Current Events - February 17, 2013

Middle Class Warrior Obama’s $900 Valentine’s Day Dinner

President Obama took First Lady Michelle out for dinner Thursday night to the restaurant Minibar, possibly the most exclusive joint in Washington.

It’s almost impossible to get a reservation – the place seats 12. The dining room includes an open kitchen where you gaze in awe as famed chef Jose Andres cooks you dinner as if you were in his home.

“Each bite is an experience to be savored, pondered, and sometimes puzzled over,” asserts the website for the restaurant.

Which is nice, since each bite probably costs about $10.

That is, the price for tasting approximately 20 small dishes is $225, not including tax and tip, while wine pairings will set you back $75, $120, or $200. If we assume a mid-range $120 for wine, the total comes to $345 per person, or $690 for two. Add in Washington’s 10 percent restaurant dining tax and a 20 percent tip and we’re at $910.80 for dinner.

Surprisingly, the Obamas did not go out for any $900 dinners during the presidential campaign.

http://www.whitehousedossier.com/2013/02/14/middle-class-warrior-obamas-900-valentines-day-dinner/

$1000/Hr: Obama Books World's Top Golf Pro for Vacation

Economic growth is in the negative, unemployment is on the rise, Walmart's forecasting a disastrous February for retail sales, poverty's up, gas prices are up, the cost of health care premiums are up, middle class incomes are falling, consumer confidence is at a two year low, our deficit is unsustainable, and Barack Obama has just signed up for private golf lessons with two of the top teachers in the country.  

You might want to go back and read that last part again.

Safely re-elected and with no concerns whatsoever that the media will take issue with his elitist behavior (hell, the media won't even make an issue of the economy), what would certainly be the kind of optics the media would bludgeon a Republican with will likely go unnoticed, because the narrative's been set that Obama can do no wrong.

The only other possibility is that the media will tell us that Obama hiring the number-one golf teacher in the world represents Obama "creating a job."

The President's golfing weekend at The Floridian GC in Palm City, Fla., will include more than golf on a Tom Fazio course or an afternoon of ball beating at the Harmon School of Golf on campus. The Harmons, Butch and son Claude III, are flying in to work with President Obama[.]

This would be perfectly fine were it not for the fact that Obama knows he can oversee a faltering economy, where millions are suffering, and still get all brazenly one-percentary, knowing the media will give him a complete and total pass.

Romney wasn't even president, and the media beat him senseless for his wife Ann wearing a nice blouse.

Anyway, enjoy yourself, Mr. President. According to "Golf Digest," Harmon's hourly rate is $1,000 an hour. So it sounds like you're, uhm, "doing fine." And don’t feel bad for those of us in the 99%. We're also "doing fine." We might be all out of hope, but we still have a little change and those food stamps.

Yesterday marked the third time Obama has golfed in 2013 – he played twice in Hawaii last month – and the 114th time he has played since becoming president.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/02/15/Obama-Hires-Americas-Top-Golf-Teacher

WH: Obama Called Libyan President One Day After Benghazi Attack

President Barack Obama first called Libyan President Mohamed Yousef el-Magariaf  “on the evening of September 12,” one day after the terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya that killed 4 Americans, according to a White House letter to senators this week. (See WH letter-Obama-Libyan.pdf)

That was also one day after the president departed Washington, D.C.  for a Las Vegas campaign event.

According to the official White House schedule for Sept. 12, 2012, Obama departed the White House at 2:05 p.m. en route to Andrews Air Force Base. At 2:20 p.m. he departed Andrews en route to Las Vegas. He arrived in Las Vegas at 6:50 p.m. (3:50 p.m. local time) and delivered remarks at a campaign event at 9:10 p.m. (6:10 p.m. local time).

Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), John McCain (R-Ariz.), and Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) sent a letter to President Obama on Feb. 12 that said, “During the eight hours the U.S. mission was under attack, did you personally speak with any officials in the Libyan government to request assistance for our American personnel?”

Then, on Feb. 14, White House Counsel Kathryn H. Ruemmler sent a letter to the senators. (See WH letter-Obama-Libyan.pdf)
 
“The President spoke to President Margariaf on the evening of September 12,” Ruemmler wrote.
The letter did not specify whether "the evening" referred to U.S. Eastern Standard Time or to Libya time (Libya is 6 hours ahead of U.S. EST).

Obama did deliver remarks that morning from the Rose Garden about the attack. According to the White House schedule, he also visited the State Department.

The White House did not respond to inquiries from CNSNews.com Friday regarding the letter.

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/wh-obama-called-libyan-president-one-day-after-benghazi-attack

Mark Steyn: Magical Fairyland budgeting

I'm also issuing a new goal for America," declared President Obama at his "State of the Union" on Tuesday. We'll come to the particular "goal" he "issued" momentarily, but before we do, consider that formulation: Did you know the president of the United States is now in the business of "issuing goals" for his subjects to live up to? 

Strange how the monarchical urge persists even in a republic two-and-a-third centuries old. Many commentators have pointed out that the modern State of the Union is in fairly obvious mimicry of the Speech from the Throne that precedes a new legislative session in British Commonwealth countries and Continental monarchies, but this is to miss the key difference. When the Queen or her viceroy reads a Throne Speech in Westminster, Ottawa or Canberra, it's usually the work of a government with a Parliamentary majority: in other words, the stuff she's announcing is actually going to happen. That's why, lest any enthusiasm for this or that legislative proposal be detected, the apolitical monarch overcompensates by reading everything in as flat and unexpressive a monotone as possible. Underneath the ancient rituals – the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod getting the door of the House of Commons slammed in his face three times – it's actually a very workmanlike affair.

The State of the Union is the opposite. The president gives a performance, extremely animatedly, head swiveling from left-side prompter to right-side prompter, continually urging action now: "Let's start right away. We can get this done. ... We can fix this. ... Now is the time to do it. Now is the time to get it done." And at the end of the speech, nothing gets done, and nothing gets fixed, and, after a few days' shadowboxing between admirers and detractors willing to pretend it's some sort of serious legislative agenda, every single word of it is forgotten until the next one.

In that sense, like Beyoncé lip-synching the National Anthem at the Inauguration, the State of the Union embodies the decay of America's political institutions into a simulacrum of responsible government rather than the real thing, and a simulacrum ever more divorced from the real issues facing the country. "Over the last few years, both parties have worked together to reduce the deficit by more than $2.5 trillion," said the president. Really? Who knew? "Now we need to finish the job." Just one more push is all it'll take.

What's he on about? The annual "deficit" has been over a trillion for every year of Obama's presidency. The cumulative deficits have, in fact (to use a quaint expression), increased the national debt by $6 trillion. Yet Obama claims Washington has "reduced the deficit" by $2.5 trillion, and all we need to do is "finish the job." Presumably this is a reference to allegedly agreed deficit reductions over the next decade, or quarter-century or whatever. In other words, Obama has saved $2.5 trillion of Magical Fairyland money, which happily frees him up to talk about the really critical issues like high-speed rail and green energy solutions. These concepts, too, exist mainly in Magical Fairyland: if you think Obama-approved taxpayer-funded "high-speed rail" means you'll be able to board a train that goes at French or Japanese speeds, I've a high-speed rail bridge to Brooklyn to sell you.

Take, for example, the "goal" Obama "issued": "Let's cut in half the energy wasted by our homes and businesses over the next 20 years." What does that even mean? How would you even know when you've accomplished that "goal"? What percentage of energy used by my home and business is "wasted"? In what sense? Who says? Who determines that? Is it 37 percent? 23 percent? So we're going to cut it down to 18.5 percent or 11.5 percent by 2033, is that the "goal"?

Barack Obama is not the first president to "issue" "goals." John F. Kennedy also did, although he was more mindful of the constitutional niceties:

"This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.'"

That's a goal! No wiggle room. A monkey on the moon won't count, nor an unmanned drone. We need an actual living American standing on the surface of the moon, holding Old Glory, by Dec. 31, 1969.
Whoever's writing Obama's speeches these days either has a tin ear – you don't "issue" goals, you set them – or he has a very refined sense of the ersatz nature of contemporary political discourse. Old-school monarchs issued "edicts." One thinks of King Charles the Bald in his Edict of Pistres in AD 864, announcing, among other things, that henceforth selling a horse to a Viking would be punishable by death. No doubt the odd equine transaction slipped through the regulatory net, but historians seem to agree that the sale of mounts to Norsemen certainly diminished. And, more to the point, his courtiers would have thought Charles the Bald was an even bigger schmuck than they already did if, instead of an edict, he was issuing a new goal to reduce the sale of horses to Vikings by 50 percent by the year 884.

These days, the edicts are issued by commissars deep in the bowels of the hyper-regulatory state, and most of them are, like King Charles, a little too bald in their assumptions of government power to be bandied in polite society. So, in public, the modern ruler issues goals, orders dreams, commands unicorns. People seem to like this sort of thing. No accounting for taste, but there we are. "America moves forward only when we do so together," declared the president. I dunno. Maybe it's just me, but the whole joint seems to be seizing up these days: the more "activist" Big Government gets, the more inactive the nation at large.

But the president's sonorous, gaseous banalities did serve notice that the Republicans don't want to get too far behind on his "goals." He's right that Washington "moves forward" like a pantomime horse lurching awkwardly across the stage and with the Republicans always playing the rear end. A "bipartisan" agreement means that the Democrats get what they want now and Republicans at some distant far-off date. Try it: New taxes and government programs now, alleged deficit reduction of $2.5 trillion a decade hence. Illegal immigrant amnesty now, alleged rigorous border enforcement the day after tomorrow. Washington has settled into a comfortable pattern: instant gratification for spending binges that do nothing for any of the problems they purport to be solving, assuaged by meaningless commitments to start the 12-step program next year, or next decade or next century. No other big spender among the advanced democracies lies to itself about the gulf between its appetites and its self-discipline.

"Tonight, let's declare," declared the president, "that in the wealthiest nation on Earth..." Whoa, hold it right there. The "wealthiest nation on Earth" is actually the Brokest Nation in History. But don't worry: "Nothing I'm proposing tonight should increase our deficit by a single dime."

"Should"? Consciously or not, the president is telling us his State of the Union show is a crock, and he knows it. Under Magical Fairyland budgeting, Obama-sized government "shouldn't" increase our debt. Yet, mysteriously it does. Every time. Because, in a political culture institutionally incapable of course correction, that's just the way it is.

http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/president-496076-obama-goal.html

Night of nonsense

By George Will
 
In the 12 months we have to steel ourselves for the next State of the Union spectacle, let us count the ways that this spawn of democratic Caesarism — presidency-worship — has become grotesque. It would be the most embarrassing ceremony in the nation’s civic liturgy were the nation still capable of being embarrassed by its puerile faith in presidential magic.

The Constitution laconically requires only that the president “shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.” Nothing requires “from time to time” to be construed as “every damn year.” Informing and recommending need not involve today’s tawdry ritual of wishful thinking by presidents unhinged from political reality, and histrionics by their audiences. And must we be annually reminded that all presidents think that everything they want is “necessary and expedient”?

Some of the blame for this yearly night of nonsense goes to Ronald Reagan. Most, however, goes to Woodrow Wilson. Reagan, who loved entertainment, pioneered the regrettable practice of stocking the House gallery with (usually) admirable people. Wilson, who loved himself, had, as professors often do, a theory, which caused him to reverse Thomas Jefferson’s wholesome reticence.

When the Founding generation was developing customs and manners appropriate to a republic, George Washington and John Adams made the mistake of going to Congress to do their constitutional duty of informing and recommending. Jefferson, however, disliked the sound of his voice — such an aversion is a vanishingly rare presidential virtue — and considered it monarchical for the executive to lecture the legislature, the lofty instructing underlings. So he sent written thoughts to Capitol Hill, a practice good enough for subsequent presidents until Wilson in 1913 delivered his message orally, pursuant to the progressives’ belief in inspirational and tutelary presidents.

It is beyond unseemly, it is anti-constitutional for senior military officers and, even worse, Supreme Court justices, to attend these political rallies where, with metronomic regularity, legislators of the president’s party leap to their feet to whinny approval of every bromide and vow. Members of the other party remain theatrically stolid, thereby provoking brow-furrowing punditry about why John Boehner did not rise (to genuflect? salute? swoon?) when Barack Obama mentioned this or that. Tuesday night, the justices, generals and admirals, looking as awkward as wallflowers at a prom, at least stayed seated.

Except for Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, who stayed away. They missed a clunker of a speech, although the tedium was not much worse than usual, and was redeemed by clarifying three things.

First, Obama’s declaration that nothing in his long list of proposed spending “should” — should? — “increase our deficit by a single dime” means there should be commensurate tax increases. Second, now that he has proclaimed that government “must keep the promises we’ve already made,” only the uneducable can still believe he will consider entitlement reforms. Third, by saying spending cuts under the sequester would be “harsh” and would “devastate” domestic programs, he made applesauce of those two words: The cuts would remove only $85 billion from this year’s almost $3.6 trillion budget, and over a decade they would cut just $1.2 trillion from projected spending of $46 trillion. And spending this year would still be well above the post-1945 norm as a percentage of gross domestic product.

Although Obama is a self-proclaimed respecter of science, he does not stoop to empiricism.

Understandably. Data are unkind to his assertion that climate change is causing storms to become more severe and drought to become more prevalent. Measured by “accumulated cyclone energy,” hurricane and other tropical cyclone activity is at a three-decade low, and Nature journal reports that globally “there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years.”

Wilson’s stroke prevented him from delivering the State of the Union orally in 1919 and 1920, but Warren Harding, not known for a strong sense of propriety, continued the deplorable practice in 1921 and 1922. Calvin Coolidge did so in 1923, four months after becoming president, but not a second time. Wilson’s practice was, however, made the norm by the man who had first come to Washington as Wilson’s assistant secretary of the Navy, Franklin Roosevelt.

State of the Union addresses are now integral to the apotheosis of the presidency. If government is going to be omniprovident, modern presidents are going to be omnipresent, and politics is going to be infantile.

http://www.humanevents.com/2013/02/16/will-night-of-nonsense-state-of-the-unio/ 

President Obama has set in motion forces that he can't handle.

Barack Obama is a terrible president. That's obvious to everyone who isn't chronically ignorant or incurably liberal.  By "liberal" I don't mean the classic definition of the word which has to do with being open-minded and objective. I mean the modern version of liberal: self-centered, emotional, illogical, and void of reason. Unfortunately, in 2012 ignoramuses and liberals represented the majority of those who voted. I'm not worried about offending them with my harsh words. My very existence offends them, and so does yours if you don't buy into their worldview.

From economic policy to energy policy to environmental policy to foreign affairs to national security to border security to you name it, the president failed the test, but we re-elected him anyway. Obama's misadventures in the Oval Office are becoming the stuff of legend. Benghazi and Fast and Furious are two of his more high profile blunders, but they aren't the only ones. If George W. Bush had committed just one of those offenses, the mainstream media would have demanded his head on a platter, but they gave Obama a free pass. The nation as a whole became complicit in the president's shenanigans because we didn't demand that he be held accountable.

President Obama has done one thing superbly well: he has demonstrated skill par excellence on a national scale as a community organizer. He is second to none when it comes to inciting, agitating, race baiting, stoking fears, and motivating the masses. If you discount voter fraud, more than anything else, those skills got him re-elected. But like a snowball gathering momentum as it rolls down a hill, the forces that he has unleashed will be impossible to stop without pain and suffering.

For example, Occupy Wall Street's demands for social justice dovetailed perfectly with the president's fairness campaign. Was that coincidence or was it by design?  The answer should be obvious, but whatever the case may be, the OWS crowd eventually ran amuck in cities across the fruited plain until government officials finally took action to shut them down. 

That's the way it is with unruly mobs. Once agitators get them started, you never know what will happen. But we do know this: President Obama is their champion, and they are still among us waiting in the wings for another opportunity to vent their frustrations. Will the next version of OWS be more malevolent than the first? Only time will tell, but I wouldn't rule it out.

OWS types aren't alone. In the United States today, large and growing numbers of people believe that their mere existence is their contribution to society. They think that those of us who have worked hard all of our lives owe them a living, and not just a living, but a very good living.  The takers among us are easy pickings for a man with exceptional community organizing skills, and as I said, the forces that the president has unleashed will prove to be impossible to control.  If they explode, there will be hell to pay. 

Common sense is totally absent in their world. For instance, who would dare to suggest that the 1% who paid almost 40% of federal income taxes in 2010 should pay more because it's "fair" even though about 50% of our fellow citizens paid no federal income tax?  The answer: Barack Obama and his merry band of malcontents. If George Orwell were alive today, he would be scratching his head and thinking about a mind-bending plot for another novel.

Takers have no misgivings about attaching themselves permanently to the government tit, and they feel no guilt or shame as they scream for more. Obama knows them and their predilections all too well, and he takes advantage of every opportunity to stoke the fires that burn within them.  The president's mother and his grandparents should have taught him the basics -- things like if you play with matches, you will get burned -- because the fire that he's igniting can easily turn into an inferno.  If it does, all of us will pay a very high price.

In due course, simple mathematics will dictate that we can't afford to keep able bodied men and women on the dole. Our current debt and deficit situation is so dire that something has got to give.  Judging by a recent Gallup poll, most Americans agree with me, but metaphorically speaking, it may take a swift kick in a sensitive area to wake up our elected officials in Washington. Be that as it may, the day is rapidly approaching when no one can ignore our fiscal quagmire because the combination of Medicare, Social Security, and defense spending plus interest on the debt and paying freeloaders threatens to sink this nation.

Reneging on our national debt is out of the question since global pandemonium would ensue.  Obamacare may help to reduce healthcare costs, but when evidence mounts that those "death panels" that we have heard so much about are real and that we are saving money by medicating patients and allowing them to pass away peacefully rather than treating their maladies, people will be hopping mad. Many of them will take to the streets to vent their anger.  If you think that it can't happen here, you haven't been paying attention.

Social Security is a special breed of cat because it involves seniors, a powerful voting block, and it is regarded as a national promise that we must not break. Besides, people actually paid in to Social Security as did their employers so it's an annuity -- and not a very good one at that.  Any politician who thinks that he can safely tamper with Social Security isn't playing with a full deck of cards. Even so, we can't solve our debt and deficit problems unless we make adjustments in Social Security and Medicare. It's the quintessential Catch 22.

Similarly, we need to cut defense spending without jeopardizing our national security, but defense reductions translate into job cuts and that creates another set of problems. No matter what we do, people will not be happy with the outcome, and many of them will vent their frustration in the voting booth and possibly on the streets.

This is the point: a perfect storm is brewing. I think we're heading for a chaotic and violent period in this country the likes of which no one alive today has ever witnessed.  If I'm right, conditions will be ideal for criminals to ply their craft, and President Obama is pushing for gun control at precisely the wrong moment.

I believe that what I have described is realistic and unfortunately inevitable, and that brings me back to my back to the president.  He has set in motion forces that he can't handle, and all of us are going to suffer the consequences so get ready for a wild ride.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/02/president_obama_has_set_in_motion_forces_that_he_cant_handle.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=facebook

Excuse Me, Your Illogic Is Showing: Orwell’s Vision Emerges In California

In the 1940’s and 50’s, famed Author George Orwell surmised that both the English language and civilized society were in decline. 

After a press conference held last week by Emeryville, California Police Chief Ken James, it’s easy to see a decline in both language and critical thinking skills in our country. And as Orwell thought, indeed civilized society may very well be in jeopardy.

It happened on February 14^th. Taking to the microphones and cameras in his suburban San Francisco community, Chief James stood at a podium with the requisite group of serious-looking, professionally dressed, pouty-faced people standing behind him (it appears that Emeryville Mayor Kurt Brinkman was one of them). In part, the Chief said “one issue that always boggles my mind is that the idea that a gun is a defensive weapon. That is a myth. A gun is not a defensive weapon.”

From there, Mr. James went on to say that “a gun is an offensive weapon used to intimidate and show power. Police officers don’t carry a gun as a defensive weapon to defend themselves or their other officers. They carry a gun to be able to do their job in a safe and effective manner and face any oppositions we may come upon. If it was a defensive measure, why did we lose 55 officers nationwide last year to gun violence? And unfortunately, in just the two months of this year so far, we have lost two officers to gun violence in the state of California alone.” 

So, how shall we begin to analyze the logical fallacies here? Let’s start with this: a gun is an inanimate object. A gun doesn’t think; it doesn’t feel; it has no intentions or aspirations; and despite what the Emeryville Chief of Police says, a gun does not have “offensive” or “defensive” tendencies.

In this regard, guns and footballs share something in common. Neither a gun nor a football is “offensive” or “defensive” in its essence. Yet each of them can be utilized by a human being for either offensive or defensive purposes. In short, whether a gun or a football is used for offensive or defensive purposes depends on who possesses it. 

Having established this, consider these words again: “a gun is an offensive weapon used to intimidate and show power. Police officers don’t carry a gun as a defensive weapon to defend themselves or their other officers. They carry a gun to be able to do their job in a safe and effective manner and face any oppositions we may come upon.”

Really, Mr. James? I won’t bother doing “grammar police” work here (“oppositions” is not a word, and placeing “we” and “they” as the subject of the same sentence is problematic as well). 

But seriously, does Chief James believe his own definition of a gun? If a gun is nothing more than something used to “intimidate and show power,” then why would police officers carry them? And is it the role of police officers to “intimidate?” Is it ever the job of a cop to “show power?”

I would answer both these questions with an emphatic “yes.” At times police officers absolutely need to “show power” and to appear intimidating in the face of lawless threats, and I suspect that most cops, if they were honest, would agree. 

Yet James probably would not want to publicly say “our job as police officers is to intimidate” – especially not in California’s very left-wing Bay Area – because he would steer himself in to yet another public relations debacle, appearing as though he’s making excuses for police officers displaying “excessive force.”

But if James’ assertions are true, and a gun is merely something used to “intimidate and show power,” and can never be used for defensive purposes, then police officers should abandon them immediately. Law enforcement officers should be about the business of defending property, themselves, and the citizens they serve. If a gun isn’t helpful for those types of efforts, as Chief James insists, then it’s time for his police force to hand them in. 

And here’s another implication of Chief James’ illogical remarks: If a gun was really something to be used for defensive purposes, then cops would never get killed. Well, in a perfect world, maybe this would be true. But in the real and imperfect world in which we all live (and this would include Chief James), even the best defensive plans sometimes are insufficient to save a life.

I mean no disrespect here to law enforcement officers, or to Chief James. On the contrary, I respect the profession of law enforcement enough to point out the recklessness of this man’s words.
I also realize that we live in a time when logic, critical thinking, communication, and the ability to draw inferences and to consider the implications of one’s words are skills that are in short supply. Yet the demand for them has, perhaps, never been greater in our nation’s history.

A gun in the hands of a criminal is a dangerous thing. The power of law enforcement in the hands of people who can’t think or speak logically is, perhaps, even more so. 

 http://townhall.com/columnists/austinhill/2013/02/17/excuse-me-your-illogic-is-showing-orwells-vision-emerges-in-california-n1514215/page/full/

Upworthy — or, How we are losing the internet to lowest of low information young liberals

I previously wrote about how BuzzFeed Politics has combined “the culture” and savvy crafting into a highly effective tool for undermining Republicans with subtle and not-so-subtle mockery.  “Look at the goofy cat, look at the goofy celeb, look at the goofy Republican” is more dangerous to us than a 5000-word article in The New York Times Sunday Magazine.

To follow up on that theme, I happened upon a website called Upworthy, which had one its posts run at HuffPo, Elizabeth Warren Asks The Most Obvious Question Ever, Stumps A Bunch Of Bank Regulators.
The post was so wrong on substance, I just had to click over to the source.

And therein I learned what millions of very low-information young liberals already knew — there is this website called Upworthy which is one giant liberal activist social media machine which creates viral social media memes in the cause of liberal political activism.

Upworthy was co-founded by the former digital media consultant for MoveOn.org.  Upworthy touts its political agenda (emphasis in original):

Upworthy is…
…social media with a mission: to make important stuff as viral as a video of some idiot surfing off his roof. Here’s a piece by The New York Times‘ David Carr about our first 100 days….
Our mission at Upworthy is to elevate and draw attention to the issues that really matter — from gay marriage to body image to global poverty — through irresistible social media. You should judge us by how good a job we’re doing at that. And please do, sincerely—we want you to hold us to that standard. Send us feedback on how we’re doing, anytime.
For mission-driven organizations working in a business like lead generation, where you’re very tangibly and concretely building organizing power to create change, whom you work with is a moral decision. We promise that we’ll never do lead generation/membership-building work with groups that we don’t believe are, on balance, creating positive social change.

Upworthy is the fastest growing website and already receives millions of visits a month despite being less than one year old, and has over 55 thousand Twitter followers.  It recently received $4 million in venture capital funding.

Upworthy is not interested in deep thinking, or you:

Who’s your audience?

Basically, “The Daily Show” generation. People who care about what’s going on in the world but don’t want to be boring about it

The Elizabeth Warren post at Upworthy is a prime example of how low information is combined with a political agenda to create a meme which is based on a lack of understanding, but very, very catchy.

As mentioned above, HuffPo ran the post with the same title as the original Upworthy post, Elizabeth Warren Asks The Most Obvious Question Ever And Stumps A Bunch Of Bank Regulators. 

The first thing to note is that when you click on the homepage link to the post, an anti-NRA poll pops up.  It’s the equivalent of a push poll, delivering a political message in the form of a poll.  The “I Agree” button already is highlighted, so that the reader does not even need to think through the already biased question.  How long before Upworthy runs a post about the overwhelming demand that Congress “stand up to the NRA”?

If you click “No” you go to the post.  If you click “Yes” they ask for your email address:

Here is the entire text of the post:

Someone drank too much coffee this morning before a Senate Banking Committee hearing and decided to “do the job we hired her for” and ask the question the rest of us have been “asking for years.” That someone is my new favorite senator, Elizabeth Warren. Someone go on another Starbucks run for her, pretty please?
[video embed of Warren at Senate Banking Committee]

• At 1:20, she asks the question we’ve all been wanting someone to ask FOREVER. Then a government lawyer stumbles over his words.
• At 2:20, she rattles off another one. Then a government lawyer stumbles over his words.
• At 2:55, she asks another lawyer the same question. Said lawyer then tries to not stumble over her words.
• At 3:25, she asks the same question again. That lawyer asks for some time.
• At 3:45, she gets our back and goes for the knockout punch.
• And then right after that you reward her good behavior by sharing this with everyone on the Internet. You know you want to.

As I explained yesterday, Warren engaged in pure demagoguery, asking a question which not only was not “most obvious” but was a designed-for-TV distortion of what the regulators appearing before the Committee do, Elizabeth Warren’s heroic Senate demagoguery.

Upworthy doesn’t actually get into the substance of Warren’s questioning or the answers, just presuming it was pure genius and urging people to “shar[e] this with everyone on the Internet.”  To that end, Upworthy’s post becomes one giant share button as you scroll down:

And so they did.  The video now appears at Reddit with the exact same headline as at Upworthy and has generated over 1000 comments:

The social media has helped propel the video to over 600,000 views as of this writing.  It’s on target to exceed Warren’s Factory Owner rant.

There is nothing like Upworthy or BuzzFeed on the right.  The closest we have come is Twitchy, Michelle Malkin’s brilliant website.

Are you surprised that Obama won the youth vote even though his policies are a complete disaster for the young?

We are losing the fight to the lowest of low information voters, who are pushed toward a liberal agenda by very smart and talented people who understand the power of social media in a way we don’t.

So often when I ask readers to follow us on Facebook and Twitter, I’m met with comments about privacy concerns on Facebook and “I don’t do Twitter” type responses.  Fair enough, but at least understand the swarm effect a website like Upworthy can create based on dumbed-down politically-savvy social media interactions, and how that swarm may result in Elizabeth Warren being on the Democratic 2016 ticket if Hillary doesn’t run.

When I read about plans for Republicans planning to narrow the digital divide, I can’t help thinking we are fighting the last war.

http://legalinsurrection.com/2013/02/upworthy-or-how-we-are-losing-the-internet-to-lowest-of-low-information-young-liberals/

Also Reads:

Obama, own your secret wars

"Throughout this period, the administration has tried to have it both ways — leaking out success stories of our growing use of these new technologies but not tying its hands with official statements and set policies.
This made great sense at first, when much of what was happening was ad hoc and being fleshed out as it went along.
But that position has become unsustainable. The less the U.S. government now says about our policies, the more that vacuum is becoming filled by others, in harmful ways."