Get Started

Unappreciated
The first thing to appreciate is that Barack Obama is the real private equity king in this race, not Mitt Romney. Obama’s restructuring of the auto industry displayed, on a much grander scale, precisely the kind of tough-minded business calls Romney says are private equity’s specialty. With help from ex-private-equity maven Steven Rattner (and a staff filled with other private equity refugees), Obama fired management, shed workers, slashed costs, revamped operations, restructured the balance sheet and fashioned new strategies. When the dust cleared, Obama had positioned General Motors and Chrysler to move forward as viable firms.(Matt Miller, Washington Post, 5/23/2012)


Miller (a.k.a. Captain Delusional) serves up this whopper: Obama knows how to do private equity and GM is proof. Geez, the way we remember it, the government gave GM enormous amounts of taxpayer money that will never be repaid, while turning the company over to the unions. The closest Miller gets to the truth is to mention "bridge loans" which we will relabel as "bridge loans to nowhere."


Unprotected
An article in The Times last week described the experience of 23-year-old Kelsey Griffith. She currently earns a meager wage as a restaurant worker and owes $120,000 in student loans for an undergraduate degree from Ohio Northern University, a college whose recent graduates are among the most indebted in the country....Ms. Griffith’s debt was worsened by the fact that she changed majors and took five years to graduate. And because federal loans did not cover her total costs, she had to take out more expensive private loans that offer fewer protections than federal loans — like deferments and income-based repayment plans. Ms. Griffith voiced an increasingly common sentiment when she told The Times: “I knew a private school would cost a lot of money. But, when I graduate, I’m going to owe like $900 a month. No one told me that.”.......Before students borrow to pay for their education, they need to understand the obligations they are taking on, and how long it will take to pay them off. (NYT editorial, 5/22/2012)


Last week the Times introduced us to their latest victim, Ms. Griffith. Griffith was apparently duped into signing for college loans....or something like that. RedStateVT called out this nonsense, but now the Times wants to double down on her. So let's get a little more specific. 


Maybe, just maybe, college is not for everyone. If Griffith is now somehow befuddled by the debt she has accumulated after five years and multiple majors, she should have spent her time instead learning to be the best waitress she could be, and not wasting her time and her professors' time in class.  To Liberals, however, the blame lies with the lenders who financed Ms. Griffith's misadventures in higher education.


Call Us Lazy
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney insisted to reporters on Air Force One today that President Obama has "demonstrated significant fiscal restraint” and applied a “balanced approach.”


According to the pool report, Carney added that any reporting to the contrary, would just be the result of “sloth and laziness.” (Washington Examiner, 5/23/2012)


Is this the new White House tactic to unfavorable press coverage...insults and intimidation?


Ekey
President Obama eked out narrow primary victories Tuesday in Arkansas and Kentucky, a sign the president is struggling in Southern states. The challenger in the Arkansas primary, attorney John Wolfe Jr., took 42 percent of the vote, compared to 58 percent for Obama, with 89 percent of the votes counted....Though the results in either state will not hamper Obama's effort to gain the party's nomination en route to a second term, they are embarrassing for the Democratic Party. (Foxnews.com, 5/23/2012)


We would quibble with Fox only in the sense that the story of Obama's embarrassing showings will be ignored by every other media outlet except Fox. Kind of like that one about the tree falling in the forest.....