POWIP Piece of Work In Progress – Former Abode of Dan Collins

Hi-Dee-Ho

I think Film Ladd's new political attack ad is unlike anything you've ever seen before, if you haven't seen it yet. If you're an ass man, you'll probably want to play it several times.

Heck, you may want to watch it several times just to make sure you saw what you think you saw.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Monday Evening Fun with Stupid

You know, I thought I was being kind of funny when I came out as Weiner's Sixth Sextstress, but you just can't beat dumb reality. Over the weekend, it came out that Syrian lesbian blogger Amina Arraf was actually an American dude living in Edinburgh. His excuse is that none of the situation on the ground stuff that he reported about Syria is inaccurate, and that "Amina Arraf" was an important voice for freedom. Now it's discovered that blogger Paula Brooks of Lez Get Real is actually another dude.

But the funniest part is that "Amina Arraf" and "Paula Brooks" flirted with each other on the latter's website, without either one realizing the other was a hoax.

Also in stupid for the day are the woman who posted an ad for a hitman to kill her baby daddy and the guy who responded to the ad.

I also whined yesterday, in part, about people letting Andrew Sullivan off the hook. Well, Jeff didn't.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Ladd Ehlinger’s Latest Attack Ad/Viral Video

To be released tomorrow.

By the description, I would guess it is going to be the boldest, most disturbing masterpiece of political video since Demon Sheep.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Mickey Kaus on the Rush to Rehab in the Wake of Weinergate

Kaus has the details on Kos, Kurtz and Toobin, but the best one is Toobin. What a stand up guy.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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A Companion Piece to Yesterday’s Zero Hedge Post on US Bailouts of European Banks

Francis Cianfrocca's absolutely right about the legislative component of the global financial meltdown.

Of course, if the full bailout of Greece happens, the people of Greece will take it in the neck, with onerous fiscal-austerity requirements. They’ll suffer a permanent reduction in living standards, in order to pay back their old debts.

Policymakers will strongly prefer this course of action, and primarily for this reason: because it will allow private creditors in France and Germany to avoid taking losses. No one wants to see a big name French or German bank become the next Lehman Brothers.

A great many conservatives would respond to this the same way they responded to TARP: “Let the bankers fail! No one held a gun to their head to force them to make stupid loans.”

Except that this isn’t quite true. Policymakers and politicians DID INDEED encourage private lenders to expand their commitments to Greece; and to many other defaulting countries; and to US homebuyers, etc etc etc.

The point here is that the expansion of credit is what has stood behind the broad-based economic growth of the three decades to 2008. If bankers didn’t take more risk (with implicit government guarantees), then growth would not have been so strong. There has been clear political support for credit-driven growth in the developed economies for decades now.

But as it turns out, the cost of that risk could not be avoided. When we use official money to buy impaired assets at nearly (nominal) par, the effect is to ratify the original overpricing of this risk, and to shift the resulting losses from private creditors to taxpayers. The INEVITABLE result is an effective deflation or austerity.

That explains the position of Greece today; of the US economy after the housing-bubble collapse; and most ominously, of the US in the near future as we come up to a huge expansion in social commitments.

And it's still the legislative component that to this point hasn't been exposed by the MSM. Between the devaluation of illiquid assets and the devaluation of the dollar, Americans can expect a substantial reduction in quality of life, no matter what the intellectual elite may imagine about compensatory societal improvements.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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A Little Whining

Hey, it worked for Ace over the Weiner thing.

First of all, nobody has taken me up on my offer to cross-post anything they've written about Joan Walsh. I know that Weinergate has sucked up all the oxygen in the room, but her mendacity on Weiner is classic Joan. Alex Pareene deserves far more abuse than I've been able to dole out, too.

Second, I'm a little astonished that more bloggers haven't taken the opportunity to subject Andrew Sullivan to the humiliation that he so richly deserves over the contents of the Palin emails.

Third, and most importantly, very few bloggers have taken up Trevor Loudon and Cliff Kincaid's research into Leon Panetta's communist connections and communist sympathizing past. He could be confirmed as early as Tuesday. It is simply unacceptable that more people aren't demanding that he get asked important questions about these connections and policy statements in the past.

Weiner is finished, whether he resigns or not. For the reasons I've already outlined, I'd rather see him stay in office, but I won't be saddened if he leaves or--better yet--gets booted out on his ass. He's a political dead man walking. There are a lot of other, more important things to focus on now.

For instance, this:

The Sunday Telegraph has uncovered more than a dozen other cases in Tower Hamlets where both Muslims and non-Muslims have been threatened or beaten for behaviour deemed to breach fundamentalist “Islamic norms.”

One victim, Mohammed Monzur Rahman, said he was left partially blind and with a dislocated shoulder after being attacked by a mob in Cannon Street Road, Shadwell, for smoking during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan last year.

“Two guys stopped me in the street and asked me why I was smoking,” he said. “I just carried on, and before I knew another dozen guys came and jumped me. The next thing I knew, I was waking up in hospital.”

“He reported it to the police and they just said they couldn’t track anyone down and there were no witnesses,” said Ansar Ahmed Ullah, a local anti-extremism campaigner who has advised Mr Rahman. “But there is CCTV in that street and it is lined with shops and people.”

Teachers in several local schools have told The Sunday Telegraph that they feel “under pressure” from local Muslim extremists, who have mounted campaigns through both parents and pupils – and, in one case, through another teacher - to enforce the compulsory wearing of the veil for Muslim girls. “It was totally orchestrated,” said one teacher. “The atmosphere became extremely unpleasant for a while, with constant verbal aggression from both the children and some parents against the head over this issue.”

Or this:

The Security Service had placed a listening device in a car driven by one of the men as part of an investigation into a suspected terrorist network in East London, sources told the Daily Telegraph.

When transcribers went back over a conversation the men had held in the car, they were picked up discussing killing Gary Smith and praising Allah as they drove from the scene after attacking him.

Akmol Hussein, 27, Sheikh Rashid, 27, Azad Hussain, 26, and Simon Alam, 19, all admitted causing grievous bodily harm with intent after ambushing Mr Smith outside his school.

Akmol Hussein was heard setting out the plan to attack Mr Smith, head of religious education at Central Foundation Girls' School in Bow, east London, saying in a Bangladeshi dialect: 'This is the dog we want to hit, to strike, to kill.’

'He's mocking Islam and he’s putting doubts in people's minds...How can somebody take a job to teach Islam when they’re not even a Muslim themselves?' he added.

Or this:

“The legislative cannot transfer the power of making laws to any other hands. . . . The power of the legislative, being derived from the people . . . [is] only to make laws, and not to make legislators.”

— John Locke

“Second Treatise of Government”

Here, however, is a paradox of sovereignty: The sovereign people, possessing the right to be governed as they choose, might find the exercise of that right tiresome and so might choose to be governed in perpetuity by a despot they cannot subsequently remove. Congress did something like that in passing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare.

The point of PPACA is cost containment. This supposedly depends on the Independent Payment Advisory Board. The IPAB, which is a perfect expression of the progressive mind, is to be composed of 15 presidential appointees empowered to reduce Medicare spending — which is 13 percent of federal spending — to certain stipulated targets. IPAB is to do this by making “proposals” or “recommendations” to limit costs by limiting reimbursements to doctors. This, inevitably, will limit available treatments — and access to care when physicians leave the Medicare system.

The PPACA repeatedly refers to any IPAB proposal as a “legislative proposal” and speaks of “the legislation introduced” by the IPAB. Each proposal automatically becomes law unless Congress passes — with a three-fifths supermajority required in the Senate — a measure cutting medical spending as much as the IPAB proposal would.

This is a travesty of constitutional lawmaking: An executive branch agency makes laws unless Congress enacts legislation to achieve the executive agency’s aim.

I'm not trying to downplay the importance of the Weinergate coverage of Dana Loesch or Ace or Patterico or Stranahan or anyone else who was involved in getting the message out . . . such as CNN's Dana Bash. It could prove to be a sort of watershed moment in blogging, such as that which was provided by one-hit wonder Charles Johnson during Rathergate. Take a bow, people.

Now, let's refocus.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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QE2 Should Be Renamed EU2

Tyler Durden of Zero Hedge:

In summary, instead of doing everything in its power to stimulate reserve, and thus cash, accumulation at domestic (US) banks which would in turn encourage lending to US borrowers, the Fed has been conducting yet another stealthy foreign bank rescue operation, which rerouted $600 billion in capital from potential borrowers to insolvent foreign financial institutions in the past 7 months. QE2 was nothing more (or less) than another European bank rescue operation!

Read the whole thing.

Soros backing efforts to remove conservatives from local judgeships? Jeff Dunetz:

For the past ten years there has been a well coordinated effort to reshape the composition of America's state courts by excluding conservative, rule-of-law judges from the bench. The plan is to replace the publicly elected judiciary with what they ironically call "Merit Selection. Under “merit selection,” the power to select judges is transferred from the people to a small, unelected, unaccountable commission comprised primarily of legal elites, typically including representatives of powerful special interest groups, such as state trial lawyers associations.

"Who is behind this effort? The Spooky Dude himself, progressive sugar daddy George Soros who's Open Society Institute (OSI) has invested at least $45.4 million into its campaign to reshape the judiciary.

A report by the American Justice Partnership describes the effort as using the full bag of Soros' brand of campaign tactics through an organization his OSI funds called Justice at Sake (JAS) .

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Total Electoral War in Wisconsin

I'm sure that the spectacle is repugnant to most Wisconsinites.

By certifying the 6 Republican recalls a month to a couple of weeks before any of the 3 Democrat recalls, the Wisconsin GAB gave the Democrats an advantage in preparation for the recall elections. The Republican response was to gum up the works by forwarding pseudo-Democrat candidates to run in those elections. Now the Dems are returning the favor:

The Democrats and their union comrades are pulling out all the stops in the Wisconsin in their attempt to seize control of the State Senate. An unholy alliance of public sector unions and their Democrat enablers have joined together under the banner of an innocuous sounding organization called We Are Wisconsin. The plan is a tried and true staple of leftist politics, get involved in the Republican primary elections and manipulate the process in order to ensure victory in the general election.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports that in an email Kelly Steele, communications director for We Are Wisconsin said "it would be in the interest of Democrats to run candidates in the Republican primaries," adding that "it would be in the interest of flipping the Wisconsin Senate that interested Democrats contact the Democratic Party of Wisconsin."

Steele claims that his strategy has been developed to counteract a similar primary strategy that he says the Republican Party is trying to implement. Kelly Steele came to Wisconsin along with numerous other Democrat operatives and union thugs during the ugly public sector union protests earlier this year. The Democrats' hired gun is no stranger to the gutter warfare of the left as he has been credited by many in the party for his role in saving Harry Reid's senate seat last year.

Every maneuver the Democrats have made has taken advantage of any and all options that they could muster: For example, the GAB determination that the Fleabaggers could use campaign funds to offset their expenses while refusing to do their jobs out of state, or the ridiculous maneuverings of Marianne Sumi, or the recounts of JoAnne Kloppenburg, or the attempts to prevent lawmakers from being able to conduct business in the Capitol, or the Madison mayor's attempt to prevent the publication of Walker's budget bill.

Naturally, they cry foul when the other side decides to play hardball, too, because it's only ethical when they do it.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Remember When Obama Insulted the Supremes During the State of the Union?

Or when he invited Paul Ryan to sit in the front row, so he could get a good look at Thug Boy lying about his budget plan?

Shortly after the photo-op meeting and “working lunch” with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the one that saw President Obama openly chastised by the Prime Minister for Obama’s earlier public comments regarding wanting to see Israel return to its 1967 borders, the president verbally “went off” on Richard Daley in the private study area that adjoins the Oval Office. President Obama’s verbal attack was clearly heard by numerous staff up and down the West Wing hallways.

The essence of the president’s rage and embarrassment can best be summed up with him yelling out very loudly, “What the f-ck was that!?” That phrase was apparently repeated a number of times in the span of about five minutes, a time period in which Obama’s voice became “louder and louder” and culminating in Obama exclaiming, “Never again! Do you understand me? Never again!” Any response by Bill Daley back to the president, if given, was not overheard.

Punks really hate it when they get punked, don't they? Is it already a Downfall parody?

Via @phelony_jones

Correction: As Andy points out in comments, it's Bill Daley, not Richard. Ulsterman gets it right elsewhere in the piece.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Andrew Sullivan and the Palin Emails [UPDATEDx2]

I haven't been so stupefied by a shocking revelation since Geraldo opened Al Capone's safe.

Now, I know everyone's been busy pounding Weiner so often and hard that they're liable to go blind, and I know that Joanie Baloney and Alex Pareene have gotten (some of) the shit they deserve, and Chuckles Green Footballs, and that there are loads of scores still left to be settled on Weinergate coverage, but with regard to the Palin emails . . . what about the evidence that Trig is actually the child of Bristol? Wouldn't Palin's staff, complicit as they were in the greatest political cover-up EVAR, have used some kind of coded language to communicate their manipulation of the press and all that stuff?

Oh, wait. Maybe Palin's not so stupid. Maybe she used her personal account! Then . . . oh, yeah. We've seen those emails, haven't we?

It's going to be fun watching loony Andrew contort over this. I'd like for you to help make sure he has to take the issue up.

Politico, via Insty:

After Sarah Palin revealed she was pregnant with son Trig in March 2008, her office quickly zeroed in on then-state Senate president Lyda Green as the source of rumors that Bristol Palin was actually carrying the baby, according to emails released Friday.

The series of emails reflect the former Alaska governor’s deep frustration over the issue, which would later gain national attention after an active network of gadflies, bloggers and authors on the left sought to raise doubts about the circumstances surrounding the birth of Palin’s fifth child.

UPDATEx2: In the headline, The Daily Mail states that Palin "plays God" in reacting to Trig's birth (whereas aborting him would have been prudent), but in the article, it states that she's imagining what God had in mind, giving her a son with Down Syndrome:

The letter also makes unlikely conspiracy theories that have long been circulating on blogs that Trig was actually born to Mrs Palin's unwed daughter Bristol.

"Makes unlikely"? They've always been batshit insane.

The week that was, according to Andrew's Acolytes at the Daily Dish:

Monday: "Monday on the Dish, Andrew demolished the Republican agenda as a fulfillment of Christian ideals."

Tuesday: "Tuesday on the Dish, and Andrew backtracked on his original defense of Weiner since the lying complicates things."

Wednesday: "Wednesday on the Dish, Andrew marveled at American puritanism about sex, and picked apart what it means to live, both online and off, while we all seek out our authentic selves."

Thursday: "Thursday on the Dish, Andrew dismantled AIPAC's disproportionate popularity in Congress. He also pinpointed the moment our political system became decadent, and poked Limbaugh for thinking anyone in the world thinks Palin is sane and stable."

Friday: "Today on the Dish, Andrew analyzed testosterone as a blessing and a curse (for gay men and straight). We eagerly awaited the Palin emails . . . ."

Cape and tights. Large.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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