Columnist.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Cue "Fanfare for the Common Man" and rev up the Government Motors engines. Wednesday is Great American Auto Bailout Day at the Democratic National Convention. Party propagandists have prepared a prime-time-ready film touting the "rescue's" benefits for American workers. UAW President Bob King will sing the savior-in-chief's praises. But like all of the economic success stories manufactured by the White House, the $85 billion government handout is a big fat farce. "I said I believe in American workers, I believe in this American industry, and now the American auto industry has come roaring back," Obama bragged on the campaign trail. Here's the inconvenient story they won't tell you: GM is once again flirting with bankruptcy despite massive government purchases propping up its sales figures. GM stock is rock-bottom. Losses continue to be revised in the wrong direction. According to The Detroit News, "The Treasury Department says in a new report the government expects to lose more than $25 billion on the $85 billion auto bailout. That's 15 percent higher than its previous forecast."
Thumper the Rabbit's parents always taught him, "If you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all." If the left's self-appointed Omniscient Diviners of True Meaning have their way, conservatives in the public square won't be left with anything at all to say. Ever. It's a treacherous business exercising your freedom of speech in the age of Obama. As a public service, I present to you: "The 2012 Condensed Liberal Handbook of Racial Code Words." Decoder rings, activate! --Angry. On the campaign trail this summer, President Obama has become -- in the words of the mainstream Associated Press -- more "aggressive." But don't you dare call him "angry." According to MSNBC host Toure, that's racist!
While all eyes were on the Republican National Convention in Tampa and Hurricane Isaac on the Gulf Coast, the White House was quietly jacking up the price of automobiles and putting future drivers at risk. Yes, the same cast of fable-tellers who falsely accused GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney of murdering a steelworker's cancer-stricken wife is now directly imposing a draconian environmental regulation that will cost untold American lives. On Tuesday, the administration announced that it had finalized "historic" new fuel efficiency standards. (Everything's "historic" with these narcissists, isn't it?) President Obama took a break from his historic fundraising drives to proclaim that "(by) the middle of the next decade, our cars will get nearly 55 miles per gallon, almost double what they get today. It'll strengthen our nation's energy security, it's good for middle-class families, and it will help create an economy built to last."
Breaking news: The Fishwrap of Record has finally discovered that the Obama administration gives its Chicago corporate pals special access to power and regulatory favoritism. On Thursday, The Not-So-New York Times published an A1 story titled "Ties to Obama Aided in Access for Big Utility." Everyone, put on your shocked faces! "With energy an increasingly pivotal issue for the Obama White House," the Times intoned, "a review of Exelon's relationship with the administration shows how familiarity has helped foster access at the upper reaches of government and how, in some cases, the outcome has been favorable for Exelon." You mean Hope and Change was all smoke and mirrors? Well, knock me over with a feather and call me Grandpa Daley!
Can we stop calling the hosts of the presidential debates "moderators"? They're left-erators. It's time for the old media godfathers to end the pretense that they're fair and neutral observers of the American political scene. And it's time for the GOP to stop perpetuating these rigged exercises in futility. Last week, the Commission on Presidential Debates announced the names of 2012's chosen referees: CNN's Candy Crowley, PBS's Jim Lehrer and CBS's Bob Schieffer will preside over the three presidential debates; ABC's Martha Raddatz will host the sole vice presidential debate. While the debate panel trumpeted the gender diversity of its picks, the chromosomal diversity is far outweighed by the political uniformity, class conformity and geographical homogeneity of the group.
Hey, remember when Nancy Pelosi and a gaggle of Democratic women vowed to eradicate Washington's culture of corruption? Tee-hee. Instead of breaking up the Good Ol' Boys Club, Capitol Hill's leading liberal ladies have established their very own taxpayer-funded Sisterhood of the Plundering Hacks. This week, the names of two of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano's gal pals surfaced in a mortifying, Animal House-style scandal. If the allegations of whistleblowers pan out, DHS may soon be known as DSH: The Department of Sexual Harassment.
Looks like Vice President Joe Biden has been taking extracurricular Democratic jive-talking lessons. The results of condescending liberals' cynical racial pandering attempts are, as always, seismically cringe-inducing. At a campaign event in Danville, Va., the gaffetastic veep dropped his g's and picked up a bizarre twang in front of an audience of black voters. Middle-Class Joe swapped his Home Depot apron for an A.M.E. preacher's robe and sermonized about the big, bad GOP.
In the wake of the horrific Sikh temple shootings in Wisconsin, left-wing barrel-scrapers are demanding that talk-radio giant Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives apologize for criticizing a 2009 Department of Homeland Security report that hyped an ominous new wave of violent "rightwing extremism." I don't apologize. I call foul. The media lowlifes who exploit every tragic shooting to silence their law-abiding, First Amendment-exercising enemies are tearing this country apart. "Progressives" have had free rein to libel and slander peaceful, liberty-loving citizens -- while whitewashing the violent plots and criminal behavior of their ideological counterparts. No more.
Chutzpah overload in full effect: President Obama's sleazy super-PAC, run by his former White House spokesman Bill Burton, just released an ad accusing GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney of causing the cancer death of a steelworker's wife. It's not just a slanderous and false attack. It's a foolish attempt to camouflage the administration's massive jobs death toll, politicized pension plundering and Big Labor bailout cronyism. And it will backfire big time because the thousands and thousands of true victims of Obama's economic wreckage are speaking up and fighting back.
Rafalca is the name of Ann Romney's show horse, which competed in Olympic dressage this week. Rafalca Derangement Syndrome is the name of a debilitating partisan disease that is raging among snotty "progressives" posing as populists. On Thursday, the George Soros-funded henchmen of MoveOn promoted a new TV ad that "features a talking Rafalca Romney, who tells us Mitt would treat many Americans worse than a horse!" Interspersed with scenes of a dressage competition, the talking Rafalca mimics a faux British accent and lashes out at the Romneys' privately earned wealth...
It's come to this: In the name of protecting parents from their own lack of responsibility and common sense, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is waging all-out war on an innovative consumer product company in New York. The vengeful, destructive feds won't stop until the world is safe from tiny, magnetic Buckyballs -- and until every last job created by the firm is wiped out. Where are the defenders of American innovation and entrepreneurship when you need them? While the White House doles out billions of taxpayer dollars to failed crony ventures, this phenomenally successful toy maker is fighting for its life.
Vice President Joe Biden, America's textbook Beltway barnacle, still labors under the illusion that he is America's middle-class Everyman. And now, he's gone and dragged his adult children into the land of Democratic make-believe. This is a BFD: a Biden Fabulist Dud. As usual with White House class-warfare demagoguery, reality doesn't fit the wealth-bashing narrative. At the International Association of Fire Fighters 51st Convention in Philadelphia on Wednesday, Biden stoked passive-aggressive resentment of the 1 percenters. "The wealthy," he sniveled. "God bless 'em," he snarked. "I wish my kids would become wealthy," he sighed before railing against tax relief for all those evil, privileged rich people earning more than $250,000 a year.
It's one thing for Hollywood moppets and television Muppets to protest Chick-fil-A over the fast-food chain president's support for traditional marriage. They're private citizens and entities. But when an elected public official wields the club of government against a Christian business in the name of "tolerance," it's not harmless kid stuff. It's chilling. This week, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino declared, "Chick-fil-A doesn't belong in Boston." He recklessly slandered the company by accusing it of "discriminat(ing) against the population." And he warned ominously: "If they need licenses in the city, it will be very difficult -- unless they open up their policies."
When it comes to soldiers, breast-feeding moms, toddlers and grannies, the Transportation Security Administration is not just hands-on, it's hands-all-over. But when it comes to illegal alien pilot trainees, our homeland security bureaucracy's policy is still stuck in pre-9/11 mode: Hands off, blinders on. This week, the U.S. Government Accountability Office released a report on the airline security agency's "process for ensuring (that) foreign flight students do not pose a security risk." In short, there isn't much of a "process" at all when it comes to checking the immigration status of flight school students. While the GAO report may be new, the documented lapses are part of the same old, same old refusal to profile foreign flight risks for fear of offending and inconveniencing politically correct special interests.
Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod and his hatchet people are still yammering about GOP presidential rival Mitt Romney's overseas investments. It's time for the Romney campaign to educate voters about all the shady financial institutions embraced by Democrats right here on American soil. The fat-cat narrative attacks on Republicans won't go away by making nice with the White House -- or by relying on Beltway journalists to drop their double standards and vet the president's own bad bank entanglements. Indeed, The New York Times admitted this week that their staff and other political journalists from every major media outlet submit their work to the White House for unprecedented review, editing and "veto power." Fortunately, the truth manipulators and message massagers haven't gotten to this column yet. So, let's talk sleazy Democratic Party-backed banks, shall we?
The Obama administration's loathsome cowboy, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, won't take no for an answer. He's been smacked down repeatedly by federal courts for imposing a draconian, junk science-based moratorium on the oil and gas industry. Yet, the job-killing zealot and his boss just introduced another ruinous offshore drilling ban two weeks ago. The White House rationale for the renewed crackdown? Because we said so. Thomas Pyle of the D.C.-based Institute for Energy Research reports that the Salazar scheme "reinstitutes a 30-year moratorium on offshore energy exploration that will keep our most promising resources locked away until long after President Obama begins plans for his presidential library." Instead of working to enhance our energy independence and free up abundant natural resources, the Obama administration has worked tirelessly to close off access to nearly 86 billion barrels of oil on America's Outer Continental Shelf alone.
Hollywood and the American left love diversity, except when it offends their "progressive" value system. Witness the reaction to actor Brad Pitt's mother, Jane, who publicly opposed President Obama's re-election. Mrs. Pitt's pro-life, anti-gay marriage statement to her local paper last week enflamed the Tolerance Mob. And her mere expression of dissident political views exposed the glittering hypocrisy of the left-wing "No H8" campaign. In a letter to the editor for Missouri's Springfield News-Leader, Mrs. Pitt responded to another reader who argued that Christians should not support Mitt Romney because of his Mormon faith. Arguing for interfaith tolerance, she praised Romney's "high morals" and "business experience." The celebrity mom urged "prayerful consideration" from fellow Christians before voting for Obama -- "a man," she pointed out, "who sat in Jeremiah Wright's church for years, did not hold a public ceremony to mark the National Day of Prayer, and is a liberal who supports the killing of unborn babies and same-sex marriage."
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- Good news: The Waldo Canyon fire, which forced 32,000 residents (including our family) to flee, claimed two lives and destroyed 347 homes, is now 100 percent contained. Bad news: Radical environmentalists won't stop blowing hot air about this year's infernal season across the West. Al Gore slithered out of the political morgue to bemoan nationwide heat records and pimp his new "Climate Reality Project," which blames global warming for the wildfire outbreak. NBC meteorologist Doug Kammerer asserted: "If we did not have global warming, we wouldn't see this." Agriculture Department Undersecretary Harris Sherman, who oversees the Forest Service, claimed to the Washington Post: "The climate is changing, and these fires are a very strong indicator of that." And the Associated Press (or rather, the Activist Press) lit the fear-mongering torch with an eco-propaganda piece titled "U.S. summer is what 'global warming will look like.'"
What's pale yellow, riddled with holes and not very sharp? President Barack Obama's renewed class-warfare attack on GOP opponent Mitt Romney. To kick off the Independence Day holiday, America's fundraiser-in-chief took to Twitter to stoke wealth-bashing resentment against Republicans. "FACT," Obama's official Twitter account declared, "In 2010, Romney reported having a $3 million Swiss bank account." Obama for America campaign manager Jim Messina piled on, urging "every reporter covering Romney" to read left-wing Vanity Fair's new report on his offshore finances. In a water-carrying news conference call, Obama campaign flack Ben LaBolt assailed Romney's "mysterious corporation in Bermuda, his funds in the Cayman Islands and the Swiss bank account he opened." The Democratic wizards of election-year optics believe that such populist rhetoric demonizing foreign money will help shore up their left flank and win independents tired of crony, out-of-touch government. One problem: They launched their class war fusillade in the same week that Tinseltown tycoon George Clooney announced Obama fundraising efforts -- in Geneva, Switzerland. Oops.
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- Did you know that President Obama has been incommunicado with Colorado's governor for more than two weeks as the nation's worst wildfires rage across the state? Maybe he thought we were all "doing fine." After an embarrassing Beltway press briefing revelation about our out-of-touch White House, the administration finally decided to divert the campaigner in chief from his nationwide fundraising frenzy for a quick look-see at our devastated city on Friday. It's "leadership from behind" you can count on. On Wednesday, press secretary Jay Carney acknowledged that Obama hadn't talked to Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper in 15 days. Holy smokes. The High Park fire, which has consumed nearly 90,000 acres and claimed nearly 257 homes west of Fort Collins, ignited on June 9 and is still active. During a campaign swing just last week, first lady Michelle Obama made a brief mention of the High Park fire before launching into her standard GOP-bashing stump speeches.
