If youÂ’re Barack Obama and youÂ’ve lost the Three Stooges of MSNBC, Olbermann, Mattthews and Fineman, (like to self starting video) Eugene Robinson and Maureen Dowd you might not think that the oil spill is the biggest problem youÂ’ve got.

I doubt the spill and the disastrous speech it spawned will be the permanent end of the great political-media love affair of our time but things will never be the same again.

The liberal chattering class invested so much hope in the unknown Senator with the dreamy pecs, that they were blind to all his faults. Now those faults are all too clear…he’s clueless. The detached Spock like monk they loved so much doesn’t turn into the raging Spock suffering from the Pon Farr on command. “Where’s the passion, the righteous anger?”, they ask. Alas, it’s not to be found. Worse still, where’s the competence? Wasn’t this Dream Team of Rivals supposed to be everything that the cowboys from Texas and Wyoming weren’t? And yet when faced with the first great crisis of his presidency, Obama has MIA on substance and rhetoric.

“How can this be?”, they wonder.

Naturally, the liberal chattering classes will never admit they were wrong. They will never admit that they, the hard-boiled, cynical self-appointed protectors of the Republic were sold a bill of goods by a snake oil salesman.

No dear Barack, the fault will not lay in them but you.

You see the pundit class stays and is this permanent protector of the liberal flame. Presidents come and go. Some make a mark, some not so much, but pundits, like bureaucrats are forever. Some one will have to pay the price for the sagging fortunes of the liberal dream and the likes of Matthews, Dowd and Robinson will be damned if itÂ’s going to be them.

Obama always talked about wanting to bridge the partisan divide and nowÂ’s his chance. HeÂ’s going to get a taste of what itÂ’s like to be the object of the herds scorn, in other words, a Republican. In some ways he wonÂ’t get treated that badly, he is one of them after all but in other ways it will actually be worse because there is one hell worse than a woman scornedÂ…a pundit class attempting to defect blame and avoid responsibility for being duped by a mere politician (even one of their own creation).

ItÂ’s almost enough for me to feel bad for ObamaÂ….but not quite enough. So yes, yes I will have another serving of schadenfreude.

Posted by: DrewM at 08:54 AM | Comments (157)
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Clinton's pick for Attorney General Assistant AG for Civil Rights, Lani Guiner, was withdrawn in controversy after her odd views on voting were publicized: She favored an expressly race-oriented cumulative voting system in which, for example, all Representatives for a state would be voted on by everyone in the state, with people receiving multiple votes each, and permitted to cast multiple votes for the same candidate.

The purpose was to allow minorities to put all their votes on to one candidate and thus give him a strong chance of being elected.

The theory was also scoffed at as being contrary to the American system and expressly racially oriented by design. "Quota Queen," she was labeled.

Seems she was only ahead of the curve.

Arthur Furano voted early — five days before Election Day. And he voted often, flipping the lever six times for his favorite candidate. Furano cast multiple votes on the instructions of a federal judge and the U.S. Department of Justice as part of a new election system crafted to help boost Hispanic representation.

Voters in Port Chester, 25 miles northeast of New York City, are electing village trustees for the first time since the federal government alleged in 2006 that the existing election system was unfair. The election ends Tuesday and results are expected late Tuesday.

Although the village of about 30,000 residents is nearly half Hispanic, no Latino had ever been elected to any of the six trustee seats, which until now were chosen in a conventional at-large election. Most voters were white, and white candidates always won.

Federal Judge Stephen Robinson said that violated the Voting Rights Act, and he approved a remedy suggested by village officials: a system called cumulative voting, in which residents get six votes each to apportion as they wish among the candidates. He rejected a government proposal to break the village into six districts, including one that took in heavily Hispanic areas.

...

"That was very strange," Arthur Furano, 80, said after voting. "I'm not sure I liked it. All my life, I've heard, `one man, one vote.'"

It's the first time any municipality in New York has used cumulative voting, said Amy Ngai, a director at FairVote, a nonprofit election research and reform group that has been hired to consult. The system is used to elect the school board in Amarillo, Texas, the county commission in Chilton County, Ala., and the City Council in Peoria, Ill.

Posted by: Ace at 08:24 AM | Comments (123)
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al-Reuters slugged their piece dramatically with "plunges", but there's a fine semantic difference between the two words. When you're plunging off the roof of a 100 story skyscraper, things are still looking pretty good at the 20th floor, no real damage done yet.

Craters suggest serious damage...smoke fireballs raining from the sky, Ragnarok kinda shit... We've been there for a while now.

...As the government's tax incentives for homebuyers expired, new home building dropped 10 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 593,000 units, the lowest level since December, the Commerce Department said on Wednesday....

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 07:12 AM | Comments (92)
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42% at least somewhat approve.

Meanwhile the MFM reaction to Obama's major Oval Office speech last night ranges from "unimpressed" to "irritated", including this piece in the LAT. Gabe says it's a must-read and he's right, but check out the bonus "Charlie Crist scouring Florida beaches for signs of oil" photo.

Heh.

via gabrielmalor

(link to LAT changed cause some folks have Twitter blocked at work)

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 06:17 AM | Comments (151)
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Eeep!

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:10 AM | Comments (206)
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UPDATE: Holy crap. Fan and Fred are going to delist from the NYSE.

It was a big day for stocks. The Dow gained almost 214 points to close at 10,404.77, and the S&P 500 gained a little over 25 points to close at 1,115.23. Manufacturing and tech stocks were the drivers of the rally. I expect that we're going to see some wide swings in the equities markets over the summer as investors go through their manic-depressive phases. Volatility is here to stay for awhile.

More after the jump. more...

Posted by: Monty at 03:02 AM | Comments (78)
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It's cute/sad the two black people on the panel are so determined to insist Obama is doing everything right. (An older black guy isn't having that.)

The real comedy comes from the communist hipster d-bag in the back row at 8:00.

Logistics!

I'm sure this idiot is already bragging on sassing Sean on his MySpace page.

Meanwhile, even Matthews, Feinman, and Olbermann (!) were critical of Obama's speech.

Oh Dear Lord: Paul Begala really strains to convince you he thought the speech was doggone awesome.

Posted by: Ace at 06:20 PM | Comments (242)
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Good evening all M&Ms.
Also don't forget about the job bank at the AoSHQ yahoo group.

The Greatest Hits From RoboGames 2010

RoboGames is a convention held every year where people bring their robots to show off, to solve challenges, and to compete in battle. Some are remote controlled like these battlebots, but others are completely autonomous.

I went to the Robogames two years ago and it was a blast. Pretty much every possible variation of robots was there including a team of soccer robots. I expect in just a few years from now to start seeing T-1000 prototypes with tissue exoskeletons duking it out. So here are the highlights from this year's battlebot competition.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:49 PM | Comments (464)
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Appoint a czar. Great! His way of saying "I'm too busy to deal with this and need someone I can fire to take the heat."

Now, a czar can be useful, especially if the president, like this one, wants to play golf 24 hours a day.

But why didn't President Genius figure out this was beyond his abilities/beyond his interest level earlier?

Everyone knows that when you appoint a czar, finally, stuff gets fixed!

60% of the time, it works every time.

"There will be more oil and more damage until this siege is done."

I remember Bush always telling us the war would be long and hard.

Didn't seem to buy himself any leeway for having said that.

Posted by: Ace at 03:31 PM | Comments (969)
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Oy.

Via Jay Cost, Mark Hemingway of the Washington Examiner gave Daniels a chance to ‘revise and extend his remarks’ about his proposed truce and Daniels doubled down.

And indeed, Daniels called me to say that he's dead serious about the need for the next president to declare a truce. "It wasn't something I just blurted out," he told me. "It's something I've been thinking about for a while."
He's emphasized the need to focus like a laser beam on the existential threats facing the country -- the two big issues he's previously identified being the war on terror and the country's precarious fiscal position. "We're going to need a lot more than 50.1 percent of the country to come together to keep from becoming Greece," he said.

He did, however, want to clarify that he's not just singling out controversial social issues. "I'm talking about all divisive issues," he said. Clear and unified priorities are the only way he sees the country rallying around common purposes.

Daniels struck me a serious and thoughtful guy but this idea of his is the antithesis of both of those things.

More to the point, it’s impossible. To govern is to choose. If Daniels has his way, all the social liberalism of the Obama is locked in. Well, that goes well beyond the Mexico City abortion issue, DADT, same sex marriage and the rest. For a lot of liberals, health care is a ‘social issue’ not a fiscal one. Where’s that fit into Daniels narrative?

Daniels wants to sound high minded (and I think he is in his sincerity) but he really just sounds kind of silly.

With whom on the left is Daniels going to sign this supposed truce? How would it be enforced? I think IÂ’ll win a lot of money betting on the left to view a truce not as a pause in fighting but a chance to run up the score while the other side isnÂ’t on the field. TheyÂ’ll still be funding their favorite programs in schools and universities to ensure that liberalism is the default position of the culture.

That ties into another point I wanted to make.

PoliticoÂ’s Ben Smith asked via Twitter

So who would be a parallel to (Sharon) Angle or (Rand) Paul on the left? It's as if ____ were a nominee for Senate...

I offered back that once Al Sharpton is considered acceptable in polite company, thereÂ’s no one too extreme for the Democrats. He responded that Sharpton never won a party nomination. True enough so I upped the anti with Paul Wellstone and Bernie Sanders. Not only did these extreme liberals (Sanders self-identifies as a socialist) win Democratic nominations but they won Senate seats. Funny but not so much as an eyebrow was raised in the salons of DC or New York. Yet the mere nomination of Angle and Rand Paul is enough to send shudders of fear and revulsion up and down the Amtrak lines and all the way out to LA.

WhatÂ’s the difference? The media and much of the cultural elite are liberals. Not only arenÂ’t thy not horrified by the Wellstones and Sanders of the world, they see them as fine, mainstream Americans.

ThereÂ’s a social and cultural price to pay when we donÂ’t fight back against these kinds of built in assumptions.

Sure there are differences in the way left and right approach economics but those differences are informed by culture and values. ItÂ’s easy to say, hey letÂ’s not talk about abortion or same sex marriage but what about immigration? AmericaÂ’s role in the world? Free speech v. speech codes? The proper role of government in our lives? These issues are economic and cultural. You canÂ’t draw some arbitrary line between them.

Where exactly does the ‘truce’ end and surrender begin?

I corrected the headline to reflect the Daniels' quote. He's not talking just about "social issues" but all "divisive" issues. That's simply not a serious position.

Posted by: DrewM at 12:08 PM | Comments (627)
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