And, again, that's only so far. The media is looking into this, tepidly, but only in scattered reports.

Bear that in mind: These are just the "jobs saved, created, or fabricated" that the media has found thus far in 11 specific, limited analyses.

My favorite? A shoemaker receiving under a thousand bucks of "stimulus" money claimed he'd put that $900 into creating nine jobs.

Talk about bang for the buck!

His actual record? He sold nine pairs of shoes to the military.

Well, I guess making each one of them was a "job," if you define it that way. But then -- why not 18 jobs? Why be stingy when you're makin' shit up?

A San Diego tv station, meanwhile, finds only one job in the entire city "created" by stimulus money.

If We're Making Up the Jobs, Why Not Make Up the Locations of Them, Too? This stupid douchebag.

Here's a stimulus success story: In Arizona's 9th Congressional District, 30 jobs have been saved or created with just $761,420 in federal stimulus spending. At least that's what the website set up by the Obama Administration to track the $787 billion stimulus says.

There's no 86th Congressional District in Arizona either, but the government's recovery.gov Web site says $34 million in stimulus money has been spent there.

In Oklahoma, for example, the site lists more than $19 million in spending -- and 15 jobs created -- on Congressional districts that don't exist. In Iowa, it shows $10.6 million spent – and 39 jobs created -- in non-existent districts.

In Connecticut's 42nd District (which also does not exist), the website claims 25 jobs created with zero stimulus dollars.

The list of spending and job creation in fictional Congressional Districts extends to U.S. territories as well.

$68.3 million spent and 72.2 million spent in the 1st Congressional District of the U.S. Virgin Islands.

$8.4 million spent and 40.3 jobs created in the 99th Congressional District of the U.S. Virgin Islands.

$1.5 million spent and .3 jobs created in the 69th district and $35 million for 142 jobs in the 99th district of the Northern Mariana Islands.

$47.7 million spent and 291 jobs created in Puerto Rico's 99th Congressional District.

Obama's creating jobs like wildfire in those "bonus seven states" he once alluded to.

Posted by: Ace at 11:57 AM | Comments (189)
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A read the whole thing deal.

Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, 39, went on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood that claimed 13 lives and wounded more than 40. Three hours later, while the base was still in lockdown, an FBI spokesman dismissed suggestions that the attack was terrorism and said that a link between Hasan and terrorist organizations "is not being discussed."

Yet, a little more than a week after the shooting we know that Hasan justified suicide bombings in an Internet posting. He lectured colleagues using the rhetoric of jihad. He warned darkly about "adverse events" if Muslims were not allowed to leave military service. He repeatedly sought counsel from a radical imam with known ties to al Qaeda. He tried to convert some of his patients to Islam--many of them soldiers troubled by their near-fatal experiences with jihadists. He printed business cards that made no mention of his military service but instead identified him as an "SOA," a soldier of Allah.

And U.S. authorities knew about some of this well before the attack at Fort Hood. At Walter Reed--where Hasan spent the six years before his posting to Fort Hood in July--his superiors wondered whether he might be "psychotic" and worried that he consistently sided with jihadists over his fellow soldiers. The FBI had intercepted emails Hasan had sent to Anwar al Awlaki, an al Qaeda supporter with strong ties to three 9/11 hijackers.

But the FBI did not know all that the Army knew. And the Army did not know all that the FBI knew. The participants in an FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force discussed Hasan's case briefly and concluded that it did not warrant an investigation. If they had performed even a cursory, unobtrusive examination of this man, his contacts, and his radical views, they would have quickly turned up a great deal of troubling information.

Since the shooting there have been dozens of theories floated about Hasan's motivations. On the night after the attack, CNN's Larry King interviewed the ubiquitous "Dr. Phil" McGraw, who speculated that Hasan's counseling of traumatized soldiers might have in turn traumatized him and caused him to snap. In his November 10 remarks at Fort Hood, President Barack Obama suggested the cause of the shooting was--and may remain--a mystery. "It may be hard to comprehend the twisted logic that led to this tragedy." The FBI agreed: "The investigation to date has not identified a motive, and a number of possibilities remain under consideration." One of them, according to an article in the Financial Times, was "anti-Muslim bias."

Here is another: Nidal Malik Hasan is a jihadist. That so many refuse to even consider this in the face of the overwhelming evidence might help explain why those whose job it was to keep us safe refused to see it back when it really mattered.

The passages on page two about the radical Al Qaeda preacher Hasan contacted are worth reading, but I can't copy the whole thing.

Anyone notice the media has lost all interest in this story already?

Thanks to EdwardR.

Posted by: Ace at 11:42 AM | Comments (65)
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I don't know what is more appalling: The way Europe continues to whine for attention, or the fact that Obama is giving the back of the hand to still-somewhat-serious nations.

The enemy of my enemy is also my enemy, but an enemy that's fun to quote.

Now, Denis MacShane, a former British minister for Europe, who met with other Atlanticists at the NATO Parliamentary Assembly in Edinburgh over the weekend, describes the circumstances this way: “There’s a growing worry everywhere in Europe that we have the first U.S. president since 1945 to show no interest in what’s happening on this side of the relationship.”

...

;The Administration's attitude is] not what you’d call an embrace. It’s reinforcement for the idea that the president over his first year in office has shunned, or taken for granted, Europe’s initial burst of affection for him. The fallout — either attributed to the private comments of European leaders, or reflected in major editorial voices — is an expression of skepticism about Mr. Obama’s capabilities and the depth of the change he claims to represent.

In Germany, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a newspaper that knows Chancellor Angela Merkel well, has written ironically of how little has changed, outside atmospherics, from the Bush to Obama administrations in attitudes toward Germany.....

In France, the tone has been harsher. Olivier Debouzy, a lawyer and former French Foreign Ministry official, wrote last week that foreign governments were “opaque” for Mr. Obama because he projected his own notion of American rationality on them. Mr. Debouzy asserted that the president also showed a sense of his and America’s superiority to foreign leaders.

“He expresses this by holding himself at a distance from them, which is unusual for an American political figure,” Mr. Debouzy wrote. “It makes personal relations with him complicated, a fact attested to by more than one European chief of state or government.”

The current issue of Le Canard Enchaîné, the controversy-loving French political weekly, which specializes in putting direct quotes into the mouths of French politicians — regarded with interest here although not as verbatim scripture — has President Nicolas Sarkozy saying:

“The truth is that Bush was more interested in Europe than Obama. Obama is very disappointing in terms of foreign policy. It’s not only with me that relations are difficult. It’s the same with Merkel and Brown. The words have changed. The hand was extended. But no one has grasped it.”

The French, it's noted, view Obama as "stalling" on Iran and "dithering" on Afghanistan.

Well, they sure hated the hip-shootin' cowboy from Texas, didn't they? They got what they said they wanted and they hate that even more.

Posted by: Ace at 11:31 AM | Comments (84)
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In absolutely no way does the media write these idiotic fake-"news" articles to coincide with interest in a popular movie opening up. You should definitely not suspect that entirely fake articles about pretend vampires are suddenly commissioned just because the new Twilight is opening.

I suppose I prefer this to another funemployment piece.

Being a vampire is boring compared to the young, beautiful and powerful bloodsuckers appearing weekly on TV and movie screens.

1, no it's not, because 2, there are no real vampires.

Merticus, an organizer of the 4-year-old Atlanta Vampire Alliance, said vampires are mostly like anyone else.

Exactly like everyone else, Merticus, except for the psychological problems.

Not "mostly." The "real vampires" in movies are mostly like humans, except for the superpowers. (By the way: Vampires are just superheroes for goths and emos; instead of being bitten by a radioactive spider, they're bitten by a sunken-cheeked goth of dubious sexual preference.)

You are, on the other hand, exactly like everyone else.

"We could be the model-train group down the street from you," he said.

You can only aspire to be the model-train group down the street from me.

Except the model-train group depends on electricity as a power source. Atlanta vampires believe they drain energy from people and some, yes, drink a bit of human blood to get the boost they need.

And except the model-train group does not believe they are actually building real trains. They're not out in front of their houses passing out schedules and collecting boarding passes.

And everyone who's ever had a cut has drank a little blood. It's salty. Film at 11.

Merticus, who declines to give his real name...

Oh, you mean his slave name?

... and alliance members claim they are different, physically or psychologically. They draw energy to feel good and stay healthy...

Yes, "normal" humans draw energy to feel good and stay healthy, too. We call this energy "food."

...,and they absorb it psychically from close contact with "donors" or from drinking a tablespoon of blood from them maybe once a week. They do not claim mythic powers such as immortality, and the screen depictions are often off-putting to members.

By off-putting I assume they mean "off-whacking." Everytime these guys see Lestat they come in their pants. Give me a break.

For instance, the vampires from the Twilight Saga...

"For instance." The Twilight connection just off-handedly occurred to the writer! Oh, right, Twilight! Silly me, I'd almost forgotten to mention the pop-culture tie-in that is the entire point of this piece!

...the luridly romantic novel and movies for young adults, have skin that sparkles in sunlight.

"That doesn't sit too well with us," Merticus said by phone.

Poor kid's oppressed due to the non-diamond-sparkly color of his skin. Damn stereotypes about made-up pretend creatures.

Sounds weird? That is why Merticus, a politically active small business owner in Atlanta, and the eleven other members of his group do not talk to outsiders about their alternate identities. They fear losing jobs, discrimination or shunning.

And of course Abraham Van Helsing.

Few vampires have come out like the lady who posed for photos in a T-shirt and jeans for the Washington Post in 2008.

"The only thing I objected to in the article is that we were painted as boring," Merticus said dryly.

Dude, you dress up like a bat and obsess about movies made for 12 year old girls. How exciting could your life be?

Vampire groups have been around for decades, but the pop culture obsession fueled by the Twilight phenomenon (85 million novels sold worldwide)...

Whoops, Twilight again. Thank goodness they mentioned it, because people reading this article might not know about Twilight.

Laycock's book shows vampires are teenagers and grandmothers, stay-at-home moms and professionals.

Well, without having written a book, I could have told you the two groups most commonly affected by "vampirism" were teens, followed distantly by very bored and somewhat schizophrenic housewives. I'd also be willing to wager, sans research, that "vampirism" affects a lot of chubby homosexuals who can't get laid the normal way.

...

Merticus said the survey was a start to answering doubts like Ramsland's. The survey shows vampires report higher incidences of depression, asthma, migraines and other physical ailments.

Really? "Vampires" are unhealthy, depressive geeks? Thank God for science.

He would love for genetic testing to take place to look for scientific explanations for their differences.

Here's a scientific explanation: Marriage between first cousins.

In the meantime, "The only thing I would ask is tolerance," he said.

And mascara that has that all-day "smeared from crying hot tears of despair" sexy look.

Thanks to Gabriel Malor.

Posted by: Ace at 09:35 AM | Comments (314)
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Count your blessings. Obama is President, and all is good in the world.

Before I quote the piece, let me note that anyone writing in a news weekly about the depressive psychology of the recession is unqualified to do so, because,k of course, that writer, unlike millions of Americans, still has a job.

Now of course such a writer has to write the article anyway. The fact that, having a job and all, he is not really an expert on how a recession feels to the unemployed or underemployed, doesn't mean he shouldn't write the article. Someone has to, and anyone paid to do it will share his lack of full qualification.

But just as recently as, oh, say, the last eight years during the Bush Administration, comfortable and secure and well-paid writers were nevertheless able to dig deep and imagine what being out of work, or seeing one's wages stagnate, must feel like. They were able to channel the emotions of others, Method Acting style, and oh, did they channel. They virtually ate the scenery, so "in-character" were they as they decried the pain of Bush's... um, 5% unemployment rate.

And now? Ah well, that capacity is entirely gone from them, fled like a thief caught in the light. Now they are unable to put themselves in the shoes of the tens of millions of unemployed Americans scrabbling to get by, depleting their almost-depleted savings accounts, counting on friends and relatives to loan them money to keep them in shelter.

Happy days are here again.

Happiness is a sappy word and a flimsy concept — more fleeting than contentment, several octaves lower than joy. But happiness is what pollsters test and economists track, however clumsily, so we're stuck with it as the medium for measuring our mood. Not surprisingly, that mood has bounced around over the years, with the general sense of well-being hitting its lowest points in 1973, 1982, 1992 and 2001, all recession years. So why is it that at least some aspects of the Great Recession of 2009 appear to have made people feel better?

In January 2008, the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index was launched. It was designed to work like a Dow Jones average of attitude. At least 1,000 people are surveyed daily, 350 days a year... But here's the funny thing: by this past summer, overall well-being was higher than it was in the summer of 2008, before the Apocalypse.

This poll is exactly one year old and they're championing as proving people are happy.

"Before the Apocalypse" is extremely misleading. The housing bubble broke a year before and everyone was watching their home values tumble and also worrying about the Big One coming down the road. This poll merely demonstrates not that people are "happy," but something sort of obvious: People dread losing what they have, and then, once lost, they adjust themselves to the new normal. They're sadder and poorer, but have less anxiety about it. As they've already lost what they feared they would.

So this poll did not really happen "before the Apocalypse." It began on the eve of destruction, with everyone realizing something big and bad was coming.

But a one-year old poll is apparently good evidence for Time!

Be happy, Morons. Everyone's doing it.

By the way: As liberals never tire of reminding us, the recession began under Bush. In his last quarter. It was retroactively determined it had begun then.

So this poll does not measure happiness in a recession to happiness in a growing recovery, as the writer deliberately misleads. It measures happiness at one point in a severe recession (after most of the damage is, hopefully, already done) to another point in the same severe recession (when people are still waiting for the bulk of the losses to come).

I want to emphasize that: Liberals never tire of telling us the recession began in 2008 until it's convenient to forget that, in order to mislead us that Americans are happier now than they were in a growing economy.

Disgusting.

...

But the Great Recession has also exposed our magical thinking about what constitutes a middle-class lifestyle. Flash back a generation to the house with the white picket fence. It had a black-and-white TV with an antenna, a car in the garage, a chicken in every pot and two kinds of lettuce (light green and dark green). Now the average house is more than 50% bigger, the car is twice as powerful (and there's often more than one), the TV is flat and gets 900 channels, and we expect the grocery store to have strawberries year-round and about 50 flavors of mustard....

All of these things were true in Bush's 5% unemployment economy and I don't remember Time citing them as reasons to realize "You've never had it better."

... I'm struck by how many people tell pollsters that the voluntary downshifting and downsizing of the past year have come as a kind of relief.

Keep talking like that and you will be struck.

Yes, it is not really a shock that there is some relief to lose what you feared you'd lose for years.

But you know what? You still lost.

Maybe we've lowered our standards.

"Maybe."

I don't remember standards being lowered under Bush. I remember Clinton's one year super-economy -- and that magic super-heated bubble really only lasted for a year and a bit -- being vindictively used as the standard of comparison that all presidents would now have to aspire to.

Seems like under Republican presidents, expectations are raised by the media vindictively.

But we already knew that money can buy only comfort, not contentment; happiness correlates much more closely with our causes and connections than with our net worth. Americans may have less money — charitable giving in current dollars dropped for the first time in 20 years in 2008 — but about a million more people volunteered their time to a cause. Which makes me wonder: Is it a coincidence that eight of the 10 happiest states in the country also rank in the top 10 for volunteering?

Again, equally true under Bush, but not offered as reason to celebrate then.

Seems to me that people would be happier if only 5% were out of work as opposed to 10.2% (and climbing). Then we could both volunteer and have a job.

Whatever you make of the psychology of happiness, we know something of its physics. It rises as it ricochets off other people, returning to us stronger by virtue of being released. It gets bigger when we don't care if it gets smaller; we stopped buying all the stuff we didn't need that was supposed to make us happier, and we seem to be happier for it. And who would have expected that?

Ah. Anyone grousing about being unemployed is also being a dick by feeding negative energy into the loop and bringing other people down, man.

It's amazing, isn't it? It's so utterly shameless.

This is very similar to a previous LAT piece about "funemployment," and a NYT piece celebrating the joys of being liberated from a job so one can go out and volunteer (unpaid) and make a difference.

It's also very similar to a recent AP piece. Remember, under Bush (with his sky-high 5% unemployment rate), people were hurting. They were in pain.

And so they must be hurting twice as much in Obama's 10.2% apocalypse, right?

Nope. They're just grouchy. Unable to appreciate the blessings they still have.

Thanks to Warden.

Posted by: Ace at 08:49 AM | Comments (155)
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Ideological purification. But the expensive kind.

CNN was so sick of Lou Dobbs, it gave him an $8 million severance package to leave, The Post has learned.

"They wanted him out," according to a source.

Dobbs, who a source said had a year and a half to go on his $12 million contract, shocked viewers last Wednesday by announcing he was quitting.

CNN boss Jonathan Klein and Dobbs, 64, had been publicly feuding over the kind of reporting Dobbs was doing on his show -- especially stories about illegal immigration and the anti-Obama "birther" movement, which contends the president was not born in Hawaii and is not an American citizen.

But it was not clear until now that CNN was willing to pay Dobbs so much money to leave.

"What they do is their business," Dobbs said yesterday. "I tried to accommodate them as best I could, but I've said for many years now that neutrality is not part of my being."

Klein long believed Dobbs was at odds with CNN's desire to position itself as an opinion-free, middle-of-the-road alternative to its cable news rivals -- conservative Fox News and liberal MSNBC.

Uh-huh. Opinion free. As Anderson Cooper makes cutesy jokes about "teabaggers." Say, that Jack Cafferty is pretty opinion-free too, isn't he?

Posted by: Ace at 07:54 AM | Comments (134)
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Actually there are two bad calls here: To go for it on fourth down deep in Patriots' own territory, and to not challenge the spot of the ball.

Chris Collinsworth immediately began yelling about a "bobble" that took away forward progress, but as the replay shows, there was no bobble, and it looks like the receiver went past the first down marker. (They discuss the spot at the end.)

Epic collapse for the Patriots regardless, of course.

Correction: I was confused on this point, but a commenter fills me in: The Patriots couldn't challenge, as they had used up all of their time outs. If it had happened inside 2:00, the booth guys would have reviewed it, but the play was run at 2:08. No challenge possible, then.

Posted by: Ace at 07:38 AM | Comments (89)
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Obama ran around claiming to be a big time tax cutter because of his $400/person "Making Work Pay" scheme. At the time, some smart blogs pointed out this was nothing more than a scam.

Well, the withholding chickens are coming home to roost.

The Making Work Pay tax credit, offered as a wage advance, may have been incorrectly administered to more than 15.4 million workers, according to a report released Monday morning by the Treasury Department's Inspector General for Tax Administration.

Consequently, a large swath of recipients could find themselves forced to return most -- if not all -- of their Making Work Pay credit, and others could discover they also owe tax penalties, the Treasury Department's inspector general warned.

...What makes the refundable credit particularly unique -- albeit difficult for the Internal Revenue Service to implement -- is its method of payment: The money was advanced to taxpayers throughout the year, but workers were required to claim it only much later on their tax returns, according to the report.

What's really scary is Obama commissioned a panel headed by former Fed Chair Paul Volcker to examine ways to reform the tax code. As much as that's needed this is clearly not the crew to put in charge of it.

Fortunately, they may not be making much headway.

Posted by: DrewM at 07:35 AM | Comments (48)
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Lots of reviews out there but the Journal is likely to be more fair than most media outlets, so I figured it would be worth a look.

First though, I hate this book. Not what's in it, not because it's Palin and not because I begrudge her making money from it. I hate it because in someways she's becoming the Bill and Hillary Clinton of the Republican Party/conservative movement. Palin is a figure bigger than the party or movement in the media at the moment. Like the Clintons did to Democrats for a number of years after Bill's term ended, she is sucking all the air out of the room. I don't meant that in a policy or electoral terms but in a celebrity sense. She's going to get far more time and attention in the next week than say the Republican health care plan has received in the last year.

No other Republican or conservative figure could get this kind of media attention and so for the next week or two we are going to relive and re-fight the 2008 McCain campaign. Let's just say that as Republicans and/or conservatives, it was not our finest hour. Why we want to remind people of that in the midst of debates on health care, Afghanistan troop levels and Cap and Trade is beyond me.

But it is out of 'our' control, so here we go.

That said, "Going Rogue" is more a personal memoir than a political one. More than half the book is about Mrs. Palin's life before the 2008 campaign. She discusses her coming of age in the "new frontier" state of Alaska; her personal faith journey; her experiences with marriage and motherhood, including two miscarriages, a special-needs child and a pregnant teenage daughter; and the free-market convictions that have guided her political career. As a politician, she comes across as a prodigious worker capable of mastering complicated issues—not least the energy policies that matter so much to Alaska's economy—and of building bridges to Democrats.

...But of course it is for details of the McCain campaign that many readers will pick up "Going Rogue," and Mrs. Palin will not disappoint them. She describes in particular how campaign aides muzzled her and mismanaged her family. If anything, she is too gentle on the staffers who kept her out of the loop and under wraps. She is certainly too gentle on the man at the top of the ticket who let them get away with it. She has hardly a critical word to say about John McCain, whose appearances in the book are surprisingly few.

The mistakes started on day one. The McCain communications team had not compiled the usual press-briefing guides, she writes, with the result that the national media had "zero information" on her or her record in Alaska. Moreover, her "family, friends, and political associates were under strict instructions not to talk to the media." She wasn't even allowed to speak to her home-state press, which was very friendly. When one of her aides asked McCain headquarters for permission for her to go to the rear of the campaign plane to talk to reporters, the response was swift: "No! Absolutely not—block her if she tries to go back."

...Speaking of which, "Going Rogue" offers little guidance on the big question: Is Mrs. Palin preparing to run for the presidency? The final chapter, "The Way Forward," is a mere 13 pages and reads like a stump speech. It consists mostly of generalities on conservative values, fiscal restraint and the need for a strong defense. But the quotation from her father with which she introduces the chapter perhaps offers a clue to her future plans: "Sarah's not retreating; she's reloading!"

All that I said above the quotes not withstanding, I'm not immune from Palin Curiosity. If the book plays out as the Journal's review and others indicate, I'm not entirely sure what she's trying to do (I don't think most people are, it's the Palin enigma thing).

Does reliving the '08 campaign and settling scores with McCain staffers help position her for '12? The fact that McCain was a lousy candidate and his staff was a nest of vipers of the worst kind (incompetent) is not exactly a state secret.

If '12 is her goal, I'm not sure how this kind of thing helps with people who aren't already in her camp or at least wiling to be convinced. Of course a book that leaves all of that out and only talks about her background and her thoughts on America's future, doesn't sell more than 25 copies and land you on every TV show under the Sun. Any book by her is always going to be a compromise of sorts.

If she's not angling for '12, then it makes perfect sense. This is the best way to keep her 'brand' in the public eye and to make some money. Again, I don't say that pejoratively, I'd write "Dirty Secrets: My Life and Times at AoS HQ in a heartbeat if anyone would pay for it, I'm just not fond of any diversion from defeating health care at the moment.

I know it's not her fault and there will 'always be something' important we don't want to lose focus on. So, we will live with the distraction and the walk down the unpleasant memory lane that is the 2008 election.

Posted by: DrewM at 06:51 AM | Comments (285)
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And grow brave by reflection.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:20 AM | Comments (92)
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