Several of our readers suggested we do another Los Angeles dinner.  Please let me know if you could make a gathering in two weeks on Thursday, November 17.

And since I’ll be in Denver for Thanksgiving, would like to organize a lunch for our readers in the Mile High City (and surrounding regions of the Mountain State) on the following Friday, November 25.

If you’d like to attend either event, please drop me a line.

In 1991, in the highest of dudgeon, Democrats told us how serious an allegation sexual harassment was, that if a woman (even if unable to corroborate her claim) said a man hinted at finding pubic hairs on a can of soda or just happened to mention a pornographic movie with a title derived from the name of a fictional pirate, then said man was not qualified to sit on the Supreme Court.

A few years later, members of that very party informed Republicans they were prudes for obsessing about the then-Democratic president’s “bimbo eruptions” (an expression coined by a top aide to said Democrat).  His extramarital dalliances were immaterial to his ability to serve.  Few in our media paid much heed to a corroborated story alleging that while Attorney General of Arkansas, said Democrat raped a woman — or made untoward advances on another woman in a private study in the White House.

For the past four days, we have been treated to wall-to-wall media coverage about unspecified allegations against a Republican candidate for president, as if this were an issue more important than the president’s ties to lobbyists, a Wall Street tycoon under investigation raising piles of cash for said president, his administration’s possible cover-up of a government program to sell guns to Mexican drug lords, shenanigans in granting government loan guarantees to favored green energy firms, and the sour economy.

Well, we finally have some specifics of the encounter, with a source “telling PJ Media that she witnessed the woman [alleging harassment] and Herman Cain break away from the large group [of co-workers] as part of a smaller group.”

Now, these allegations may indeed be serious, but can you imagine such wall-to-wall media coverage if a conservative news source had published an account alleging a Democrat had sexually harassed employees without specifying the allegations?  On Wednesday, neoneocon wrote

Just take a look at the amount of coverage on memeorandum today, for example, and you’ll see what I mean. All those articles for something that shouldn’t have seen print until (a) the sources were identified; (b) the allegations were specified, including whether there were witnesses to the alleged acts; and (c) the details of what a settlement might mean in terms of a person’s actual guilt or innocence were fully explained.

Now, a few details of the story are dribbling out.  Perhaps, there is indeed a story here.  Only now with these details coming out does it appear to merit publication.  It should not have driven news coverage for the past four days. (more…)

Remember when the unhappy Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank insisted “his GOP colleagues need[ed] to do more to ‘differentiate themselves’ from the hateful speech spewed in the healthcare debate’s final hours.”

Blogging law professor William A. Jacobson links a report from ABC News about a threat on House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and his family.  ”Will,” that blogger asks, “Democrats be held responsible in the press for overheated rhetoric and creating a climate of hate? Paul Krugman, Paul Krugman? SPLC, SPLC?”

And will, Barney, so concerned about hateful speech on the right, ask that his colleagues do more to “differentiate themselves” from the hateful speech spewed by their fellow partisans?

The cover of the October 31 issue of the National Review featured a picture of a handful of #OWS protesters with a woman hoisting this sign at the center.

It seems that this young lady is not familiar with the the precise manner in which Mr. Jefferson updated the standard classical liberal list of rights. Up until, political philosophers often talked about the rights of life, liberty and property. In the Declaration of Independence, Mr. Jefferson removed the third, replacing it with the expression, “pursuit of happiness.”

I emphasized the two words the woman left out as they help us understand the Founders’ view of the role of government.

NB:  More on this anon.  Purpose of this post is to stimulate discussion on the reasons the Continental Congress ratified the Declaration with Mr. Jefferson’s expression intact, that is, why they understood “the pursuit of happiness” to be a right, but not happiness itself.

A reader alerted me to the latest episode of South Park which takes on #OWS, linking this post where Christian Toto offers a summary of the episode, including this line from Cartman, “Don’t you get it, Mom? People voted for Obama, and now that everything sucks they have to blame me!”

Shouldn’t these folks be #Occupying the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

NB:  Oops, inadvertently published this piece before I was done writing it, so delayed the publication as I was editing.

Ever since I “liked” Paul Ryan on Facebook, I have been treated on my own page to updates from this accomplished and principled young man, including this own today which echoes something we addressed on this very blog:

This fetching Wisconsin Republican has put forward a budget plan which passed the U.S. House. The president’s only released budget plan for the current fiscal year couldn’t even garner one Democratic vote in the U.S. Senate.

Remind me again, who’s calling whose branch of government a “do-nothing” institution?

“Imagine,” our reader ILoveCapitalism wrote about the Occupy Movement’s “victory” in shutting down Oakland’s port, “what the coverage of the Tea Party would have been like, if they had shut down a port.”

Another headline today also invite us to imagine how the media might cover some remarks of the incumbent president had his predecessor made them, Obama: God backs jobs plan:

President Barack Obama Wednesday said even God wanted to put Americans back to work, invoking divine blessing for his joust with Republicans over measures designed to slice into high unemployment.

Obama also taunted his foes with historic arguments in favor of repairing vital infrastructure once made by conservative icon Ronald Reagan, as he stumped for a $60 billion infrastructure bill being taken up by the Senate.

The president rebuked the House of Representatives for passing a bill reaffirming the US motto “In God We Trust” rather than getting to work on his stalled $447 billion jobs program.

“That’s not putting people back to work. I trust in God, but God wants to see us help ourselves by putting people back to work,” the president said.

Um, Mr. President, I thought that your $800 billion “stimulus” was supposed to take care of those infrastructure needs.  (According to the legislation’s web page, “the Recovery Act is targeted at infrastructure development and enhancement.“)

Remember how, back in the early days of this century, you practically had to pull out the fainting couches and smelling salts to tend to our keepers of the sacred separation of church and state when they alleged then-President George W. Bush claimed to be on a “mission from God.”  The same folks don’t seem all that upset that that good man’s successor invokes Jesus more often than he did.

“Until action is taken on the jobs bill,” Doug Powers quips, “apparently God also wants to see a slew of executive orders signed in order to work around Congress.”

UPDATE:  ”Does,” Ann Althouse asks

. . . the President purport to know what legislation God wants Congress to pass? And if God is big on people helping themselves, why should government intervene with attempts at help? I know… it’s just a joke about God. Obama is using the Lord’s name to jab at people who are using the Lord’s name. I need a reading on whether God likes any of that.

(H/t  Glenn Reynolds.)

Perhaps the best thing about the proliferation of quality conservative and libertarian blogs is that if you don’t get around to checking the blogs until late morning PST (early afternoon EST) you will invariably find a blogger (or blogress) who expresses your views with reasonable accuracy so to make your point, you just need cut and paste his (or her) post and encourage your readers to read the whole thing.

This just a few minutes ago, when while scanning Memeorandum, I chanced upon law professor William A. Jacobson’s post on the Cain kerfuffle*:

Let’s sum up the “facts” as they are known right now.  Mostly unnamed people accused Herman Cain of unspecified conduct which some people who will not specify the people or the conduct have deemed “inappropriate.” . . . .

That’s what’s known now.  Maybe actual facts will come out proving that Cain did something wrong, but those facts are not out now.

Insisting on actual facts before a major conservative politician is taken down is not “selling out our minds.”

Cain has seriously messed up the situation and his campaign with an inconsistent response and a blame game, but does this justify the gloating and pure happiness being exhibited at the media feeding frenzy?

Read the whole thing.  And read that last paragraph again.  Jacobson really nails it.  Yeah, I agree, the candidate did himself no favors with his (seemingly inconsistent) responses to the allegations.  But, we still don’t know all the facts.

RELATED:  Glenn links another of Jacobson’s posts, Show Us Your Sources Or Shut Up! (with a reference to a former CBS News anchor).

*as happened when I read Michael Barone’s post–but that was in the wee hours of the morning.

Occupy protesters declare victory at shipping port:

Occupy Wall Street protesters have shut down operations for the day at one of the nation’s busiest shipping ports.

Port of Oakland officials said in a statement late Wednesday that the peaceful rally attended by thousands of demonstrators forced them to cancel typical evening maritime activity. Officials at the nation’s fifth-largest shipping port say they hope the work day can resume Thursday.

. . . .

Meanwhile, protesters left the port declaring victory with the nearly 5-hour rally that highlighted a daylong “general strike” in Oakland that prompted solidarity demonstrations across the nation.

Shutting down operations at a one the nation’s busiest shipping ports is victory?  Success is hindering the flow of goods and keeping people from working.

Sounds like someone is delighting in sabotaging our nation’s economy.

UPDATE:   Michelle Malkin posts some imagery (not suitable for MSM publication) of how these folks won their victory.

If you want to know why so many conservatives were initially skeptical of the allegations leveled against Herman Cain, all you need do is read the latest column by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s daughter, Jackie Gingrich Cushman.

For the longest time, our liberal friends have told us how the Georgia Republican presented his first wife with divorce papers while she lay dying of cancer in an area hospital. They wanted to show us just what a horrible, no good very bad man this guy is. Seems some Democrats are willing to sacrifice the truth in order to smear a rising Republican.

As Mrs. Cushman reports, the real story is far removed from the Democrats’ narrative:

My father, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, has been in politics as long as I can remember.

And as long as I can remember, media coverage about him has contained misstatements of facts. . . .

I’m talking about the story of my father’s visit to my mother while she was in the hospital in 1980.

For years, I have thought about trying to correct the untrue accounts of this hospital visit. After all, I was at the hospital with them, and saw and heard what happened. But I have always hesitated, as it was a private family matter and my mother is a very private person. In addition, for the four people involved, it was one of a million interactions and was not considered a defining event by any of us. (more…)

Democratic talking points notwithstanding, the 112th Congress is not Republican.  The GOP controls just one chamber, the House of Representatives.  The president’s party, i.e., the Democrats, still have a majority in the Senate.

While it took the Republican chamber 102 days to pass a budget, as of tomorrow the Democratic Congress will have gone nine times than long without passing a similar spending. There are no plans to vote on one in the next twenty-four hours.

Speaking to reporters “after a conference meeting in which he rallied House Republicans around the message that while the lower chamber is taking action on jobs legislation, the Senate is dithering and the president is campaigning”, House Speaker John Boehner reminded them just what the Republican chamber of the federal legislature has accomplished:

Citing the so-called “Forgotten 15” House-passed bipartisan bills that have been shelved in the Senate, Boehner told his conference, according to a source in the room: “These jobs bills are stuck in the Senate because we have a president who is disengaged from the legislative process. Instead of engaging in the legislative process, the president has been campaigning. If the president would get more engaged and call on the Senate to get moving, there’s a lot more we could get done this year on jobs for the American people.”

Democrats may “counter that the legislation Republicans have hyped would do little for job creation”, but Republicans would say the same thing about the “Jobs Act” the president has proposed.  And Republicans can point to the failed “stimulus” as evidence, given the similarities between the legislation the president has proposed to the current Congress and the one which passed the previous Congress.

Seems for the president’s party, doing nothing means not doing what Democrats want to do. (more…)

“The most underreported story in the Middle East“, writes Jennifer Rubin

. . . is the suffering inflicted on Christians in Arab lands. “So while Christians are thriving in Israel they are under intense pressure in many neighboring Muslim countries. Europeans, and American enemies of Israel like the famous professors Walt and Mearsheimer, most often attribute American support for Israel to the ‘Jewish lobby.’ But American Christians know more about the Middle East than these supposedly sophisticated critics, and are aware of the fate of their coreligionists. They see Christianity free to grow in Israel, and faced with violence and suppression nearby. They see Christians free to worship in Israel but fleeing all too many Arab lands. There’s no need for complicated political science analyses here, much less bigotry: those seeking to understand why American Christians overwhelmingly support Israel should study the treatment and the fate of Christianity in the Middle East.”

Wonder when all those concerned for the victims of what they deem Israeli apartheid will stand up for the Christians suffering under tyrannical non-Jewish regimes.

Wonder if the White House has seen this poll:

Ronald Reagan beat out Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the former president Americans would like to see in the White House during these trying economic times, a new 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll finds.

Thirty-six percent of those polled said they wanted the Gipper to lead America out of the economic crisis, while 29 percent picked Roosevelt. Thomas Jefferson came in third place with the support of 14 percent of those polled, followed by Roosevelt’s successorHarry Truman at 8 percent. William Henry Harrison, who was inaugurated in March 1841 and died one month later, came in last with 1 percent support.

Maybe that’s because there’s actual evidence that Reagan’s policies worked, helping end an economic downturn and create an era of prosperity.  By contrast, FDR’s policies worked only in theory.

Maybe, the Cain story notwithstanding, our media are offering more critical treatment of the left. Just caught this on Yahoo!’s homepage.

The article linked comes from the conservative-leaning Daily Caller.

Commenting yesterday on House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s contention the the federal government should shut down a non-unionized private sector plant in South Carolina, Ed Morrissey  offers a nice synopsis of the conservative view of government:

Government should have no interest in whether a particular plant is unionized or not, let alone assert authority in this area.  Government exists to uniformly enforce the law without bias.  Agencies like the NLRB want to use the color of authority to favor unions because they see that as a preferred social-engineering outcome — whether or not workers themselves want union representation or not.

We have come far from the legitimate exercise of government in this and many other areas.  It’s time to demand a return of government to its proper boundaries, and perhaps eliminating altogether those agencies that have arrogated to themselves the power to impose their preferred social prescriptions through the abuse of agency authority.  That would include the NLRB, the EPA, and a number of other federal entities.

Emphasis added.  Exactly.  This helps explain — in a most succinct manner — the rise of the Tea Party.

While I have devoted most of my coverage of the Cain kerfuffle to discussing what it shows about our biased media, I think the Republican candidate could have done a better job responding to the allegations.  As Michael Barone explains, putting the story into its proper political context:

And it has to be said that Cain and, even more, his campaign spokesmen were unprepared to deliver a single definitive response to a story that they had known was brewing for several days.

Read the whole thing.  Barone is spot on in his analysis.  The candidate seems to keep shifting his strategy as details of the story drip out.  As soon as his team knew the story was “brewing,” they should have developed a strategy to respond.  (As Meg Whitman learned last fall, even a well-prepared response to a a media hit job may not provide adequate “damage control.”)

Simply put, Republican candidates have to be prepared to face a media which covers them more critically than it does Democrats.  It may not be fair.  Indeed, it’s not, but that’s the way it is.  At least for now.

Had John McCain recognized that fact, he might have added a couple more states to his tally in 2008.

NB:  Fixed a whole passel of typos in this post which I originally crafted somewhere between 2:30 and 3:00 AM PST.

On Monday, it was Anderson Cooper.  On Tuesday Wolf Blitzer.  If I work out at different times of the time, I chance upon different CNN anchors flacking the same story.  Despite record deficits, continued economic unease and turmoil abroad, no other topic seems as important as the allegations leveled against a charismatic conservative.

Others have noted the “news” network’s obsession.  An Instapundit reader also took note of the coverage — and its bias:

I’m at one airport, my sister’s at another, and of course they’re both playing CNN, and it’s wall-to-wall coverage of Cain and the harassment charge. Two things: first, they aren’t bringing people on who will defend Cain or at least criticize the poor reporting involved, and second, they are reporting and commenting on it as though it is hard fact and there are no questions about what went on.

CNN, it appears, has devoted more time to this story than it has to the cozy relationships between politicians (mostly but not exclusively Democrats) and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored enterprises at the heart of the financial meltdown.

Heck, a New York Times reporter even wrote a book on the topic.

With all the media focus on these allegations, they have less time to devote to real scandals inside the Obama administration or to the sour state of the economy.  Maybe that explains why the folks at CNN find this story so newsworthy.

Yesterday, I started Thomas Sowell’s Economic Facts and Fallacies, underlining many passages, including this one:

. . . the zero-sum fallacy had kept millions of very poor people needlessly mired in poverty for generations before such notions were abandoned.  That is an enormously high price to pay for an unsubstantiated assumption.  Fallacies can have huge impacts.

Emphasis added.  In the margin, I wrote, “Obama’s ‘stimulus’: was there evidence it would work — where have similar programs tried & succeeded?”  Yes, we read economists explaining how the president’s plan was supposed to work, but they derived their explanations from Keynesian theory and not marketplace experience.  They reached their conclusions on unsubstantiated assumptions.  And we’re paying an enormously high price for that.

It does seem that Democrats and left-of-center pundits, not to mention intellectuals, make their cases on faith, er, theory rather than experience.  A few hours after reading Sowell, I caught something  on Instapundit which helped confirm that hypothesis:

JIM TYNEN: “Here’s what interests me: why do the journalists and professors so fervently believe in things they cannot possibly verify on their own? . . . Journalists who are not scientists, or professors who are not climate scientists, identify with the Knowledge Class.”

Tynen adds that “journalists and others on the low rungs of the Knowledge class defend the dogma. And of course this also goes for the dogma of Keynes, and multiculturalism, and much else.”  Emphasis added.

Last Thursday, a blogger at Ace of Spades quoted White House flack Josh Earnest’s contention that the president’s American Jobs Act is “the only plan before Congress that independent analysts confirm would create jobs right away“. And just who are those independent analysts, Josh? And did they show how the president’s plan was similar to other government programs which led to job creation or did they base their conclusions on economic theory?

It seems sometimes that so much of liberal theory is just that, theory, based not on how the world works, but on how some very smart people believe it works.

Going through old e-mail, I chanced upon this video linked in one of Jim Geraghty’s Morning Jolts.

Note particularly what he says at the beginning and end of the clip.  He begins by saying that we “must also confront the larger challenge of mandatory spending or entitlements.  When Democrats cheered their obstructionism, the Republican reminded them that the “rising cost of entitlements is a problem that is not going away” (1:17 above).

Seems this guy had a plan at least to face a long-term fiscal challenge facing the federal government.  Oh, and please remind me, ’cause I kind of forgot, what is the current president’s plan to reform entitlements to prevent them from bankrupting the federal government?

“On the night of his inaugural gala, all his dreams seemed within his grasp. . . .
within 100 days _______ would be compared to Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.”

(Heard on a recent documentary.)

HINT:  It’s not Barack Obama.  And that’s the point of this post.

UPDATE: Seems Cas has been reading my posts as I had mentioned last week that I had been watching a DVD about LBJ.  It was indeed LBJ.  And few would consider that Democrat one of the greatest U.S. Presidents though he shepherd through a lot of legislation.

Seems that the presidents about whom our chattering classes have the highest expectations turn out to be the greatest disappointments.