Disrupting the Narrative of the New Left, its allies in Academia, Hollywood and the Establishment Media, and examining with honesty the goals of cultural Marxism and the dangers of reactionary and abusive political correctness.
THE NARRATIVE AND POLITICAL CORRECTNESS
“Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.”-George Orwell
Showing posts with label Left-wing strategery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Left-wing strategery. Show all posts
Harry Reid's unhinged rants on the Senate floor about David and Charles Koch reflect not just one man's paranoia but an empty strategy of demagoguery by a major political party. A new ad from the party's Senate Majority PAC attempting to protect Mary Landrieu from the consequences of her support for Barack Obama's agenda tried to shift attention in Louisiana to "out-of-state billionaires," by which they did not mean George Soros or Tom Steyer. The ad claims that the Kochs support "tax cuts for companies that ship our jobs overseas," but as the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler deduces, practically nothing in that argument is true...
Black Friday is here and you know what that means: minions of Big Labor, left-wing activist groups and yes, maybe even a handful of actual Walmart employees, will be out picketing the nation's largest retailer in various locales across the country. Big Labor propagandists and left-wing activists are trying to convince people that this is the year when their predictions of "widespread, massive strikes and protests for Black Friday" will actually come true. This, in turn, will signify a heroic new era of workers uniting against the evil empire of capitalism…or something.
In reality, these "strikes" are not the culmination of an organic movement of oppressed and unhappy employees. Instead, they are nothing more than the kind of Potemkin village protests - comprised of few or no actual Walmart employees - that are organized by Big Labor to smear the nation’s biggest retailer. It's the usual shakedown.
But you won't see those national labor unions on the front lines. Instead you'll see an organization called OUR Walmart, which represents the unions’ latest gimmick: "worker center" front groups (the lefties prefer the term "alt-labor").
Worker centers look like unions, throw money around like unions and protest like unions. But since they don't actually negotiate with company management on behalf of workers, these so-called "worker centers" aren't required to register as unions under federal labor laws. They are typically registered as nonprofit organizations - the same designation as churches, charities and schools.
This allows them to avoid many of the reporting requirements of labor unions, as well as the necessity of holding democratic leadership elections. There's nothing left-wingers abhor more than public accountability and honest elections. Thus the rise of astroturf outfits like OUR Walmart.
The loophole in labor laws that OUR Walmart and other worker centers are exploiting is central to their existence. Without it, after 30 days, they would be forced to do one of two things: either call for an election - an election they'd undoubtedly lose - or call off their protests.
Even MSNBC recognizes that the so-called "strikes" are more left-wing agitation than legitimate labor action. In an article on MSNBC.com, Ned Resnikoff acknowledged that OUR Walmart hasn't predicted large scale employee turnout. Instead, they're suggesting that the agitators will be just more liberal activists:
But a protest - which doesn't even necessarily include current Walmart employees - isn't the same thing as a strike. Indeed, the organization has been downplaying the number of strikers, and instead emphasizing the support it enjoys from organizations like Color of Change and MoveOn.org.
Depending on which union leader you talk to, OUR Walmart is either a subsidiary of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, or a recently spun-off independent organization that's merely funded by the union. The UFCW has devoted substantial resources to this week's street theater by printing and distributing protest materials including posters, handbills, etc., and is even providing social media operational support through paid consultants.
What they can't provide is an authentic employee protest.
OUR Walmart's 2012 Black Friday protest featured thousands of demonstrators, but less than 50 actual associates, according to the company. Labor watchdogs expect more of the same this year, especially because the worker center keeps focusing on the number of protests, rather than the number of employee dissidents.
"They're not the type of grassroots worker-driven efforts that media portrays them to be," Ryan Williams of Worker Center Watch said. "They're protests held by professional protesters - oftentimes paid and given training - to cause a scene for publicity."
J. Justin Wilson, managing director of the Center for Union Facts, said that UFCW members, political allies, and paid protestors dominate such rallies, in order to give off the appearance of strength.
"OUR Walmart has nowhere near the support they need to unionize Walmart; if they did, they would do it," he said.
There are some indications that even the non-employee activists are unreliable:
Wilson's organization sent observers to labor union meetings designed to plan and promote the Black Friday walkouts in Chicago, Pittsburgh and Raleigh. Although touted by union leaders as crucial to the strike’s success, according to Wilson nearly no one attended the events.
Only two union activists - not Wal-Mart employees - showed up to the Chicago meeting on Nov. 12. Just four managed to make it to Pittsburgh's strike planning committee this Wednesday. And an expected meeting in Raleigh earlier this month was canceled, apparently due to a complete lack of interest.
"At the Chicago one, instead of having a meeting talking about the strike they had people making phone calls, trying to get people to turn out for the strikes," Wilson claimed. "And even after making a fair number of calls, no one actually even wanted to come."
Strikes against Wal-Mart were similarly exaggerated in the run-up to Black Friday in 2012.
However many activists show up for the latest protests, there is no doubt that this activity is intended to do nothing but make life difficult for Walmart by fabricating a public relations disaster. It's the threat that always accompanies an extortion racket.
President Barack Obama has bungled HealthCare.gov so badly that he's told senior aides to not even try to win positive coverage from the national press.
Instead, they're going local.
In the past month, Obama and his Cabinet have hit nine of the top 10 cities with the highest concentration of the uninsured, while senior administration officials have held almost daily reporter conference calls in nearly a dozen states to challenge Republican governors who refuse to expand Medicaid.
Obama's political arm, Organizing for Action, is taking a similar approach, holding protests — some attended by only a dozen or so people — that win coverage on the local pages of the nation’s small-town newspapers.
The local strategy is unusually aggressive, even for a president on the ropes and desperate to circumvent the national media. It's been the only way to break through the glut of bad headlines and go on the offense to make the law work — although even when the White House showers attention on small markets, the results can be mixed.
Obama, thin-skinned about media coverage of his presidency and often frustrated by the White House press corps, knows a few favorable local headlines is as good as it gets these days.
On the floor of the U.S. Senate on Friday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D.-Nev.) said that "a very wealthy group of people" are backing the Tea Party in what Reid described as an "effort to destroy our government."
"A bad day for government is a good day for the anarchists among us, those who believe in no - I repeat, no - government. That is their belief," Reid said. "The modern-day anarchists known as the Tea Party, they believe in no government. And they are backed by a very wealthy group of people who finance this effort to destroy our government."
Reid's accusation that the Tea Party is an "effort to destroy our government" - which he made at 12:16 p.m. Friday afternoon Eastern time - was not included in "his remarks as prepared for delivery" that were posted on his official Senate website. However, they were captured on video by C-SPAN and included in the transcript of Reid's speech printed in the Congressional Record.
Today’s vote by House Republicans is pointless. The American people will not be extorted by Tea Party anarchists. #GOPshutdown
— Senator Harry Reid (@SenatorReid) September 28, 2013
"We have a situation where this country has been driven by the Tea Party for the last number of years. When I was in school, I studied government, and I learned about the anarchists," Reid said. "Now, they were different than the Tea Party because they were violent. But they were anarchists because they did not believe in government in any level and they acknowledged it. The Tea Party kind of hides that."
Or maybe there's no "anarchism" to be hidden because the accusation itself is a load of bullshit. I'm just sayin'...
I guess there's nothing like celebrating May Day in the Oval Office by hugging an adorable little girl. Of course, the hugging could have been done without the royal photographer being there to record for the viewing pleasure of the people.
I know that Dear Leader is desperate for any activity that doesn't require actual leadership or governing but the sheer number of these idiotic photo ops needs to be reduced. The so-called "charm offensive" is already a failure because the people are fully aware that Dear Leader is a liar who cannot be trusted. History has taught us that using children as props and exploiting them for political gain is neither a new phenomenon nor a credible one. See for yourself...
Now, let's be clear. It's not my intention to imply that Obama is like Hitler. The point is that publicity stunts, such as arranging an official photo be taken in order to demonstrate "caring," are extremely sketchy. Obviously, any genocidal dictator can do as much.
So if all our Dear Leader has to offer are more speeches, more photo ops and more emotional blackmail aimed directly at the people in order to promote his legacy, then he's already a lame duck. Almost as lame as the dead guy below.
It seems to me that left-wing elites, who see themselves as the intellectual vanguard of their movement, have always relied on an army of foot soldiers to do the actual fighting and destroying. The original Marxist vision assumed it would be "the workers."
Later, non-whites, specifically blacks, were seen as the most likely group to overturn the existing order. But while there have been flare-ups over the decades, the ultimate race war never really broke out. In the United States, race relations and racial equality under the law has mostly been a gradual, legal and relatively peaceful process. No cataclysmic upheaval.
Nowadays, the great hope for the destruction of the West lies with radical Islam. It's ironic that Islamofascism - the Left's last best hope of destroying our Judeo-Christian culture- is hardly a friend of the Left's stated value system. But left-wingers don't think that far ahead. They only dream about destruction, which they feel must come first, before they can create their utopia on Earth.
My point is this: They see radical Islam as the enemy of their enemy, which is why they support it. This is the answer to the question posed in the article below.
Liberalism is an essentially secular movement that began within Christian culture. (In Worshipping the State, I trace it all the way back to Machiavelli in the early 1500s.) Note the two italicized aspects: secular and within.
As secular, liberalism understood itself as embracing this world as the highest good, advocating a self-conscious return to ancient pagan this-worldliness. But this embrace took place within a Christianized culture. Consequently liberalism tended to define itself directly against that which it was (in its own particular historical context) rejecting.
Modern liberalism thereby developed with a deep antagonism toward Christianity, rather than religion in general. It was culturally powerful Christianity that stood in the way of liberal secular progress in the West—not Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Shintoism, Druidism, etc.
Liberals therefore tended to approve of anything but Christianity. Deism was fine, or even pantheism. The eminent liberal Rousseau praised Islam and declared Christianity incompatible with good government. Hinduism and Buddhism were exotic and tantalizing among the edge-cutting intelligentsia of the 19th century. Christianity, by contrast, was the religion against which actual liberal progress had to be made.
So, other religions were whitewashed even while Christianity was continually tarred. The tarring was part of the liberal strategy aimed at unseating Christianity from its privileged cultural-legal-moral position in the West. The whitewashing of other religions was part of the strategy too, since elevating them helped deflate the privileged status of Christianity.
And so, for liberalism, nothing could be as bad as Christianity. If something goes wrong, blame Christianity first and all of Western culture that is based upon it.
Once again Barack Obama has managed to achieve bipartisanship in Washington - in opposition to his agenda. In the latest blow to Dear Leader's credibility and influence, the House overwhelmingly passed a measure to end furloughs at the Federal Aviation Administration, sending it to President Obama for his signature. White House press secretary Jay Carney said Friday the president would sign the bill, which the Senate approved late Thursday by unanimous consent. Meanwhile, the proglodytesare upset, complaining that Democrats caved to Republican demands, and have essentially lost the sequester fight:
The point of sequestration is supposedly to create just enough chaos that regular people - people with political clout, such as, say, business travelers - demand that Congress fix it. Or as the Democrats conceived it, to create the public pressure they need to knock Republicans off their absolutist position on taxes
Well, they got their outcry…and then promptly folded. They allowed Republicans to inaccurately characterize the FAA furloughs as a political stunt. Then without any organized effort to cast the flight delays as part of the same problem that’s also keeping poor people homeless they assented to providing special treatment to the traveling class.
So now the big, predictable opportunity to return to the sequestration debate under genuine public scrutiny is gone.
Inaccurately characterized? Wrong again. This was nothing but a political stunt and everybody knew it:
The corrupt media is largely falling into line, blaming "steep budget cuts" for the flight delays. But President Obama's original FAA budget request for fiscal year 2013 was $15,146 million. Congress, knowing sequestration loomed, appropriated $16,008 million. From that, sequestration cut $637 million; so this year's actual, final FAA budget is $15,371 million. That's a cool $225 million more than Obama's original budget request.
So why can't the FAA simply implement the original plan? Heck, they could even ask Congress to rescind the extra $225 million they don't need - and use it for deficit reduction. But that would prove there is plenty of room to cut spending in the bloated federal budget. And the Obama administration instead insists on arbitrarily and artificially making spending cuts painful.
The Federal Aviation Administration claims the sequester spending cuts are forcing it to delay some 6,700 flights a day, but rarely has a bureaucracy taken such joy in inconveniencing the public.
Though the FAA says it is strapped for cash, the air traffic control agency managed to find the dollars to update its interactive "command center" tool on its website so passengers can check if their airports are behind schedule due to what it calls sequester-related "staffing" problems. Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn noticed this rare case of FAA technological entrepreneurship and fired off a letter Wednesday protesting what he called the agency's "full blown media rollout" to hype the flight delays.
That had zero impact on FAA bosses, who were on Capitol Hill rationalizing their dereliction. But after Mr. Coburn published his letter on his website, FAA regional employees wrote to blow the whistle on their bosses. As one email put it, "the FAA management has stated in meetings that they need to make the furloughs as hard as possible for the public so that they understand how serious it is."
Strategies include encouraging union workers to take the same furlough day to increase congestion. "I am disgusted with everything that I see since the sequester took place," another FAA employee wrote. "Whether in HQ or at the field level it is clear that our management has no intention of managing anything. The only effort that I see is geared towards generating fear and demonstrating failure."
Harry Reid began the week with a statement that was framed as a dire warning but was really more of a boast:
"In airports across the country, millions of Americans will get their first taste of the pain of sequestration."
But the braggadocio quickly turned to concern and then panic as the public saw right through the media smokescreen and correctly blamed the incompetent Obama administration for the annoying delays. Once Senate Dems backed down, Obama had no choice but to signal that he would sign the legislation because to veto it would only confirm the suspicion: that his goal was to turn the American people into collateral damage in order to hurt the House GOP. Speaker Boehner left no doubt who he blamed for the problem:
"The disruption to America's air traffic system over the past week was a consequence of the administration's choice to implement the president's sequestration cuts in the most painful manner possible... With this solution, Americans will no longer be burdened by President Obama’s flight delays and our economy will not take an unnecessary hit."
House Majority Leader Cantor weighed in as well on the GOP's latest triumph:
As a CQ / Roll Call reporter tweeted last night, "Make no mistake, this FAA fix is a complete, utter cave by Senate Democrats and, if signed, by the White House." This is a sentiment expressed in other press reports over the last 12 hours, including, Politico: "Democrats blink first on aviation" and Chicago Tribune: "White House Scrambles For Damage Control."
Consider that the Democrats opening position was they would only replace the sequester with tax increases. By the first of this week Senator Reid proposed replacing the whole sequester with phony war savings. And by last night, Senate Democrats were adopting our targeted "cut this, not that" approach. This victory is in large part a result of our standing together under the banner of #Obamaflightdelays.
When Dear Leader tries to harm us, we'll just keep dancing. Power to the people!
Jon Allen follows HuffPost's intriguing advocacy journalism by quoting the few Democrats who haven't endorsed gay marriage yet. (HuffPost's been straight-up shaming them, naming the senators who have yet to flip and explaining that "the arc of history is moving in the direction of marriage equality.) He finds only two senators up in 2014 who refuse to endorse same-sex marriage. That's incredible. It was also predicted by conservatives nearly 10 years ago.
Above, you'll find a short video composed of the floor speeches some top Democrats made about SSM. At the time, Republicans wanted to block gay marriage in Massachusetts by amending the constitution with an official marriage definition. Democrats argued against that, but they didn't argue in favor of gay marriage. They argued that DOMA made such an amendment unnecessary. They assured people like Rick Santorum that the slippery slope case for gay marriage was bogus.
The new Democratic advocates for SSM fall into two camps. The first consists of people who always liked the idea of this but worried about losing national elections. In his memoir, Democratic consultant Bob Shrum remembers John Kerry fretting that the Massachusetts Supreme Court had forced Democrats to talk about gay marriage before they were ready to. "Why couldn't they just wait a year?" he asked Shrum, mournfully. The second camp consists of people who really do oppose the idea of gay people getting married. Republicans argued that this second camp was tiny, and that liberals were hiding behind it. They were right!
The lesson to be learned here is that whenever Democrats scoff at the idea of a slippery slopeyou can safely assume that they are either deliberately lying about their true agenda or they are too naive to be taken seriously. Either way, they cannot be trusted. The question to be answered going forward is whether or not this sudden rush to embrace homosexual marriage by the Democrats represents a shift to the Left for which they need to pay a political price next year and in 2016 or if this represents the Overton Window of public opinion shifting from radical to popular. I think it's a bit of both.
On the issues ofhomosexual marriage (and gun control) there is no question that moderate Democrats are being purged, either in primaries or by leaving them to fend for themselves in states that voted for Romney last year. The party that booed God at its convention last September is adopting positions that were still politically dangerous for them as recently as 2008. Obama's "evolution" on the issue of homosexual marriage and subsequent victory in November has eased the way.
On the other hand, while I think that the pollingwe are being spoon-fed by the media is questionable, there is no doubt that public opinion on the issue of homosexual marriage has shifted in its favor. This is why winning the culture is so important. This is an issue that has found its way into the mainstream through the culture, primarily viaHollywood andacademia. It's also a triumph of messaging. The focus has been on "equality" and "civil rights" and "fairness." Who can be against those things, right?
The focus of the dialogue must be changed to more accurately reflect the Left's agenda here: The continuing assault on our First Amendment rights. The issue of homosexual marriage is a useful way to create a hammer with which to hit Americans over the head by classifying any opposition to the radical LGBT agenda as "bigotry."It is not a coincidence that our inalienable rights to freedom of speech and religion as well as our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms are under constant attack these days. The slippery slope is real.
According to information the Tatler has obtained from the Battleground Texas kickoff meeting, the mechanics behind Organizing for Action's "people based" approach are at once simple and revolutionary. Bird's team has developed a five-point contact plan for identifying and courting low-information, low-frequency voters. These voters are average folks who pay little attention to politics and current events and have left no trail allowing either party to identify which party they're more likely to vote for.
Bird's volunteers call these prospects and use a script to ascertain whether they are persuadable to the Democrats' point of view. Volunteers perform a "gut check" on the prospective voter, and these gut checks have proven to be accurate nearly 95% of the time. If the prospect is not identified as persuadable, then the volunteer files them away and does not call them again.
But if the prospect appears to be persuadable, then the five-point plan comes into play. Volunteers will call the voter again, based on current events, to deliver information crafted to shape the prospect's beliefs. For instance, if a volunteer has identified a suburban Fort Worth mom as a persuadable Democratic voter based on social issues, Todd Akin's remarks on rape would have generated a second phone call. Richard Mourdock's comments would have generated a third. A fourth call may have focused on the ObamaCare birth control mandate, casting it as a service to women and casting opposition to it as a "war on women." The fifth call would have simply given the prospect information on where to vote. Job done.
Someone who probably would not have voted at all has been processed over a few weeks into a likely Democratic voter. At the very least, they have become far less likely to vote for the party of Akin and Mourdock, who have been cast along with their party as villains. Obviously, none of the recent Democrats' remarks on rape that aired during Colorado's gun control debate would get any play at all in these calls. They are one-sided information streams, intended to create velocity on the way to creating a vote.
The simple part to this is that parties and campaigns have used phone banking for decades. But phone banking has not typically been used in this way, using follow-ups over a longer period of time, to turn an unidentified non-voter into a known quantity voter. Widespread and cheap VOIP phone technology and the Obama campaign's massive and highly organized volunteer army work together to make the five-point system affordable, and the tactic of making the political phone call a source of tailored information that amounts to a running commentary on the campaign over time makes it effective.
Bird's group used this system in 2012 in several swing states, capturing all of them. Democratic volunteers from Texas played critical roles; now Democratic volunteers from outside Texas will join in the effort to swing the Lone Star State.
Along with its emphasis on out-of-state events to manipulate voters in the state, BT intends to deceive Texas voters regarding what the Democrats actually want to do in Texas. Texas policy successes stand for themselves, but Democrats have consistently and relentlessly attacked them while holding up other, Democrat-controlled, states as models. Over the years, Texas Democrats have essentially parroted the national DNC message. If the national party was for ObamaCare, so was the state party. If the national party preferred California and Chicago governance over Texas governance, so did the state party.
Texans tend to be pro-life and favor the Second Amendment; the Texas Democrats have consistently and loudly gone the other way on both. Bird's group intends to cater its message to Texas, so that the national Democrats' message does not scare off potential voters in traditionally conservative communities.
The national Democratic platform of union power, high taxes, lavish government spending, weak national security, curtailed constitutional rights, and centralized government control does not play well in Texas. So the Battleground group intends to avoid explaining and detailing the Democrats' plans as much as possible. They're not jettisoning any of that. They just intend to hide it. Once elected to power, this Obama-centric group can be counted on to deliver Obama-style policies like those that are carving California hollow and turning Chicago into a war zone.
And here are some useful items to help combat these Kool-aid peddlers:
#BGTX ED @jennb_jennb: We will do this block by block. When neighbors are talking to neighbors...that is how we win. #GameOnCorpus
— Battleground Texas (@BGTX) March 16, 2013
This organizing effort is aimed at and relies almost exclusively on the Hispanic community in Texas. This is where the GOP must concentrate its outreach efforts. There's no reason why the techniques outlined in the article can't be used by Republicans. And, of course, the GOP has a massive headstart and a ready-made political infrastructure. There is absolutely no excuse - none! - for the Texas GOP and the national organizationto not come down on these clowns like a ton of bricks. They want to turn the success story of Texas into a horror story like California. What are you going to do about it?
Critics of voter ID and other laws cracking down on voter fraud
claim they're unnecessary because fraud is nonexistent. For instance,
Brennan Center attorneys Michael Waldman and Justin Levitt claimed last
year: "A person casting two votes risks jail time and a fine for minimal
gain. Proven voter fraud, statistically, happens about as often as
death by lightning strike."
That statement is as ludicrous as it is self-serving. It would be much more accurate to say that voter fraud gets caught about as often as death by lightning strike. Without voter ID, it's extremely difficult to catch the fraud since most of it occurs at the time of registration, not on election day. By the time election day rolls around it's already too late.As demonstrated below, one person can register under a variety of names. Without ID there is no way to detect when that person shows up at various polling places and gives a name that is already on the rolls. That's why the names of dead people and shut-ins are so useful to fraudsters.
Yet not only do Democrats deny the existence of voter fraud but they claim that any attempt to maintain the integrity of the voting process amounts to "voter suppression." Theyare fond of accusing Republicans of engaging in the same kinds of tactics perfected by Democrats in the Jim Crow South. It's outrageous. Voter fraud is the kind of anti-democracy criminality that has been a hallmark of Democrats (how ironic!) since the early 1800s. So when it comes to contaminating the process, historically, it's the Dems who are guilty.
Meet Melowese Richardson, a Democrat poll worker in Cincinnati. She practices voter fraud and she's been busted, along with a two other operatives.
Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters said he was pursuing charges against Russell Glassop, 75, Melowese Richardson, 59, and Sister Marguerite Kloos, 54.
A grand jury indicted Glassop and Kloos for one count of illegal voting each, a felony. Glassop and Kloos could face up to 18 months in prison if convicted.
The grand jury indicted Richardson on eight counts of illegal voting. If convicted, she faces up to 12 years in prison.
Deters said Glassop voted on behalf of his deceased wife in the 2012 presidential election. Glassop's wife requested an absentee ballot before her death but she died before the Hamilton County Board of Elections mailed out the ballots. Deters said Glassop cast an absentee ballot under his wife's name.
Kloos was accused of casting a ballot for another nun in the 2012 presidential election. Kloos's lawyer contacted Deters and said she would plead guilty and cooperate with the prosecutor's office.
Deters said Richardson was charged with eight counts of illegally voting after she cast ballots in various elections for her family members. One count charges her of voting twice in the 2012 presidential election. Deters also said Richardson has been a poll worker in Hamilton County since 1998.
There are three other cases of possible voter fraud still under investigation by the prosecutor's office, Deters said.
"This is not North Korea," Deters said in a statement announcing the indictments. "Elections are a serious business and the foundation of our democracy. In the scheme of things, individual votes may not seem important, but this could not be further from the truth. Every vote is important and every voter and candidate needs to have faith in our system. The charges today should let people know that we take this seriously."
EVERY TIME FRAUDSTERS LIKE MELOWESE RICHARDSON CAST AN ILLEGAL VOTE THEY NULLIFY THE VOTE OF AN HONEST PERSON.
What was supposed to be yet another propaganda coup against the GOP has rapidly become a farce that has blown up in Dear Leader's face.
The phrase "jumping the shark" describes that gimmicky moment when something once considered significant is exposed as ludicrous. This is the week the White House jumped the sequester.
The precise moment came Tuesday, when the administration announced that it was canceling public tours of the White House, blaming budget cuts. The Sequesterer in Chief has insisted that cutting even $44 billion from this fiscal year will cause agonizing pain—airport security snarls, uninspected meat, uneducated children. Since none of those things has come to pass, the White House decided it needed an immediate and high-profile way of making its point. Ergo, it would deny the nation's school kids a chance to view a symbol of America.
The act was designed to spark outrage against Republicans, yet the sheer pettiness of it instead provided a moment of clarity. Americans might not understand the technicalities of sequester, but this was something else entirely. Was the president actually claiming there was not a single other government item—not one—that could be cut instead of the White House tours? Really?
Keep in mind that the clip comes from ABC, not Fox, so it's hard for even the most hardcore LWNJs to whine that it's all Roger Ailes's fault. I can only say "well played, sir" to John Boehner. While Dear Leader disappoints little kids by petulantly shutting down the White House tours, Boehner's throwing out the welcome mat. And Eric Bolling of Fox is happy to take things to the next level:
In a Facebook post on Thursday, anchor Eric Bolling announced that he will offer to personally pay the costs to keep the tours at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue open for a week.
During Thursday evening's episode of "The Five," Bolling elaborated. "I will absolutely write the check if they open the doors next week."
"I'll make you a deal Mr. President…Let these families take their White House tours next week and I'll cover the added expenses. Word is it will cost around $74,000."
Referencing White House press secretary Jay Carney, the Fox host added: "Mr Carney, you know this an offer you can’t refuse. Give me a call."
