Recent History Repeats: Media Concerned About Angry Mobs, and Anti-Obama Activity Being "Monitored," Back in April, Too
— Ace

I was looking for an old post someone wanted to read. It's here, by the way, though only indirectly relevant to today's news.

Anyway, in looking for that, I stumbled across this headline:

The Fearful Left: Tea Parties Are a Clear and Present Danger to Democracy, or Something
Plus: Site Now Monitoring... "Anti-obama Activities"

Escalation now, of course, as union thugs are sent out to take care of business, and the site monitoring "anti-Obama activities" isn't a private one anymore, but the whitehouse.gov site.

By the way, don't worry about the White House Informant line. They're not keeping your names. Just your emails. Which, for the 90% of us who don't have goofball handles like "Ace of Spades" and "CatLover57," are our name.

Posted by: Ace at 11:24 AM | Add Comment
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"The Persuasion of Power:" Vid of SEIU Bullyboys Attacking Actual Grassroots Citizens
Obama: I Don't Want Repubicans "to Do a Lot of Talking; I Just Want Them to Get Out of the Way"
— Ace

Background from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

St. Louis County police say six people were arrested. Two of those were arrested on suspicion of assault, one of resisting arrest and three on suspicion of committing peace disturbances. Carnahan was gone when the ruckus started.

Kenneth Gladney, a 38-year-old conservative activist from St. Louis, said he was attacked by some of those arrested as he handed out yellow flags with Don't tread on me printed on them. He spoke to the Post-Dispatch from the emergency room of the St. John's Mercy Medical Center, where he said he was waiting to be treated for injuries to his knee, back, elbow, shoulder and face that he suffered in the attack. Gladney, who is black, said one of his attackers, also a black man, used a racial slur against him before the attack started.
It just seems there's no freedom of speech without being attacked, he said.

These Members need cover.

We have strategies to deal with that.

Headline... Changed. Michelle Malkin is, as usual, all over this, and I went over there to find one of her favorite quotes. From Andy Stern of SEIU, as it turns out.

From Michelle's new book, which I've been dickishly derelict about mentioning.

EXCERPTED FROM Chapter 7, “SEIU: Look for the union label,” Culture of Corruption

“The persuasion of power”

Asked about his organizing philosophy, Andy Stern summed it up this way: “[W]e prefer to use the power of persuasion, but if that doesn’t work we use the persuasion of power.”

If the media were doing its job, that damning quote would be viral right now.

But they are doing their jobs, I guess. Just not the jobs they pretend to have. They're covering it up, because they're actually unofficial staffers of and consultants to the DNC.

His Master's Voice: "Shut up," Obama explained.

Or you might get your head knocked in a bit.

Kind of terrifying in this context, as... um, Peggy Noonan notes.

Credit to DrewM., who sent me this a while ago, but I ignored him, thus missing an opportunity to beat Allah.

Posted by: Ace at 09:29 AM | Comments (26)
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Flashback: When the Left Protested Bush, the Media Saw Only "everyone from grandmothers and students to veterans and mothers pushing strollers"
— Ace

I cite this as an example, and I trust not even a liberal will dispute that when it came to anti-war protests, the protesters were unfailingly described as "just normal folks," spontaneously animated to gather without, apparently, any organization at all; somehow, it seems, they psychically intuited where their fellow "just normal folks" might be banging their drums and shaking their paper mache effigies of Bush and Cheney.

Ah, but that was when dissent was patriotic.

After the meeting, everyone from grandmothers and students to veterans and mothers pushing strollers marched along Lake Merritt to Oakland City Hall for an afternoon rally at which Lee again spoke.

That's noted leftist anti-american firebrand Rep. Barbara Lee. She spoke with Sean Penn.

I searched for "grandmothers" for this because I remembered just about every story about the wonderful anti-war protests mentioned the grandmothers by the fourth paragraph.

Here, a grandmother (absolute moral authority conferred by wisdom of long years) instructs us how important it is for citizens to accept the claims of their president at face value and in respectful silence and with absolutely no back-talk or sass-mouth whatsoever.

Wait, that's not what she said at all.

"The only thing this government needs is for the people to be silent and then they can do whatever they want," said Joan MacIntyre, a 74-year-old great-grandmother from Oakland. "As long as the government keeps doing what it's doing, I'll be out in the streets."

At some point, the article does mention that these protests actually were (gasp!) organized, but seems quite unbothered by this fact. No nefarious machinations are imputed.

At the rally, which was organized by a coalition of Oakland community groups, folk singers led the crowd in song and a rapper rapped about violence in the streets.

Of course, omitted from that -- and omitted from nearly all of these "everyone from grandmothers to students to veterans to mothers pushing strollers" stories -- is that most of these protests were organized, in whole or in part, by radical socialist anti-american organization ANSWER.

So, in the case of a leftist protest, the protesters are depicted sympathetically, the reporter striving to stress their diversity and normalness so that any reader can see himself or herself in the protests.

And there is no hint of disrespect for the fact that yes, at some point, an email alert went out and people were told where to assemble.

On the other hand, when Obama opponents assemble (and that includes Democrats in good standing), the press strives to paint the protesters as not only weird and possibly dangerous ("carrying swastikas") but also deceptive, in that they're somehow "faking" their anger, or have been paid to be there.

Well, to be fair, some people are in fact paid to be at these protests. Some people belong to a hierarchical organization and are, in fact, part-time paid profession protesters, trouble-makers, and intimidators. Some people know exactly what to do and what to yell and who to push, because they do it every three or four months and it is, effectively, part of their job description.

But these people -- these people -- the media "forgets" to mention.

SEIU & Castor organize a townhall and announce it at the last minute as to reduce opposition voices. The townhall was packed 1/2 w SEIU people.

When supporters of healthcare freedom (ie, anti-BigGovHealth demonstrators) were prevented access to the townhall they began to shout, bang windows & doors.

Some of these people are even told specifically to show up just to provide "cover" to the Congressmen they're trying to support and influence:

Another one of Ms. Jorge’s tips is to “Address the [member of Congress] directly with a positive message: Remember, and they are getting beaten up by right wing zealots in these meetings.”

HCAN Communications Director Jacki Schechner said protecting elected officials who support their favored reforms was necessary given the contentious nature of some town-hall meetings.

Ms. Schechner said conservatives are baiting lawmakers into holding town-hall meetings, “so [lawmakers] can get yelled at and they don’t want to feel unsafe and uncomfortable.”

In fact, the media will go so far as to rewrite their stories to omit damaging admissions made in the first published version. Here, Tampa Bay Online originally included this admission from the SEIU...

Asked earlier today about possible disruption at the event, Kim Diehl of SEIU said, "We're prepared. We have strategies to deal with it if it should come up."

...but then deleted it. After all, violence broke out, and you can't have people getting the wrong -- right -- idea that maybe the "strategies" the SEIU contemplated included physical intimidation.

The media also suddenly stops reporting specific details when those specific details damage the the crowd they're trying to portray as "everyone from grandmothers to students to veterans to mothers pushing strollers:"

Ironically, the only photographic evidence of a physical encounter that the paper published showed a woman, later identified by Henke as local Democratic operative Karen Miracle, shoving an Obama critic in the face.,

Identified by Jon Hencke, a conservative-leaning blogger, not the media. I don't want you to get the impression the MSM pointed this out.

And so it goes on. Union thugs show up at rallies to "provide cover" and engage in rough-house "strategies," but the media makes no mention of it (or, having made mention if it, quickly deletes it from the record).

And meanwhile opponents of Obama are all apparently on the payroll of insurance companies or otherwise illegitimately... um, informed of protests (apparently it's illegal for conservatives to talk to each other and organize themselves) and are furthermore just there to make trouble and carry swastikas.

It is breathtaking. It is breathtaking.

I wanted to write this last night but it was so enormously... breathtaking, it's the only word I can think of, I wasn't able to do so.

I'm still not.

I am literally stunned.

I cannot believe the MSM's new heights of double-standards, hypocrisy, and frankly anti-American behavior -- yes, anti-American behavior; the MSM is attempting to rule that 50+% of the American public is per se illegitimate and entirely excludable from the public debate.

50% + of the public disagrees with them, and there is no getting around that, so they've simply decided to make overt and a binding "rule" what they've long believed silently -- 50% of the public will simply need to be disenfranchised if we're ever to "get things done" and impose our progressive agenda.

Breathtaking.

Semi-Correction: I got a bit careless in conflating the MSM with the Democratic Party. Nancy Pelosi, for example, "reported" people "carrying swatikas" (and suspiciously upscale and stylish swastikas, one imagines, according to Barbara Boxer's "too well dressed to be real citizens" thesis); that wasn't the MSM, per se.

Although they did not demand her evidence for this assertion nor debunk it.

So I did conflate the two bodies a bit, but given that the MSM simply regurgitates talking points directly from DNC faxes, I hope people can forgive me for forgetting the two are, nominally, separate entities.

If they were actually separate entities, one would imagine the media would eventually ask an administration accusing opponents of "astroturfing" about the fact that Obama's campaign manager was the acknowledged "gold standard of Astroturf organizing." And he was called such not by a partisan operative, and not even after he became Barack Obama's chief strategist.

He was called that by Business Week, and his mastery of Astroturf was acknowledged long before Obama was anything more than Bill Ayers' beard.

Posted by: Ace at 08:53 AM | Comments (21)
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Unemplyment, Part II: Rate Goes Down Only Because 300,000 People Exited the Workplace (That Is, Gave Up Looking for Work); "Discouraged Workers" Meme No Longer Operative
— Ace

Update: I read most of Slublog's post on unemployment and then... um, stopped, and figured, "Oh, my way of writing something new will be to discuss the disappearance of 'discouraged workers' from the labor force!"

Ummm....

Yeah. Slublog already covered that, and better than I did.

...

First, Geoff's chart:

Good analysis, too:

Seems a little odd, since we actually lost 155,000 jobs in July (and we lost 247,000 jobs on non-farm payrolls). The only way we can lose jobs and still have the unemployment rate go down is if the labor pool goes down even faster. And in fact that’s what it did, dropping by 422,000 workers. But the “Want a Job” category only increased by about 100K, so where did the other 300K workers go?

[See chart at link; I can't steal everything from them. -- ace.]

As you can see from the chart, both the unemployed and “want to work” categories dropped, and we know that the employed dropped as well. Something’s not right here, unless 300,000 people simply gave up entirely and decided to become bloggers or something.

Yes, "discouraged workers." During periods of low unemployment -- like under Clinton's last few years, and the middle/end of Bush's years -- the unemployment figure overstates unemployment, because that figure includes people who normally don't work often or full time but who are enticed back into the labor pool because jobs seem so plentiful. That is, the plenty of jobs encourages people to join the workforce, and thus more people are working, even if the unemployment figure doesn't change much.

In periods of high unemployment, the unemployment figure understates unemployment, because people used to working become some discouraged from finding regular work they stop looking and try to make money in some nonstandard way.

Or give up entirely and move in with their parents. Or their kids.

We heard a lot about "discouraged workers" under Bush, despite the fact that Bush had a fairly low unemployment number for almost the entirety of his term and would thus not expect great numbers of discouraged workers. Actually we might expect more "encouraged semi-workers" to join the labor force than discouraged workers to exit it.

Under Obama, the unemployment rate is very high indeed. There are a lot of discouraged workers the current figure misses entirely, because they've just given up. And yet, when it's actually appropriate to note the extra discouraged workers not included in the figures, we get headlines and ledes like this:

Payrolls fall less in July, jobless rate eases

The U.S. unemployment rate fell in July for the first time in 15 months as employers cut far fewer jobs than expected, providing the clearest sign yet that the economy was turning around.

Not a single word about those "discouraged workers" we heard about every single unemployment report story under Bush. Despite the fact that, plainly, simply doing the math, one quickly can calculate that the unemployment rate only "eased" at all not because more people found work, but because 300,000 fewer people now put themselves in the "expecting to find work" category at all.

In the Age of Obama, there are no discouraged workers. Merely people taking advantage of the cool, stylish, urbane new trend of funemployment.

Oh: The reduction in job losses is a positive sign... sort of. The number of jobs lost is closing in on seven million. There are fewer and fewer jobs to shed in the first place.

Further, there is no guarantee at all that this will be a "V" shaped recession/recovery. In fact, many economist expect it to be "L" shaped, with very little job growth for years.

So it's nice that we're losing fewer jobs... but if, as many expect, those jobs will remain lost into the foreseeable future, it's not really a sign that we're headed into true recovery.

Few would be happy if the current jobless rate continues bouncing around between 9 and 10% for two or three years.

Posted by: Ace at 07:53 AM | Add Comment
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Mel Martinez Is Resigning From The Senate
— DrewM

Interesting.

Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) will be stepping down from the Senate, according to several senior Republican sources familiar with his thinking.

He made the announcement at a morning staff meeting, where he said he will not be returning to the Senate after the August recess.

Martinez had already announced he was retiring after next year. I guess he wanted to get a jump on that whole 'spend more time with the family' thing.

I don't know Florida law off the top of my head but I'm guessing the Governor will appoint a replacement. That's kind of awkward since the Governor is currently running to replace Martinez. I'm assuming he'll appoint some respectable placeholder who will not run next year.

All in all, the sooner we are rid of Martinez the better.

On the related Republican primary, Governor Crist is desperately trying to pretend he's not the stimulus loving, cap and trade supporting RINO we know him to be.

Meanwhile, there's an actual conservative in the race, Marco Rubio, and Jim Geraghty has a profile.

Over a two-hour conversation, Rubio offers a conservative message on a wide spectrum of issues, often punctuating his points with memorable and witty observations: “We’re getting lectured to by the Chinese on economics”; “On the stimulus, mostly we’re stimulating the debt”; “No start-up guy is going to get any stimulus dollars”; “I like Dick Cheney, but nobody’s perfect — he’s not a very good hunter, apparently”; “Cuban-Americans don’t think of themselves as minorities, because in Miami, they’re the majority”; “There’s a correlation between cigar-smokers and their politics.”

On immigration, Rubio disagrees a bit with his mentor, Jeb Bush, and another former governor, George W. He prefers a tougher line on illegal immigration, but he understands the immigrant dream.

...Rubio calls the Obama administration’s response to Honduras’s power struggle “outrageous,” and when discussing the Iranian protests, laments that the loudest voice for freedom and liberty on the world stage belongs to French president Nicolas Sarkozy.

Read the whole thing and enjoy the fact that there are still conservatives out there.

BTW-Here's Rubio's website. He's running an insurgent campaign and while money isn't everything, it ain't nothing (IYKWIMAITYD).

Posted by: DrewM at 06:58 AM | Add Comment
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9.4%! Are We Saved?
— Slublog

And thus Reuters declares the economy recovering:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. employers cut 247,000 jobs in July, far less than expected and the least in any month since last August, according to data on Friday that provided the clearest evidence yet that the economy was turning around.

With fewer workers being laid off, the unemployment rate eased to 9.4 percent in July from 9.5 percent the prior month, Labor Department data showed, the first time the jobless rate had fallen since April 2008.

It's great to see the bleeding slow, but I wish the reason for it were different. Basically, unemployment went down because the rate of layoffs slowed; employment did not increase. People are not getting hired, they're just getting fired in lesser numbers.

Yay?

Back in 2004, when unemployment was 5.6%, Reuters looked more deeply into the numbers and produced this story: "Low US Jobless Rate ignores 'Hidden Unemployed'"

A key reason the official U.S. unemployment rate is so low is the growing number of working-age people leaving the labor force, outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas said on Thursday.

This trend was first reported exclusively by Reuters on Monday in a study of little-known figures buried inside the U.S. employment report each month.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which produces the data, also publishes an alternative measure that tries to capture the hidden unemployed, those who are not included in the official unemployment rate for various statistical reasons, Reuters reported.

So, using the analysis so helpfully provided by the media when Bush was president, Jim Geragthy looks at the real unemployment rate:

In July, 796,000 of those were taken out of their definition of the workforce, and thus their unemployment calculations for this month, because they have stopped looking for work "because they believe no jobs are available for them..."

...In a work force of JulyÂ’s number of 154,504,000, thatÂ’s an unemployment rate of 9.9 percent.

In a work for of JuneÂ’s number of 154,926,000, thatÂ’s an unemployment rate of 9.8 percent.

I haven't seen this sort of in-depth analysis performed on the jobless numbers since...oh...January of this year. The discouraged worker is now the forgotten worker.

The Reuters Unemployment News Formula:
Low unemployment + Republican President = Hidden bad economic news.
High unemployment + Democrat President = Economic recovery.

Posted by: Slublog at 06:15 AM | Comments (1)
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WaPo Columnist Calls Republicans "Terrorists"
— Gabriel Malor

Not one day after WaPo staff writer Philip Kennicott called us racist, WaPo columnist Steven Pearlstein says that Republicans who oppose Obamacare are "terrorists."

The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they've given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They've become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.

Republicans are exercising our God-given right to speech--political speech, no less, which is the core of the First Amendment protection. Steven Pearlstein, apparently unfamiliar with the concept, thinks that is terrorism. Sure, he'll claim he's softening it by using the circumlocution "political terrorists"...except, isn't all terrorism political? He just wussy-worded it.

This is an extension of the same old strategy the Democrats are using to try and shut down debate. Call us "the mob." Call us "terrorists." Call in the union goons.

Fortunately, that strategy isn't working. We know we're not the mob and we know we're not terrorists. We are concerned citizens who have a right to demand answers before the Democrats burden us with more out-of-control spending and a crippled healthcare system. Steve Pearlstein is afraid that Democratic efforts to marginalize us aren't working, so he's upping the rhetoric just in time for Obama's union goons to up the violence.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 06:01 AM | Add Comment
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Top Headline Comments 08-07-09
— Gabriel Malor

Friday!

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:24 AM | Comments (1)
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Pakinstani Taliban Chief Dies from Loss of Inner Child, Brain and Major Organs, but Mostly Brain and Major Organs
— Dave in Texas

Golly. A missile attack.

Bet it sucks to have one of those.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 05:21 AM | Add Comment
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The Bully Boys Take the Stage
— Slublog

Go figure. One day after the unions enter the debate over health care, violence breaks out. Who could have seen that coming?

Oh, right.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina:

“If you get hit, we will punch back twice as hard,” Messina said, according to an official who attended the meeting…

The president's supporters seem to have taken that advice a bit too literally:

Kenneth Gladney, a 38-year-old conservative activist from St. Louis, said he was attacked by some of those arrested as he handed out yellow flags with “Don’t tread on me” printed on them. He spoke to the Post-Dispatch from the emergency room of the St. John’s Mercy Medical Center, where he said he was waiting to be treated for injuries to his knee, back, elbow, shoulder and face that he suffered in the attack. Gladney, who is black, said one of his attackers, also a black man, used a racial slur against him before the attack started.

Yeah, bringing in the SEIU was a fantastic idea.

Perhaps the White House should heed the advice of Peggy Noonan, who has a strong column in today's WSJ:

All of this is unnecessarily and unhelpfully divisive and provocative. They are mocking and menacing concerned citizens. This only makes a hot situation hotter. Is this what the president wants? It couldn’t be. But then in an odd way he sometimes seems not to have fully absorbed the awesome stature of his office. You really, if you’re president, can’t call an individual American stupid, if for no other reason than that you’re too big. You cannot allow your allies to call people protesting a health-care plan “extremists” and “right wing,” or bought, or Nazi-like, either. They’re citizens. They’re concerned. They deserve respect.

The Democrats should not be attacking, they should be attempting to persuade, to argue for their case. After all, they have the big mic. Which is what the presidency is, the big mic.

As the quote in the first story makes clear, the pushback against health care opponents is a top-down effort by the administration and Obama's supporters. On the campaign trail, Obama promised us all that if elected, he'd work to heal the nation's divide.

Looks like we can count that as another broken promise. Looks like he's more interested in winning, no matter the cost. Obama's conciliatory speeches were "words...just words..."

Posted by: Slublog at 05:07 AM | Add Comment
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