Bad Vapors

Laid Out
Mr. Obama will unveil his own 10-year budget plan in February, laying out his tax and spending plans for his second term. But Senate Democrats, for the past four years, have refused to move a budget blueprint to the Senate floor, in violation of the Budget Act of 1974, which laid out new rules for controlling deficits. (NYT, 1/18/2013)

It took four years of hard investigative work by intrepid reporters at the New York Times, but they can now reveal the truth about the Senate's failure to write a budget....in paragraph fifteen of a seventeen paragraph article. Next up, in 2016, should Harry Reid be indicted for this lapse?


Symbolic
C. Ray Nagin, the former mayor of this city who fulminated against the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina but became for many a symbol of the shortcomings of government himself, was indicted by a federal grand jury on Friday on 21 counts including conspiracy, bribery and money laundering. (NYT, 1/18/2013)

No word in this twenty-seven paragraph article as to whether Nagin is a Democrat or Republican. The New York Times Style Book for Reporters says that the political affiliation of a corrupt politician should only be mentioned if that politician is a Republican.  And so we are betting he's a Dem. (He's a Dem.)


Slim And Slimmer
After a first term of both big achievements and disappointments and the economy still struggling to recover from the financial crisis he inherited, Mr. Obama retains the approval of a slim majority of Americans, 51 percent, according to a pre-inauguration survey for The New York Times and CBS News. That is down from 62 percent soon after he took office four years ago, and conceals a sharp divide: 8 in 10 Republicans disapprove of how he is handling the job, while almost 9 in 10 Democrats approve. Independents are split. (NYT, 1/18/2013)

"Poll Finds Most Back Obama, With a Split Along Party Lines" screams the New York Times headline. Yes, 51% technically counts as "most" we suppose. But then again that is down from 62%. Reading further, we find that only 42% expect the economy to be better in four years. So what might have been a better headline? Perhaps: "Poll Reveals Dangers for Obama in Second Term."


Overhaulin'
The federal health-care overhaul is prompting some colleges and universities to cut the hours of adjunct professors, renewing a debate about the pay and benefits of these freelance instructors who handle a significant share of teaching at U.S. higher-education institutions.

The Affordable Care Act requires large employers to offer a minimum level of health insurance to employees who work 30 hours a week or more starting in 2014, or face a penalty. The mandate is a particular challenge for colleges and universities, which increasingly rely on adjuncts to help keep costs down as states have scaled back funding for higher education. (WSJ, 1/18/2013)

Colleges, bastions of Liberalism, run into the buzzsaw of Obamacare. Perhaps they can petition Kathleen Sebelius for a waiver...


The Race Is On
It is difficult to quantify, but one factor for anyone judging Mr. Obama is race. The biggest bloc of voters opposed to the president are older white men. He lost 57% of the white vote in 2008 and 60% in 2012. Meanwhile, he won over 90% of black voters in both elections.

Typically, Mr. Obama avoids the issue the way Superman avoided kryptonite. He makes the point that he is not "the black president" but the president of all Americans. But when it comes to judging his place in American history, it is impossible not to address his minority status. The first blacks in any field, much like the first women, are always held to strict standards. (Juan Williams, WSJ, 1/18/2013)

The usually thoughtful Williams invokes race and gets it exactly wrong. Obama is not being held to a higher standard, he is being held to a lower standard, at least by a number of voting blocs. Let's look at the demographics: older white males, blacks, females, young voters. Which group is more likely to hold Obama accountable for four years in which the economy did not recover, unemployment was consistently high and gas prices averaged $4/gallon? We would argue that older white males who grew up in working environments where accountability in job performance was an everyday reality. Screw up on the job and you do not get that raise or that promotion. There is no place to hide and your buddies often cannot save you. Screw up too much and you get fired. Now look at the other groups - blacks, females and the young. All are more likely to give the president a pass on performance for a wide variety of cultural reasons (e.g. the desire to not see the nation's first black president fail; persistent depictions of the president's opponents as vindictive or worse, racist; the president's "likability"; compassion, etc.)


Speechless
(Obama) had nothing to say about America's culture of violence—its movies, TV shows and videogames. Excuse me, there will be a study of videogames; they are going to do "research" on whether seeing 10,000 heads explode on video screens every day might lead unstable young men to think about making heads explode. You'll need a real genius to figure that out. (Peggy Noonan, WSJ, 1/18/2013)

Exactly. Which reminds us of how we expect that Liberals will react the next time that there is a shooting (God forbid) with a weapon other than an AR 15. They will seek to ban it. And then their reaction the next time there is a shooting (God forbid) with another type of weapon?  You see where we are going on this. Liberals would rather approach each mass murder as a separate event which needs a legislative fix. They avoid the hard work of looking at American culture starting with their friends in Hollywood and in the gaming industry who bankroll them.