Bloodthirsty Liberal

Because on top of all the incompetence resides the mind of a hypocrite

A photo of Obama’s “army” originally posted on the campaign’s Tumblr site and run in conjunction with a BuzzFeed story on the Obama campaign reveals a stunning lack of diversity among the president’s Chicago staff.

The Obama campaign’s Chicago headquarters has it all—from Jack Daniels and Ping Pong to bouncy balls and ironic desk mementos.

Yet the “army of twenty-somethings” campaign manager Jim Messina has assembled in the president’s hometown is almost uniformly white, according to photos contained in a detailed BuzzFeed report Monday.

Further examination of the Obama’s campaign’s Tumblr site over the past month reveals very few black individuals—apart from the president and his wife, Michelle—in the pictures posted in the feed.

- Aggie

That’s the thesis

Texas Congressman Ron Paul is 76 years old, yet the demographic from which he attracts the most amount of support is voters less than half his age. Just what do young voters find so appealing about Paul?

In the latest Gallup results broken down by age of respondents, Paul does disproportionately well with voters aged 18-34, being the preferred choice of 20 percent of that demographic nationally, statistically tied with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich at 19 percent. But with older demographics Paul barely registers, being supported by 8 percent of the 35-54-year-olds, and 4 percent among those over age 55.
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Mike Devanney, a Republican strategist, echoed that view, calling Paul “a bit of a counter-cultural figure.”

“He doesn’t usually fit into that Republican ideological box, and young people are regularly idealistic and look for things that are different, and, certainly, his political phenomenon is different,” Devanney added.

“Maybe it’s the rebel in him,” joked Republican consultant Jim Dyke.

Another aspect of Paul’s appeal is “the straight talk,” suggested Grayson. “He does exactly what he believes. He’s pretty consistent philosophically.”

“No caveats, no nuances, no ‘it depends’ — purity of beliefs is always a hit among young people,” echoed Republican political consultant Dan Hazelwood. “They want to be in the vanguard of the revolution. It’s why students on the left rallied to candidate Obama in ’08, and on the right they rally to Ron Paul. Also, in Ron Paul’s case, its hip to be for the square, grumpy old dude because he is an anti-establishment conservative.”

“I’ve noticed about the folks who are big supporters of Ron Paul, they feel like they’re part of a cause, they feel like they’re part of something greater than just backing a simple candidate,” Grayson observed. “In many ways, that’s somewhat similar to Obama in ‘08.”

“This is a cause; it’s a calling for them, in a way that Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Rick Perry — none of them have that. And I think for the millennial generation that’s a big deal — making them feel like they’re part of something bigger. Obama captured it in ‘08, Paul might do it in ’12,” Grayson predicted.

I agree with the assessment and it concerns me. I have heard of young adults who are behind him because he doesn’t seem like he’s the product of a marketing campaign. He is dangerously naive – just like Obama – but is even more arrogant and less likely to listen to different viewpoints. He has had over seventy years to calcify his thinking.

- Aggie

This is whine country:

President Barack Obama isn’t the only one starting to look a bit like Jimmy Carter.

Taking a page from the peanut farmer’s handbook, Young America’s Foundation compiled a “Youth Misery Index,” which adds youth unemployment, average graduating student debt and per capita national debt. And the numbers aren’t pretty.

Average graduating student debt is now at an all-time high of $26,300, per-capita national debt is $46,900, and youth unemployment has outstripped that of the general population, at a staggeringly high 17.4 percent. That puts the Youth Misery Index at 90.6, up more than 25 percent in the last four years.

“The Youth Misery Index represents a three-pronged attack on young Americans’ financial security — educational debt from their past, unemployment in the present, and a future plagued by the burden of massive government debt,” said a press release from YAF.

“All three indicators of the Youth Misery Index have gone up, at least in part, thanks to government intervention and out-of-control spending. Few things are more earth-shattering to a young person than being stuck with no job and tens of thousands in college debt.”

Ron Meyer, the YAF program officer who helped devise the statistic, said in a statement, “as a recent college graduate myself, I’ve seen the harsh realities of the Youth Misery Index. Young people can and must be the catalyst to shock the establishment by advocating for the halt of big government. If we do nothing, we can kiss the American dream goodbye.”

Why don’t you try kissing a girl first?

I suppose I should be more sympathetic—I am more sympathetic—but I’m also right royally p-o-ed that this demographic—the wet behind the ears set—burdened us with Obama in the first place, having voted for him over McCain by a margin of greater than two-to-one.

Youth are miserable? You can say that again.

Kathy Shaidle, via Mark Steyn:

Shaidle lets this pass without comment, but she’s made of sterner stuff.

I look at Rachel (because I have to, not because I want to) and the most frightening thing is not the road kill hue of her hair or the fishing tackle in her face, but the look of an utter simpleton. She is oblivious to the irony that someone who looks like Chuckles the Clown can’t find work as a cosmetologist. (Is that a BA or a BS degree? I’m guessing the latter.) You’d think Make-Up 101 would teach not to attract attention to your poorly concealed zits by perforating your face with shiny studs.

Or did she mean cosmologist? Maybe she’s a 10 on Uranus.

The picture originates here, three weeks ago, where she had a lot of company.

Now, that’s a good look!

So I’ll have to put it on a blog, and hope some O-cow-pie Wall Street-er reads it. (Reads?)

This is certainly not America’s answer to the Arab Spring—the Bobo Fall perhaps, unmistakably both bohemian and bourgeois.

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Now ask yourself what the financial crisis really means for today’s 15- to 24-year-olds. Not only has it raised the probability that they will be unemployed after graduation. More seriously, it has massively increased the debt that they will have to service when they do get jobs.

Never in the history of intergenerational transfers has one generation left such a mountain of IOUs to another as the baby boomers are leaving to their grandchildren.

When you do the math, there is only one logical political home for today’s teens and 20-somethings … and that is the Tea Party. For who else is promising to slash Medicare and Social Security and keep the tax burden at its historical average?

Let’s just remind ourselves of the report of the Trustees of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds back in 2007, which projected a rise in the cost of these two programs from 7.3 percent of gross domestic product to 17.5 percent by 2030. The trustees warned that to achieve actuarial balance—in other words, solvency—for these two programs would require (for Social Security) an increase of 16 percent in payroll tax revenues or an immediate reduction in benefits of 13 percent. For Medicare we are talking a 122 percent increase in payroll taxes or a 51 percent cut in spending.

As Laurence Kotlikoff and Scott Burns pointed out in The Coming Generational Storm, by 2030 there will be twice as many retirees as there are today but only 18 percent more workers. Unless there is really radical reform of entitlement programs—especially Medicare—the next generation of American workers will be paying roughly double the taxes their parents and grandparents paid. This is what Kotlikoff and Burns mean by “fiscal child abuse.”

Of these harsh realities the occupiers of Wall Street seem blissfully unaware. Fixated on the idea that they somehow represent the 99 percent of people who scrape by on 80 percent of total income, they fail to see that the real distributional conflict of our time is not between percentiles, much less classes, but between generations. And no generation has a keener interest in slashing future spending on entitlements than today’s teens and 20-somethings.

Call me naive, but I still believe America would be fine if it adopted conservative, free market economic principles. If we cut taxes and regulation, slashed spending, and got government out of the business of picking winners, the economy would respond accordingly with expansion, job creation, and deficit (even debt) reduction. It could happen tomorrow. What’s so depressing, however, is that such an immediate and (in my opinion) infallible approach might as well be across the Sahara Desert… like Kenya.

Sasha and Malia will be fine. The rest of them, however, not so much:

The brutal job market brought on by the recession has been hard on everyone, but especially devastating on the youngest members of the labor force.

About 60% of recent graduates have not been able to find a full-time job in their chosen profession, according to job placement firm Adecco.

And for those just entering the workplace, a bout of long-term unemployment can affect their career plans for years to come.

Wait a minute. What recession? We’ve been in recovery for almost two years. Thanks to Obama’s stimulus package and laser-like focus on jobs, we’re practically rolling in employment opportunities, aren’t we?

Guess not:

Meghan O’Halloran was one of those who had her career derailed by the timing of her graduation.

She left Cornell University with a degree in architecture and six summers of internships at top firms in New York, Milan and London.

“I thought getting a job would be a snap,” she said.

But after graduating in December 2008, just as job losses in the economy were reaching a high point, she was confronted with a very cold reception into the labor force.

She followed her boyfriend to China for a year, and found architecture work plentiful in the building boom there. But when she returned home at the end of 2009, not much had improved, and no one was hiring.

“I’ve applied for temporary work,” she said. “The answer is always the same, ‘We wish we could hire you.’”

She’s decided to leave behind her hopes for a career as an architect and has started her own business making custom fabric, carpets and furniture.

Wait another minute. Instead of working in a field overstaffed with like-trained people, she’s providing a service and a product people seem to want. Maybe the economy isn’t bad, people’s expectations are just warped. Stop thinking you are owed stuff, and go out and make a living. If Obama has taught this generation that lesson, he has done his country a great service.

Brittney Winters, 23, graduated from Princeton University in 2009 and can’t find a teaching job, despite graduating from a top school.

“When you go to an Ivy League school, you figure this degree will mean something — that it will guarantee you a job,” she said.

Winters has taken on other “survival” jobs to get by, including working at a video rental store.

She now works for a public relations firm in Chicago. But the job is a long commute from her parents’ home, and she’s struggling to fill the gas tank each week.

Who goes to Princeton to teach 2nd grade? She’s probably making a better contribution to society as a PR flak. The jobs marketplace thinks so. But I do salute her for taking “survival jobs” rather than going on welfare (assuming she didn’t). The last thing this country needs is Ivy League welfare cases.

These two young woman are not alone, God knows:

Last year, the unemployment rate for college graduates age 24 and younger rose to 9.4%, the highest since the Labor Department began keeping records in 1985.

One reason is because recent hires with limited experience have the toughest time competing in a job market flooded with experienced candidates.

“We know that young people coming out of college have the least experience,” said Kathy Kane, senior vice president of talent management at Adecco. “And these entry-level jobs can be the easiest for companies to reduce.”

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Adecco also found that 18% of recent grads have been forced to turn to full-time jobs outside their field of study, often jobs for which a college degree is not required.

Many others are underemployed, or working part-time or temporary jobs and internships.

And the lack of steady income can also delay the start of their lives as independent adults. About a third of recent graduates are still living with their parents, Adecco found, with 17% saying they are financially dependant on their parents. Almost one in four say they are in debt.

So it could also said Obama is keeping families together.

Sorry, Obamasnots, he isn’t doing for you as you did for him. It was all a con, just like college. But becasue you went to college, and because you are indoctrinated in conventional Marxist dogma, you are likely to vote for him again, so likely to endure another several years of underemployment (at best). Get used to it.

But who am I to talk? My first presidential vote was for Jimmy Carter. (So was my second, oy vey!)

Aggie has followed the trend of the groups most loyal to Messiah Obama (which is very close to Massa Obama, when you think about it—if you think about it) being hurt, or at least unhelped, by his policies. Minorities, young people—it’s hard out there for the simps.

Here’s the latest:

Many of the groups that Obama needs to turn out most enthusiastically in 2012—particularly young people, African-Americans, and Latinos—are still suffering the most as the economy crawls back from the Great Recession. That dynamic looms like a crack in the foundation for Obama’s reelection, which relies on those groups surging to the polls in 2012 after their participation sagged even more than usual in the 2010 midterms.

The continued strain on the groups at the core of Obama’s coalition underscores the political stakes in his recent turn toward deficit reduction. Obama’s pledge to reduce the deficit by about $4 trillion over the next 12 years has allowed him to shift the debate from whether to reduce the deficit to how. That’s much stronger terrain for Obama and Democrats—as demonstrated by the sharp backlash many congressional Republicans faced in town halls this week over the GOP’s proposal to convert Medicare into a voucher (or premium support) system.

But many liberal strategists fear that Obama could win this battle and lose the war in 2012. These critics argue that the tactical benefits of embracing greater deficit reduction come at a high cost: By agreeing that Washington must tighten its belt, the president has essentially precluded additional large-scale government efforts to stimulate growth and create jobs. “You are really conceding whatever the growth we have is the growth you are going to run with—and maybe even a little less, because you are going to start cutting spending,” says veteran liberal activist Robert Borosage, codirector of the Campaign for America’s Future.

To Borosage and like-minded critics, that means Obama is consigning himself to relatively high levels of unemployment in 2012. The risk is especially great among the groups that Obama most needs to mobilize. In the latest federal figures, unemployment stood at 15.5 percent among African–Americans, 13.4 percent among young people, and 11.9 percent among Latinos. In each case, those figures are down since January but still higher than when Obama took office—and considerably higher than among whites (8.3 percent).

We white people with jobs are appreciative (even if we’re not going to vote for you), but we wonder what your base thinks of these numbers. Let us stipulate that they will still vote for you in overwhelming numbers—that’s what bases do—but the Peggy Josephs of the nation, who have learned to their regret that you won’t pay their mortgages, might rather stay home (if they still have a home) than turn out and vote for your sorry a**.

Rush has been saying recently that if the election were held today, Obama would lose in a landslide. He doesn’t say who would win, only that Obama would lose. Given the discouragement of these unemployment numbers, and the disillusionment of the independents (also documented in numbers), he’s probably right. But that may be only because there is no named opponent. Against actual opposition, his reelection has a real chance.

Why does this image bring me such joy?

It’s a young boy in the midst of getting hit by a car—how could I takes such glee?

Because the little [bleeper] deserved it.

“I had just left the Friday prayers at the neighborhood’s protest tent when I saw a car speeding towards me,” remembers Amran Mansur, 11, who was ran over by David Be’eri, chairman of the Elad Association promoting Jewish settlement in east Jerusalem.

Amran was released from the Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital in Jerusalem early on Saturday. “I couldn’t run away in time, I didn’t even have time to signal him with my hands,” he says. “It was clear he did it on purpose. I was on the sidewalk, so there’s no chance it wasn’t deliberate.”

Poor little Amram. Walking home from prayers when a Big Bad Jew ran him over with his Subaru.

Except…

Except Amram was in the street, not the sidewalk. The picture’s quite clear on the subject. So is it clear that he and his mates are covering their faces and throwing stones—just what the Big Bad Jew said they were doing. Go figure.

Look at the picture again. Do you see even a hint of youthful innocence? I don’t. I see the evil spawn of an evil society. Maybe no 11 year old deserves what little Amram got. But if anyone does, it’s that little [bleep] himself. In fact, I would have thrown it in reverse and backed up over him.

Whatever else it makes me, it makes me meticulous.

I’m not saying it’s the only way to deal with stone-throwing youts, but it’s certainly an effective way:

A leader of Jewish settlers in the Palestinian village of Silwan ran over two Arab teens who were throwing stones at his car, Al-Jazeera reported Friday.

The station broadcast a video clip showing David Be’eri, who heads Elad, an organization promoting Jewish settlement in east Jerusalem, running over the two youths, who had to be hospitalized.

That’s enough for me. But if you want more context:

“David left his home together with his son and began driving when suddenly he was attacked by dozens of masked men who began to throw stones from every direction,” his associates said in comments to the press.

“He tried to escape, first by driving in reverse, but the vehicle behind him blocked his path. It must be understood that he an ambush was prepared for him, which included cameras brought to the scene ahead of time.”

So, everybody got what they wanted. What is the big deal?

If I detect a slow, almost imperceptible change among Israelis to take care of their own security while America grows colder and more distant, I could not be happier. Not with the cold and distant part, but with the self defense part. Two suspected murderers shot while resisting arrest, two punks getting up close and personal with a set of Uniroyals—it’s been a very good day.

President Obama is going to need the youth vote to turn out for his party this November—if their moms will drive them to the polls:

President Obama will swoop into the heartland this week in a high-stakes bid to boost enthusiasm for Democrats by reigniting the coalition of young and minority voters who were critical to his success two years ago.

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But without Obama on the ballot this year, his grass-roots network is a shadow of its former self. And with just five weeks before the midterm elections, Obama’s political advisers acknowledge that transferring the goodwill he cultivated over a historic presidential bid to an array of other Democrats has proved difficult.

Who knows, maybe the Facebook crowd will turn out for him. But Obama isn’t cool anymore. He could try pardoning Lindsay Lohan, or issuing an executive order legalizing pot, but I’m not sure even that would help. Fads come and go very quickly among young people.

The students on this leafy, generally liberal campus [U Wisconsin/Madison] once constituted one of the strongest battalions in Obama’s grass-roots army. Two years later, the political dynamic has changed. Across campus, stickers, signs or chalkings for any politician are scarce. The laundromat where Obama’s young volunteers once staged late-night phone banks and planned bus trips to neighboring Iowa has gone out of business. And some students who say they voted for Obama in 2008 now say they don’t even know who’s on the ballot this fall.

Do you want your future left to college students who don’t wash their clothes? It already is, but it could be even worse.

Maybe I should be more charitable toward the soured, despondent, and disheartened Palestinian youth. How optimistic would you be if you were raised to believe you were occupied, humiliated (daily, no less!), despised, and if your only future (or sex life) lay in blowing yourself up?

Maybe I should be charitable, but instead I say eff-them. Bunch of whiny bitches.

The latest Palestinian Authority public opinion poll shows that the population’s 18-year-olds largely reject any solution whatsoever to the so-called “Palestinian problem” and appear to be unable to make their peace with any compromise that might provide a way out of their conflict with Israel.

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Perhaps surprisingly, only a slim majority of respondents (52.5 percent) said they accept the creation of a new PA country on the area of the 1967 borders “as a final solution for the Palestinian problem.” Nearly as many (43.6 percent) rejected the idea, with only 3.8 percent saying they had no opinion.

An even greater majority (62.9 percent) said they opposed the creation of a PA state within the 1967 borders with some land exchange as a final solution for the “Palestinian problem.” Only 32.9 percent of respondents said they would accept such an option, with 4.2 percent expressing no opinion.

Significantly, more than three-quarters of the PA’s voting youth (78 percent) rejected the idea of making Jerusalem a capital for two states, “Palestine” and Israel, with only 19.4 percent of respondents supporting the idea.

It appears that none of the options presented found favor with young PA voters, regardless of what they were.

No [bleep]! These guys would boo Santa Claus!

The Palestinians have been feeding poison to their children for decades. It’s no surprise that their emotional and intellectual growth is stunted. But how do you make a state out of that? You can barely make a reform school out of that.

Not why is she doing it—I get that. People love to explore, push boundaries, challenge themselves. Not me, but some—and I’m oh so accepting of diversity. (Why their parents let them is another question.)

But why do we rescue them when they [bleep] up?

A 16-year-old California girl trying to sail solo around the world is safe and well after a massive search and rescue was launched in the Indian Ocean when she triggered distress signals, her parents and Australian authorities said Friday.

Her parents had lost contact with teenage adventurer Abby Sunderland Thursday as her yacht Wild Eyes was pounded by huge waves in the remote southern Indian Ocean, but an Australian plane flew over her Friday and made contact with the girl, Australian authorities said.

A French fishing vessel was on the way to rescue the young American, who began her trip in January, her parents said.

“The aircraft spoke to her, they told her that help was on the way, and she sounds like she is in good health,” said Mick Kinley of the Australian Maritime Safety Authority in Canberra.

“She is going to hang in there until the vessel can get to her in about 24 hours,” Kinley told a news conference.

The search for Sunderland involved Australia, U.S. and French rescue authorities sending ships and a commercial airliner to an area about 2,000 miles southeast of Madagascar and 2,000 miles southwest of Australia.

Was the Aussie really named Mick? I mean, that’s like an Irishman named Paddy, isn’t it? G’day, Mick! Good on ya, mate. Throw another shrimp on the barbie.

Anyway, if she wants to sail around the world, I say go for it, Magellan. But don’t expect us to bail your ass out. Did the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria have training wheels? Did the Beagle have GPS and Triple-A? They sent rescue ships from three different countries and an airliner to look for her. She’s going to have to babysit every night until she’s 135 to pay back that kind of investment in her safety.

Except she probably won’t. Her parents let a teenager barely old enough to drive try to sail around the world without a single backup system in place if something went wrong—that’s just sick. Unless they chartered the jetliner or captained the French vessel. So, next time, don’t rescue her. Someone needs to get the point before someone gets hurt. Don’t they always tell us to take the sea seriously? Well, I am. This is serious. Stop playing around.

If you want someone derserving of serious admiration, I give you Reinhold Messner. Not only has he climbed Everest without supplemental oxygen, he’s done it solo, up the north face, during the monsoon. There would have been no airliners searching for Herr Messner if things had gone wrong.

And he sacrificed six toes and a brother to his obsession. Come back when you’re willing to do the same, honey. In the meantime, get our your checkbook—or mummy’s and daddy’s.