P.J. Gladnick's blog

James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic, usually presents an image of himself as a "reasonable" liberal. However yesterday he revealed his inner moonbat with an article title worthy of a thread name in the sanity challenged Democratic Underground: "5 Signs the United States is Undergoing a Coup." After a few hours of reflection, Fallows realized he allowed too much of his moonbat side to be displayed to the public so he altered the title with this explanation:

Remember all the cries in the past for governmental transparency by the "progressive" media? Well, when it comes to the Department of Justice lack of transparency in refusing to turn over documents related to Operation Fast and Furious, Rolling Stone writer Jillian Rayfield excuses it away by claiming that the demand is really due to a GOP 'war' on Eric Holder:

A big part of the show is demonizing Holder himself. Several Republicans have recently called for Holder to step down, among them Johnny Isakson (R-GA), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), and Jon Cornyn (R-TX), who did so to Holder's face in a Senate Judiciary hearing just last week. In one Republican primary debate, Rick Perry and Rick Santorum also both called for Holder's resignation. Romney, for his part, has steered clear of the issue so far, but he won't be able to for long if RNC Chair Reince Priebus gets his way. Priebus says that "Fast and Furious" will be a central 2012 campaign theme, so even if the contempt proceedings go away, it doesn't look like Holder will be off the hook anytime soon.

The Occupy Wall Street movement was first proposed by the leftwing Canadian magazine, Adbusters. However, now even they are forced to admit the obvious about the failure of their creation which you can read in their sad OWS obituary:

Burned out, out of money, out of ideas… seduced by salaries, comfy offices, book deals, old lefty cash and minor celebrity status, some of the most prominent early heroes of our leaderless uprising are losing the edge that catalyzed last year’s one thousand encampments. Bit by bit, Occupy’s first generation is succumbing to an insidious institutionalization and ossification that could be fatal to our young spiritual insurrection unless we leap over it right now. Putting our movement back on track will take nothing short of a revolution within Occupy.

We begin tonight with what has become by any measure a pretty massive protest movement. While it goes by the official name ‘Occupy Wall Street,’ it has spread steadily and far beyond Wall Street, and it could well turn out to be the protest of this current era. ---Brian Williams on Oct. 5, 2011 gushing with extreme hype over OWS.

Despite all the friendly hype given to the Occupy Wall Street protests by much of the mainstream media, OWS is now in its death throes according to this Reuters report by Chris Francescani. He also notes that as OWS is about to be taken off life support, the much maligned Tea Party movement is doing quite well by contrast:

David Shuster is predicting the imminent indictment of Karl Rove.

Oops!

That was Shuster as an MSNBC host back in 2006. In his current incarnation on the no-rated Current TV he is predicting the possible indictment of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. Despite making himself a laughingstock six years ago by projecting visions of Karl Rove being frogwalked across the White House lawn, Shuster now seems intent on delivering an encore performance.

Are you prepared, Bernie Quigley?

Are you prepared for your inevitable coronation as national laughingstock?

Bernie Quigley of The Hill has written himself into the laughstock status by his incredibly laughable excuse for Elizabeth Warren's false claim to be part Indian. According to Quigley, paleface Warren really wasn't lying about her ancestry. Why? I have placed Quigley's bizarre rationale below the fold so you have a chance to put down your drinks to prevent the drenching of your monitors when you read it:

One almost has to feel sorry for Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt.  He showed up on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 yesterday probably expecting the type of softball questions that MSNBC hosts would toss at him. Instead, Anderson Cooper took a page from Cory Booker's criticism of  "nauseating" attacks on private equity firms such as Bain Capital and kept asking LaBolt how the Obama campaign can criticize Bain while simultaneously raising funds from the same type of companies.

The clearly unprepared LaBolt spent the interview filibustering with a flurry of words that were designed not to answer the questions about the obvious fundraising hypocrisy by the Obama campaign. Watch LaBolt as he filibusters his way to the end of the interview without giving any answers:

It is ironic that one of the two guys who founded Google was originally from Russia because the Russia Today news channel producers should have checked that search engine before featuring a certain Justin Wedes in their "American Spring" documentary about the Occupy Wall Street protests. Had they done their homework they would have discovered that Wedes, described in their documentary as an "OWS Organizer, School Teacher" is in reality a FORMER school teacher.

And why is Justin Wedes a former school teacher? Because he was forced to quit his job last year as a Brooklyn school teacher when he was discovered forging signatures in an attempt to fraudulently scam several thousand dollars in government grant money.

Lawrence O'Donnell yesterday on The Last Word vehemently denounced Newsweek's "The First Gay President" cover because he thought it could mislead many people into believing that message. Ironically (and hilariously) "FIRST GAY PRESIDENT" in bold capital letters along with Obama's picture kept appearing on the MSNBC screen throughout O'Donnell's denunciation. His own screen graphics amusingly worked in contradiction to his arguments as if to mock O'Donnell.

It might have sounded quite reasonable to David Brooks and his tight circle of media friends but to most of the rest of us, using the term "ESPN Masculinity" to describe President Obama is just flat out hilarious. Brooks performs a comedy encore at the end of The ESPN Man story in the New York Times with his psychobabble description of Obama's "manliness." These supposed traits listed by Brooks are the reasons why he claims Obama remains somewhat popular despite a lousy economy.

First, let us go right to the ESPN Man money quote:

Bill Clinton was the first black president. And now, according to Newsweek, we have the first gay president.

Yes, all the speculation over what cover Tina Brown would choose for Newsweek is over. Despite several suggestions from The New Republic on this crucial subject, Brown refrained from taking their kindly advice and chose a picture of President Obama with a rainbow halo over his head.

Did you know that one of the reasons for the federal lawsuit against Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio was Obama political campaign strategy? Don't take my word for it. This assertion has been made by the Huffington Post editorial director Howard Fineman in his story excusing negative Obama campaign strategy by claiming they are merely taking pages from the GOP playbook:

The world awaits a momentous decision in a few days. According to the New Republic staff, Newsweek editor Tina Brown must decide what Newsweek cover to use to illustrate President Obama's announced support  for gay marriage. To aid Ms Brown in making her choice, the New Republic staffers provided a gallery of illustrations for the Newsweek cover including the Obama rainbow umbrella man at the top of this story.

You can see several of the New Republic suggested illustrations below the fold. I must give them credit for extreme creativity although I am slightly disappointed that they didn't suggest a Tinker Bell Obama with transparent wings hovering above us all while tinkling stimulus pixie dust over the land.

One of the best things about the internet is the ability of readers to quickly and easily post their reactions to articles. In the strictly hard copy era before the web, authors who wrote completely absurd articles could be easily shielded from reader reaction. This is no longer the case as evidenced by this Daily Beast article by Lyndon B. Johnson biographer Robert Dallek: Obama’s LBJ Moment with His Gay Marriage Endorsement.

Yes, a few days ago Richard Cohen of the Washington Post was yearning for President Obama to become more like LBJ. And now we have Dallek declaring that Obama did indeed have his "LBJ Moment."  So break out your peanuts and Cracker Jack as you enjoy the entertainment ahead starting out with Dallek setting himself up to be mocked out of the ballpark with this incredibly slow pitch of a silly article:

"Do You Believe Obama Actually Changed His Mind About Gay Marriage?"

That was the question posed in the title of a column written by Slate editor David Plotz. And here is his succinct answer:

I don’t.

In sharp contrast to the misty-eyed hallelujahs offered up by most of the mainstream media in the wake of President Obama's "evolution" to the point where he announced his support of gay marriage, Plotz remains extremely skeptical about his supposed conversion:

Imagine President Barack Obama leaning hard into Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, pressing him to support a piece of legislation or, say, introduce a budget bill that has been MIA for the past three years. Obama is a real go getter and has been burning up the phone lines until late at night to convince legislators to support him. He even invites a number of people from Capitol Hill to join him for rounds of golf where he continues the art of persuasion.

Hard to believe that fantasy? Well, that is what the Washington Post opinion writer Richard Cohen is fervently wishing for. Cohen's magic genie wish, inspired by the newly published Robert Caro book, The Passage of Power, is that Obama will do a complete U-turn on his introverted, hands-off personality and become like Lyndon B. Johnson. Here is Cohen going into flights of fantasy on this topic in his latest column with the somewhat less than ringing endorsement title, What Obama doesn’t know about being president:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother.

I have to wonder how the St. Crispin's Day speech by Henry V as written by William Shakespeare would sound if read from a teleprompter. The reason for this strange speculation is that Chris Matthews yesterday on Hardball compared President Obama's speech to the troops in Afghanistan to Henry V as you can see on this video and below the fold.

Forget the fact that Cuba is a one-party totalitarian state where leadership is entirely dependent on how closely related one is to a certain Fidel Castro rather than any electoral process. The good news is that "Cuba may be the most feminist country in Latin America." That laughable premise has been published by New York Times blogger Luisita Lopez Torregrosa. Of course, that revelation would be news to the best known female group in Cuba, the Ladies In White (photo) who have been oppressed by the Communist regime and their thugs. Ms Torregrosa bases much of her analysis on the leftwing pro-Castro Center for Democracy in the Americas which helps explain her complete divorce from reality in her paean to one party feminism:

In sheer numbers and percentages, Cuban women’s advance is notable. Cuba has a high number of female professional and technical workers (60 percent of the total work force in those areas) and in Parliament (43 percent), as well as high levels of primary, secondary and tertiary education enrollment, according to the Gender Gap report.

Get me outta here! I'm being forced in a most humiliating manner to reveal to all the world my profound ignorance of basic constitutional issues.

Something like that thought must have been rolling around inside the mind of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius while she completely choked under questioning about these legal issues by South Carolina Congressman Trey Gowdy. Even if you disagree profoundly with Sebelius you almost have to feel embarrassed by her pathetic performance last week at the House Education and Workforce Committee hearing. Fortunately for Sebelius her confessions of ignorance were completely ignored by the Mainstream Media but the video (and below the fold) lives on for all eternity to serve as a testament to liberal ignorance and arrogance.

New York Times publisher Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr has suddenly become the moose in the room that everybody now wants to talk about, including his disgruntled staffers...and Taiwanese animators who have produced an hilarious video about his bizarre management style (below the fold). The Taiwanese parody is based on a recent email sent by Times science and health reporter Don McNeil to about 150 fellow staffers.

Reading McNeil's explosive email, one gets the impression that Sulzberger's primary qualification to helm the Times was to live through birth:

So when is lackluster economic growth a good thing? When it happens in the first quarter of an election year in which an incumbent Democrat president is attempting to win re-election and when the organization reporting this bad, or "good," news as they laughably attempt to categorize it is National Public Radio.

Here is the NPR comedy act performance by Scott Neuman in which he attempts to spin the lousy economy as a good thing:

It appears that simple fact checking isn't part of the reporting process at the New York Daily News. Even worse, the story that they declined to fact check was about an explosive situation in Sanford, Florida where supposedly neo-nazis were patrolling the streets in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting.

The Daily News finally revised their story but only after being contacted by professor William Jacobson of the Legal Insurrection blog who did the fact checking for them with the Sanford police that they should have done in the first place. Here is the Daily News excerpt below the fold that was published before being forced to revise it by the Legal Insurrection fact check: