Once again, Stacey McCain asks the relevant question:

If it weren’t for the fact that it plays 24/7 in airport waiting areas, would anyone ever watch CNN?

Well, I sure wouldn’t watch the network if they didn’t play it on the TV monitors at my gym.

(I recommend McCain’s piece, a reflection on the consistency and angry preening of Jimmy Carter’s favorite living filmmaker.)

(H/t:  Ann Althouse at Instapundit.)

Earlier this week, I was chatting with a friend of mine, a spirited and savvy lesbian north of 50.  She was a little giddy after having just met a fetching young woman who appeared to be very much her type.  Those in our group expressed optimism that things might work out between our single friend and the young lady whose acquaintance she had just made.  But, she worried about the age difference — greater than a quarter century.

Fumbling for words, I tried to recall that term for older woman who like younger women.  Knowing it was a wild and fierce cat, I said, “Maybe she likes cheetahs.”

“Cheetahs?”  She said.

“You know older women who like younger women.”

She corrected me and said the term I was looking for was “cougars” — older women who date younger men.

A cheetah ready to pounce

So, we decided to adopt a new term, a cheetah for an older lesbian who dates younger women. And a kitten is a young lesbian who likes cheetahs.

(Via American Spectator.)

Back in the early mid-1980s as unemployment started to plummet, after having spiked up to over 10%, critics of then-President Ronald Reagan’s economic policies said most of the new jobs created were at fast food joints like McDonalds.  Indeed, given that some of his critics were leading figures in the media, the term McJobs quickly gained currency:

Since the 1980s, McJobs had become synonymous with low-paying jobs with no growth opportunities. Analysts felt that such jobs imparted a few skills to workers that would be more or less of no use to them in the future

Well, with unemployment still high today, the unemployment rate now one full point higher than the highest rate promised if the president’s “stimulus” plan passed (and at the highest rate forecast should that plan have been defeated in Congress), Jim Hoft reminds us that “McDonald’s created one quarter of the jobs last month.”  For some reason, I don’t think the critics of Reagan’s plan (or their ideological heirs) will be offering the same criticisms of Obama’s plan.

Please note that I’ve circled the part on the chart (based on estimates from the president’s economic team) of the unemployment forecast in the absence of the plan. They said it would peak at 9%–which is the latest figure offered by the Labor Department.

To be sure, even as the unemployment rate has increased, private employers like McDonald’s did great hundreds of thousands of new jobs.  Ed Morrissey helps us unpack this apparent ambiguity: (more…)

Since Barack Obama has taken office, the SEIU-backed rallies against responsible Republican reforms in Wisconsin have been the closest thing on the left to the Tea Party rallies against big government on the right.  Like most rallies, theirs have attracted a number of extremists shouting angry slogans and hosting mean-spirited posters.

Last March, when a handful of Tea Party members protesting the president’s health care overhaul called “Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) . . . a ‘Homo Communist’“, that unhappy Massachusetts Democrat said his GOP colleagues needed “to do more to ‘differentiate themselves’ from the hateful speech spewed in the healthcare debate’s final hours.”

Now, Zombie alerts us not to conservatives using “Communist” as a slur, but to actual participants in an rally “co-sponsored by the SEIU” proudly proclaiming themselves as Communists:  ”Not only did the SEIU help to organize the rally in conjunction with communists, they marched side-by-side with communists, while union members carried communist flags, communists carried union signs, and altogether there was no real way to tell the two apart.”

Just wondering, if Barney doesn’t do more to “differentiate himself” from these Commies, does that mean they are representative of Democrats, given Communist participation in a rally of one of that party’s key allies?

Earlier this week, a reader sent me Ben Smith’s Politico post on what he deemed, “The Gay Republican tide“.  I found the blogger’s word choice interesting:

This year’s iconic Conservative Political Action Conference was beset by controversy over the inclusion of a gay Republican group — but that was just the start of gay demands for acceptance in the broader conservative moment, according to an OUT story calculated to inflame social conservatives:

Emphasis added.  Granted Smith may have penned this post in a rush, as we bloggers often do.  That said, as is, his word choice suggests that gay Republicans have adopted a confrontational tone with the GOP.  That may have been true in Log Cabin’s early years, but today, we’re not so much demanding acceptance as finding a welcome.

Yeah, there still remain social conservatives loath to include us in conservative conclaves, but, by and large, we’ve found a welcome.  Conservatives today are more concerned with the size of government than they are with the private lives of individuals — and pretty much have been for the past forty years, only the media do seem to dwell on the presence of religious conservatives in the movement as if said indviduals define it, rather than represent one aspect of it.

A reader sent this to me. Jim Geraghty has a similar one on Campaign Spot.

When the loudest critic of your policies achieves his only success because of them.  Well, I might quibble a bit with the caption.  It’s not his only success, but his greatest one.

Sure seems that way…

Osama Bin Laden spent the last five years living in the room of his mansion where he was shot and killed by U.S. forces, according to Pakistan security officials.

The claims were made by the terrorist leader’s wife, who apparently told interrogators that she and her husband had not left the same room for the past half a decade.

I’m kind of enjoying the image of Bin Laden collecting urine in mason jars and having 6-inch long fingernails.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

UPDATE (from Dan):  But, Bruce, here’s the difference:  Hughes chose to hide out.  Seems Osama lacked that choice.  From everything I’ve read, it seems that he never once emerged from the compound.  The aggressive search that begun in 2001 forced him into hiding.  He must have been quite miserable in his last years, dependent on couriers for contact with the outside world.

Back in 2004, when Michael Moore’s movie, Fahrenheit 9/11, was released, the guest list at the Washington premiere read like a Who’s Who of leading Democrats:

The Fahrenheit 9/11 premiere was organized by Clinton White House social secretary Capricia Marshall, and the attendees who praised the movie included DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe, Sens. Tom Daschle (D), Tom Harkin (IA), Max Baucus (MT), Ernest Hollings (SC), Debbie Stabenow (MI), and Bill Nelson (FL), as well as Reps. Charles Rangel (NY) and Jim McDermott (WA).

Jimmy Carter invited the filmmaker to sit in his box at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and dubbed Moore’s movie one of his two favorites.  Now, Moore has been making some crazy statements about the death of Osama bin Laden, hinting at some bizarre conspiracy theories involving White House deception.

So, given Democrats’ past embrace of Mr. Moore, some might think it really shameful that the supposedly responsible leadership of the Democratic Party has not repudiated him.

“It,” Mark Twain quipped in Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar, ”could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”  That most American of writers didn’t have a very high opinion of our elected federal legislators, attributing the “kindly feeling” Congresses had “for idiots” to their “personal experience and heredity”.

It seems most Americans share his disdain for Congress.  For a post yesterday, I tracked down Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s favorability ratings, I expected them to be low, but what I also noted was that both Republican leaders, House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell are slightly underwater, with each having an unfavorable rating slightly about his favorable, 4 and 2 points respectively.  The Democratic leaders by contrast have even more significant deficits, 29 points for Mrs. Pelosi and 26 for Mr. Reid.  While a plurality of Americans give the Republicans unfavorable ratings, a majority give such ratings to the Democrats.

And no matter which party is in power, congressional disapproval remains high.

This lead me to wonder has there even been a time period when Americans had a favorable opinion of the legislative branch — and its leaders?

(more…)

Please join me to hear our reader Leah talk about Operation Gratitude, a non-profit which sends “care packages contain food, hygiene products, entertainment items and personal letters of appreciation” to soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines “deployed in harm’s way,” at next week’s meeting of the Westside Republicans, Wednesday, May 11th, 7:00 – 9:00 pm at Jerry’s Deli in Westwood Village, 10925 Weyburn Avenue, Westwood Village 90024. Methinks that if we get a good enough crowd of GayPatriot readers, Leah might want to share a bite of dessert with us after her talk.

When last we heard from the worst president of the twentieth century, Jimmy Carter was accusing the nation he once led of human rights violations:

Carter also used his trip to North Korea to observe the country’s food rationing system. That the United States and South Korea have chosen “to deliberately withhold food aid to the North Korean people because of political or military issues not related is really indeed a human rights violation,” he said.

Carter had traveled to North Korea to meet with Communist Party leader Kim Jong-il, but that meeting did not take place as he had hoped.  Instead, he met with regime functionaries and came back to the West convinced of their good will.

Guess Jimmy wasn’t aware that the regime has a practice of siphoning off Western food aid to “to support Kim’s military forces.“ Commenting on the Democrat’s visit to North Korea, the editors of the Wall Street Journal mince no wordst:

So let’s see. Kim Jong Il runs a dungeon of a nation whose policies cause repeated famines, but the U.S. and South Korea are morally obliged to alleviate the consequences of those policies even if this means helping the dungeon masters maintain control so they can cause more famines.

Wouldn’t it make more moral sense to try to depose the dungeon masters, or at least speak out against them? But Mr. Carter says he can’t do anything about the North Koreans, so he denounces his own country in sharper language than he dares to use against a regime that murders and imprisons its own people.

Yesterday, the New York Times reported something that a champion of human rights would clearly denounce: “North Korea’s work farms and prison factories” considered by “human rights experts” to “the world’s most notorious” are “massive and growing”:

New satellite images and firsthand accounts from former political prisoners and former jailers in North Korea have confirmed the enormous scale and bleak conditions of the penal system in the secretive North, according to a report released Wednesday by the human rights group Amnesty International. (more…)

It’s already beginning.  Some in the media (as well as their allies in the Democratic Party) are already trying to credit Barack Obama as the man who single-handedly tracked down Osama bin Laden, okayed the risky operation to eliminate him, clandestinely went into Pakistan to face him in his lair where he, while an adoring team of Navy SEALs looked on, strangled him with his bare hands while the terrorist brandished a knife, crossbow and submachine gun.

Heck, Joy Behar thinks we should just cancel the 2012 election.

In article that doesn’t mention the contributions of any other administration official — or any member of our armed forces — the AP anoints Obama the mastermind of the operation:

By secretly sending a team of special operations forces into an enemy fortress in a suburban neighborhood of a sovereign country, President Barack Obama chose the path of greatest risk, but also greatest reward.

There were so many ways it could have gone wrong.

Meanwhile, a dubiously-sourced piece, widely referenced on conservative web-sites, suggests that CIA Director Leon Panetta was the real driving force behind the operation with the president little more than a spectator.  I’m with Glenn on this, “The story might be true, but I’ll need a lot more convincing. This is telling too many people what they want to hear.”   The supposed Washington insider contends that Panetta, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, General David Petraeus, and Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper spearheaded the operation.

Now, from everything I’ve read, it appears there is some merit to this argument, as it is clear Clintonistas Panetta and Hillary as well Bush holdovers, Gates and Petraeus, were pushing this type of operation.  But, none of them could give the final go-ahead.

We may never learn the names of many of the others responsible for its success, interrogators at Guantanamo and other U.S. detention facilities, CIA agents who worked with persistence and determination over nine years to pursue countless clues (many leading to dead ends) and, of course, those brave Navy SEALs who carried out their task so professionally. (more…)

Can you imagine the reaction if a Republican leader said a Latino Democrat shouldn’t forget who he is, lecturing him that “he has to understand who he is and who he represents” and then expressing the hope that he’ll “do a better job than he has been.”  Well, here we’ve got the Senate Democratic leader, a man who just won reelection not with an uplifting message , but instead by trashing his opponent, lecturing Marco Rubio, a man who won election with a much more upbeat appeal, on how to do his job:

Meanwhile Marco Rubio enjoys stellar ratings among, as Harry Reid might put it, the people he represents:

Marco Rubio is the more popular of Florida’s two Senators less than three months into his first term in office. Senator Rubio’s job approval rating stands at 61%, with only 30% of likely voters giving him a negative review. Just 48% of Democrats said they disapproved of the Republican Senator Rubio, while 83% of Republicans graded Rubio favorably.

At the same time, 25% of the American people have a favorable rating of Reid, with more than twice that number, 51%, having an unfavorable view.  That is, more Americans have an unfavorable view of Harry Reid than Florida Democrats disapprove of Marco Rubio.

In the wake of his smashing victory Sunday,

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said on Tuesday the energy sector can rest easy that his government will not impede plans to vastly expand the country’s oil sands output and ship some of the crude to Asia.

Harper, in his Western Canadian home base of Calgary on the morning after his Conservatives won big in the federal election, singled out the Western-based oil industry as being a beneficiary of his party’s pro-business agenda, which will also include corporate tax cuts and deficit reduction. Investors greeted the result with relief.

(Via Sondra K via V the K.)  Do hope President Obama is paying attention and intends to follow the lead of our neighbor to the North.  If he moves to unfetter oil exploration, instead of spiking, oil prices might start to decrease.

Mark Tapscott explains why “Oil prices suddenly plummeted from their historic high of $145 a barrel” on July 14, 2008:

Because that was the day President George W. Bush signed an executive order lifting the moratorium on off-shore drilling in the eastern half of the Gulf of Mexico and off the U.S. Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Overnight, the price per barrel of oil plunged, and that plunge was reflected at the pump soon thereafter.

In other words, Obama could with the stroke of a pen sign an executive order telling his appointees at EPA, the Department of Interior and the Department of Energy to stop throwing up obstacles to increased U.S. oil and natural gas production and instead work with the energy industry on a crash program to “drill here, drill now.”

Seems the Canadian Prime Minister is more aware of what happened when the immediate past American president moved to allow more oil exploration than is the incumbent.

Leon Panetta has always conducted himself with dignity on the public stage. And in this exchange with Brian Williams, he comes off as a pretty stand-up guy, not milking the dispatch of Bin Laden to partisan ends and giving credit to the immediate past president and his team for their efforts in tracking down the Saudi-born terrorist.

In this video, he indicates that our intelligence officials gained some information that would later help us track down the hide-out of the Al-Qaeda leader through, um, well, “enhanced interrogation techniques“.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

VIdeo via Gateway Pundit.

When asked, Doug Powers reports, “whether or not advanced interrogation techniques helped get Bin Laden,” Attorney General Eric Holder “said he didn’t know.”  You’d think an official of an administration which has been most critical* of such polices would have given an unequivocal response (in the negative) if they hadn’t helped.

Of all the Democrats the president could have tapped to take over from Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Panetta seems the best choice. He acknowledges truths at odds with his party’s anti-Republican talking points and acknowledges the accomplishments of Republicans as well as the merits of their policies.

RELATED:  Ed Driscoll alerts us to this observation in Investor’s Business Daily, “If President Bush had not invaded Iraq, President Obama likely would not have found Osama bin Laden. The al-Qaida operative who fingered bin Laden’s courier was caught in Iraq helping terrorists in 2004″.  Ed’s initial roundup on the death of Mr. Bin Laden also has a plethora of pithy points and interesting links.

ALSO RELATED AND WELL WORTH YOUR TIME:  Michael Barone contends that to get bin Laden, Obama relied on policies he decried.

*UPDATE:  Peter Wehner reports: “After all, Barack Obama was a fierce critic of EITs [Enhanced Interrogation Techniques] during and after the 2008 campaign.“

Even as information comes our showing Obama’s hesitation in the run-up to Sunday’s successful operation to kill Osama bin Laden and as the White House bungles in providing that information, the fact remains that the operation succeeded.  And that President Obama gave it the go-ahead.  While many people contributed to its success, most notably Navy SEALs, the president deserves a great deal of credit.  And I for one am hesitant to criticize him on this — or other matters — at present.

Let this be a moment of national unity when we all rejoice that the man who declared war on the United States first in 1996 and then again in 1998 has, thanks to our men at arms, lost the ability to declare war on anyone.  I agree with Allahpundit that it’s ”fitting” for the president to visit Ground Zero on Thursday to “mark Bin Laden’s demise by paying his respects on the public’s behalf. And if that respect-paying just so happens to produce a 24-karat photo op for his upcoming campaign, well, that’s his reward for icing the man Americans hate most.”

That blogger eminds us that the immediate past president would likely have

. . . have done the same thing and, yes, unquestionably, the left would have screeched about “politicization,” but I would have taken his side then so I’ll take The One’s side now. So much goodwill has he earned in the last 24 hours, in fact, that not only are Republican leaders congratulating him but even — gasp — Donald Trump is patting him on the back.

The President of the United States should be allowed to get some political capital out of his accomplishments.  And yet when a Republican does it, we see the mainstream media castigate him for politicizing national security or whatnot.  Recall how back in 2004, when then-President George W. Bush released his first ad, the media went apoplectic that he used an image from 9/11 — as if it were blasphemy, violating some sacred compact, to show that good man’s determination in the face of attack. (more…)

Earlier today, Glenn Reynolds linked Rand Simberg’s piece asking if the United States was undermining moderate Muslims by burying Osama bin Laden at sea.  This thought-provoking piece raises a lot of good questions about aspects of our strategy in the War on Terror.  In his conclusion, Simberg contends, “It is long past time for us to stop spending so much time worrying about incurring the wrath of those who make war on us. We need to spend a lot more time working on ways to get them to fear our own wrath.”

Read the whole thing.

Just got a second fund-raising letter on behalf of President Obama’s reelection effort. This is the first piece I’ve seen to indicate he’ll be running with Joe Biden, but only on the back flap of the envelope.

Now, I’m just wondering what gay group sold my name to the Democratic Party.*  Just another piece of evidence that these organizations which style themselves as gay advocacy groups are little more than shills for the president’s party.

Here’s a clue:  my name and address as they appear on the envelope from BarackObama.com is exactly the same as it appears on that of LA’s Gay & Lesbian Center.

* (more…)

Among the many reasons, Jim Geraghty offers for releasing the photos of Osama bin Laden’s last moments in his round-up of blogger commentary on the topic is this his own:

They should remember him cowering behind his wife as the foe he was never prepared for — armed American soldier — closed in, and how his much-touted warrior skills failed him when faced with a real opponent, not unsuspecting civilians on planes or in subways or in skyscrapers.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  TnnsNe1 offers that the photos won’t show the terrorist cowering behind a woman:

“Officials also retreated from claims that one of bin Laden’s wives was killed in the raid and that bin Laden was using her as a human shield before she was shot by U.S. forces.”

http://michellemalkin.com/2011/05/03/brennan-and-the-bin-laden-story-bungle/