But, but, we were promised that if he was elected the world would love us. What happened?

Barack Obama’s visit to Brazil had a very unpromising start after police had to quell riots against the U.S. in Rio de Janeiro with rubber bullets and tear gas.

The U.S. President landed in the capital of Brasilia with his wife and daughters, visiting the country on a mission to re-assert trade links with Latin America.

But the day before he landed Brazilian military police fired on 300 demonstrators who had gathered outside the U.S. Consulate in Rio.

[...]

Mr Obama’s visit to the region’s economic powerhouse is the centrepiece of his effort to re-engage with neighbours no longer content with being relegated to Washington’s ‘backyard’ and where the United States faces rising competition from China.

But after the riots he was forced to cancel an outdoor speech that he was set to give in a Rio square.

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We’ve blown it once again, another great opportunity to win the biggest sporting event on the planet and America comes away empty handed in the World Cup.

I thought this was our year. The world was supposed to love us. We were told that during the 2008 Presidential election that all we had to do was put Barack Hussein Obama in office, and the world would love us. Instead, what do we get? We get horrible calls where goals are being taken away from us by World Cup officials who are either blind, or they haven’t heard that Obama is now our President.

Now, before you think that sports and politics do not mix, just Google “USA Basketball vs. USSR 1972.” Sports and politics cannot be separated. Oh, there was another political incident that year involving Israeli athletes, but since Obama was only 11 years old at the time it’s not relevant to this White House.

I watched much of the media analysis of World Cup Soccer and much of it centered around who played where and why, and how USA coach Bob Bradley said “we needed stronger legs in the midfield.” You had Ricardo Clark and the Yellow Card and bla bla bla bla bla. No, forget all that, there is something much bigger here that the media is missing.  This is the biggest sporting event in this solar system, so no analysis can be ignored.

We were promised. (more…)

“Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?” Alexander Pope asked in his Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. Well, on ABC’s “This Week” show Sunday, a mere 277 years later, we learned the answer: George Will does. With gusto.

The poor butterfly was “Real Time’s” Bill Maher, making his maiden voyage as a member of the political show’s roundtable, and the merciless wheel of torture was the ever-anatomizing mind of George Will. There’s no need to recount the incident—odds are you’ve seen it by now. And if not, you can read about it—and relive it—in this excellent analysis by Brad Schaeffer on this very website.

To be honest, Mr. Maher’s talent for self-immolation is so highly developed that Mr. Will had little to do other than ask two clarifying questions and watch Maher try to free his flailing self-pinned wings. The logorrheic Maher had fallen prey to his own intemperate mouth. Hoisted on his own petard, Maher forgot that vanity is not just a character flaw—it’s one of the Seven Deadly Sins. You can put vanity ahead of truth in the comedy arena with near-certain impunity, but you’re bound to pay a heavy price when you relegate truth to hind teat in the Sunday morning political ring with heavyweights like George Will punching back.

What lesson can be learned from the Maher meltdown? Or in the parlance of today’s telespeak, what’s the “teachable moment” in all of this? Let’s get out our Maher microscope and take a look. (more…)

The idea of citizens writing the news is not a new one. In fact, it is an idea that is as old as the newspaper itself.

There were no professional journalists around 50 BC when Julius Caesar, serving as the First Counsul of Rome, ordered scribes to publish the Acta Diurna, a daily report of governmental activities.

There were no professional journalists in the early 1400s to take advantage of Johann Gutenberg’s new and exciting moveable type press. In fact, it wasn’t until 1505 that a German printer in Augsburg named Erhard Oeglin put out a broadside that announced the discovery of Brazil.

There were no professional journalists to chronicle the travels of Marco Polo (1300s) or to report the discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus (1492) or to tell the horrors of Russia’s Ivan the Terrible (1500s).

There were no professional journalists to chronicle the challenges to the Crown by Oliver Cromwell (1600s) or to report the advancement of freedom during the American Revolution (1700s) or to tell the stories of the Spanish-American War or even the Civil War, which ended in 1865.

After the Civil war, things began to change. (more…)

Juan Williams is the titular liberal on Fox News and he tries very hard to maintain the impression that the news panels are fair and balanced. To do that he routinely parrots the Democrat mantra du jour on all issues and ofn a recent Fox News Special Report he defended President Obama’s call for new energy policies and cited the need for the government to explore alternative means to reduce our dependency on foreign oil.

I’m a decade older than Williams so maybe he doesn’t recall the Carter administration as well as I do but the Department of Energy was established for that very same purpose and it has produced absolutely nothing towards that aim in over 32 years.

The energy crisis of 1973 was the impetus for President Carter to propose creation of the DOE and the enabling legislation was passed and signed into law on August 4, 1977. The DOE began operations on October 1, 1977.

On its website, this department lists all its awards and achievements but the fact is that hundreds of billions later with a budget of $24.2 billion a year, 16,000 federal employees and approximately 10,000 contract employees, we are no closer to being independent of foreign oil. That’s how a bureaucracy operates — it produces nothing except a mechanism to drain money from taxpayers. Now the banking, healthcare and auto industry are scheduled for the same ‘fix.” Heaven help us! (more…)

During his State of the Union address, President Obama tossed a couple of sops to popular opinion, promising to support: A) nuclear power, and B) offshore drilling. James Hudnall did a brilliant job of dismantling Obama’s atomic promises, pointing out that even if the President happened to be uncharacteristically sincere in this case, no new nuclear plant will be built in a dog’s lifetime, even if the pooch happens to one of those little yip-dogs that seem to live forever. Based on what we have seen of his administration so far, the same is true of Obama’s newfound commitment to offshore drilling.

Suspending reality for a moment, let’s assume that burning fossil fuels will indeed result in catastrophic climate change. According to the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, “we can’t drill our way out” of this supposed problem.

Actually, we can.

Burning natural gas is a much less intensive carbon intensive way of generating energy than burning any other fossil fuel. There are a couple of reasons for this. When you burn coal, just about all of the energy generated comes from turning carbon into carbon dioxide (a chemical reaction that releases heat). When you burn natural gas, the energy comes from two reactions: one that turns carbon into carbon dioxide, and another that turns hydrogen in water. Thus, from the start, natural gas generates less greenhouse gases for the same amount of energy produced. (more…)

This week, thousands of Haitians will be the beneficiaries of Pat Robertson.  In fact, long before the horrific earthquake struck on Tuesday, when many of the more fashionable humanitarians who always flock to every tragedy probably would have been hard-pressed to find the island of Hispaniola on a map, Robertson’s Operation Blessing was already hard at work, helping to address the centuries-old tragedy that is Haitian poverty.  Many Haitian bellies have been filled in the past, and undoubtedly many more Haitians will live and be fed in the coming days, because of Robertson and his organization, which has given more than $500 million in aid to suffering people since it began in 1978.

Just a little thought worth bearing in mind about Robertson while watching this clip of his High Moral Majesty, Keith Olbermann, discuss damning him to hell:

Of course, Olbermann is also outraged by Rush Limbaugh (Olbermann is always outraged by Rush Limbaugh), but Rush’s deliberate tweaking of the left by using the words of their own party’s leader in the Senate doesn’t need any defense from me, nor does the irony of Olbermann attacking his political rival while people are still dying in Haiti need any further exploration. (more…)