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January 10, 2012 | Left-leaning summary of Bain and Holson Burns | |
Today was the New Hampshire Primary, and Mitt Romney won big. But this also marks only a very few days since Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry started attacking Romney's work at Bain Capital from a perspective more suited to a class warrior like President Barack Obama than someone who claims to be a fiscal conservative who understands capitalism. On Sean Hannity's show tonight, Rick Perry went so far as to bring up Gaffney SC as an example of what he called "vulture capitalism." I looked it up, and while I'm sure there are more details to be uncovered, at first blush, Perry appears to be completely lost in the weeds. A vulture, Governor Perry, eats an animal that's already dead. In order for your metaphor not to make you look foolish, the plant that Holson Burns closed in Gaffney would have to have been in operation already, and already in trouble, when Bain made its investment. Unfortunately for you, the facts appear to be quite different: Bain bought Burns, organized it with Holson, and tried to make it a leading player in the photo album and frame market, with mixed success. The plant in Gaffney would likely never have been built, and the workers never employed in such an industry, had Bain not been trying in good faith to grow a business. They were not operating a charity that might employ people to sell overpriced goods that no one would buy except as a charitable exercise. They were trying to be profitable. The business fell on hard times in the early nineties, and they had to restructure. That's when the plant in Gaffney was closed. There was no vulture trying to pick a corpse clean. This was an attempt to nurture and grow a business. It was not perfectly successful, but you have made a grave error by criticising it. You have just indicted any small businessperson who ever hired employees during a boom and then let any of them go when they fell on hard times as "vulture capitalists." If there are any such people in South Carolina (dare I say even in Gaffney?), you will not win their support if they learn the truth about Holson Burns. | ||
I just heard Austan Goolsbee on Fox News Sunday repeating a grave distortion of the truth that the Obama team has been retailing for months trying to misrepresent the record of "the last eight years." But he didn't stop there. He actually expanded the scope of the misstatement because he said words to the effect that the Bush recovery was weak and squeezed the middle class by reducing median family income by $2000 per year.
As even FactCheck.org has pointed out long since, there is no measure by which this is true, and, true to form, they were kinder to Obama than he deserved by using 2000 statistics as the benchmark. Check out the last secion of the article linked.
I hope to expand on this point in a more lengthy article, soon.
In the first Presidential debate on Sept. 26, Obama said the following in a rebuttal of McCain's attack on his weak reaction to the Russian invasion of Georgia:
No. 1 is we have to have foresight and anticipate some of these problems. So back in April, I warned the administration that you had Russian peacekeepers in Georgian territory. That made no sense whatsoever. And what we needed to do was replace them with international peacekeepers and a special envoy to resolve the crisis before it boiled over. That wasn't done. But had it been done, it's possible we could have avoided the issue.
I haven't completed my research, but the claim by Obama that he had discovered something in April that no one knew is, of course, patently ridiculous. The Georgians have been trying to "internationalize" the peacekeeping force since at least 2006, as the linked release demonstrates. The peacekeepers have been there for more than fifteen years, so it is certainly nothing new. I think Obama exposed how little he knows about the history of this issue, and again exposed how little he knows despite his willingness to claim to have figured everything out before anyone else.
The media are out in force repeating Obama's and the Democrats' talking points regarding the White House meeting called yesterday to negotiate a deal to rescue the financial markets from the fallout from the mortgage crisis. . According to them, McCain did nothing in the meeting, and somehow that derailed the deal they had already struck.
Of course, there was no deal with the House Republicans, but a few leaders spoke for them out of school. Linked above is a blog entry that tells a fascinating story of how Obama apparently tried to seem like the hero, but all he did was pit the majority against the minority and, surprise of surprises, the minority did not respond well to being railroaded.
Perhaps this is what Obama meant by "Yes, we Can!" "Yes, we can walk in and tell some parties to a negotiation what they are going to agree to. Yes we can step out afterward and blame it on everyone but ourselves."
Check out this piece I discovered today. It refers briefly to a few of the problems with Obama's claims to share the values of Middle America. There's a lot more detail here but this is a good, quick summary.
Obama's tax plan has begun to unravel on him, as evidenced by his recent admission that he may have to reconsider raising taxes on the very rich if the economy is still struggling when he comes into office. It exposes the fact that such tax increases are damaging to the economy, and thus it's not a good idea in general. It leaves him wide open to the accusation that he has flip-flopped again. In short, I'm ecstatic that he said it...
Once again the Democrats have stepped in it. They forgot that attacking a Conservative woman in sexist terms is still a sexist attack. When will they learn the lessons the rest of us have long since learned about not using stereotypical language in attacking their political rivals as Harry Reid's office did in sniping at Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as follows:
"Anyone who knows Senator Reid knows he never backs down when he's fighting for what's right and that he always stands up to John McCain when he is wrong. Shrill and sarcastic political attacks may fire up the Republican base, but they don't change the fact that a McCain-Palin administration would mean four more years of failed Bush-Cheney policies."
Maybe this is the kind of thing Michelle Obama meant when she said this country was "downright mean" ...
The Democrats are apoplectic trying to blunt the impact of McCain's appointment of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running mate. I don't think they can avoid exposing again just how unqualified Obama is as they try to assert that she is unqualified.
If they accuse McCain of being irresponsible for appointing someone more qualified than their own headliner, how can they not admit that as a party they have failed the nation by nominating someone less qualified in turn?
If these were candidates in my party I would be embarrassed. They made statements in this debate that add up to the following:
You can't predict the future based on clear historical patterns. Presidents have the right to give orders that their subordinates universally declare to them to be foolish. (More importantly, a person who promises to do so would be a good candidate for president. But when George W. Bush ignored the alleged advice of SOME of his subordinates, they would say he was COMPLETELY irresponsible. What a crew of hypocrites...) It is good to raise taxes even if this will reduce revenues, because the tax code is about fairness and social justice, not about paying for massive new entitlement programs.
If one of these nuts ends up elected, our chickens will really be coming home to roost.
ABCNews.com today is proudly featuring an article offering the chance to view the allegedly suppressed Pentagon report that acknowledges that an examination of reams and reams of documents recovered from Iraq show no operational ties between Saddam Hussein's regime and al Qaeda. And that is true. But this would have been a more accurate teaser: "Read the report that shows that al Qaeda was virtually the only crew of bloodthirsty murderers with which Saddam Hussein had not established an intimate working relationship."
Samantha Power, the national security adviser to Barack Obama's campaign who resigned after calling Hillary Clinton a "monster" in an interview, is an extreme left-wing activist whose policies would be a disaster for our country (and wouldn't effectively relieve the suffering she considers a higher calling for our military than protecting our collective interests worldwide). Read this op-ed in the Investor's Business Daily for more details of this political liability for Obama. We should exploit this in the general election to expose just how extreme and impractical are his beliefs on foreign policy.
A lot of buzz is going around about how much advantage the Democrats have going in to the next election. The data I've seen cited is mostly regarding party affiliation, which currently favors Democrats. I think it likely, though, that this is a residual effect of the anti-Republican backlash of 2006 which hasn't entirely worn off as long as Bush is the big Republican story. But the Democrats are divided between a known quantity and a dream candidate, and the dream candidate is an unknown whose blemishes will become apparent as the days wear on. The Democratic leadership has been completely ineffective and has failed on almost all of their agenda, and have exposed their hostility to security and justice in their inability to pass the Protect America act and other similar legislation. As consciousness of these failures grows when the Republican campaigns hammer them I think their "moderate" and "independent" support will erode significantly. I am feeling more and more optimistic that we will either not lose more ground in the fall, or even gain ground against the failed liberal policies of the Democrats.
A couple of choice tidbits come out in a recent poll by Newsweek. First, Reuters did not report on it. It has McCain in a virtual tie with Obama in the head-to-head race. Reuters was very excited about the ABC/Washington Post poll last week that had Obama up by 11 points. But they didn't report on this. And I noted that they had a recent summary of the race, and characterized the three candidates as follows:
Obama was "a first-term lawmaker seen as charismatic yet largely untested."
Clinton is "the tenacious, politically savvy, two-term Democratic Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York."
McCain is "a crusty old politician known for blowing his top."
How's that for fair and balanced coverage? I would say, using the same tone as they used with McCain, that Obama is "a naive hypocrite dining out on the myth of his political purity" and Clinton is "an ambitious, self-important political hack."
Back to the Newsweek poll: Obama beats McCain by one point, 46% - 45% in the poll. But McCain takes first place in the derby to see who would be more prepared to take the 3 a.m. call: "When all voters were asked which of the three candidates they would most trust to take a 3 a.m. call, the largest number pointed to McCain (45 percent), followed by Clinton (27 percent) and Obama (18 percent). Almost a fifth of Clinton's supporters say that they would trust McCain more to take the call."
Furthermore, "[m]any Democrats in the NEWSWEEK Poll said that they would back McCain if their favorite candidate were not the nominee." This bodes well for November...
Overnight I published a piece suggesting the Obamawave had crested. Indeed, today the poll averages on RealClearPolitics.com show a distinct movement toward Clinton. This could be interesting...
This is a great site for looking into Global Warming: http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/ Anthony Watts is a moderate skeptic and he analyzes the data effectively.
Joe Biden is winning converts even among Republicans for his "partition Iraq" proposal. I suppose it must have merit. It worked well in the Balkans, after all. The Bosnian muslims and Croatians and Serbs had trouble getting along, so they just split into three states. Neat and simple, and everyone was happy. Oh, wait... There were Serbs living in Bosnia and Croats living in Serbia and Muslims living in Croatia, and these minorities didn't just voluntarily pick up and go "home" to the new homeland. Hmmm.
I wonder if the Sunnis of Kurdistan or the Shiites of Anbar or the Sunnis of the south of Iraq will leave more willingly when we forcibly partition their nation.
I wonder if, when racial tensions erupted in the U.S., any liberals suggested we should just create Black cities and Hispanic cities and White cities and Asian cities to reduce the tension.
Only a Democrat (and a "moderate" Republican) could try to make Jim Crow, by another name, smell sweet.
I happened to be following Jim Lehrer's News Hour in recent days and found it interesting that, among all the negative stories he reported about Iraq, he failed to mention some significant facts. First, he neglected to mention, when he tallied the total U.S. casualties in Iraq for July, that it was the lowest total in eight months. He also failed to mention that there are two left-of-center pundits who have been critical of the President's handling of Iraq who have now published in the New York Times their opinion that the surge is turning the situation in Iraq and may indeed make victory possible.
Today Democratic Congressional Leaders patted each other on the back for delivering on one of their 8 or 10 campaign commitments, 200 days into the 100 days, sporting their lowest public approval ratings in history. And we learn from a report in the Washington Post taken from Rowan Scarborough's latest book that the Dubai Ports World deal that the Republican Congress should have left alone would have given us unprecedented access to intelligence at ports all over the world. Nice job, guys.
The Democratic Congress has its lowest approval numbers ever, 9 points lower than the vilified G.W. Bush, matching the numbers the Republican Congress put up before being trounced in the election of 2006. Perhaps they ought to stop criticizing the Iraqi parliament for its inaction and stop looking for smoking guns where there can't be any guns (the President can't be accused of crimes for executing his constitutional authority to grant pardons and hire and fire U.S. attorneys, so why bother investigating unless it is simply a McCarthyite witch hunt--something Democrats and liberals are supposed to oppose). Maybe if this Congress could accomplish something it could get away with pointing out other legislatures' failures.
Paul Harvey has some nerve. Like so many liberals who advocate embryonic stem cell research as though human embryos were not human and alive, and as if someone cannot reasonably believe that there are any rights to be weighed, he implied in his news commentary today that President Bush must be a cold-hearted person. After all, said Harvey, there are many medical professionals who believe that embryonic stem cells can save lives and relieve suffering.
Be fair, Paul. How many infants would you be willing to kill to eradicate cancer from the world altogether? How many? To relieve the suffering and premature death of millions of people, how many infants would you kill? How about this, we would only kill infants that were going to die anway from some kind of disease. SInce they would never have a long life, or never achieve adulthood anyway, how many would you have executed so that their organs could be used to make a sustainable cure for all cancers?
If that question is not easy for you to answer with a number greater than zero (and I hope it is not!), then you know why it is hard for many of us to decide how many embryos, which are human beings in our minds, should be destroyed to serve the needs of the rest of us.
As the situation with today's two shootings on the campus of Virginia Tech University is being investigated, I have noted the media ignoring explicit warnings from the principles, rushing instead to conclude that there was one shooter in both incidents. I listened carefully to the news conference and read the news report on FoxNews.com, and so far this appears to be an inference, not a fact. But it is being reported widely, both on Fox News and ABC radio news reports. I wish journalists were more careful.
Here are the rumors: an Asian man came to the campus looking for his girlfriend. He killed two people in the dorm and then went on a premeditated killing spree more than two hours later in an academic building on the opposite and of the campus using a completely different modus operandi.
We shall see...
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