That’s all the information that we have now; no doubt the full details will be available later. Judging from current time constraints involving absentee ballots, I don’t particularly expect much likelihood of a successful appeal.  Ach, well: as I noted Tuesday, this remained a possibility.

(This is a placeholder post: as soon as I have the full details and a chance to read the ruling, I’ll be updating.)

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Wall Street Vampire? Or Just Another False Caricature?

Mitt Romney has been depicted as a blood-sucking, Wall Street Vampire. If only that were the simple truth. Having an iniquitous personality would be better than the public persona he exudes right now. It would add a certain cache to his otherwise soporific blandwagon of a campaign.

Newt Gingrich represents the anti-Romney persecution with a 28 minute political ad entitled “When Mitt Romney Came to Town.” The ad could be a Michael Moore “documentary” about E-VIL, Greeeee-dy, Rethuglicans snorting fine, Columbian Cocaine off the succulent rear-end of a hooker through rolled up $100 bills. Cicero was more fair and balanced in his indictments during The Cataline Conspiracy.

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It’s January 13th. As in, Friday the 13th. Thaaat’s right. On this date in 1128, Pope Honorius II granted papal sanction to the Knights Templar, calling it an “army of God.” Little did he know that a mere 884 years later, Ron Paul would raise an army to blog obsessively about them. This is also the anniversary of the addition of two stars and two stripes to the American flag, for Vermont and Kentucky, in 1794. Consider this an OPEN THREAD.

Union Protestor Calls for Legislators to be “Tarred and Feathered” | Hoosier Access
“But the fireworks weren’t done with the Democrats. Before the gavel even fell on the hearing protestors erupted on the House Floor claiming everything under the sun you’d expect to hear from a union protestor.”

DNC Chairwoman Getting ‘Fast and Furious’ with Eric Holder | The Shark Tank
“Harrington cites the New Times post which claims that Wasserman Schultz has missed 62 votes in Congress.”

Michelle Obama sees Barack’s ‘wonderful progress’ in jeopardy | IBD
“According to Mrs. Obama, way too many Americans are still suffering economically. This isn’t because of anything her husband did or failed to do in the last 1,086 days that they’ve inhabited the White House. In fact, she maintains, things would have been much worse without the many changes her husband’s administration has implemented.”

Another ATF weapons operation comes under scrutiny | L.A. Times
Officials from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives declined to comment on whether any firearms were lost in White Gun. But unlike Fast and Furious, they vigorously defended the previously unreported White Gun operation as a well-managed investigation that produced three arrests and convictions.

Today’s word of the day comes from Dictionary.com, and is gross.
viscid (VIS-id): adjective 1. Having a glutinous consistency; sticky; adhesive. 2. Covered by a sticky substance.

Pursuant to the Budget Control Act, brought to you by the GOP leadership’s sellout, Obama notified Congress yesterday that the federal debt is approaching the statutory ceiling of $15.194 trillion. [The actual total debt is already $15.237 trillion, but a small amount is not subject to the limit.]  As such, he is calling on Congress to grant him another $1.2 trillion in debt, conveniently enough to last him until after the election, with the possibility of saddling his successor with a tough decision over yet another debt limit increase.  It is really more of a notification than a request.  Obama will automatically receive his $1.2 trillion supercharged credit card unless two-thirds of Congress votes to disapprove of the request within 15 days.

In just three years, he has accrued $4.6 trillion in debt, more than Bush amassed during his entire eight-year tenure.  Now he will add another $1.2 trillion by the end of his first term, and, thanks to the horrendous budget deal, which was cheered on by the same outlets that are now fawning over Mitt Romney, there’s nothing we can do about it.

But here’s the question: If Congress is in recess and cannot fulfill its responsibility to advice and consent, as the President has suggested, how can Obama fulfill his obligation of submitting a certification to Congress?

The Budge Control Act requires the following of Obama:

“the President submits a written certification to Congress that the President has determined that the debt subject to limit is within $100,000,000,000 of the limit in section 3101(b) and that further borrowing is required to meet existing commitments, the Secretary of the Treasury may exercise authority to borrow an additional $900,000,000,000, subject to the enactment of a joint resolution of disapproval enacted pursuant to this section. Upon submission of such certification, the limit on debt provided in section 3101(b) (referred to in this section as the ‘debt limit’) is increased by $400,000,000,000.”

Is this submission invalid?  Do we need a new submission to start the 15 days Congress has to disapprove of the increase in debt?  How was the House able to file the resolution of disapproval and set up a vote for next week?   After all, Congress is all but gone, according to Obama.

If Obama wants Congress to issue $1.2 trillion of debt while their gone, imagine what they can do when they’re “in session.”

It is a good thing that elected officials know so much about how to run our lives. First trans-fats, then salt, then sugary drinks, then Alcohol (well, almost). NY City Mayor Bloomberg may as well pick up the hatchet used by Carry Nation on her crusades in the 1920′s.

For more information on the topic, see Caleb Howe’s article here: The Great Bloomberg Booze Backlash of 2012.

Cross-Posted: TobyToons (Conservative Political Cartoons)

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca to discuss the slow growth stagnant economy and a nearly nonexistent market for electric cars.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

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Nobody’s this clueless. Nobody.

Via AoSHQ.

Open thread.

It is one of my overarching concerns with the myth of Mitt the Electable — Bain Capital and Romney’s time in the private sector. Byron York sums it up here.

There’s no basis to reflexively defend Romney’s record, because we don’t know in any real detail what he did at Bain. But there’s no basis to indict him, either, for the same reason.

There are seemingly two caricatures of candidates that play badly with the American people. One is the evangelical preacher out to save the world. The politician as tent revival preacher is a long caricatured American political staple going back to the ninetieth century and William Jennings Bryant among others.

The other caricature is that of the millionaire tycoon out to buy the election. This has been a staple of American politics since the turn of the 20th century and passage of the first campaign finance laws. Historically, neither caricature is popular or successful on the national stage.

Within the Republican Party, the least successful of the two has been the millionaire tycoon caricature. Dan McLaughlin noted the other day

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RedState Morning Briefing
January 13, 2012

Go to www.RedStateMB.com to get
the Morning Briefing every morning at no charge.

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TEN YEARS HAVE passed since terrorists hijacked airliners and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  In that period, America has fought wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, carried out hundreds armed drone attacks in Pakistan and Yemen (among other locations), and conducted covert operations around the world, all in the name of what President George W.  Bush termed the “Global War on Terror.”  Terror plots and attempted attacks have been foiled, terrorist leaders have been killed or captured in massive numbers – including the world’s most wanted terrorist himself, Osama bin Laden.  All of this has combined, in the words of President Barack Obama, to “put al Qaeda on the path to defeat.”

Given all this, is it possible that America is actually losing the war on terror? In Bin Laden’s Legacy: Why We’re Still Losing the War on Terror, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorist Radicalization at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, argues not only that we are losing, but that we as a nation still fail to understand what kind of a war we are fighting, and what our enemies’ actual goals are.  This is a powerful indictment, and Gartenstein-Ross painstakingly lays it out in a book that is both sharply analytical and accessible to any audience.

A KEY PROBLEM with America’s attempt to wage a War on Terror while safeguarding itself from future attack, Gartenstein-Ross writes, is that our ignorance of the enemy we are facing has allowed us to pursue both goals in a profligate fashion that plays right into the hands of an enemy that sees America’s economy as the long-term target.  To understand the reasoning behind this, we must look to the Soviet Union.  Though myriad factors contributed to the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., its collapse so shortly after its withdrawal from a decade-long quagmire in Afghanistan helped convince Osama bin Laden and other former mujahedeen that they had been the cause of its ultimate defeat.

Now, al Qaeda has taken this strategy of embroiling a much larger and wealthier enemy in a long and costly war of economic attrition and has aimed it at the United States, with no small measure of success gained over the last decade.  “Even though it has lost Osama bin Laden and its safe haven in Afghanistan,” the author writes, al Qaeda’s “fight against America is broader, and al Qaeda and its affiliates are key players in more regions than they were engaged in a decade ago…Meanwhile, the U.S. economy is shattered, it faces an almost unthinkable debt burden, and its policy makers have largely been consigned to arguing with each other on the sidelines while the country’s traditional allies…are overthrown or see their power erode” (p. 200).

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The lefties on Twitter are very upset with their favorite paper, The New York Times.  They’ve even started a hashtag (#NewNYTSlogans) attacking them for the apparent lack of dedication to truth that the paper has exhibited of late in its pages.

An article titled, “Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?” is what has sent them into full fledged mock mode and, as best I can understand it, they believe that the Times has basically acknowledged that the truth and fact checking are not top priorities in The New York Times newsroom.

They don’t sound too terribly off from opinions expressed on the right about the Paper of Record.  Perhaps we’ve reached a point where we can all agree that this old world rag is nothing but a liberal front and about as unbiased as Dan Rather?

Not exactly.  

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New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg probably needed a stiff drink last night, after an article ran at the New York Post earlier in the day reporting that the mayor was planning to curtail alcohol sales in the Big Apple. The city health department’s Partnership for a Healthier New York City was considering initiatives to slash the number of businesses that were licensed to sell liquor.

One of the goals listed in the “request for proposal” document to community groups is “reducing alcohol retail outlet (e.g. bar, corner store) density and illegal alcohol,” the document states.

A spokeswoman for the department stated that “the city’s goals for the Partnership for a Healthier New York are in line with our ongoing strategies of promoting healthy eating and physical activity and discouraging tobacco, excessive alcohol use and consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages.”

The Post later reported that the story, “drew howls of outrage from responsible drinkers and operators of liquor venues across the city.”

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