Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift:

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It’s hard not to feel sorry for Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift. She’s like the unlucky girl who keeps trying oh-so-hard but never makes the cheerleading squad. In column after column Clift seems to be angling for some future sinecure in the Obama administration a la Jay Carney, who left Time to work as communications director for Joe “Big F—ing Deal” Biden. But so far, no luck.

How else to explain this woman’s latest effort in sis-boom-bah journalism? Like a good little cheerleader, Clift flings her pom-poms in an acrobatic effort to distract from the real issue—Obama’s woeful handling of the Gulf catastrophe—with a gratuitous attack on the Tea Party, Dick Armey, and defenders of the Constitution in general.

What Would the Tea Party Do?

They object to Obama. Fine—but it’s worth asking how they would handle something like the gulf oil spill.

In actuality, no, it’s not worth asking what the Tea Party would do. The Tea Party is a movement, not a person. But in light of the fact that the average Tea Party candidate running in any of the various races around the country has more practical business experience than President Obama—who has none—smart money would take the odds on the Tea Party candidate versus the Community Organizer any day—even on an oil-slippery track.

After her opening move, Clift flashes her brightest Obama smile: (more…)

Let’s face it. From the 2004 New York Yankees to that statue of Saddam Hussein, most of us get a kick out of seeing the mighty fall. And that’s essentially what’s happening to teachers’ unions all over this nation. For all the good they did when they were first formed 50 to 75 years ago, teachers’ unions have devolved into opponents of meaningful educational reform.

Teaching is steady work and in most states the pay is now about the same as a mid-level manager in business, but the profession requires substantially fewer days of work per year. And sure, there have been recent layoffs, but even in bad economic times, those who remain in the classroom manage to secure substantial raises and maintain their Cadillac health care plans while most of the rest of us in the private sector must beg our employers for a paltry increase and hope we don’t get sick. Still, good teachers themselves remain largely popular in their respective communities — and justifiably so.

So why are teachers’ unions losing clout? One big reason is that after decades of reflexive support, the news media are finally starting to turn against them. That’s right. Journalists and editors, many of whom belong to labor unions themselves, are finally waking up to the plain fact that taking courses and simply showing up to work every day — the standard measures that the unions demand in determining wages — are poor incentives to improve performance.

A story in yesterday’s Washington Post on the recent ratification of a new D.C. teachers contract, which calls for using student improvement as a measure of teacher evaluations, was as balanced a piece as you will ever see. In addition, the Post’s progressive editorial board has been remarkably supportive of D.C. school Superintendent Michelle Rhee’s plans to make it easier to remove chronically underperforming teachers from the classroom. Commendably, the Post’s editorial page has also been a proponent of nationwide school reform in general. (more…)

As the nearly two-year-old Palin piñata-fest demonstrates, for the devout liberal the intersection of Sorority Street and Politics Avenue is left-turn only.

To no one’s surprise, Sarah Palin remains the left’s First Lady of political feminae non gratae, the gold standard. The needle on the left’s Feminometer moves from the safe green left-hand side (Barbara Boxer, Nancy Pelosi) to the beige neutral middle (Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins) to the hazardous red-hued right-hand zone (Michele Bachmann) to the far-right crimson danger area (Sarah).

Palin’s status as the left’s lead whipping girl is not news. What is news is that women like Eleanor Clift (Hell hath no fury like a liberal feminist scorned) are using the same elitist Palinesque prejudices to bash this year’s crop of wrong-turning conservative women.

One of them is Linda McMahon, the Republican candidate for the Connecticut Senate seat soon to be vacated by writing-on-the-wall-peruser Chris Dodd. Here’s Clift in her May 28 column “2010 Likely to Bring a Crop of One-Term Senate Wonders:” (more…)

A drowning man will cling to any spar. A drowning Democrat to any Critz.

There’s nothing wrong with clinging to spars when you’re shipwrecked in mid-ocean. It beats the alternative. But one should never mistake spars for lifeboats. As Eleanor Clift does in her May 21 Newsweek column “Firewall Around the Democrats’ House.” She might just as well have called it “Denial for Dummies: A Democrat’s Guide to Silver Linings.”

Let’s examine Clift’s mid-term election Pennsylvania blind side as she educates us, using the PA-12 special election in which Democrat Mark Critz defeated Republican Tim Burns, in the natatory art of political survival.

Democrats had a very good night on Tuesday, dampening, at least for now, Republican boasts about taking back control of the House… Republican hopes to regain the House took a big hit when they failed to carry Murtha’s district. It is the only one in the country that went from supporting John Kerry in 2004 to backing John McCain in 2008. Its constituents are heavily white, Catholic, blue-collar workers displaced from the steel and coal industries, a hardscrabble life that lends itself to expressing grievances against the Obama administration.

Adrift in the fog of Clift’s Critz mist, it’s easy to overlook three small words in her opening sentence: “very good night.” (more…)

Castro’s Stalinist regime just released pictures of 16-year-old Elian Gonzalez, resplendent in the uniform of a Communist Party youth. The timing of the photo release may coincide with the tenth anniversary of Elian’s shanghaiing from the U.S.

The magnitude and methodology of  the snow-job Fidel Castro, with the aid of his ever-faithful  MSM and Democrat allies, pulled on the American public (69, per cent of whom  fell for it and  embraced Castro’s position on the kidnapping) is partly explained here.

Thanks to MSM-Castroite collusion most  people forget  (or missed) the crucial legal and ethical details of this circus/tragedy– which were mostly established during the first week after Elian’s rescue at sea, after his heroic mother’s drowning. The “son-belongs-with-his-father” crowd, for instance, “missed” (with the help of the MSM) that Elian’s father was initially delighted that his motherless son was in the U.S. and in the loving arms of his uncles and cousins.

The evidence—frantically buried by the mainstream media—was overwhelming.  Mauricio Vincent, a reporter for Madrid newspaper El Pais, wrote that during that first week he’d visited Elian’s home town of Cardenas and talked with Elian’s father, Juan Miguel, along with other family members and friends. All confirmed that Juan Miguel had always longed for his son Elian to flee to the United States. Shortly after Elian’s rescue, his father had even applied for a U.S. visa!

In phone call after phone call from Elian’s Cuban family to Elian’s Miami family, the Cuban Gonzalez family always made themselves very clear:  “Please take care of Elian. His father’s on the way….even if he has to row over in a washtub.” (more…)

From a speech by Jimmy Carter at the University of Havana on May 14, 2002 which was broadcast throughout Castro’s islandwide fiefdom and trumpeted worldwide by all “news” agencies with Havana bureaus:

My nation is hardly perfect in human rights. A very large number of our citizens are incarcerated in prison, and there is little doubt that the death penalty is imposed most harshly on those who are poor, black, or mentally ill. For more than a quarter century, we have struggled unsuccessfully to guarantee the basic right of universal health care for our people. …but Cuba has superb systems of health care and universal education.

Thus did a former President of the United States prostrate himself before a regime that jailed and tortured political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s and murdered (in absolute numbers) more political prisoners in its first three years in power (out of a population of 6.4 million) than Hitler’s murdered in its first six years (out of a population of 70 million.) Not to mention that Pres. Carter’s host insulted his nation as “a vulture preying on humanity!” and came within a hair of nuking it.

There’s more: (more…)

Revisionist historians usually wait a few years before recounting events to fit their bias. But Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift is already transcribing the autopsy report on Obama’s health-care reform with the analytical skills of a revisionist historian.

In her February 12, 2010, piece entitled “What Obama Did Wrong: On health-care reform, the president didn’t repeat Clinton’s mistakes. Obama made new ones,” Clift spins her interpretation of events as though they represent fact.

Here’s how she does it:

Obama had to tackle health-care reform in his first year because (1) he made it a key campaign promise and (2) his base of support would have felt betrayed had he not.  Okay, so health-care linked to his oft-used campaign phrase attributed to MLK…“the fierce urgency of now.”  Clift writes that it’s easy to criticize him today for taking on the issue,

…now that we’ve seen what a hash Congress made of the reform effort.

She just couldn’t make her fingers type “now that we’ve see what a hash Democrats in Congress made of the reform effort.”  So we have a clue to what follows right there in her first paragraph. (more…)