A few more days off. Which is fine with me, actually.

He joins many Americans in having numerous weeks off from work.

USAToday is of course very understanding:

et's face it: In terms of downtime, President Obama's vacation has been a bit of a gyp.

First, he had to interrupt his R&R to renominate Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.

Then he got the bad news about his friend Ted Kennedy.

And then there are the latest dispatches from the summer of no love for the nation's lawmakers and what they might mean for the president's No. 1 legislative priority, an overhaul of the nation's health care system.

Huh. The president has duties even when on vacation. Who would have thought.

I don't know how Obama is going to handle pressure. He might handle it well, being fundamentally detached, unserious, and dream-dazed, and so immune to the normal stressors.

On the other hand, I kind of worry that this poseur has never had a position of responsibility in his life -- his highest-stress position was editing the Law Review 20 years ago -- and it's possible he's going to freak and crack as he experiences difficulties and trouble for the first time in his life.

Um, Okay: Runningrebel tips this from The Politico:

White House spokesman Bill Burton told reporters ... "As I recall, the previous president [took] quite a bit of vacation himself, and I don't think anyone bemoaned that."

Nah. No one bemoaned it. Michael Moore made an entire movie about it, but no one bemoaned it.

Posted by: Ace at 03:05 PM | Comments (1)
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Exurban League made me laugh with this riff on Matt Cooper's "gee this is just like 9.11/wait not just like 9.11, only pretty much like 9/11" stupidity:

Predictions on Matt's next tweet? My guess: I'm flying to S.F. coach while my friend flies 1st class. Which is a lot like apartheid.

Followed an hour later with: No, no, not *exactly* like apartheid... just the same tragic feel. Should have said "apartheidy." Stupid 140-character limit.

Posted by: Ace at 01:33 PM | Comments (1)
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I think some people need to sit down with a beer.

A memo arguing that African-Americans should unite behind a single black candidate in the race for mayor of Atlanta is about to become a prime topic of debate.

The material, which we include below, is said to be distributed by Aaron Turpeau, a long-time City Hall figure, on behalf of something called the Black Leadership Forum.

Turpeau argues that Council President Lisa Borders is the only candidate who can prevent the election of Councilwoman Mary Norwood as the first white mayor since Atlanta Mayor Sam Massell.

Both Borders and state Sen. Kasim Reed, also an African-American, have scheduled pressers this afternoon. AJC colleagues Eric Stirgus and Ernie Suggs will be there. We anticipate that Reed will demand that Borders renounce the memo.

Here is some key language plucked from the memo:

1. There is a chance for the first time in 25 years that African Americans could lose the Mayoral seat in Atlanta, Georgia, especially if there is a run-off;

2. Time is of the essence because in order to defeat a Norwood (white) mayoral candidacy we have to get out now and work in a manner to defeat her without a runoff, and the key is a significant Black turnout in the general election;

3. The reasons support should be given to Lisa Borders is... she is the best black candidate in the race who has a chance to win the election because she can attract downtown white support...

WhatÂ’s At Stake?

Determining whatÂ’s at stake depends on perspective:

1. The view that the times are too serious to stand on the sidelines is absolutely correct from the perspective of a black mayor at all cost. In fact, if a white candidate were to win the 2009 mayoral race, it would be just as significant in political terms as Maynard JacksonÂ’s victory in 1973.

2. Therefore, the question becomes, if that were the case, how would African American interests be addressed... ?;

...

4. The changing demographics which show a more rapid growth in the cityÂ’s white population (faster and a higher percentage than anywhere else in the country) requires that we critically evaluate all candidates;

...

At the end of the day, “when the morning comes,” a black agenda would better enable us to have our interests respected by and our influence realized in any administration.

Colorblind society, etc.

There is sad irony in the fact that he pimps his preferred candidate, Lisa Borders, as being the black candidate who can draw the most white support, even as he composes a memo stating how all blacks must unite to prevent the tragedy of a white woman winning the mayoral race.

As Jeneane Garafalo says, all opposition to Obama "is all about hatin' on a black man as president."

Thanks to DJ.

Posted by: Ace at 12:46 PM | Comments (3)
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Tester, vague:

Tester said it is more important to find a combination of ideas that can gather enough votes to get out of the Senate - although he is not yet certain it can be done. He also said the bill can't add to the deficit, even if that means adopting a tax on wealthier people to help pay for it.

"I too am worried about the national debt," Tester said. "I certainly don't support taxing the middle class; they pay their fair share already. But I think you are going to have to give something to get something."

As has been pointed out six bazillion times, Obama's plan already envisions higher taxes on the rich and that's not nearly enough to cover the new costs. So when he's talking about "you" giving up something to get something, he does in fact mean you, and not some rich people you don't know.

Represenative Markey is muchclearer on the point. She lapses into reckless candor here; it will only be hours before she retracts and claims she was "taken out of context."

Some people, including Medicare recipients, will have to give up some current benefits to truly reform the nation's health-care system, Rep. Betsy Markey told a gathering of constituents in Fort Collins on Wednesday.

Markey has repeatedly said during the August congressional recess that Medicare spending needs to be reined in to help pay for reforming the broader health-care system.

"There's going to be some people who are going to have to give up some things, honestly, for all of this to work," Markey said at a Congress on Your Corner event at CSU. "But we have to do this because we're Americans."

Have to?

Sharon Begley just emailed me to say these people have obviously contracted some form of viral insanity, thus causing them to believe the "myths" about ObamaCare that all rational people know are false.

Karl Rove is pushing these "myths" too, of course, in the WSJ. But that's to be expected. He's a lunatic.

wo weeks ago, White House Senior Adviser David Axelrod said in a now legendary "viral" email that, "It's a myth that health insurance reform would be financed by cutting Medicare benefits." This was sent out the day before Mr. Obama told a Montana town hall that he'd pay for health-care reform by "eliminating . . . about $177 billion over 10 years" for "what's called Medicare Advantage." And it was two days before Mr. Obama told a Colorado town hall he'd cover "two-thirds" of the "roughly $900 billion" of his plan's cost by "eliminating waste," again citing Medicare Advantage.

Who's right? As a former senior adviser, I can tell you who: the president. What's more, according to a White House fact sheet titled "Paying for Health Care Reform," Mr. Axelrod was misleading his readers. It notes the administration would cut $622 billion from Medicare and Medicaid, with a big chunk coming from Medicare Advantage, to pay for overhauling health care. Mr. Obama heralded these cuts as "common sense" in his June 13 radio address.

Medicare Advantage was enacted in 2003 to allow seniors to use Medicare funds to buy private insurance plans that fit their needs and their budgets. They get better care and better value for their money.

Medicare Advantage also has built-in incentives to encourage insurers to offer lower costs and better benefits. It's a program that puts patients in charge, not the government, which is why seniors like it and probably why the administration hates it.

Already, an estimated 10.2 million seniors—one out of five in America—have enrolled in Medicare Advantage. Mr. Obama is proposing to cut the program by nearly 20% and thus reduce the amount of money each will have to buy insurance. This will likely force most of them to lose the insurance they have now. Yet Mr. Obama promised in late July in New Hampshire that, "if you like your health-care plan, you can keep your health-care plan."

This is that famous money we're "wasting subsidizing insurers," it seems. It's what I figured it was: Not subsidizing insurers at all, but subsidizing seniors so they can buy private insurance more cheaply.

Obama has been mentioning cutting this "subsidy for insurance companies" in every single speech he's made.

Posted by: Ace at 12:27 PM | Add Comment
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50-43... losing one in approval and gaining one in disapproval.

Eh, a bit of noise. But once again: The trend is obvious, persistent, and dramatic.

If When he drops below 50% in the coming weeks, it will be the third-fastest fall below 50% of any postwar president.

Rasmussen has Obama picking up support, flipping from 49-50 to 50-49. Noise.

For cowbell, the original Cowbell Girl, Kim Richards. Here, in Tuff Turf. I was sort of obsessed with her as a kid, and watched thoroughly rotten shows like Hello, Larry just because she was in them. more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:50 AM | Comments (1)
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It feels a bit like 9/11 on Martha's Vineyard. End-of-summer weather is achingly beautiful but the mood is melancholy because of Teddy.

America stunned as 77-year-old chronic alcoholic succumbs to old age; Al Qaeda suspected.

He's now twittering he didn't mean it that way, he just sort of meant it that way.

Thanks to AHFF Geoff.

Endure: We can't really live. Not anymore. Not with Kennedy gone.

But we owe it to him to endure.

Posted by: Ace at 11:35 AM | Add Comment
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Mike Kelly, by the way, died heroically in a car accident. I say heroically because he was covering the Iraq War when the car he was in flipped over.

In 1990, he wrote this GQ article. Commenters are recommending it (as is LauraW.) so I'm linking it before I've read it.

It contains this heroic moment, with a chivalrous Kennedy once again looking out for women:

It is after midnight and Kennedy and [Senator Chris] Dodd [D-CountryWide] are just finishing up a long dinner in a private room on the first floor of the restaurant’s annex. They are drunk. Their dates, two very young blondes, leave the table to go to the bathroom. (The dates are drunk too. “They’d always get their girls very, very drunk,” says a former Brasserie waitress.) Betty Loh, who served the foursome, also leaves the room. Raymond Campet, the co-owner of La Brasserie, tells Gaviglio the senators want to see her.

As Gaviglio enters the room, the six-foot-two, 225-plus-pound Kennedy grabs the five-foot-three, 103-pound waitress and throws her on the table. She lands on her back, scattering crystal, plates and cutlery and the lit candles. Several glasses and a crystal candlestick are broken. Kennedy then picks her up from the table and throws her on Dodd, who is sprawled in a chair. With Gaviglio on DoddÂ’s lap, Kennedy jumps on top and begins rubbing his genital area against hers, supporting his weight on the arms of the chair. As he is doing this, Loh enters the room. She and Gaviglio both scream, drawing one or two dishwashers. Startled, Kennedy leaps up. He laughs. Bruised, shaken and angry over what she considered a sexual assault, Gaviglio runs from the room. Kennedy, Dodd and their dates leave shortly thereafter, following a friendly argument between the senators over the check.

Eyewitness Betty Loh told me that Kennedy had “three or four” cocktails in his first half hour at the restaurant and wine with dinner. When she walked into the room after Gaviglio had gone in, she says, “what I saw was Senator Kennedy on top of Carla, who was on top of Senator Dodd’s lap, and the tablecloth was sort of slid off the table ‘cause the table was knocked over—not completely, but just on Senator Dodd’s lap a little bit, and of course the glasses and the candlesticks were totally spilled and everything. And right when I walked in, Senator Kelly jumped off…and he leaped up, composed himself and got up. And Carla jumped up and ran out of the room.”

Charming.

Henry Rollins, a guy now primarily famous for being famous, manages to note the obvious, putting him well above the MSM.

Posted by: Ace at 11:31 AM | Comments (22)
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Karl from Hot Air's Green Room has a great post about the MSM's differing treatment of the Robert Novak and Ted Kennedy Obits. For Novak, the Plame non-scandal is mentioned early, sometimes even in the second paragraph. Sometimes even in the second sentence.

For Kennedy, Chappaquiddick is only mentioned deep, deep into the article.

Good piece.

But the real find here is this Carl Cannon piece on Chappaquiddick and the media's selective memory.

I thought it was good piece as it explained why conservatives care about Chappaquiddick and liberals in the MSM are wrong to dismiss these concerns as merely held by "haters."

But then it got... appalling, as it recounted the Chappaquiddick Manslaughter in harrowing detail. Details I never knew about before. It's the little things that stick with you, and there are some little things here (not little at all for Mary Jo Kopechne) that truly bring home how vile this man was.

So, Howie Kurtz is surprised Chappaquiddick and Kopechne are hot search terms, and that some of the "comments are pretty harsh?"

He ought to read Carl Cannon's piece. You know what's harsh? Kennedy returning to the party from which he absconded with Mary Jo Kopechne and telling his (married) male friends not to tell Kopechne's (unmarried) female friends that their coworker and friend was currently lying, state of life or death questionable, beneath a river.

In order, he would (illegally) later tell police, to keep the women from going off on some hare-brained rescue attempt that might jeopardize their lives. See, he withheld news of the crash from Mary Jo Kopechne's friends to protect them.

He was all about protecting the women.

That is one of the several fresh (to me) facts that is sticking with me. Returning to a party and deliberately withholding the possible death of a woman (who might actually have been rescuable at that point; we'll never know) from her friends.

Treating Kopechne's life as completely disposable, and a mere political obstacle. Dead? Alive? Who knows; gotta sober up and start working on a story for the police (including claims of heroic rescue attempts, naturally). She was just an unconnected party-girl anyway; the world is filled with them, and won't miss her much.

On the other hand, there were issues of genuine consequence, such as contriving a story as to why exactly Kennedy was driving drunk to the beach with a woman not his wife.

It really is sickening stuff. I recommend that all those liberals in the MSM who can't fathom why we conservatives still care about a petty little manslaughter read particularly closely about Teddy Kennedy's long, heroic walk back to the party he just left, and the telephones he passed along the way.

One of which was no more than 150 yards from the site of Kopechne's eventual death.

Posted by: Ace at 10:22 AM | Comments (34)
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Seriously. When I saw this in Hot Air's headlines, I thought there was some lunatic debate over this.

No. Per the rules, you're not permitted to lie.

Well, you can tell a number of specifically-defined lies. It tells you what lies are permitted. It's not as if a terrorist is going to get that list or anything and realize if an interrogator is telling Authorized Lie Number Three -- which is, and I'm not making this up, claiming to already "know everything" and parading about a deceptively thick dossier loaded with mostly-blank pages to convince a subject you have a fat file on him (did I mention I'm not making that up? That is one of the permissible lies) -- that a terrorist is going to recognize it as Authorized Lie Number Three.

But apart from not allowing any kind of bodily contact like a slap, or any kind of threat, or even any kind of lie except a couple of hoary old cop-lies that are so old few cops bother with them anymore -- yeah, the Army Field Manual is really all we need.

"The Army Field Manual is very, very restrictive in what it can do," said Michigan Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the top Republican on the House intelligence committee. "For high-value detainees, it's a joke. ... In theory, it sounds great."

The guidelines are all psychological in nature. The methods include good cop-bad cop, the silent treatment, and a trick in which interrogators can pretend to be from another country.

The silent treatment.

Oh.

My.

God.

But the administration, which is establishing a special unit for questioning high-value detainees, is now indicating it is open to examining new methods -- even as Attorney General Eric Holder launches a probe into alleged prisoner abuse under the Bush administration.

Critics say the field manual guidelines just might not be enough to shake a hardened terrorist.

Hoekstra said he believes a lot of the intelligence obtained from high-value detainees over the past several years would not have been uncovered if interrogators were limited to the field manual all along. He said going forward, interrogators should be allowed to do more, since the approved techniques are "not going to break anybody."

There are 19 approved techniques in the manual, last updated in 2006. The manual, which Obama designated as the standard for interrogations when he took office, prohibits techniques like waterboarding, electric shock, forced nudity, mock executions and other acts.

It permits interrogators to ask questions in a "rapid fire" sequence; repeat questions over and over; try to break the prisoner by focusing on his emotional anxieties or personal fears; change the environment in which the prisoner is being questioned; and, under very specific circumstances, keep a detainee separated from others.

...

Charles Stimson, who as the former deputy assistant defense secretary for detainee affairs worked on the 2006 revision of the field manual, said the administration is expected to consider other techniques.

While Stimson defended the field manual guidelines as effective in many cases, he said there are others that could be put to good use.

"We will be constraining ourselves, inappropriately so, if we confined the CIA (or HIG) to the 19 techniques in the Army Field Manual," he said. "Our enemy trains to our protocol, studies our protocol ... (They) will know how to resist."

...

While "lying" might seem like an obvious interrogation method, the Army Field Manual only approves it in very specific circumstances.

Under the "we know all approach," interrogators are allowed to "subtly" convince the prisoner that they know what he or she knows. This can be complemented by the "file and dossier" approach, in which interrogators present a "file" to a prisoner that appears to be much bigger than it really is, by being "padded with extra paper" and other decorations.

Other methods are mild enough to be authorized in any school principal's office.

One method, the "direct approach," is simply when the interrogator asks questions. Another involves creating incentives for cooperation. The "emotional pride" approach is when the interrogator flatters the prisoner into cooperating by appealing to his ego. The "silent approach" is also relatively mild.

"When employing this technique, the (interrogator) says nothing to the source, but looks him squarely in the eye, preferably with a slight smile on his face," the guide says, urging the interrogator not to be the first to break eye contact.

Wow. Tough stuff. That's almost as cruel as the dreaded "Homo says what?" technique (pioneered by the North Vietnamese in 1952, of course).

The Obama Administration, which lies to the American public on a daily basis, is said to be keeping an "open mind" (seriously, this is not a joke) about "expanding" the range of options to include controversial, innovative new techniques such as lying to suspects.

Daniel Henniger is right -- the war on terror is dead. In fact, so is even "The routine police work against terror."

So let's stop pretending and make it official. The terrorists won; America lost; Obama (with an assist from McCain) have decided that it's contrary to American principles to so much as lie to a terrorist.

Posted by: Ace at 08:47 AM | Add Comment
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Odd that everyone has to sacrifice except the Democrats' biggest donors.

Posted by: Ace at 08:27 AM | Comments (22)
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