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NOVEMBER 11,  2014

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 9:25 P.M. ET: 

CNN IN TROUBLE – From Media Bistro:  "Monday’s 9 pm ET timeslot on CNN drew 181,000 total viewers, the lowest for the time period since at least Oct. 1, 1991, as far back as Nielsen electronic records go. Anderson Cooper anchored a second live hour of AC360 at 9pm. It was also the lowest rated hour of CNN’s entire day. Cooper finished fourth in the hour behind Megyn Kelly on Fox News, Rachel Maddow on MSNBC and Dr. Drew Pinsky on HLN, in both total viewers and the demo.  CNN’s  9 pm ET hour was the longtime home of Larry King and, until earlier this year, Piers Morgan. Most nights, CNN’s new non-fiction shows from Lisa Ling, Mike Rowe and John Walsh fill the timeslot. But Mondays have included a second live hour of Cooper."  CNN has some very fine people working for it, but the network's reputation for liberal bias is suppressing its audience and compromising its credibility.  I'm not so sure there's a ready answer.  The image was cast years ago.

NANCY BYE-BYE – From the Washington Times:  "House Democrats are sticking with Nancy Pelosi as their leader after their party suffered humiliating losses in last week’s elections, but many of them are privately eyeing a post-Pelosi era, saying they think she will cede power when President Obama’s tenure ends in two years.  For now, Mrs. Pelosi’s position is secure. Nobody has stepped forward to challenge the Californian’s leadership, and two of her potential rivals have said they will continue to seek lower leadership posts.  But supporters have quietly begun to talk about those who could ascend to the top job eventually, including House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, who has played second fiddle to Mrs. Pelosi for years, and House Budget Committee ranking member Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who has built a strong following in the caucus as one of Mrs. Pelosi’s top lieutenants."  It will probably be Van Hollen, as he is clearly to the left of Hoyer, and left is where it's at in the Democratic Party.

MISSOURI READY FOR FERGUSON DECISION – From Reuters:  "WELDON SPRINGS Mo. (Reuters) - Missouri Governor Jay Nixon said on Tuesday the National Guard would be on standby to respond to any violence after a grand jury decides whether or not to indict a white police officer for shooting dead an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson.  In addition to the National Guard, police officers from across the state could be called on to restore order if protests get out of hand, Nixon told a news conference.  A decision by the grand jury is expected in mid-to-late November.  The August shooting of Michael Brown, 18, by Darren Wilson sparked a national debate on race relations and led to weeks of street demonstrations. Some groups have threatened extensive protests if the officer is not charged with a crime.  'That ugliness was not representative of Missouri and it cannot be repeated,' Nixon said."  Back to the 1960s.  It's not surprising.  There are many on the left who yearn to relive that era.

ARIZONA DECISION – There apparently is a winner in the Congressional district once represented by Gaby Giffords.  From the Arizona Daily Star:  "With just 200 votes countywide left to count, Republican Martha McSally is the apparent winner of the Congressional District 2 seat.  McSally holds a 133-vote lead over incumbent Democrat Ron Barber.  But with such a narrow margin, a final, official declaration of a winner will have to wait for an automatic recount, required by state law because the gap between the two is less than 200 votes.  Pima County this afternoon finished counting more than 4,700 provisional ballots, which showed McSally maintaining a small lead.  It's unknown how many of the 200 votes still left to count in the county are from voters in CD2. The ballots are conditional provisional, which means the voters have to appear at the Pima County Recorder's Office and show their identification before their votes will be counted."  Martha McSally, a graduate of the Air Force Academy, is the first woman in American history to have flown a combat aircraft into enemy territory.

November 11, 2014       Permalink

THE DAY – AT 10:37 A.M. ET:  There is nothing significant that I can add to commemorate Veterans Day. 

But I do think we should reflect on the way our veterans are sometimes treated.  And that treatment is often a reflection of distorted journalism or "history."

We cheered our veterans returning from World War I and World War II.  We didn't treat every one of them well, as depicted in the motion picture, "The Best Years of Our Lives," but they knew their nation respected them and regarded them as heroes and heroines.  We properly gave them the G.I. Bill of Rights.

Korea was different.  We were told Korea ended in a stalemate, and maybe that diminished the welcome.  It did not end in a stalemate.  We achieved our objective in Korea, which is why there is a free South Korea today.  The Korean War was bitter, and our soldiers deserved the same cheers and respect that those of previous wars received.  Their liberation of South Korea was one of the most decisive acts in our battle against the Communist nations, led by the Soviet Union.  I've always wondered whether the fact that we were fighting Communism, rather than Fascism, affected the coverage of that war.

Vietnam was even worse.  It was announced to us by Ivy Leaguers with press cards that we could not possibly win.  We didn't understand the enemy.  It was a civil war.  Our allies were all corruptionists.  And we were bombing innocent people.  Some of our vets were actually spat at when they returned home, and called "baby killers" by those who had no problem with North Vietnamese forces killing babies.   

In fact, the enemy wrote his own official history of the Vietnam War and freely admitted that he was losing by 1968, which is why North Vietnam agreed to peace talks.  That written history has been largely ignored.  The approved narrative is that we were run out of Vietnam.  The war was ultimately lost in the press, and by the growing power of the left wing in the Democratic Party and our universities.  The North Vietnamese history admits how much North Vietnam was helped by our "anti-war" movement.  In 1975 we cut off all aid to South Vietnam, insuring its defeat.  It was an act of dishonor, in President Ford's words.  There were mistakes made in Vietnam, as in all wars.  The notion of gradual escalation was a disaster.  But our Vietnam vets have never been given credit for what they achieved.  The politicians live in disgrace.

We've treated recent veterans better.   Maybe we learned something from the Vietnam experience.

Salutes are in order. 

November 11, 2014       Permalink

WHAT ABOUT ALASKA? – AT 9:58 A.M. ET:  Many people are unaware that the Senate race in Alaska has yet to be decided, although we're optimistic about our side's chances there.  Counting in Alaska is slow.  From the Alaska Dispatch News: 

At least 50,000 ballots remain to be counted that could affect margins and possibly outcomes in two closely watched political races in Alaska.

The competition for Democratic Sen. Mark Begich's U.S. Senate seat has drawn national attention, with Republican candidate Dan Sullivan holding a 8,149-vote lead over Begich -- a 3.6 percent difference -- after the first round of vote counting immediately following Tuesday’s general election.

The governor’s race is also tight, with independent Bill Walker leading Republican Gov. Sean Parnell by 3,165 votes, or just 1.4 percent.

More than 220,000 votes have been counted in those contests. To make sure the remaining ballots are properly verified, campaigns have sent observers to watch teams sort through absentee and questioned ballots at the state Department of Elections' regional headquarters in Anchorage, Fairbanks, Wasilla, Juneau and Nome.

Tyson Gallagher, an observer and data director for Gov. Sean Parnell’s re-election effort, said Republican candidates typically gain ground at this stage in the process. But it’s uncertain if that will occur this time, he said.

COMMENT:  While an Alaska win will make no difference in control of the Senate, it's nice to have that one extra vote.  Also, Louisiana will decide its Senate race on December 6th, with a runoff.  Republican Bill Cassidy is strongly favored to win.

So, potentially, Republicans have two more potential Senate seats.  But let's count the votes first.

November 11, 2014        Permalink

NO DICE – AT 9:18 A.M. ET:  As the deadline for concluding the Iran nuclear talks gets closer – it's November 24th – the talks seem to be going nowhere.  The Iranians may well be waiting for Obama to cave, and, based on his record, the wait may be worth it.  From The Wall Street Journal: 

MUSCAT, Oman—Two days of exhaustive negotiations between U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and his Iranian counterpart, Javad Zarif, in the Persian Gulf nation of Oman resulted in no significant breakthrough in forging a comprehensive agreement to curb Tehran’s nuclear program by a Nov. 24 diplomatic deadline, said senior U.S. and Iranian officials.

“Real gaps” remain between Washington and Tehran, said an American diplomat, in describing talks that seek to end a decade-long standoff over the future of Iran’s nuclear program.

Lower-level diplomacy between the U.S., Iran and other world powers continued on Tuesday in Muscat, as Mr. Kerry arrived in China to brief President Barack Obama on the status of the nuclear diplomacy.

“What we’ve said about this is that we may get there and we may not,” said a senior U.S. official who traveled with Mr. Kerry, referring to he prospects for a deal by late November. “I don’t think that anybody has said at any point recently that we are, quote-unquote ’on track’ to reach an agreement by the 24th.”

COMMENT:  Maybe reality is starting to set in.  Part of that reality is that Obama will now be facing a Republican Senate, and the GOP is serving notice that it expects to be involved in any decision to accept an agreement with Iran.

It would be best for the U.S. for the deadline to pass.  That would drag the talks into the time period after the new Senate and House are seated.  Our side, which is a lot more adult about dealing with Iran, would then be in place to confront Obama should a bad agreement come our way.

November 11, 2014       Permalink

INCREDIBLE – AT 9:04 A.M. ET:  This will certainly add to the popularity of Obamacare.  From Fox: 

ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber said that lack of transparency was a major part of getting ObamaCare passed, and that it was written in such a way as to take advantage of "the stupidity of the American voter."

Gruber, the MIT professor who served as a technical consultant to the Obama administration during Obamacare’s design, also made clear during a panel quietly captured on video that the individual mandate, which was only upheld by the Supreme Court because it was a tax, was not actually a tax.

“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it’s written to do that. In terms of risk rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in – you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed… Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical for the thing to pass… Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.”

COMMENT:  Well, now we know.  Of course, in a way we knew it before when Nancy Pelosi said that Congress had to pass Obamacare to learn what was in it.

Obamacare was the largest social program in American history to go into law without any bipartisan support.  Process is critical to legitimacy, and the process here was disgraceful, cynical, and, as we can see from the quote above, utterly contemptuous of the American people.

November 11,  2014     Permalink

NOVEMBER 10,  2014 

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:52 P.M. ET: 

WHOOPS – From The New York Times:  "WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Monday offered a surprisingly modest estimate of the number of people who would sign up for health insurance in the second round of open enrollment, which begins on Saturday.  Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the secretary of health and human services, said she was working on the assumption that a total of 9.1 million people would have such coverage at the end of next year.  By contrast, the Congressional Budget Office had estimated that 13 million people would be enrolled next year, with the total rising to 24 million in 2016. In the past, the White House has used the budget office numbers as a benchmark for success under the Affordable Care Act."  Where are those 40 million Americans who were desperate for new health insurance?  I think that's a question the Obama press must answer.

WARM FRIENDS – President Obama is in China, wearing Chinese-style clothing at least some of the time.  And, during his visit, we learn this.  From Fox:  "Chinese government operatives reportedly are suspected of hacking the U.S. Postal Service, in a security breach that may have compromised personal information for more than 800,000 workers.  The breach was announced Monday, as President Obama arrived in Beijing.
The Postal Service confirmed the incident in a written statement, saying personal information that may have been obtained in the attack includes employees' names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, addresses, emergency contacts and other information."  I wonder if Obama is concerned about this.

WOMEN PESSIMISTIC ABOUT JOBS – From WaPo:  "The 'gender gap' typically refers to the difference between how much women and men are paid, the kind of jobs they tend to pursue or how well they're represented among a company's senior ranks. Yet a report released by Gallup on Monday finds there's also a big gap between how confident men and women are about the job market. And that gap is wider in North America than in any other major region of the world.  Fifty-six percent of North American men, according to the 2013 data set, thought it was a bad time to look for a job, compared with 62 percent of North American women. While Europeans were much more negative overall about their job outlook — 77 percent of European women thought it was a bad time to look for a job — the average gap between the views of men and women there was smaller (just three percentage points, compared to the six-point spread in North America). In Asia, there was also a three-point difference; but, in a flip, Asian women rather than men had the more favorable outlook."  Bottom line:  the job market is bad for both sexes.  Yes, we're creating jobs, but nowhere near enough, and not jobs of the quality Americans are used to.

November 10, 2014       Permalink

COUNTDOWN – AT 11:15 A.M. ET:  We are only two weeks away from the deadline in the Iranian nuclear talks.  The negotiators are supposed to come to some agreement on restricting Iran's nuclear program by November 24th.  If no agreement is reached, the talks will end.  Unless they're extended. 

Obama sees an agreement with Iran as a possible crown jewel in his foreign policy.  But a majority of Congress, and American Mideast allies, see it as potentially disastrous, especially if it is filled with loopholes and leads to the abandonment of sanctions against Iran.

Obama is speaking cautiously, suggesting that an agreement may not be reached at all.  Whether he's being serious, or just posing as a tough negotiator, is hard to determine.  Integrity is not the strong suit of this administration.  From Reuters: 

Iran, the US and European Union will hold an unscheduled second day of talks on Monday, on disagreements blocking resolution of a dispute over Tehran’s nuclear programme, a US official and Iranian state media said.

In the US, meanwhile, President Barack Obama said there was still a big gap between Iran and western powers, and said a deal could be out of reach.

Speaking in an interview with CBS, Obama said a final step in the talks would involve Iran providing “verifiable, lock tight assurances that they can’t develop a nuclear weapon”.

“There’s still a big gap,” he said. “We may not be able to get there.”

Obama declined to comment on a report that he sent a letter to Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, about combating the Islamic State militant group in Iraq and Syria. The president said the US and Iran shared a common enemy, but reiterated the nuclear talks were not connected to the fight against Islamic State, also known as Isis or Isil.

“We’re not coordinating with Iran on Isil,” he said.

With two weeks to a deadline for a comprehensive accord on Iran's nuclear ambitions, Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, US secretary of state John Kerry and EU envoy Catherine Ashton met in Oman’s capital, Muscat, on Sunday to address a decade-long confrontation that has raised the risk of a wider war in the Middle East.

Reiterating Iran’s official line, Ali Akbar Velayati, a top aide to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was quoted by Iranian media as saying the Islamic Republic would not abandon its nuclear “rights” but was committed to the negotiations under Khamenei’s leadership.

COMMENT:  The UN's International Atomic Energy Agency warned last week that Iran has been uncooperative, that it has not revealed what it must reveal to assure the rest of the world that it isn't developing nuclear weapons.  If Iran's nuclear program were, as it claims, peaceful, why would Tehran be hiding things?  We know the answer.  This is a weapons program, and no agreement will stop it.

November 10, 2014       Permalink

MORE FROM SHARYL – AT 10:17 A.M. ET:   Sharyl Attkisson is turning out to be a major thorn in the side of CBS News.  A former star at the network, she found herself increasingly at odds with what she charges was a pro-Obama bias.  She is charging a cover-up over Benghazi.  From Newsmax: 

Former CBS News investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson says CBS News executives kept a clip of President Obama refusing to call the Benghazi attacks terrorism secret until after the election in order to help Obama's re-election.

Obama was interviewed by Steve Kroft for "60 Minutes" the Sunday following the attack and said, "Well, it's too early to know exactly how this came about, what group was involved. But, obviously, it was an attack on Americans."

That clip did not air as part of the original interview, but the full transcript was sent to the "CBS Evening News" staff.

Mitt Romney brought up during one of their 2012 presidential debates Obama's failure for 14 days to label the attack terrorism. Attkisson said that would have been the perfect time to have brought out the clip.

Appearing Sunday on Fox News Channel's "MediaBuzz," Attkisson said, "That exchange, I believe, should have been pulled out immediately after the debate, which would have been very newsy at the time.  It was exclusive to CBS. It would have, it appears to me, proven Romney's point against Obama. But that clip was kept secret."

Attkisson said she was covering Benghazi, yet no one told her about the clip, instead directing her to another clip from the same interview that made Obama sound like he had labeled the act terrorism from the beginning.

"And it was only right before the election that somebody kind of leaked out the transcript to others of us at CBS and we were really shocked. We felt that there had been something very unethical had been done to have kept that up," Attkisson said.

COMMENT:  It's disturbing.  I'm not going to claim that this kind of thing only started with the Obama administration.  There have always been disturbing practices in journalism, and ethical failures, and incidents of bias. 

The problem, in my view, is that too many in journalism now accept bias as normal, and even desirable.  Far from wanting to "report the news without fear or favor," they want to "make a difference."  That's an entirely different view of what journalism is, and far different from the understanding of the American people.  These "make a difference" journalists are changing the very premise of their profession.  It is dangerous to journalism, and dangerous to the First Amendment. 

While the First Amendment does not say so explicitly, the American people understand a free press to be a barrier between themselves and government, the institution on which they can depend for the truth, or at least an attempt to get the truth.   If that understanding is violated, I think support for freedom of the press will decline, and a free press will become increasingly suspect.  That is what is happening today.  Fortunately, we have the internet.  In the end, that mechanism may save journalism as we want it to be.

November 10, 2014      Permalink

THE FADING OBAMA – QUOTE OF THE DAY – AT 9:32 A.M. ET:   Ah, it was so different
in 2008 when Barack came to save us.  Why, our future was secure.  We were pure and holy.  What could go wrong?

Everything went wrong.  Jonah Goldberg, in a terrific column, points out that the real Barack is a guy who runs campaigns very well, as long as he's a candidate, but messes up pretty badly in every other area, including his role as leader of his party.  Our quote of the day, from Jonah, in the Baltimore Sun:

In Tuesday's wake, any talk of an Obama-fueled realignment seems delusional. Young voters have soured on the president. Hispanics didn't show up. Contrary to a lot of spinning early election night, this wasn't an "anti-incumbent wave"; it was an anti-Democratic, or more properly, an anti-Obama wave. The GOP captured Senate seats in Iowa and Colorado, each of which voted for Obama twice. The governor's race in deep-blue Maryland, where Mr. Obama campaigned, went to the Republican as did Mr. Obama's home state of Illinois and liberal Massachusetts. Incumbent Republicans triumphed almost everywhere while incumbent Democrats lost almost everywhere.

When the next Senate convenes, 25 more Democrats who voted for Obamacare will be gone, and the GOP's majority in the House will be so big and solid that NBC's Chuck Todd says Democrats won't be able to recapture it until at least 2022.

But Obama is still the president, which is apparently all he ever cared about.

COMMENT:  And it may get worse for the Dems.  Obama is about to issue an executive order on amnesty for illegal immigrants that is bound to be unpopular.  It may even turn out to be unpopular among parts of the Democratic base, which fear loss of jobs to illegal immigrants who are suddenly made legal.  There are legitimate fears among African Americans and, yes, Hispanics.  The Hispanic vote for Democrats was down last week.

November 10, 2014       Permalink

GREAT SCOTT – AT 9:14 A.M. ET:  Much buzz, and increasing, about Scott Walker as a presidential candidate.  It's understandable.  Superb governor, wins every election, unflappable.  Weekly Standard has a great piece, including the first analysis I've seen of how Walker won his latest race for governor. 

Scott Walker has won every round of his long fight with Big Labor in Wisconsin, but it wasn’t until November 4 that he delivered the knockout punch. In his third gubernatorial election in four years, Walker defeated Democratic challenger Mary Burke by 6 points. It was the same margin of victory he had in the 2010 Republican wave and just a point shy of his 2012 performance in a union-funded recall.

Walker’s victory has secured the conservative reforms he implemented in his first term and will encourage other governors to follow his lead. It should also make him a serious contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination if he wants it—which seems likely.

Some of Walker’s opponents have tried to console themselves with the belief that he triumphed simply because Republicans win low-turnout midterm elections, while Democrats win high-turnout presidential elections. “President Obama went into Milwaukee” and “did all he could do,” a distraught MSNBC host Ed Schultz said on election night. “He went to the base. This was a base election. He just apparently didn’t get out enough people.”

But in reality, the election didn’t come down to turnout. Walker could have survived 100 percent turnout in the liberal bastions of Milwaukee County and Dane County (which includes Madison, the capital and home to the state’s flagship university). Burke could have netted the same number of votes in Milwaukee and Dane counties as President Obama, but if everything else had stayed the same, Walker still would have won.

And...

The key to Walker’s success was his performance among middle- and lower-income voters. Walker won those earning more than $100,000 by 20 points, just as Mitt Romney had in 2012. But he won voters earning between $50,000 and $100,000 by 17 points; Romney only won them by 1. Those earning less than $50,000 Walker lost by 9 points—whereas Romney lost them by 25. As reporter Molly Ball pointed out in the Atlantic earlier this year about that last group, “whether Democrats win these voters by a 10-point or a 20-point margin tells you who won every national election for the past decade.”

COMMENT:  Absolutely fascinating.  Walker is winning where we need to win, and holding down Dem margins where that's necessary.  The rap against him is that he's a boring speaker.  I'm not so sure.  Over time his explanatory rhetoric seems to grow on people. 

I went to a meeting of our side over the weekend, and there was buzz about a Walker–Martinez ticket, the Martinez being Governor Susana Martinez of New Mexico. 

We have to win in 2016.  I'm not terribly interested in ideological purity.  We'll never get it anyway.

November 10,  2014     Permalink