Moe Lane

You know, Eugene Robinson, I can’t help but notice that… you are upset at the current administration’s policies on leaks.

The Obama administration has no business rummaging through journalists’ phone records, perusing their e-mails and tracking their movements in an attempt to keep them from gathering news. This heavy-handed business isn’t chilling, it’s just plain cold.

And that this situation you are now describing… is a troublesome one.

The unwarranted snooping, which was revealed last week, would be troubling enough if it were an isolated incident. But it is part of a pattern that threatens to redefine investigative reporting as criminal behavior.

And, indeed, this observation that you have now taken up – that we have been seeing this sort of thing from the Obama administration for some time – is… very much on topic.  Yes.

:pause:

Thank you for pointing this out.  And thank you for noting that prior administrations have shown more restraint in dealing with journalists.

Moe Lane

(Via Instapundit.  Oh, my, yes: via Instapundit.)

Come, I will hide nothing from you: when it comes to the Adventures of Bob Menendez, it is my suspicion that the hookers will turn out to be the least important, yet most enticing, part of the story.  I am reasonably confident that Menendez availed himself of foreign prostitutes; I am neutral on whether one of them was legal by the standards of the Dominican Republic, and it would not break my heart to hear that Bob Menendez actually has enough couth and self-control to at least make sure that the girls he hires are adults.  And if the whole hooker thing turns out to be false, a brutally pragmatic view of the situation would suggest that at this point it doesn’t matter: Menendez’s ties to Florida political contributor Salomon Melgen are now out, and not shaping up well under scrutiny.

None of this should be taken as an indication that the Washington Post didn’t screw up royally, here. (more…)

Ed Morrissey is quite succinct when he answers the Washington Post’s plaintive complaint on the way that Barack Obama kicks around print newspapers:

Simply put, Obama isn’t going to change his media strategy as long as it works and he doesn’t pay a price for it.  Why should he?

The answer to Ed’s question is, by the way, Barack Obama shouldn’t.  Oh, sure, from the point of view of fairness and openness and responsibility the President should be showing some character, here – but he doesn’t have to, and if you assess the situation in terms of mere power then Barack Obama shouldn’t indulge the weak.  Particularly the Washington Post, which has deliberately made itself weak in the first place.  I know that this is a harsh attitude to take, but as I have (often) noted before: you can’t make me respect you if you won’t even respect yourself.

The Washington Post is almost believably shocked to discover that the practice of rendition has returned to Clinton-era levels:

…it is not known how many renditions have taken place during Obama’s first term. But his administration has not disavowed the practice.

Hot Air called this a ‘surprise.’ I know that they’re being sarcastic, because those folks were as aware of the situation with regard to rendition as I have been, for about as long as I have been.  Although I have to admit, I am slightly surprised by just how willing the antiwar movement was to roll over and show its belly on the subject of drone strikes; I assumed at the time that the Left actually meant it when they said that they had a problem with summarily executing jihadis.  Turns out that it’s apparently sexy to progressives when it’s a Democratic President writing out the kill list.

Go figure. (more…)

From the Washington Post:

On Monday afternoon, open-government advocates assembled in a congressional hearing room to ponder what had become of the Obama administration’s lofty vows of transparency.

“It’s been a really tough slog,” said Anne Weismann of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “The lack of effective leadership in the White House, in the executive branch, has really made it difficult to have more significant progress.”

Well, elections have consequences.

(pause)

You idjits.

Not that they say that, of course.

Two weeks of Washington Post-ABC News tracking poll interviews find 84 percent of likely voters who supported Obama in 2008 support him this year, while 13 percent say they are switching to Romney and 3 percent are backing others or haven’t made up their mind yet.

Now, let’s just assume for the moment that we have 100% turnout from 2008 and that every voter then is a likely voter now (God knows that happens a lot, particularly with the state polls these days). 69.46 million people voted for Obama; 59.93 for McCain. Assuming that Obama gets 84% of that total then he’ll be effectively handing over 9.03 million votes to Romney, 2.08 million to third-party votes, and be at 58.34 million votes… or less than McCain’s totals.

(pause)

Well all right, then.

(more…)

I normally don’t do this sort of thing, but what the heck.

So.  Biden thinks that he’s been helpful!  The WaPo lists the ways.

In nearly four years as vice president, Biden has been the chief monitor of the economic recovery efforts, coordinating federal projects with mayors and governors.

…What economic recovery? (more…)

Because if he didn’t, he should have*.  “True but false.”  Apparently, the RNC is not permitted to make the verifiable point that since January 2009 women have been losing most of the jobs.  Because that sort of thing is bourgeois truth, which apparently may not be permitted to interfere with revolutionary truth (I don’t remember who first came up with that bon mot, sorry).  Or possibly Kessler simply finds it intolerable that the RNC would want to push back on the Democrats’ War on Women rhetoric – hey, where’s the Fact Checker post on that?  Don’t see it here.

Well, at least we know now that the Washington Post’s The Fact Checker – not to mention, Glenn Kessler – is actually thoroughly in the bag for the Democrats.  Campaigns, take note.

Via… Oh, this one is going to go around, brothers and sisters.  Take your pick.

Moe Lane

*Yes, yes, I’m sure that there’s a loophole, or something.  There usually is.

…with a rotten life and bad prospects to go out there and keep trying to recruit more people to vote for the man whose party largely put her in her position.

Over the past three years, [Earline] Coe could have easily become one of those on the other end of the line — a no, a hang-up, a “refused.”

After working for Obama in the last election, Coe lost her job as a retail manager. She got another job, then lost that, too, as the recession deepened. Recently, her unemployment benefits ran out. Her husband’s job as a postal worker could be tenuous.

Whoever did that to that poor woman should be ashamed of him- or herself. (more…)

This is not really about Perry.  This is about quality control at the Washington Post.

This is getting exasperating. Now we apparently have Michael Gerson of the Washington Post making stuff up:

It is now a familiar pattern — the scandal of sanity. Rick Perry is criticized for supporting discounted higher education for the children of undocumented workers, as though the ignorance of the innocent is an obviously superior policy option.

[snip]

There is room for debate on all these issues.

[snip]

But these are not the arguments we’ve seen. Instead, candidates are accused of political heresy. Then they apologize — some eagerly, others reluctantly. Movement conservatives have created a box of orthodoxy so small that even the most conservative candidates must engage in undignified contortions just to fit.

(more…)

Now, normally I don’t like to do this sort of thing when it comes to people who will be eventually on my side when it comes to an election. Truly, I do not. But while I was reading this Jen Rubin Washington Post article targeting the latest anti-Romney… excuse me, I meant to type out “Newt Gingrich,” there… I was struck by something in these two paragraphs:

Andy Ferguson, a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and arguably the most dazzling writer on the right, has been a one-man killing machine. In a series of pieces on Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and Jon Huntsman, he has systematically done in (or helped to do in) more Republican candidates than Think Progress, the New York Times and George Soros ever could.

In some cases, the effort was an intentional dissection of the candidate’s foibles. He wrote of the liberal elites’ favorite Republican: “Huntsman seems to have missed something big in the landslides of 2010. The reason for his Rip Van Winkle aura, to use still another metaphor, is that Huntsman spent most of the Obama administration out of the country.” His kickoff suffered from “hoary rhetoric [and] the overpackaging that can’t quite obscure the obvious lack of anything fresh to say.” At other times, Ferguson has simply caught the candidates unaware, letting them sink themselves (Daniels’s “social truce” and Barbour’s musing about the civil rights movement in Yazoo City).

(more…)

I swear to God, it’s like the paper remembers that one, perfect high that it got from torpedoing then-Senator George Allen’s re-election run in 2006, and has been chasing the dragon ever since:

• 2009: You all remember the McDonnell/Deeds gubernatorial contest, yes?  You also remember how the WaPo went so all-in on pushing an absurd story that Jim Geraghty started calling it the Washington Bob McDonnell’s Thesis.
• 2011:  The Rick Perry nonsense with regard to the name of a ranch that his family rented hunting rights to.  Notice how that didn’t blow up after all?

(more…)