No Leadership, No Solutions, No Clue: Obama Speech Resurrects Jimmy Carter Era

Hey, I love that title!

Published yesterday at Pajamas Media:

... folks are now making serious comparisons between President Obama and President Jimmy Carter. It’s easy to dismiss attacks on Obama as “Jimmah” as cheap political points, but when newscasts are opening with counts marking the crisis’ longevity — “Gulf Oil Spill, Day 57” — can it be long before one of the major networks gives Ted Koppel a lifeline for the original Nightline?

It is, of course, a solemn time in American politics, and the president may have missed an opportunity to demonstrate genuine leadership and originality. Economic uncertainty is unabated across the land, and American forces continue fighting foreign conflicts of uncertain resolution. Perhaps the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico has become the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Unfortunately, bland speeches offering refurbished climate change initiatives probably aren’t going to thrill a lot of pressed and worried voters.

RELATED: See Erick Erickson, "Barack Obama Embraces His Inner Jimmy Carter: Setting the Thermostat to 68 Degrees of Barack Obama."

Tuesday Lunch at Ruby's

I took my boys out to lunch yesterday at Ruby's Diner in Costa Mesa.

We had to run a quick errand first, though, getting some paperwork signed at the doctor's office. Look carefully below. My boys are heading into the new medical building. I love the flags (and I appreciate them so much more knowing that so many leftists don't):

Ruby's is a SoCal 40's-style chain of diners. We visited the restaurant at South Coast Plaza's Crystal Court. It was mid-afternoon, about 2:30pm or so, and uncrowded:

The view from our table. That's Bristol Street out the window. A walk-bridge connects the main mall at SCP to the Crystal Court facility to the west:

Kids can play with the toy folding-box cars, this one a Chevy Bel-Air:

The restaurant wasn't empty. People are seated in a windowed section close to the entrance:

My copy of The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power. I never go anywhere without a book:

The waiter brings our vanilla shakes:

This is my oldest son's bacon cheeseburger (I had BLT&A):

That's me, Dr. D. ---- publisher of American Power! Behind me, notice how the Art-Deco styling comes out in this shot. Look at the clock and the stools at the lunch-counter:

We stopped into the Apple store on the way back to the car. You'd never know we're just coming out of recession from the looks of it --- it's always packed:

Youth Suspect in Seattle Police Punching Case Had Prior Criminal Rap Sheet

Update on today's big viral video. The main story's at Seattle Post-Intelligencer, "Police Guild: Officer Did Nothing Wrong in Videotaped Punch." That piece doesn't identify the teen girl suspect, but at the Seattle Times it turns out the girl, Angel L. Rosenthal, has quite a criminal record:

Rosenthal appeared Tuesday in King County Juvenile Court, where supporters said that she lives at the Virginia Miller House, a residential facility with behavior-modification programs for teen girls, but was in contact with her family. It's unclear why the girl is not living with her family.

King County Superior Court pro-tem Judge Ann Danieli found that Seattle police had probable cause to arrest Rosenthal for investigation of third-degree assault and obstruction. However, the judge agreed with the girl's defense attorney that she should be released ....

Rosenthal was charged in November with second-degree robbery. According to prosecutors, she punched a 15-year-old boy in the face while she and a group of youths were on their way to a rave in South Seattle last Aug. 28. The boy told police that his cellphone and $20 were stolen in the incident. A 14-year-old boy told police that he was punched in the head and his hat was stolen.

Authorities say the case was dismissed when the boys refused to testify.

In April 2008, Rosenthal was charged with third-degree theft after she allegedly stole a minivan in Tukwila, prosecutors said. Kent police said she used a screwdriver to break the ignition and start the vehicle.

The charge was later amended to theft of a motor vehicle. Rosenthal was given a deferred disposition — charges would be dropped if she stayed out of trouble — because it was a first-time offense, said Ian Goodhew, deputy chief of staff for Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg.

More at the link.

The World Turned Upside Down

Listen to Melanie Phillips discuss her book, The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power:

Hat Tip: Mark Humphrys (more here).

Governor Chris Christie: Day of Reckoning

Via Pundit & Pundette:

James Carville Stars in New RNC Ad Hammering Obama's Oil Spill Response

At Weasel Zippers, "New RNC Ad Uses James Carville Against Obama, Asking “What Took You So Long?” – Video":

Also, at OTB, "Obama Oil Spill Speech Reax: Epic Fail" (via Memeorandum). And RWN, "The Right Side of the Blogosphere’s Reaction to Obama’s Speech."

Obama's Marxist Allies Move Forward on Healthcare, Socialist Agenda

At Key Wiki and New Zeal:

Democratic Socialists of America, is despite its deceptive name is the U.S.'s largest and probably most influential Marxist based organization.

Many of its several thousand members operate through the Democratic Party, New York's influential Working Families Party and the organization also counts thousands of of labor unionists, religious activists, journalists and college professors in its ranks.

D.S.A. helped establish and continues to support the more than 80 strong Congressional Progressive Caucus and is particularly close to "single payer" healthcare champions Rep. John Conyers of Michigan and Caucus founder Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Dr. Quentin Young of Chicago is the father of the "single payer" healthcare lobby in the U.S. he is also a former Young Communist League member, a long time D.S.A. activist and a one time personal physician and long time friend and mentor to Barack Obama.

President Obama, himself has a more than 25 year history of involvement with D.S.A. members.

D.S.A. means to use its considerable power and influence to push for completely socialized health care in the U.S. in the next few years.

RTWT.

PHOTO CREDIT: Looking at the Left.

David Petraeus Faints During Senate Testimony

Please join me in holding good thoughts and well-wishes for Gen. David Petraeus. It's amazing that this morning's Los Angeles Times is just now reporting on this, "Petraeus Appears to Faint During Senate Testimony." I'm almost positive folks had already analyzed the event up and down on Twitter more than 24 hours ago. Strange. I'd be interested to know how many Americans are just learning of the fainting spell this morning over coffee. It's good to have the legacy media in terms of resources and institutional expertise and memory. But man, it's not "breaking news" anymore. In any case, check for the picture at the link especially, which shows Petraeus leaning forward from the front. The videos, thankfully, show John McCain's questioning just as Gen. Petraeus is heard to fall forward; and it's fascinating to juxtapose the shorter clip at top with the longer one below. If you're a policy wonk, you'll get a kick out of this long discussion over the administration's July '11 pullout date for the Afghan deployment. McCain is obviously unhappy about that, and tries to get Petraeus to make the case for a longer stay for U.S. forces. See also, Jennifer Rubin, "Bipartisan Criticism of Obama Timeline for Afghanistan."

Tainted Love/Where Did Our Love Go

Feels like a rip-off when some radio stations play "Tainted Love" but cut off the second half of the medley, "Where Did Our Love Go?" Don't you love it (with no apologies to Gen X-ers, Gen Y-ers, etc.)? Really takes you back to the '80s:

Pre-Order The Post-American Presidency

"Truth is the new hate speech."

Remember that? It sums up not just the Atlas Shrugs battle against Pay Pal, but the battle all good moral folks are fighting in our post-reason world. More on the story at the blog, "PJM Pamela's Paypal Power Play."

And remember, readers can pre-order, The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America:

Why America Will Still Lead the World in 2050

Joel Kotkin at ReasonTV:

World Cup Soccer Blogging

Professor Daniel Drezner's going for some World Cup blog traffic. See, "This Blog's Official Position About Soccer."

Meanwhile, I mainly wanted to get something more attractive at top after the downer of President Obama's BP Oval Office address. This un-named totty c/o Theo Spark:

RELATED: At Sports Illustrated, "Body Painting: World Cup (Sarah Brandner, Abbey Clancy, Bethany Dempsey and Melissa Satta)."

President Obama's National Address on BP Crisis ... UPDATED!!

It was dreadful.

NYT's has its report, "In Oval Office Speech, Obama Presses BP on Compensation," and also Politico, "President Obama: 'We will make BP pay'." WSJ's got the text of the speech via Memorandum, and this should be leading by the end of the evening. I'll have more later, but the president was dishonest in claiming the feds have been on the scene since day one and Obama exudes no urgency in crisis. Most of all, the speech was mostly propaganda fear-mongering on the alleged dangers of environmental collapse. I'll have more later, but watch the clip. Dreadful:

UPDATE: Check Real Clear Politics, "Krauthammer: Obama Gave It A Shot, But The Story Will Not Be His Speech"; Chris Cillizza, "President Obama's Oval Office Address: First Thoughts"; and New York Times, "In Oval Office Speech, Obama Calls for New Focus on Energy Policy." Plus, more at Memeorandum.

Al Gore Extramarital Affair – An Inconvenient Truth?!!

Hey, found this at Jawa Report. Speculative or the real deal? See Star Magazine, "Exclusive: Al Gore Cheats with Larry David's Ex." And starting to get picked up, e.g., at USA Today, "'Star' Mag: Al Gore Affair Broke Up Marriage":

It was only a matter of time before the celeb mags started prognosticating about what really caused Al and Tipper Gore's marriage ended after 40 years.

On June 1, the couple said it was "very much a mutual and mutually supportive decision that we have made together following a process of long and careful consideration." Friends said they had "grown apart."

Now, Star magazine is reporting -- with no official comment or confirmation -- that the former vice president has been having an affair with Larry David's ex-wife, Laurie David. Larry and Laurie split in 2007. Laurie was a producer on Al's 2006 Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

No doubt most people knew all along, as I quearied wrote on June 1st, "any John Edwards moments for the Gores?"

IMAGE CREDIT: No Sheeples Here!

Taking Down Eric Boehlert

Patrick Frey and Matt Welch are just hammering useful tool Eric Boehlert of Media Mutters for America. We're talkin' utter devastation --- total Maximus Decimus Meridius takedown territory for the useful clown at MMFA.

Matt's piece is especially killer, "Don't You Go Calling Obama an 'ex-state senator, 'Hater!'."

Turns out Boehlert can't get out from under this comment:

And I don't even have to do a Google search to know for a fact that when President Bush was in office, there was nobody on staff at the Times, and certainly nobody writing off the opinion pages, who was allowed to so casually insult the office of the presidency on a regular basis.

Clear and unambiguous indictment, right?

So, Matt nails him on it, for example:

As the Internet kidz like to say, let me Google that for you. There'll you see a Bush-era L.A. Times columnist – one of the most consistently popular among the paper's stable at the time – who used these phrases to describe Obama's predecessor:

* "Bubble Boy"
* "willfully blind"
* "distracted and incompetent"
* "homegrown authoritarian"
* "Torturer-in-Chief"
* "a bad dream, a shameful, inexplicable interlude in American history"
* enabler of "the so-called Big Lie theory of political propaganda, articulated most infamously by Adolf Hitler."
* "if you dilute civilian control of the military, you end up with fascism or a Latin American-style military junta....we're already well on the way to having that kind of regime."
* "being a citizen in George W. Bush's America is like being a passenger in a car driven by a drunk driver."
* "I don't hate George Bush. But I sure hate what he's done to my country."

Incidentally, that columnist above, Rosa Brooks, has since gone on to take a job in Obama's Pentagon.

QED!

Well, except that obviously there's no meaningful reality for useful tool Eric Boehlert. He writes hopelessly in response, "Thanks to Matt Welch at Reason for proving my point about LA Times hating Obama."

I'll refer readers back to Matt Welch for more. But I'm thinking this is a good time to refer Eric Boehlert to Karen Alloy:

But to continue, go to Patterico for some epic smash-mouth politics: "Eric Boehlert: No, Seriously! Kick Me!" In what has to be the funniest investigation EVAH!! turns out Boehlert denied that he cross-posted his stuff to "Smirking Chimp," the Bush-era Bush-hating website. It's too good (so follow the links above), but Patterico went over there, signed up, and posted this:

There's lots more (so again, check those links). But hey, give it up for Patterico!

And FWIW, follow Boehlert's further circus performances on Twitter.

'Death to Israel' (in Hebrew and Arabic)

See Jawa Report, "'Death to Israel' Shirt at Irish 'Peace' Protest."

RELATED: At Blazing Cat Fur, "Alleged 'Fauxtilla Peace Activist' Kevin Neish Too Stupid To Keep His Stories Straight."

What Does It Take...

Here's Garland Jeffreys' 1982 cover of Junior Walker & the All Stars' 1969 chart-topper, "What Does It Take (To Win Your Love)":

I listened to Jeffreys in the early '80s. It turns out his biggest hit was "Wild in the Streets." And funny timing, the Circle Jerks came out with a cover of "Wild in the Streets" in 1982, the lead track of the album of the same name.

At the Jeffreys clip above, notice Harvey Keitel in the opening scene (likely an MTV viddy, but I don't recall seeing it). [Added: Is that Joe Piscopo in there as well?]

The original song from Junior Walker & the All Stars is here.

RELATED: More music at PA Pundits International, "Sunday Music – All Along The Watchtower – The Bob Dylan Series (Part 11)."

Who's the Enemy in the War on Terror?

From Senator Joseph Lieberman, at WSJ:

The U.S. is at war with violent Islamist extremism, and the Obama administration does moderate Muslims no favor by refusing to recognize this.

In the new National Security Strategy released by the White House last month, the Obama administration rightly reaffirms that America remains a nation at war. Unfortunately, it refuses to identify our enemy in this war as what it is: violent Islamist extremism.

This is more than semantics. As military strategists since Sun Tzu have appreciated, the first rule in war is to know your enemy so you can defeat it. The 2006 National Security Strategy did this: It correctly identified our enemy as "the transnational terrorists [who] exploit the proud religion of Islam to serve a violent political vision." The Obama administration removed those accurate and important words.

One argument administration officials use to defend their avoidance of terms like "violent Islamist extremism" is that they are imprecise and lump together a diverse set of organizations with different goals, motivations, and capabilities. Yet the administration's preferred alternative term—"violent extremism"—is much more vulnerable to such criticism.

To state the obvious, there are many forms of "violent extremism" with which America is not "at war." The strategies and capabilities needed to counter the specific threat of violent Islamist extremism are very different from those needed to deal with white supremacist extremists in the U.S. or genocidal militias in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet at no point does the 2010 National Security Strategy explain or defend its repeated use of the nebulous euphemism "violent extremism," which also has appeared in other strategy documents over the last year ....

There is no question that violent Islamist extremists seek to provoke a "clash of civilizations," and that we must discredit this hateful lie. We must encourage and empower the non-violent Muslim majority to raise their voices to condemn the Islamist extremist ideology as a desecration of Islam, responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of innocent Muslims and people of other faiths. How can we expect those Muslims to have the courage to stand and do that if we are unwilling to define and describe the enemy as dramatically different from them? ....

After Obama? Progressives Getting Fed Up With 'The One'

Via Allahpundit, some interesting developments in the long-building Obama backlash on the progressive left. Actually, Allah's taking about British MP Daniel Hannan's buyer's remorse, but my interest is in Joan Walsh's piece at Salon, "Protecting the Obama Brand":

Two stories about President Obama this weekend pushed my growing unease with his recent moves into full-blown anxiety. They come on the heels of Tim Dickinson's devastating Rolling Stone piece laying out concrete problems with Obama's response to the BP oil spill – from delays in cleaning up the Minerals Management Service, distrusting scientists who correctly reported the spill was much bigger than BP said, and waiting more than a week to declare the crisis "an Oil Spill of National Significance," which corralled new services. Maybe the most damning section of Dickinson's piece comes when he quotes the president proudly announcing he'd reversed his stand against offshore oil drilling. "It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don't cause spills," the president said. "They are technologically very advanced." Dickenson notes: "Eighteen days later, on the eve of the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, the Deepwater Horizon rig went off like a bomb."

Of the weekend's worrisome Obama stories, the first was Politico's Roger Simon's interview with Obama, published in full today, in which his self-defense about how he's handled the BP oil disaster sounded whiny and juvenile, and raised big questions about whether he's capable of fighting the battles he needs to enter and win to move the country forward. The other was Matt Bai's "Democrat in Chief?" in the New York Times Magazine, which showed that Obama and his team seem more focused on protecting the "brand" that they believe galvanized millions of new voters, young voters and independents in 2008, to potentially realign American politics, than with helping Democrats hold the House and Senate.

Not sure why Walsh doesn't link to NYT's Sunday Magazine, so here goes, "Democrat in Chief?"

But be sure to finish Walsh's piece. She can't help laying some of the blame on the tea parties:

There are two pressing reasons that I find Obama's current stasis so worrisome. One is that we're at a dangerous time, given the world economy, and on the right, Obama's election has worsened a 20-year pattern of Republican obstruction and destruction (and it's got an undercurrent of hate and demonization that can't be denied.) At the same time, Obama has an incredible moment to articulate what Democratic leadership stands for: Improving the lives of ordinary Americans, protecting the country from the unbridled, deregulated dangerous corporate excess, and moving boldly on problems, like climate change, that require boldness and leadership.

And "boldness" on climate change? Well, it takes boldness to pass off that much B.S. on the public, especially since the AGW consensus has been completely destroyed.

(Note that unhappiness with Obama's been growing for some time, and if this progressive dissent keeps building look for Jane Hamsher and her henchmen to back a 2012 primary challenge a la Eugene McCarty '68.)

And by the way, Melanie Phillips has a fabulous discussion of the AGW fraud and more at her new book, The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power. I'm really enjoying it. Most important book I've read this year.

'Alejandro' Fashion Credits

A pretty wild photo-portfolio, at NICOLA FORMICHETTI'S BLOG!! (Lady Gaga's stylist.)

Click on the image and enlarge for full effect. And lots more pics at the link at top.

See also Nicola's, "LADY GAGA AT RAINFOREST FUND SHOW -- WITH STING AND ELTON JOHN" (and Blondie too!)

And don't forget, I've had a little crush on Gaga for some time now, despite the Katy Perry backlash. I just don't think about her politics (or racial double standards). She's doing some pretty wicked stuff no matter your ideological or musical take on things. (Although she'll score some points with a production riff on Muhammed!)