MSM Diary: Owned By The Drudge Report, Which Is More Fair And Balanced Than The Mainstream Press

The liberal bias of the mainstream media tilts so far left that any outlets not in that political lane, like the Drudge Report and Fox News Channel, look far more conservative than they really are, according to a UCLA professor's new book out next month.

In a crushing body blow to the pushers of the so-called "Fox Effect," which claims the conservative media is dragging the left into the center, UCLA political science professor Tim Groseclose in Left Turn claims that "all" mainstream news outlets have a liberal bias in their reporting that makes even moderate organizations appear out of the mainstream and decidedly right-wing to news consumers who are influenced by the slant. [Read Fox's Huckabee slams MSNBC's Matthews, Scarborough over bias.]

"Fox News is clearly more conservative than ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC and National Public Radio. Some will conclude that 'therefore, this means that Fox News has a conservative bias,'" he writes in an advance copy provided to Washington Whispers. "Instead, maybe it is centrist, and possibly even left-leaning, while all the others are far left. It's like concluding that six-three is short just because it is short compared to professional basketball players."

What's more, he says, "this point illustrates a common misconception about the Drudge Report. According to my analysis, the Drudge Report is approximately the most fair, balanced, and centrist news outlet in the United States. Yet, the overwhelming majority of media commentators claim that it has a conservative bias. The problem, I believe, is that such commentators mistake relative bias for absolute bias. Yes, the Drudge Report is more conservative than the average U.S. news outlet. But it is a logical mistake to use that to infer that it is based on an absolute scale."

And in further analysis sure to enrage critics of conservative media, Groseclose determines that Drudge, on a conservative to liberal scale of 0-100, with 50 being centrist, actually leans a bit left of center with a score of 60.4. The reason: Drudge mostly links to the sites of the mainstream media, with just a few written by Matt Drudge himself. "Since these links come from a broad mix of media outlets, and since the news in general is left-leaning, it should not be surprising that the slant quotient of the Drudge Report leans left," he writes. [Read Poll: Fox, O'Reilly most trusted news sources.]

The author developed a calculation to figure out the "political quotient" to find the bias of media outlets and the average slant of an organization.

Groseclose opens his book quoting a well-known poll in which Washington correspondents declared that they vote Democratic 93 percent to 7 percent, while the nation is split about 50-50. As a result, he says, most reporters write with a liberal filter. "Using objective, social-scientific methods, the filtering prevents us from seeing the world as it actually is. Instead, we see only a distorted version of it. It is as if we see the world through a glass—a glass that magnifies the facts that liberals want us to see and shrinks the facts that conservatives want us to see." [Check out political cartoons about the Democratic Party.]

He adds: "That bias makes us more liberal, which makes us less able to detect the bias, which allows the media to get away with more bias, which makes us even more liberal."

Some key points:

"Every mainstream national news outlet in the United States has a liberal bias."

"Supposedly conservative news outlets are not far right. For instance, the conservative bias of [Fox's] Special Report is significantly less than the liberal bias of CBS Evening News."

"Media bias aids Democratic candidates by about 8 to 10 percentage points in a typical election. I find, for instance, that if media bias didn't exist, John McCain would have defeated Barack Obama 56 percent to 42 percent, instead of losing 53-46." [See editorial cartoons about Barack Obama.]

Perhaps the most useful part of his book is the slant ratings of the media. The numbers are based on a conservative-to-liberal 0-100 rating, with 50 being centrist:

•New York Times-73.7.
•CBS Evening News-73.7.
•NPR Morning Edition-66.3.
•U.S. News & World Report-65.8.
•Drudge Report-60.4.
•ABC Good Morning America-56.1.
•Washington Times-35.4.

Left Turn, How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind, published by St. Martin's Press, is due out July 19.

THE REWARDS OF BEING A SOCIALIST: Pelosi's Wealth Grows By 62 Percent

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) saw her net worth rise 62 percent last year, cementing her status as one of the wealthiest members of Congress.

Pelosi was worth at least $35.2 million in the 2010 calendar year, according to a financial disclosure report released Wednesday. She reported a minimum of $43.4 million in assets and about $8.2 milion in liabilities.

For 2009, Pelosi reported a minimum net worth of $21.7 million.

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) also remained a multimillionaire. He reported that his minimum net worth in 2010 was close to $2.1 million, with zero liabilities. His 2009 minimum net worth was more than $1.8 million.

Forms disclosing the assets and liabilities of lawmakers for the 2010 calendar year were released Wednesday. The forms give a good estimate of lawmaker wealth, though they show ranges and not precise values for stocks, pension plans, vacation homes and other assets of lawmakers.

Pelosi saw her wealth rise due to some stock gains and real estate investments made by her husband, Paul.

Apple stock owned by Pelosi's spouse rose from at least $500,000 in 2009 to $1 million in 2010. The minority leader's husband also took a bigger stake in Matthews International Capital Management — worth at least $5 million last year, compared to $1 million in 2009 — and his investment in some undeveloped residential real estate in Sacramento, Calif., jumped to at least $5 million in value.

Paul Pelosi also has sizable assets in the United Football League, including $1 million in a partnership interest in a Jacksonville, Fla., franchise and $5 million in a partnership interest for the Sacramento Lions. (source)

Barry As President: JUST AS NIXON HAD HIS CAMBODIA OPERATION, Obama Orders The CIA To Operate Drones Over Yemen

The CIA is expected to begin operating armed drone aircraft over Yemen, expanding the hunt for al-Qaeda operatives in a country where counter-terrorism efforts have been disrupted by political chaos, U.S. officials said.

The plan to move CIA-operated Predator and other unmanned aircraft into the region reflects a decision by President Obama that the al-Qaeda threat in Yemen has grown so serious that patrols by U.S. military drones are not enough.

U.S. officials said the CIA would operate alongside, and in close coordination with, the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command, which has been flying Predators and other remotely piloted planes over Yemen for much of the past year.

Because it operates under different legal authorities than the military, the CIA may have greater latitude to carry out strikes if the political climate shifts in Yemen and cooperation with American forces is diminished or cut off.

The expanded drone campaign will make use of “a mix of U.S. assets,” said a U.S. official familiar with the plan. “It’s not like you’re going to have a change of command ceremony that goes from U.S. military to CIA.”

A CIA spokeswoman declined to comment when asked Monday about the Yemen plans. National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor said the White House also would not comment. The CIA’s plans were first reported by the Wall Street Journal Monday night.

The new tasking for the agency marks a major escalation of the clandestine American war in Yemen, as well as a substantial expansion of the CIA’s drone war.

The agency pioneered the use of armed drones in Afghanistan a decade ago and has carried out hundreds of strikes in Pakistan in recent years. As a result, officials said, the CIA has developed substantial expertise in using a combination of drone surveillance and the cultivation of human source networks on the ground to carry out strikes inside a country where the U.S. military has limited ability to operate.

The addition of CIA drones also addresses a growing concern inside the Joint Special Operations Command that the military-run drone campaign in Yemen was not getting adequate resources, given the seriousness of the threat posed by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, as the Yemen-based offshoot of the terrorist group is known.

Fewer than a dozen JSOC drones have been available to conduct patrols over Yemen for much of the past year, far fewer than have been used in Afghanistan or Iraq, said a second U.S. official.

The official, and others, spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity surrounding operations in Yemen. The decision to deploy CIA drones to Yemen comes as cooperation between U.S. special operations forces and Yemeni counter-terrorism units have collapsed amid political turmoil.

Yemen’s dictator for the past three decades, Ali Abdullah Saleh, flew to Saudi Arabia recently after being injured in an attack. Some Yemeni counter-terrorism teams, which are led by Saleh relatives, have been diverted from the pursuit of AQAP.

The turmoil has put pressure on the White House to use other means to locate AQAP operatives, who are seen as taking advantage of the chaos to improve their position in the country and potentially launch new attacks.

In recent months, some JSOC officers have complained to officials visiting from Washington that their paucity of resources was puzzling, given the concern expressed by the nation’s top intelligence officials about AQAP.

White House officials disputed that characterization. U.S. officials have testified repeatedly in recent months that AQAP represents the most immediate terrorism threat to American targets. At a hearing before a Senate committee Thursday, CIA Director Leon Panetta confirmed that the agency had expanded its counter-terrorism programs in Yemen, Somalia and North Africa.

“Our approach has been to develop operations in each of these areas that will contain al-Qaeda and go after them so they have no place to escape,” he said.

The group is responsible for plots that have included the unsuccessful attempt to bomb a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day in 2009 and an effort to send packages packed with explosives to addresses in the United States last year.

One of the key figures in the group is an American-born cleric, Anwar al-Aulaqi, who escaped a drone strike targeting him in Yemen last month. That strike was the first by the United States in Yemen since 2002, punctuating a long drought that U.S. officials have attributed to a lack of solid intelligence on the whereabouts of AQAP operatives who went into hiding after a flurry of conventional airstrikes in late 2009 and early 2010.

Another constraint on the Yemen campaign has been the availability of runway capacity at a U.S.-operated airfield in Djibouti, where the JSOC drones are based. It is not clear whether the CIA aircraft will operate from the same facility.(source)

Puerto Rican Independentistas Burn US Flag in San Juan During Obama Visit

Obama Heckeled At Miami Fundraiser

Barry As President: Unable To Make A Moral Call, White House Won't Say Weiner Should Resign

Remember how easily it was for Barry to make a judgement on the entire police department of Cambride, Mass, and how "stupidly" they acted? Even more time for review has elapsed in the Weiner scandal case than was allowed the Cambridge Police Dept in the Henry Gates case, but poor little Barry seems paralyzed with fear to make a smilar judgement about Weiner's actions.

A White House spokesman said Monday that Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) is a "distraction" from important issues, but he stopped short of calling for Weiner's resignation.

White House press secretary Jay Carney, who refused to comment on the scandal last week, said Monday that "the president feels, we feel at the White House this is a distraction."

"As Congressman Weiner has said himself, his behavior was inappropriate, dishonesty was inappropriate," Carney said, briefing reporters aboard Air Force One. "But the president is focused on his job, which is getting this economy continuing to grow, creating jobs and ensuring the safety and security of the American people."

Several senior Democrats including Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), and Democratic Campaign Congressional Chairman Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), called on Weiner to resign over the weekend.

When pressed on whether Obama would like to see Weiner resign, Carney demurred.

"I answered that question," Carney said. "We think it's a distraction from the important business that this president needs to conduct and Congress need to conduct. Beyond that I don't have any more comment."

Weiner entered a rehab facility over the weekend and has requested a leave of absence from the House while he seeks treatment.

MSM Diary: Weiner Scandal Is The Result Of "Culturally Backwards" Rural Americans, Says Chris Matthews

Palin Email Frenzy Backfires On Her Media Antagonists

The trove of more than 13,000 emails detailing almost every aspect of Sarah Palin’s governorship of Alaska, released late on Friday, paints a picture of her as an idealistic, conscientious, humorous and humane woman slightly bemused by the world of politics.

One can only assume that the Left-leaning editors who dispatched teams of reporters to remote Juneau, the Alaskan capital, to pore over the emails in the hope of digging up a scandal are now viewing the result as a rather poor return on their considerable investment.

If anything, Mrs Palin seems likely to emerge from the scrutiny of the 24,000 pages, contained in six boxes and weighing 275 pounds, with her reputation considerably enhanced. As a blogger at Powerline noted, the whole saga might come to be viewed as “an embarrassment for legacy media”.

Mrs Palin, who suddenly resigned as Alaska governor in July 2009, is no longer a public official. She holds no position in the Republican party. Despite the media hubbub that surrounds her every move, she is unlikely to be a candidate for the White House in 2012.

She is, however, viewed with a kind of horrified fascination by many in the media, who faithfully records everything she says and does while at the same time decrying her as ignorant and even evil.



Whether or not she runs for the White House – and the solid consensus among Republican leaders is that she won’t – the scramble over the Palin emails confirms her status as a pivotal figure in the race to challenge President Barack Obama next year.

It comes at a moment when the battle for the Republican nomination appears set to be transformed by the late entry of Governor Rick Perry of Texas, a social conservative and Palin ally who could almost immediately leap to the front of a currently lacklustre field.

Sources close to Mr Perry have confirmed that he is “highly likely” to announce a presidential run in the coming days. Intriguingly, they have also hinted at a something they believe would increase immeasurably Mr Perry’s chances of winning the White House – an endorsement from Mrs Palin.

On policy, Mrs Palin and Mr Perry, who succeeded George W Bush in 2000 and has since become the longest-serving governor in Texas history, are in almost perfect alignment. In addition, they are both beloved of the Tea Party, highly suspicious of Washington and physically attractive (Mr Perry is often likened to the Marlboro Man), charismatic figures.

Mrs Palin has repeatedly said that she believes Mr Obama can be defeated and that she will do everything to achieve that. With her popularity among independent voters very low, despite the intensity of her core support, throwing her weight behind a stronger candidate would be a better way of preserving her political capital and earning power than being one of the losing candidates in the Republican primaries.

The notion of Mrs Palin as White House kingmaker would have seemed wildly improbable if anyone had raised it before August 2008.

It was then that she was catapulted to international fame by Senator John McCain’s surprise decision to make her his vice-presidential running mate. Her reaction? “Can you flippinbelieveit?!”

This was a world, as the emails reveal, in which the then Alaska governor fretted about things like there being alcohol in her official residence, that might be a temptation to the teenage friends of her children.

In May 2007, she sought help from her staff in keeping the alcohol in the governor’s mansion away from young people, stating that it should be boxed up and “removed from the People’s House” – both for practical reasons and as a statement about her administration.

“Here’s my thinking: with so many kids and teens coming and going in that house, esp during this season of celebrations for young people – proms, graduations, etc, I want to send the msg that we can be – and ‘the People’s House’ needs to be – alcohol-free. There’s a lot of booze there – its too accessible and may be too tempting to any number of all those teens coming and going.”

In a February 2007 exchange, one adviser recommended that when she was in Washington she meet Pete Rouse, a Senate official who had lived in Alaska. “He’s now chief-of-staff for a guy named Barack Obama,” the aide wrote, adding that Mr Rouse “wants to help Alaska however he can”. Far from shrinking at the idea of conferring with a Democrat, Mrs Palin replied: “I’m game to meet him.”

The emails will finally confirm – in all but the darkest recesses of the world of Left-wing conspiracy theories – that Mrs Palin is, in fact, the mother of her youngest son Trig, who has Down’s Syndrome.

After relentless promotion by Andrew Sullivan, the British blogger who now works for Daily Beast/Newsweek, of the proposition that the mother was in fact Mrs Palin’s daughter Bristol, a teenager at the time, the subject had become part of mainstream debate.

The emails show Mrs Palin’s determination to protect Bristol but also her desire for a degree of privacy. “I wish I could shame people into ceasing such gossip about a teen, but I can’t figure out how to do that,” she wrote.
Communications from her children and husband make her family appear close and loving.

An email from Bristol, referring to her younger sister, said: “Hello Mother, Um, I’m sitting in library and I really thing you need to get Piper a cell phone!! Wouldn’t that be so adorable! She could text me while she was in class!! It’s a done deal right?! Perfect! Ok, I will talk to you later and I need some cash flow! Love ya!”

To an extent, the emails remind Americans of the person they saw take the stage at the Republican National Convention in Minnesota nearly three years ago – refreshing, plain-speaking, open and uncomplicated.

Since then, her image has hardened into one of a brittle, even paranoid, politician who seethes with resentment, feels aggrieved and entitled and is intent on pursuing celebrity even at the expense of her family.

Mrs Palin as a person has become so remote that it is hard to assess how much, if any, of that widely-held caricature has a basis in truth. The email release could mark the end of a chapter of what conservatives have termed “Palin Derangement Syndrome”. Her enemies in the media appear to have overplayed their hand.

Expressing a sentiment that will resonate with many, Greta Van Susteren, a Fox News anchor who is close to Mrs Palin, argued that she had been subjected to “a media colonoscopy” by news organisations on “a mission to destroy”.
With a film entitled The Undefeated, chronicling Mrs Palin’s rise to prominence, about to air, the former Alaska governor is doubtless hoping that harsher perceptions of her can be blunted.

Probably the person who has damaged her most, apart from perhaps the CBS anchor Katie Couric who elicited blank stares when she asked what Mrs Palin read, was Tina Fey, the Saturday Night Live comedienne and impersonator.

It was Fey who seared into the popular imagination the Palin phrase: “I can see Russia from my house!” Mrs Palin had never said any such thing but it encapsulated the feeling that she was frivolous and lacked any foreign policy credentials.

Three days later, a staffer called Patrick Galvin emailed Mrs Palin saying: “My suggestion is you offer to go on SNL and play Tina Fey, and you interview her as she plays you.”

Fey’s impersonation was so powerful that the two women are inseparable in some minds. Fox News, for which Mrs Palin works on a lucrative contract as a commentator, recently aired a picture of fey instead of Mrs Palin by mistake.
Mrs Palin did go on the show back in October 2008. But perhaps now might the time for Mrs Palin to take up Mr Galvin’s suggestion and return for a proper head-to-head.(source)

Obama's Failed Diplomacy At Work: Iran Speaks Nakedly About Testing Its First Nuclear Bomb

'The day after Iran's first nuclear test is a normal day'
A bizarre article on a Revolutionary Guard website breaks a taboo by anticipating the impact of an Iranian bomb

Any mention of an Iranian nuclear weapon is taboo in the Islamic Republic, which insists that its nuclear programme is entirely for peaceful, civil purposes. So it is remarkable, to say the least, that an article has appeared on the Gerdab website, run by Iran's Revolutionary Guards, anticipating the day after Iran's first test of a nuclear warhead. Here is a translation of the text:

The day after Iran's first nuclear test is a normal day.
The day after Islamic Republic of Iran's first nuclear test will be an ordinary day for us Iranians but in the eyes of some of us there will be a new sparkle.
It's a good day. It's seven in the morning. The sun is not fully up yet but everywhere is bright. In the northern hemisphere many countries are beginning the day...

The day before, probably in central deserts of Iran, where once Americans and some other Western countries wanted to bury their nuclear waste, an underground nuclear explosion has taken place. The strength of the explosion was not so great as to cause severe damage to the region nor so weak that Iranian scientists face any problems in running their tests.

Today is a normal day like any other. Like 90% of the year, there is news about Iran, and these are the headlines which can be seen on foreign news sites:

Reuters: Iran detonated its nuclear bomb
CNN: Iran detonated nuclear bomb
Al-Jazeera: The second Islamic nuclear bomb was tested
Al-Arabia: The Shia nuclear bomb was tested
Yahoo! News: Nuclear explosion in Iran
Jerusalem Post: Mullahs obtained nuclear weapon
Washington Post: Nuclear explosion in Iran, Shock and despair in Tel Aviv

Meanwhile, the domestic media will offer many congratulations to the Hidden Imam and the Supreme Leader:

Keyhan: Iran's first nuclear bomb was tested
Jomhoori-e-eslami: Iran successfully carried out a nuclear test
Iran: By order of the president, Iran's 100% homemade nuclear bomb was tested
Ettela'at: Iran's much anticipated nuclear bomb exploded

This strange, hypothetical, article, which first appeared on April 24, hammers home again and again the message that an Iranian nuclear test will not lead to disaster. On the contrary, life will go as before except that Iranians will feel better about themselves.

The news commotion will not knock life in Iran off balance. Civil servants will punch in at work on time as always, while some will be late as always. ...The day after the Islamic Republic of Iran's first nuclear test will be an ordinary day for us Iranians but in the eyes of some of us there will be a new sparkle. A sparkle of national pride and strength.

This has the look of a kite being flown, but for whom? It could be intended to get Iranians used to the idea of a nuclear test, and less fearful of international reaction. It could be a gesture of defiance to the world by hardline elements - according to independent experts, Gerdab is run by the Revolutionary Guards' cyber defence command, which is presumably still smarting from the Stuxnet attack.

Opposition websites describe it as an enforcement tool for the regime, identifying and threatening independent bloggers inside Iran.
The article comes during a period when Tehran's official stance is particularly defiant and assertive, announcing today that it will triple its production of 20% enriched uranium and shift it to the underground Fordow site, near Qom.

Meir Javedanfar, an Iranian-Israeli expert on the Tehran regime currently lecturing in Colombia, described the Gerdab article as "unbelievable".

I have never seen anything like this report. It's breaking a major taboo. For now we have to treat it as a one off. However if this report is followed by others similar to it, then it would signify a major change in the way Iran refers to its nuclear program. It would mean that Iran has decided to use the idea of a nuclear bomb as a deterrence against further sanctions and the possibility of a military attack by the West. It could also be a tool for the regime to boost its waning popularity at home.

Such a change could prove to be very damaging in the short and long term, as it would be a significant boost for western efforts to isolate Iran and to consolidate the international consensus against the Islamic Republic and its nuclear program. Such isolation and deteriorating economic situation could be more damaging to the regime's top priority, which is its survival, than a military attack by the West.(source)

Cloward-Piven Strategy: Obama's Undeclared War on America

The Cloward-Piven Strategy
Republican US House Speaker John Boehner, and US Senate Foreign Relations Committee ranking minority member Richard Lugar, are both obsessed with bringing President Obama to account under the War Powers Act for his intervention in Libya.

Libya is typical of Obama's foreign policy: timid, tardy, aloof, and counterproductive. Accordingly, the outcome from Obama's Libyan humanitarian adventure has been predictable, needlessly adding over $1 billion to the US federal deficit while emboldening a stalemate benefitting Gaddafi, who continues to inflict civilian casualties with impunity.

Whatever Obama's disposition of the War Powers Act concerning Libya, it is still trivial stuff compared with Obama's undeclared War on America. Boehner and Lugar need to stand down from the snipe hunt over Libya and pay attention to Obama's destruction here at home.

Obama's undeclared War on America has been as intense, unrelenting, costly, and devastating as any undeclared war since Korea. Obama's carpet-bombing through taxes, regulations, energy policies, and pledging to do more of the same has paralyzed and bankrupted the nation, plunging it into a despondency not seen since eight decades ago.

Apart from James Buchanan, no president has been so ill-prepared and willfully ignorant as Obama when presented with an unprecedented national crisis. We are now mired in the 21st century Great Gloom, our nation's 2nd Great Depression, having identical features with the first one: millions of Americans are out of work with few prospects for any; millions more Americans have lost their homes with even more facing foreclosure and owing more on their mortgages than the homes are worth; the private sector is calcified; high taxes and regulations frustrate capital formation and job creation.

Obama's inability or unwillingness to read history, compounded by his stubborn big government ideology, has led him to adopt or advocate for the single most devastating tactic that doomed Herbert Hoover when the Great Depression began and plagued FDR as the wretchedness of the 1930s persisted for nearly another decade: higher taxes.

The Great Depression's illiquidity closed thousands of banks, wiped out savings, and obliterated home and farm ownership. High tariffs choked international trade, idling more businesses and spoiling more stockpiles of foodstuffs.

Today's analog -- regulatory fever -- has strangled job creation, demolished the real estate markets, and crushed any hope to restore self-confidence by heaping nearly $2 trillion of unrelieved costs on American business.

Except for taxes and tariffs -- as David M. Kennedy argues in his Freedom From Fear-The American People in Depression and War 1929-1945, at least President Herbert Hoover didn't deliberately make the Depression worse. Hoover was physically exhausted and mentally drained in tirelessly applying any remedy that would ease the suffering and stop the economic bleeding.

Says Kennedy ( p. 94) "He kept up a punishing regimen of rising at six and working without interruption until nearly midnight. His clothes were disheveled, his hair rumpled, his eyes bloodshot, complexion ashen.

"By the fall of 1932 he had lost all stomach for political campaigning...seemed to campaign more for vindication of the historical record than for the affection in the hearts of voters.

"Just four years earlier he had won one of the most lopsided victories in the history of presidential elections...The Great Engineer, so recently the most revered American, was the most loathed and scorned figure in the country."

Contrast that scene with Obama on another golf outing, wolfing down chilidogs and cheeseburgers, and launching his 2012 re-election campaign eighteen months in advance.

Hoover gets a bum rap for allowing a recession to turn into the Great Depression. He tried everything at his disposal that contemporaneous economists and banker/financiers thought would work. But as Kennedy further observes, through the lens of economist Herbert Stein, the federal government at the time was too small to be leveraged; state and local governments had collective budgets five times larger than the federal government and some states had statutory restrictions on incurring more indebtedness. According to Kennedy, even Pennsylvania by its own constitution could not borrow more than $1 million.

The federal budget in 1929 was only 3% of GDP. Obama's 2012 budget would approach 25% of GDP. Obama sees no limit to bloated bureaucracies, the size of government tenfold larger and growing even more immense than Hoover could ever have imagined, and the debt to go with it flirting with sovereign default.

In the beginning Hoover, not gregarious by nature, engaged every politician and business leader who he thought could be enlisted for advice or action. Only after exhausting all possibilities, while the nation's fortunes plummeted further, did Hoover become isolated and withdrawn. Kennedy relates a dark joke circulating at the lowest point of Hoover's presidency: "the president asked for a nickel to make a telephone call to a friend, an aide flipped him a dime and said 'call them both'."

Hoover was a man of broad and deep intellect, a voracious student of economics and finance. Kennedy (p 94) recounts a quote from Theodore Joslin, a secretary to Hoover:


His was a mathematical brain...Let banking officials for example come into his office and he would rattle off the number of banks in the country, list their liabilities and assets, describe the trend of fiscal affairs, and go into the liquidity or lack of it, of individual institutions, all from memory.

What a contrast to Obama's teleprompter presidency, uttering shopworn political clichés with it, occasionally unable to string together anything coherent without it.

Prior to becoming president, Hoover was regarded as the most experienced organization titan, ironically owing to his single-handed leadership in the acclaimed Belgian food relief program upon the outset of WWI. As Kennedy notes, at the end of the War, Hoover was President Wilson's personal advisor, "as much as any one man could he got the credit for reorganizing the war-shattered European economy."

Yes, Hoover is tagged with failure. Yet he was serious, purposeful, and above all, even willing to abandon his own ideology in search for a cure. Hoover's acquiescence to the formation of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation capped a sequence of measures harnessing the potential power of government intervention when it was clear private means were insufficient. In fact, as Kennedy continues, noted Columbia University economist Rexford Tugwell, FDR's behind-the-scenes architect for much of the New Deal, "later conceded that practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started[.]"

Obama shares but two likenesses with Hoover. The first one in public utterances prone to underestimating the severity of the crisis.

Remarked Hoover in his famous understatement in May 1930, "I am convinced we have passed the worst and with continued effort we shall rapidly recover...the depression is over[.]" Last week we heard from Obama that "the economy is taking a while to mend...and faces bumps on the road to recovery."

Hoover's comments were accidents of timing, Obama's deliberate obfuscations.

And second, not unlike Hoover's (and later FDR's) addiction to tax hikes, Obama has overseen piles of costs heaped on everyday Americans from deliberately high energy prices to environmental regulatory roadblocks on energy production to $1 trillion in taxes and mandates under ObamaCare.

Who can objectively deny Obama has made the extant condition worse? Whether he has purposefully made things worse is up for some debate; after all he has no expertise in anything from which to conjure a sinister plan. Yet economic destruction derived from ignorance, folly, and neglect is still destruction. At least Hoover, by contrast, was a self-made economist who understood capital formation and liquidity, monetary and fiscal theory, and international trade, debt, and currency flows.

Arguably, international isolationism contributed to and prolonged the Great Depression. Obama's own personal isolationism, evidenced by his contempt for regular Americans and standoffish relations with foreign leaders, handmaiden to the scorn and hostility he shows towards Republicans, is a continual roadblock in finding solutions.

Even Obama's own erstwhile cheerleader for doomed Obamanomics, Austan Goolsbee, chief economic advisor to the president, has found either the task overwhelming or the companionship insufferable -- take your pick -- after only 10 months on the job.

Temperamentally Obama is a drone unleashing as much destruction on the American psyche as his drones have done to destroy military targets in Afghanistan. Devoid of honest analytics, Obama continues to issue phony reports from the domestic battlefront. Even the Washington Post, fiercely loyal to Obama's personality and politics, has had enough of his lies about the success from the auto industry bailouts.

If Obama's game is to perfect an undeclared War on America, he is succeeding. It remains to be seen whether the Republicans can summon enough nerve to reprise Gen McAuliffe's famous retort to the German demand for surrender at Bastogne in December of 1944, "Nuts."

Only Congress can now do what the voters sent them to do -- disarm and defund Obama's undeclared War on America. And for 2012, who shall be the Republicans' Gen Patton, coming to America's rescue?(source)