Left, Right, and Centered

Has My Blogmate Been Duped?

Cory Franklin — Wed, 22 May 2013 01:05:24 +0000

By the claim of Republican doctored emails?

What Do These, And Other Laughs, Mean

Cory Franklin — Tue, 21 May 2013 23:02:06 +0000

They don’t mean impeachment and they don’t mean Hillary Clinton can’t be a candidate in 2016.

If the Republicans continue to push those things, it will just mean they are as stupid as the Democrats are venal.

Part of the Democratic game plan is to portray these obvious transgressions and coverups as partisan witch hunts, and the Republicans play into their hands if they say those things.

There are obviously 40-50% of the public and more of the media in the tank as it were, they refuse to see that using the IRS as an arm of the Administration, and making up stories about killer videos, and trailing journalists are a threat to our form of Government. And many of them will not see differently no matter what evidence they are presented with.

But the measure of rectitude is not the popularity of the President -if it is we are in big trouble. After all totalitarians do quite well in popularity polls.

What this does mean is that the middle 10-155 of the people and maybe some of the media will no longer be willing to give these people the benefit of the doubt. They may pull these scandals off, obfuscate and prevaricate long enough and maybe they will blow away.

But if something else comes down, they will be in trouble. As long as that doesn’t happen they can hang out, as it were.

Their moral standing is pretty much gone, however.

Laugh #2

Cory Franklin — Tue, 21 May 2013 22:52:22 +0000

The director of the Internal Revenue Service’s Exempt Organizations division, Lois Lerner, is invoking the Fifth Amendment and will not appear before Congress to answer questions about the agency’s targeting of Tea Party and other conservative groups.

Lerner was scheduled to appear before the House Oversight committee tomorrow to discuss the improper conduct of IRS employees who singled out conservative groups, and why she failed to bring that behavior to the attention of Congress.

“She has not committed any crime or made any misrepresentation but under the circumstances she has no choice but to take this course,” said a letter from her defense attorney, William Taylor, to committee chairman Darrell Issa, according tothe Los Angeles Times, which obtained a copy of the correspondence. Taylor asked that the committee excuse Lerner from testifying since she will not answer questions.

In testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee last week, the outgoing commissioner of the IRS, Steven Miller, revealed that Lerner initially disclosed the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups by planting a question at a conference hosted by the American Bar Association.

Lerner learned that conservative groups were receiving improper scrutiny in June of 2011 and ordered that her employees in the Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division put an end to the practice. She failed to inform Congress, however, despite several inquiries from lawmakers.

Laugh #1

Cory Franklin — Tue, 21 May 2013 22:50:47 +0000

Jay Carney told reporters that President Obama did not ask his senior staff why he was learning about the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups for the first time through news reports two weeks ago, rather than from his staff. The administration has admitted that White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler was informed in late April of the inspector general report detailing the targeting and that she shared the information with members of the the president’s senior staff. The White House maintains that neither Ruemmler nor the president’s staff made him aware of the report.

“The president believes that the counsel’s decision is the right one,” Carney said. He reiterated that the president would not have wanted to intervene in an ongoing investigation.

Carney also said that White House deputy chief of staff Mark Childress spoke with Treasury Department officials about how to best reveal the IRS’s targeting, including a “discussion about the possibility of a speech.” The targeting was instead revealed when Lois Lerner responded to a planted question about the targeting at a conference earlier this month.

Wrong About Politics, Wrong About Grammar

Cory Franklin — Tue, 21 May 2013 17:02:32 +0000

Disinterested and uninterested share a confused and confusing history. Disinterested was originally used to mean “not interested, indifferent”; uninterested in its earliest use meant “impartial.” By various developmental twists, disinterested is now used in both senses. Uninterested is used mainly in the sense “not interested, indifferent.” It is occasionally used to mean “not having a personal or property interest.”

Only people who have abandoned standards use disinterested to mean indifferent, which is what uninterested means. That is why there is a distinction.

You want a disinterested judge to hear your case. You don’t want an uninterested one to hear it.

But then I guess its pretty clear my blogmate and Jay Carney want an uninterested public where these scandals are concerned

Make Of It What You Will

Benjamin Wendell — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:34:31 +0000

But the president’s approval rating remains at 51-53%, depending on which poll you read. That ought to give John Boehner pause when he starts hearing those urgings to bring articles of impeachment.

Toto, I Have A Feeling We’re Not In Kansas Anymore

Benjamin Wendell — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:20:11 +0000

My heart goes out to the families devastated by tornadoes in Oklahoma City on Monday. It makes you wonder whether there’s some some perverse puropose in karma that propells an F4 tornado, a storm that could go anywhere, to bear directly down upon an elementary school, which you’d figure would be just about the safest place to be in the first place. You read it here first: It won’t be more than a day or two before Michelle Bachman or Pat Robertson or Rick Santorum declares that this is more of God’s judgement for gay marriage, premarital fornication, or wide disbursement of “Fifty Shades of Grey”. Seeing pictures like these:

gives you some idea of just how very fragile the fabric of civilization actually is. Those things we believe to be solid are little more than a paper-thin veneer of false security. But we’ve seen pictures like this plenty of times before. We’ve seen them in the wake of Katrina and Sandy and from the streets of Bagdhad and Kabul, and before that, in an earlier age, from London and Berlin and Gettysburg. What we haven’t seen so much are pictures like these:

When I was 12 years old, the Palm Sunday tornadoes roared through Northwest Ohio and my home of Toledo, and this famous photo of a double tornado made the news:

but it was the exception, not the rule. In those days, the only tornado most of us had ever seen in photo or film was this one:

from “The Wizard of Oz”. Now it’s a brave new world in which we live. Nothing escapes the all-seeing eye of the smart phone, the CCTV, and the ever-present satellite linked cameras of CNN and the Weather Channel. We witnessed this phenomenon clearly at the Boston Marathon bombing. In 2013, when the sound of gunshots erupt, or smoke rises from an explosion, or the freight train roar of a monster tornado sounds on the horizon, people may run for shelter or rush to aid the injured, but first they grab their I-Phones and record the event for posterity. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but we’re sure as hell not in Kansas anymore.

Interesting Note

Benjamin Wendell — Tue, 21 May 2013 12:28:52 +0000

Don’t believe everything you hear, nor everything you read, particularly if the material derives from an especially curmudgeonly conservative. The president’s press secretary, Jay Carney, has had a rather challenging week. His contention that he enjoyed this week of playing defense might have been disingenuous, but not grammatically imprecise. To wit:

George Jones, Francois Jacob, Janos Starker

Cory Franklin — Tue, 21 May 2013 01:11:01 +0000

You Tube: Rememberingthepassed

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On The Web: He Was Country When Country Was Cool

Richie Havens, Pat Summerall, Al Neuharth, Frank Bank

Cory Franklin — Mon, 20 May 2013 23:18:33 +0000

You Tube: Rememberingthepassed

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On The Web: He Opened Woodstock