book is not banned by law in Germany, but Bavaria has used ownership of the copyright to prevent publication of German editions since 1945. Copyright restrictions stop at the end of 2015, 70 years after Hitler's death.
The Bavarian government says it is preparing an edition for students which will include a critical commentary. Hitler wrote Mein Kampf (My Struggle) in 1924, while serving a prison sentence for attempting to stage a coup. Part biography, part political and racist rant, the book outlines the core of Nazi ideology.
It has not appeared in German since the end of World War II but until 1945 around 10 million copies were sold. After Hitler came to power in 1933 couples were given the book at their wedding, as a present from the Nazi state.
The decision to publish was taken after talks with advocates and opponents of publication, and explained that it was aimed at "demystifying" the book.
By publishing in 2015 before the expiry of the copyright, Bavaria hopes to make future German editions as "commercially unattractive" as possible. From 2016 there will be no restrictions at all on the book's publication, unless it is used to incite racial hatred.
While the book is widely available on the Internet in translation, poor immigrants without Internet connects will be able to absorb the hatred for themselves.
On his Monday MSNBC program, just a week after condemning former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney to hell based on the Book of Mormon, afternoon host Martin Bashir cited a column from The New York Times’ Timothy Egan to suggest that Romney isn’t fit for the White House because he does not drink.
“A teenage taste of beer aside, Mitt Romney does not consume alcohol, which begs the question — will total abstention put his candidacy, perhaps even this great nation, in jeopardy?” Bashir said. “That’s the conundrum that could be drawn from a column by New York Times writer Timothy Egan, who does not deal in half measures.”
According to Bashir, former President George W. Bush didn’t drink as president either and he somehow tied that to his success as a commander-in-chief.
“Take George W. Bush. He enjoyed a very warm relationship with alcohol until he decided to ditch the stuff after waking up with a hangover on his 40th birthday,” Bashir said. “A hangover? Perhaps the perfect word to describe the condition of the country upon the completion of his second term.”
To bolster his allegation, Bashir also cited another leader that didn’t drink — former President Jimmy Carter, as well as a list of those he sees as successful leaders that did indulge, including Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.Seriously, shouldn't this guy be working in a 7-11 or something?
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| Anders Borg |
