Several more predictions for the Age of Obama, and then some

I'm sufficiently happy with my first fortune-cookie job in February of '09 to undertake a second, with predictions great and small, to wit:

1. The abolition of the light bulb will be repealed. It always was madness that the useless "Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007" included a provision outlawing the incandescent light bulb as of 2012. They're light bulbs: they're harmless, they cost a matter of pennies each, and they're so towering a monument to ingenuity and improvement that the image of the light bulb is the very symbol for genius inspiration. No American government can possibly be acting as intended by the Founders if it busies itself with the likes of abolishing the light bulb. But the House of Representatives now is to be re-taken by Republicans, and those Republicans will move to repeal the ban before the impossible enforcement of it commences, polls will show something over two-thirds support for repeal, and the ban will necessarily die, if not before Obama leaves office on January 20 of 2013 then very shortly thereafter.


2. This is probably so uncontroversial as to go without saying, but I thought it would only be appropriate to put on the record here that Republicans will hold the House of Representatives and gain the Senate in 2012. The Democrats were only saved in the Senate in 2010 by the fact that the third of the Senate that was up for re-election happened to be Republican seats or sufficiently Democratic seats to have survived a Republican year like 2004, when Republicans held the House, the Senate, and the presidency. The Democrats' margin was made in '06 and '08, which were high-water marks for them, and artificially high, at that, and those seats that took them from minority to majority will be up for grabs in '12 and '14. The next two years will be the last for Democratic control of the Senate for some time.

And the House Democrats affirmed their new status as minority not long after the midterms, in re-electing Nancy Pelosi to lead them, Pelosi being the most reviled figure in national politics and government and one of three authors of the greatest disquiet in American society in at least a generation. Something like re-nominating Carter against Reagan for '84. That lot won't be entrusted again with a House majority anytime soon.

3. Obama will be a one-term president, that much seems assured to me and has all along. His 2008 campaign was a fraud and he is singularly unsuited to the American presidency. The next president of the United States will be whomever is nominated for president by the Republican Party in 2012, but that question is an open one. Already there are maybe a dozen prospects, but I'm prepared now to venture out onto a limb and predict that the next Republican nominee for president and indeed the next president of the United States will be one Rick Perry of Texas.

Yes, my forecast two years ago was for Mark Sanford of South Carolina, but that ought not be held against me: Sanford might even have been the prohibitive favorite today if he hadn't got himself ruined by taking off for Argentina one fine day in 2009 to take up with an Argie gal he liked better than his wife back in SC, which Charles Krauthammer diagnosed as subconscious self-sabotage, in his capacity as a former psychiatrist.

So barring another unscheduled Argentine vacation, Rick Perry it is. Perry is now the longest-serving governor in the second-largest state in the Union. That he is a governor at all is a boon, but he is a particularly successful one. He has kept a balanced budget in a juggernaut state with no state income tax, and between August of '09 and August '10, "half of all the net new jobs created in the United States...were created in Texas," so says the National Review. Perry is solidly conservative and forcefully anti-Obama. He's sufficiently old without his seniority being anything approaching a liability, and he looks the part of president of the United States, for whatever that's worth, and it's not nothing. He's a Methodist, which I count among the "presidential denominations", though after Obama I suspect even a Mormon president would be a relief to the nation. And Rick Perry is a former airman, a Vietnam-era veteran of the United States Air Force. There's a presidential profile for 2012 if I've ever seen one.

Perry is not often counted among the prospective Republican candidates for president, but then John McCain was running third and fourth in the Republican primary polls in October of '07 when I reckoned him for the 2008 Republican nominee, and anyway at this point Perry is arguably better off in the shadows. The nation isn't ready for another presidential race just yet; no need of making everyone sick at the sight of you before it's even time for declarations of candidacy and fundraisers and debates and interviews.

4. The next Republican president, with his Republican Congress, will re-institute America's manned space program. Obama cancelled America's manned space program for the first time since there's been such a thing as manned space flight, not by presiding over the end of the 1970s-vintage shuttle program, which is in fact overdue for retirement and was scheduled to be retired, anyway, but by cancelling the replacement for the shuttle, which was called Constellation.

Constellation was inaugurated under the Bush Administration, and that may be the first clue as to why Obama ordered it cancelled. But the bigger reason seems plain enough to me, which is that Obama has an inveterate hostility to American greatness and to all those things that make for national greatness, including especially domination in rocketry which Obama and the Left like to fret will lead to a "weaponization of space", as if space isn't "weaponized" by military satellites and ballistic missiles already, and as if an American capitulation in space would make space any less "weaponized" by the Chinese and Russians.

Obama cancelled Constellation and with it America's manned space program for the same reason that Neil Armstrong came out of his seclusion along with two other Apollo commanders to oppose that cancellation, pleading that it would put America on "a long downhill slide to mediocrity." If you're the sort of person who takes it as read that America is the problem in the world, that it's a fundamentally wicked and stupid and greedy and abusive nation -- and Obama's personal history gives us every reason to believe that he is precisely that kind of person -- then "a long downhill slide to mediocrity" is the most politically-viable way of neutering and diminishing America, to where it is left to take orders from the more "enlightened" in the world, and no longer has it so good or has any capacity for venturing out into the world in the defense and promotion of its interests and values.

But Obama's red herring that America simply can no longer afford Constellation is an absurdity. At this point Constellation would be costing the United States something over $3 billion a year; Obama's worse-than-useless stimulus ended up at $862 billion, and with about 40 percent of that still unspent, Obama was calling for $266 billion more. Obama never came down against anything because it cost too much; he's against Constellation because he's against an American manned space program. For crying out loud, Obama put $2.5 billion over five years into NASA for the study of "global warming". Besides which, the American taxpayer has invested $9 billion in the program already, and the cancellation itself is supposed to cost $2.5 billion.

When the shuttle program expires and there is no Constellation program to replace it, America will have no heavy capacity for making it out of earth's atmosphere, and will be dependent on Russia for its space business, at $50 million per astronaut just to get to its International Space Station and back. There's $3 billion in the United States budget for a proper space program like America has had since there's been any such thing, and what America cannot afford is to cede space to the Chinese and Russians.

5. Obama-care will not stand. Michael Barone, who is as sober as he is encyclopedic, has called Obama-care the most unpopular major national legislation to be passed since the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and that led in part to the Civil War. It's a plain bad bill, for a start. Megan McArdle, who is an economist and by no means a Republican partisan, has concluded that Obama-care is "unstable, politically and practically." Quite. When over a hundred companies and institutions need exempting from a national law as just the first phases come into effect, then what you've got hold of is a bad law.

And Obama-care is the only social program ever to be enacted against the will of the people and with not a solitary vote from the minority opposition. Indeed, some 34 Democrats voted against the thing in the House. There was a consensus on Obama-care, both in the nation at large and in Congress, and it was that the bill ought not be passed. In the event, the final bill had to be passed by parliamentary manoeuver to circumvent the 60-percent threshold in the Senate.

The states are about to go into revolt against the mandates in Obama-care. In these midterm elections just past, Democrats were turned out of the state legislatures in what may be the largest-ever turnover at the state level since the founding of the Republic, with something like 680 seats switching from Democrat to Republican, and those Republican legislatures will become little battlefields in the war against Obama-care. And Obama-care may well be holed below the waterline by the Supreme Court if it strikes down as unconstitutional the "individual mandate" compelling the American people to buy health insurance -- and not some bare-bones health insurance, approximate to liability insurance for cars, but the comprehensive kind, as determined by the Health and Human Services Director and enforced by the IRS. Oh, yes: Obama-care will not stand.

Clinton v. Obama, 2012

Though I'm not predicting it at this point, a Hillary Clinton insurgency against President Obama doesn't seem so outside the realm of possibility -- not in the Democratic Party. The speculation is occasioned by the remarkable Gallup poll of September '10 finding that just 52 percent -- of Democrats -- would vote to re-nominate Obama for president, to 37 percent for Clinton. In fact there've been quite a lot of one-termers and contested re-nominations on the Democrat side in the six decades since the Second World War.

Clinton of course won two terms, though it has to be said that he was the beneficiary in his first election especially of a strong third-party candidacy in Ross Perot, who split the anti-Clinton vote in '92 and '96 such that Clinton could pass through to the White House with 43 percent and 49 percent of the popular vote. And a third-party candidacy as substantial as Perot's is not a usual thing historically.

Carter was the object of a contested primary in '80 which might conceivably have gone to Ted Kennedy had Kennedy not fallen on his face in the 60 Minutes interview when he couldn't answer the question of why he was running, and of course the Chappaquiddick business didn't help. Carter was only weakened the more by the challenge and wound up losing the general election to Reagan so badly that he'd conceded before the polls were closed on the West Coast.

Johnson served out the last year of John Kennedy's term and then won a term of his own in '64, but he was eligible per the 22nd Amendment for re-election in the spring of '68 when the writing on the wall had become sufficiently plain that he announced, "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president." Johnson had come within eight points of losing the New Hampshire primary to Eugene McCarthy, which result had brought Bobby Kennedy into the race. The Democratic National Convention that summer was a circus and the Democrat Party was radicalized and banished from the presidency for seven of the next ten elections.

Kennedy obviously was assassinated about three years into his only term, so his case can only be left out of consideration.

Which leaves Truman. Truman filled out all but a few months of Franklin Roosevelt's last term and then won a term of his own in '48 but was exempted from the 22nd Amendment and was on the ballot in the Democratic primaries of '52, until he lost New Hampshire to Estes Kefauver, 55-44 percent, whereupon he announced he'd not stand for re-election. The Democrats nominated Adlai Stevenson later that year and again four years after that, to lose to Eisenhower.

So Bill Clinton is the only proper two-termer the Democrat Party has produced since FDR in the '30s and '40s, and even Clinton got a push across the finish line by a historically-anomalous third-party candidacy.

On the other side in that same period are Bush 43, Bush 41, Reagan, Ford, Nixon, and Eisenhower. Bush 43, Reagan, Nixon, and Eisenhower were all elected to two terms, though Nixon didn't finish out his second. Ford assumed the presidency to fill out that second Nixon term, was challenged seriously in the '76 Republican primaries by Reagan, and gave way to the Carter interregnum. But Ford doesn't exactly fit in this scheme on account of he was never elected. Which leaves George H. W. Bush, who was the object of a spirited primary challenge in '92 from Pat Buchanan among others, and a one-termer, though Bush 41 was hindered by the same 19-percent Perot phenomenon that aided Clinton.

And that's it: the one-termers and the contested re-nominations have tended to be on the Democrat side in the six decades since the Second World War, and in fact that kind of thing has been the rule rather than the exception with Democrat presidents.

I wrote when Obama clinched the Democrat nomination in June of '08 that "the Democrat Party has made a mistake". That must have looked foolish sometime that November when Obama won the presidency with supermajorities in both houses of Congress, but it was one of the shrewder assessments I've ever made. Obama was unqualified and unprepared for the presidency, his instincts are consistently and suicidally wrong, his ideas are unworkable and alien to the American nation, and he is unusually vain and bitter and arrogant even by the standards of the sort of men who presume to lead the world. Barack Hussein Obama is a plain bad president, and he could only ever have been a bad president.

Obama is already a marginalized, discredited, unheeded, and failed president. He fell further, faster than any president since the advent of polling. His campaign was a fraud, and the more he says and does -- the more he reveals himself truly -- the more abhorrent he is to the American people. I decline to say that the American people make mistakes, but they do sometimes have accidents, and November of 2008 was one for the ages. It will be put right at the first opportunity. The question is whether Obama marks the end of leftism in American national government, and the rebirth of First Principles, for a couple of election cycles, or for a generation.

So Obama is a one-term president, though the details have yet to be written. If he tells the American people that they can't fire him, he quits, or if he takes his chances on a re-election and the Democratic Party does to him as the mob does to a fellow who's outlived his usefulness, then the obvious alternate standard-bearer will be the the one they now know they ought to have nominated in the first place. Only, that assumes Hillary Clinton would want another run at the presidency, but my assumption has always been that Clinton would never run unless she could be confident of winning, and in 2012 she would of course lose: if a party can't re-elect a sitting president, it won't elect a runner-up pleading that she's one of the good ones.

The Great Peasant Revolt, or, the state of the United States, Age of Obama, Year 2

(Updated and expanded, October 9, '10)

The United States is roiling. This Age of Obama has brought a wrack and upheaval in America beyond what even Obama-bashing right-wing reactionary rednecks like myself had reckoned on.

This is the greatest disquiet in American society in at least a generation, and what is called the mainstream press mostly missed the story, because it's part of the same elite that's looking over the palace balconies at all those uncouth, unlovely commoners in this Great Peasant Revolt.

It does seem that there's an entire class of people who deny or dismiss what President Obama and his Congress have wrought, or else blame the American people for not more joyfully giving their country away and deferring to their elite while it "remakes the nation" unrecognizably. There's a conventional wisdom among the conventional Obama-apologists to explain it all away, invoking the old "it's the economy, stupid" formulation from the 1992 presidential campaign, that if the natives are restless then it's a simple matter of their impatience with the pace of Obama's economic "recovery," which is perceptible mainly to the most partisan Democrats and the press. It is the economy, sure enough, but it's everything else as well.

So here is a pitifully inadequate list of recent news to give some small sense of the state of the United States in the Age of Obama, Year 2. Anyone depending for their news on the news sections of this Chronicle-Herald would be oblivious to all of the following points and more besides.

In just the first year and a half under Obama, the national debt "held by the public" went from $6.3 trillion or $20,000 per American, to $8.8 trillion or $28,000 for every man, woman and child in America -- more debt in 19 months than was accumulated under the first 40 presidencies over 200 years.

In the 19 months since Obama's $862 billion stimulus to "create or save 3 to 4 million jobs," the American economy has lost 2.6 million jobs net.

More Americans have died in Afghanistan in 20 months under Obama and his suicidally-restrictive rules of engagement, than died in seven years under Bush.

The Commandant of the Marine Corps confirmed that Obama's announced date-certain for starting the Afghan withdrawal is giving "sustenance" to the enemy.

The ruinous ramifications of Obama's unread, 2,700-page health-care bill have been coming out every few days, from the very East German requirement that businesses file two "1099" forms for every transaction with another party having dealings amounting to more than $600 a year, to increases in premiums of up to 9 percent, to the outlawing of the cheaper, no-frills prescription plans held by over 3 million seniors.

Obama's mad "Cash for Clunkers" policy of destroying used cars caused a needless and predictable shortage, so that Edmunds.com found the average used car a year later cost $1,800 more.

Obama's allies at the "Business Roundtable" turned on him, its chairman blaming him and his Congress for an "increasingly hostile environment for investment and job creation."

Obama's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is regulating the smaller operators in the New England groundfishery out of business, its Obama-appointed administrator having declared openly her intent to "remove" a "significant fraction of the vessels."

The House of Representatives didn't bother itself with passing a budget for the first time since the Budget Act of 1974, despite that House Democrats have a 77-seat margin and can pass any old thing they please.

The Democratic Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, who was as responsible as any single figure for Obama's unread, 2,300-page finance reform bill, announced that "no-one will know until this is actually in place how it works."

Two Justice Department lawyers testified that Obama's Civil Rights Division is "hostile" to "race-neutral enforcement of the Voting Rights Act."

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement union council voted "no confidence" in the Obama administration, 259 to 0, charging that Obama's ICE director and assistant director "have abandoned the agency's core mission."

When the president of Mexico used the occasion of his address to a joint session of Congress to denounce Arizona's modest and necessary steps against its illegal alien invasion -- which steps are supported by two-thirds of the American people -- the Democratic majority and Obama administration attendees rose in a 20-second standing ovation, after which the Obamas threw him a White House celebrity dance party.

And after Obama's cancellation of America's manned space program, for the first time since there's there's been such a thing as manned space flight, his NASA administrator listed three charges given him by Obama, none of which had anything to do with space, and "perhaps foremost" of which was "to reach out to the Muslim world."

Obama and his Congress have taken things uniformly from bad to worse, and conjured new troubles where there were none. They have replaced the consent of the governed with contempt for the governed, and they do not know better than the American people what's good for them. Obama's campaign was a fraud, and the question now is whether he'll even offer for re-election, or if he'll tell the American people that they can't fire him, he quits. There's a reckoning coming.

Stimulus repudiated

(Updated August 6, '10.)

America had problems, but too little federal spending was not one of them. President Bush spent too much; President Obama is spending much, much more. Obama and his Congress are fixing problems America doesn't have with solutions America can't afford. And it all started with the $787 billion stimulus -- since revised upward to $862 billion.

Obama's stimulus, by his own measures, has failed. Obama promised his stimulus would "create or save 3 to 4 million jobs over the next two years" -- "90 percent...in the private sector"; it's been nearly a year and a half already, and in that time the American economy has lost 2.6 million jobs net. Obama's advisers projected that unemployment wouldn't hit 8 percent if Obama got his stimulus; Obama got his stimulus, and unemployment went over 10 percent for the first time in a quarter-century. Obama promised his stimulus would "immediately creat[e] jobs"; 16 months later, in June alone, 652,000 Americans despaired even of looking for work, which for purposes of government statistics wipes them from the official labour force and conveniently lowers the top-line unemployment rate.
　
The stimulus was sold as the greatest improvement in America's roads since Eisenhower built the Interstate system, but spending for roads and bridges came to just 3 percent of the final bill.　

Forty-three percent of the bill remains unspent nearly a year and a half after it was passed -- $370 billion as of late-July -- and what is the use of a "stimulus" for "immediately creating jobs" if 43 percent of it is still on the shelf after 17 months?

The bill became too much a cheque-book for the preoccupations of the Democratic Party, and bonus spending on institutions favoured of the Democratic Party, from $39.5 billion for public schools, to $2.4 billion for something called "carbon-capture demonstration projects," to $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts.

Nowhere in the bill was there any bonus spending for some of the most "shovel-ready" of government work in war-time -- defence projects -- and in fact the Obama administration later announced cuts to missile defence and production of the world-beating F-22 stealth fighter, national defence being the solitary area of government spending which Democrats are capable of cutting, never mind that there's a war on.

The bill cost $205 billion more than President Bush spent on the Iraq War in six years.

The bill ran to 1,073 pages, and neither the Congressmen and Senators who passed it nor the president who signed it into law bothered to read the thing.

The usual legislative process was suspended, committee hearings were bypassed, and the Republican minority was shut out. ("I won," President Obama explained. "We won the election. We wrote the bill," House Speaker Pelosi elaborated.)

The bill got exactly 3 of 217 Republican votes in both houses of Congress -- one of which three turned Democrat not long after -- and the final votes were reported by the Associated Press in this newspaper as "a major victory for President Obama."

And that was the least of the press abuses where the stimulus was concerned. The Canadian Press in this newspaper reported in March of last year that if Obama's economics are socialist then "it’s a brand of socialism Americans are behind. Countless public opinion polls suggest that the majority of Americans support both additional stimulus spending as well as government intervention to save insolvent banks." The CP report didn't cite any of those "countless" polls, and at least three major national polls in the days and weeks previous were pointing in quite the opposite direction.

The Rasmussen poll found "just 27 percent of voters nationwide favour passage of a second economic stimulus." The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found 61 percent were more concerned the government would spend too much than too little in aid of stimulating the economy -- even if spending less would mean a longer recession. And the Gallup/USA Today poll found all of 14 percent saying it would have been better to spend more on the stimulus.

And never mind any "additional stimulus spending": it was only 44 percent who were calling the first stimulus a "good idea" in the Journal/NBC poll even when the bill was passed in February of '09. Five months later, that number was down to 34. And a year after passage, the New York Times/CBS News poll could find only 6 percent to say the stimulus had actually created jobs.

There was ample warning it wouldn't work. Dominic Lawson in the London Times had it right even before the stimulus was law. "Obama is backing the most primitive interpretation of Keynes’s theories: that any form of government spending amounts to an economic stimulus."

And it turned out Obama's crudified Keynesianism was his Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C for the American and global economies. So far from discreetly retiring the stimulus and taking a new direction, Obama mystifyingly claimed "every economist" had concluded the stimulus "did its job," proclaimed this "Recovery Summer," called for $266 billion more stimulus spending, pushed the $26 billion "state aid" bill to supplement the stimulus, and lectured the G-20 nations on following his example and spending their way to prosperity with bottomless boondoggles.　

The best thing at this point would be to cancel as much as is workable of the unspent provisions of the stimulus, and cut the losses. But Obama's Congress has refused to redirect even a fraction of the stimulus allocations to cover an unfunded unemployment benefits extension, so any change of course is going to take a very different government in Washington.

The stimulus was an act of faith in government, and in Barack Obama, and in the end its greatest effect has been on the national debt.

There Will Be Blood has no clothes

Dreadful. There Will Be Blood is just dreadful. It derives from a novel by Upton Sinclair, so in fairness it could only ever have been dreadful. There Will Be Blood presumes to be some searing indictment of oil and capitalism and America, but what it achieves is a reprise of Gangs of New York and Bill "The Butcher" Cutting; just another bombastic, braying, murderous madman, just another Daniel Day-Lewis psychopath picture.

Oil doesn't make "Daniel Plainview" a psychopath, much less America and its exchanges for goods and services. I defy anyone to watch that ordeal-by-cinema and tell me that Daniel Plainview would've been any more decent a human being had he not got into the oil business. Make him poor, make him a subsistence farmer, make him East Indian, and Daniel Plainview would be every bit as much a psychopath. It wasn't oil or capitalism or America that compelled Daniel Plainview to bludgeon the helpless pastor to death with a bowling pin. There Will Be Blood proves nothing more than that the Daniel Day-Lewis character is a psychopath.

There Will Be Blood is not an enjoyable two-and-a-half hours; it's meant to be unsettling, and there's no fun in a movie engineered to upset. Heaven forfend that Hollywood in the 21st Century produce a "serious" film that doesn't leave the viewer despairing of living. "Seriousness" in Hollywood since circa 1968 is too much measured by un-enjoyable-ness. But if a film isn't enjoyable then it had better achieve something of import, and There Will Be Blood is pointless.

The picture is presented with the affectations of the "sweeping historical epic" and "indictment of American society" or "portrait of the evils of oil" or some such rot. And the elite swallowed it as ever: eight Oscar nominations including Best Picture, and best film of the 2000s per prominent publications. But then, this was 2007-8, when those same elites were head-over-heels for another fancy nullity, this one running for president of the United States. They were unanimous about him, too; uniformly worshipful and uniformly wrong. It was some reassurance to read at Box Office Mojo that notwithstanding the accolades and awards, coinciding with its run in theaters, There Will Be Blood at the time of this writing worked out to Number 1,429 in all-time domestic box office receipts. You might say The Dark Knight drank There Will Be Blood's milkshake.

There Will Be Blood is shot artfully, and I'd be the first to commend its sort-of cinematic style, which doubtless will be aped transparently until its succession by some more novel trend. And Daniel Day-Lewis is a fine actor, particularly if you find indulgent bombast becoming in an actor. Though there must be a million actors who could've played a more real Daniel Plainview in a more true portrait, but those actors weren't in the right place at the right time or didn't attend the right school or don't know the right people, and so they toil in oblivion. But presentation and style don't make a film great any more than they make a president worthy of carving into Mount Rushmore. 

The critics who venerated it and the industry insiders who decorated it were responding to the "great film" trappings and elite prejudice-affirmation in the picture. The Wikipedia entry on There Will Be Blood stipulates that the industry didn't cotton to the script: "the studios didn't think it had the scope of a major picture." The studios had it right the first time. And there you have it: strip away the "great film" affectations, and those same industry insiders who later would elevate There Will Be Blood to the pinnacle of human achievement dismissed that same film as pointless.

And when a "jury" of the American Film Institute inserts the most turgid rote-leftist ideology into a single-paragraph assessment of a movie, then one gets the idea that the politics of the film figured more than a little in the support for it by the establishment. AFI pronounced There Will Be Blood "a true meditation on America." Only if you imagine a cartoonish psychopath to be a precis for America, which of course is precisely how America is caricatured by radical, hard-Left America-haters, of which the American film industry has more than a few.

More from the AFI "jury": "The film drills down into the dark heart of capitalism, where domination, not gain, is the ultimate goal." Again, the only thing that film "drills down into" is the "dark heart" of a cartoonish psychopath. I can only guess that it's not to venture out too far onto a limb to pronounce that anyone associated with the composition of those words is not hard done by capitalism, and that my income in this year would strike them as an impossibility or a joke. But in their alternate universe, the decadent elite are the noble crusaders against the "dark heart of capitalism", and some impoverished nobody alternately shivering and sweating in a cheap apartment at a malfunctioning laptop would be part of the "system" that needs tearing down, if those elites believe in all the "right" things and that nobody is an unreconstructed believer in the goodness and greatness of America.

The Daniel Day-Lewis character is a caricature -- unreal, unbelievable, and unhinged -- and There Will Be Blood is a cartoon. I have no doubt that leftist elites imagine Daniel Plainview and the corrupt pastor character to be representative of oil-men, businessmen, pastors, and Americans more generally, and the universally congratulatory reviews of those elites confirm as much. But the leftist elite deal in caricatures. They know nothing of business or Christianity or indeed of America; they have set themselves apart from the reality of the world and are interested only in stereotypes and caricatures to affirm them in their ignorance and prejudice and contempt.

What the leftist elite mean by "challenging our assumptions" is of course "challenging your assumptions". They're not iconoclasts; they mean to replace your icons with their own. The salt-of-the-earth, all-American folks who actually do things are the ones to be pilloried, scorned, and damned, while all the hatreds of the elite are stroked and sanctified, even as they preach reverently about "challenging our assumptions" and "afflicting the comfortable", etc, etc. ad nauseam. There's no-one more self-righteous than a godless leftist elite.

If they weren't blinded so by their prejudices from seeing the movie plainly, those elites might recognize it to be too cartoonish to be a serious or understanding portrait. What do they teach in Creative Writing 101, about the danger in single dimensions? Villains without redeeming characteristics and flawless heroes make for an unreal story and a tedious one. Some conventions are useful, and that's one of them; any story that relies on this kind of Soviet poster cartoonery won't hold up, and makes a dreadful, dreary picture even on the first showing.

It might have been the better way, to dispense with the weighty and solemn self-seriousness of the movie and come at it as a burlesque. A very slight tweaking could have made a joke of the picture. "I drink your milkshake" is a fine line, and might've made a good departure point for reworking the movie as a comic enterprise. That line and the Daniel Day-Lewis character were taken up by Saturday Night Live at the time, and formed the basis for an entire sketch. An English film team especially might've concluded that the script was too cartoonish to make a properly serious film, and developed and expanded the cartoonish elements to make a romp of the thing. But these dreary moviemakers presumed to make a "big", "serious", "important" film. And when a caricature isn't put up to make the audience laugh then it'll surely make them groan. So if There Will Be Blood is not a roaring spoof, the Daniel Day-Lewis character can only be a psychopath. If Daniel Plainview isn't someone's idea of a joke, then all that's left is psychopathy.

Try this on: give Daniel Plainview a dog; make it a little one, and sweet, and with a silly, cutesy name. Then have Plainview dote on the little dog with equal force to his abuse for human beings. And then tweak the script and direction very slightly, so that Daniel Day-Lewis comes off more mad than malevolent. Every menacing word and turn of the head go from disturbing to hysterical. When it may be said of a movie that a little tweaking might convert it from "sweeping epic" and "indictment of society" to comic romp, then what you've got hold of is not the weighty picture that There Will Be Blood presumes to be.

The bias of The Chronicle-Herald, or, the job description of Canadian Press "Editor-in-Chief"

(UPDATE: Expanded since first posted. A chapter and part of the introduction from an over-long and long-overdue post which I'm far from finishing, in lieu of the rest of it. I'm afraid this can't be of much interest for a general readership, but it needs putting on the record.)

Obama and the 2009 NATO summit according to The Chronicle-Herald.

This was the solitary example offered by Scott White, the "Editor-in-Chief" of Canada's newswire monopoly, as proof that "virtually all" of the news in a little Chronicle-Herald Opinions page article of mine had "been reported", presumably by his Canadian Press or by the Associated Press in the United States, which is sluiced through the Canadian Press under an absolutely typical Canadian arrangement whereby an Upper Canadian outfit headquartered in Toronto is granted exclusive rights to distribute a superior American product to its captive market in the provincial hinterlands like Nova Scotia. They call it "Confederation".

Now, if you'll be good enough to bear with me, in my little op-ed I concerned myself with the coverage of Obama's first 100 days in The Chronicle-Herald specifically, which is why my very second sentence read, "If all a person knew of Barack Obama's first 100 days as president was what he read of them in this newspaper, it would seem to be a very charmed young presidency." In case that and the other references in the article weren't clear enough, I explained again in my reply to an accusatory e-mail from this Editor-in-Chief of Canada's newswire monopoly that "I read the paper every day. The paper I write for, The Chronicle-Herald. I know what it has reported on Obama and what it hasn't." And I was referring to points of scrutiny and skepticism, which is why the summation of my list in the article -- which I'd have thought was fairly obviously a list of points -- read, "Why should these points, and many more like them, have to be made by some obscure contributor to The Herald's Opinions section?" Again, if my little article wasn't clear enough, I continued in my reply to this man's e-mail, "Anyone who depended for their coverage of the Obama administration on that newspaper would have been oblivious to those points and many more."

Whereupon the Editor-in-Chief of Canada's newswire monopoly carried right on declaring that "virtually all of the stories" I cited "have been reported", period, and I was pronounced "wrong" -- only this time it was in print on The Herald's Opinions page. Now, I've had published negative feedback since a few months after I started writing little letters to the editor. Most of it angry, much of it nasty, and some of it personal. And not only letters, but quite lot of 800-word op-eds, too. I've always appreciated that it came with the territory, and after I finished reading The Herald that morning, I shrugged and had a fried bologna sandwich. But this demands revisiting. I know The Chronicle-Herald and have been meaning for some time to document some part of its near-daily abuses, in what its "News Director" and editors choose to print, and at least as much in what they determine their readers needn't be exposed to. Those conspicuous omissions -- the "sins of omission", as Matt Drudge has called them. And so I might as well start from what is for me the beginning. I've made a thorough search of the very useful Herald Archive for the period of Obama's first 100 days, and this is what I've turned up.
I made the points among the many in my little op-ed that Obama had failed in the object of his first NATO summit to rally the allies to muster their troops for Afghanistan, coming away from the Continent with commitments for more of the accustomed noncombat tokens as opposed to fighting forces, which are after all what is called for in a shooting war and which he and his party had claimed such support would have been forthcoming -- that some mythical European cavalry would have ridden over the hill to save the day -- if only the president of the United States had been less cowboy and more Continental, i.e., if only George W. Bush had been replaced by a president exactly like Barack Obama. Then I asked rhetorically why these points and many more like them had to be made on the Opinions page of The Chronicle-Herald. But according to the very Editor-in-Chief of the national newswire monopoly, all of this had apparently been made quite clear in the coverage which I had somehow overlooked at the time, and particularly in a Canadian Press dispatch from a correspondent who'd been sent specially to Strasbourg in France to cover the summit. 

(UPDATE: Ah ha. I uncovered with some effort a Canadian Press dispatch from the conclusion of the said NATO summit, uncarried in The Chronicle-Herald per The Herald's Archive and picked up in papers few and far between per my latter-day testing for it elsewhere. That report to its credit -- and I do credit it, sincerely -- made and if I say so myself vindicated half of one of the twelve points listed in my op-ed, that Obama had failed in the object of his first NATO summit to wring combat troops out of "our European allies", although I didn't see where that fine reporting carried on to observe as I did that Obama and his lot had sworn for years that a president with a "D" appearing after his name would've had those Continentals fighting and bleeding for our Afghan cause. So there it is: the report was out there, somewhere, making half of one of my dozen points admirably, only not in the only newspaper I'd concerned myself with.)

And lo and behold, there was in fact a Canadian Press dispatch datelined Strasbourg, in the April 4, 2009 edition of The Chronicle-Herald, under the Herald headline of "NATO faces new challenge; Afghan law which curbs women's rights makes mission tough sell".

I read the CP report elsewhere, and in fact it did get around to the only practical business of the NATO summit -- in paragraphs 26 and 27. Paragraph 26: "Several European countries made a show of announcing more support for the Afghan mission on Friday, but the numbers were small." A fine bit of reporting, even if it did come at paragraph 26. Better late than never. Only, that paragraph never appeared in The Chronicle-Herald.

Paragraph 27: "Britain said it would add 'mid to high hundreds' to the 8,000 troops it has in Afghanistan. France promised more police trainers and civilian aid, and Belgium said it will add 65 soldiers and two more F-16 fighter jets." Another fine bit of reporting, even if it never did get around to that other point in my little op-ed, that Obama and his party had sworn Europe would put up and pitch in if only the president were less like Bush and more like Obama. But half is better than none. Only, that paragraph never appeared in The Chronicle-Herald.

Again, that entire passage of two paragraphs never appeared in The Chronicle-Herald. The Herald version was abridged to 564 words. Of course, the Editor-in-Chief of Canada's newswire monopoly wouldn't have known that the dispatch of his man in Strasbourg hadn't made it in one piece to the readers of The Chronicle-Herald, and clearly he didn't heed the explanations in my article itself and in my reply to his e-mail, that I was referring to the coverage in The Chronicle-Herald specifically and that my concern was not so much stories covered as points made. But the Editor-in-Chief of Canada's newswire monopoly pronounced against some nobody contributor to the Opinions page of a Nova Scotia newspaper, by name and in print, and brandishing his fancy title and invoking his office, despite that the one bit of evidence he offered for his case never appeared in the newspaper in question, denying the plain meaning of that nobody's words, and despite that to this day, that nobody has declined out of professional courtesy and Christian decency to name him or his reporters in print, where more people than a few might actually read it.

Of course, there was more coverage of the NATO summit in The Chronicle-Herald than that Canadian Press dispatch. The Herald ran an Associated Press report datelined Strasbourg on everything you ever wanted to know about Anders Fogh Rasmussen, headlined "Dane chosen as new NATO boss". (NATO "boss"? Anyone who knew anything about the office of NATO secretary-general would never accuse him of being "boss" to very much more than his secretarial staff.) And The Herald devoted an entire news item to an AP report on the protests against the NATO summit, headlined "Police quell protesters' first try".

Finally the Herald Archive turned up an Associated Press story, also datelined Strasbourg and published on the same day as the aforementioned Canadian Press report, under the optimistic Herald headline, "Obama pitching for help today". In all the news sections of the Chronicle-Herald, in all the reports making any mention on the 2009 NATO summit, a single sentence in a single story was the closest The Herald came to reporting Obama's failure:

"But the European public has no stomach for more intense military involvement by their nations. So Obama is unlikely to get additional help in the way of either major combat troops or new deployments to the toughest areas of the fighting in southern and eastern Afghanistan." That's a good start at reporting, or at least it would have been. Beside the fact that this was not a report of what had been but a reporter's expectation of what would be, and was discountable as such -- Obama was still "pitching for help today", after all -- and beside the fact that the blame for Europe's resistance to throwing in with us was put on "the European public" -- acquitting Obama -- even that much was negated by the preceding paragraph, which was the most inexplicable Pollyanna-ism: "Obama seems likely to win fresh commitments at Saturday's 60th anniversary NATO summit. He can expect more civilian aid and small troop increases for training Afghan forces and providing security for upcoming elections." ("Obama seems likely to win fresh commitments"! Gimme an O! Gimme a B! ....)

And that was it. A single sentence in a single story, indicating only that Obama was "unlikely to get additional help", preceded by a preemptive acquittal of Obama for any shortcomings plus some cheerleading that Obama "seems likely to win fresh commitments" which gave precisely the contrary impression, under a Herald headline of "Obama pitching for help today" which gave no hint of Obama's imminent failure, and without recalling the claims of Obama and his party that it'd be different if only a man like Obama were in the White House. The question of combat troops for Afghanistan was the one and only story of any practical significance in the 2009 NATO summit. And this was the first NATO summit since the 9/11 attacks and the start of the Afghan mission at which the president of the United States was not George W. Bush. "NATO tells Obama 'no' on Afghanistan; New president, no 'change'" ought to have been the headline, the lead paragraph, and the bulk of the story.

Nowhere in the news sections of The Chronicle-Herald was there any final report that NATO had told Obama "no", and nowhere in The Herald's news sections was the point in my op-ed made, that Obama and his party had sworn for at least half a decade that "our European allies" would have been wading into the melee with us, to spill their blood and treasure by our side, and fight and die for our cause in Afghanistan, but for that "cowboy" Bush and his "unilateralism" which was "alienating our allies" and all the rest. Now the Continentals had their very dream candidate for president of the United States, and still they declined to fight. The 2009 NATO summit was the final repudiation of six years of theorizing and politicking by Obama himself, his party, and indeed also the international press. Is is remarkable that all that didn't warrant a mention somewhere in the news sections of The Chronicle-Herald, and was left to me over on the Opinions page.

But it was worse than that. The Herald carried an Associated Press report at about this time, unrelated to the NATO summit, which mentioned a new allied commitment for Afghanistan and positively went out of its way to credit Obama personally for it: "Australia plans to add 450 soldiers, increasing its force to about 1,550, Prime Minister Rudd announced Wednesday, saying Obama persuaded him to increase the deployment during discussions last week." Now, Australia is of course not a NATO member nation, it's certainly not one of "our European allies", and in fact it and New Zealand were the lone Western nations to stand with America in Vietnam, so this is something apart from the NATO summit story, but here was the AP in The Chronicle-Herald crediting Obama personally with an allied commitment of 450 troops, while there was no corresponding report in that same paper of Obama's corresponding failure of persuasion with those European allies who were the foot-draggers, and the ones in need of persuasion according to Obama and his crowd themselves.

(That AP report included the only reference I could turn up in the Herald Archive over Obama's first 100 days to Britain's disappearing-ink commitment of 700 extra troops, promised at the NATO summit, to be withdrawn again after a few months. But Britain is America's greatest ally and foul-weather friend, whose support was so taken for granted that it was discounted when the president was named Bush, so that's also in a different category from what is meant by "our European allies".)
Indeed, the AP dispatch reported "the United States and other NATO countries now have some 70,000 soldiers in Afghanistan -- a record level." Anyone would think from reading that AP report that the Obama ally-rallying was going swimmingly. But how much of the increase to 70,000 came from those "other NATO countries"? So far from reporting Obama's failure, that AP dispatch in The Herald actually left just the contrary impression.

And it was worse than even that. Not one month before the NATO summit, The Chronicle-Herald reproduced an Associated Press report, albeit left to The Herald's Metropolitan edition, which referred to "President Barack Obama's policy to bring more European allies on board to fight the Taliban-led insurgency," and added to that bit of fantasy this bit of editorializing: "Biden said the Obama administration will be keen to engage NATO allies in global security discussions, marking a departure from the last eight years when Washington often was on a go-it-alone course that upset its European allies."

So The Chronicle-Herald was quite happy to report that it was "Obama's policy to bring more European allies on board to fight the Taliban-led insurgency", but when, a matter of weeks later, that was shown to be less "policy" than "fantasy" -- or if it was a "policy" then it was shown to be a failed one -- The Herald declined to make the point. And The Herald was happy to pass off as matter-of-fact newswire copy that it was the Bush administration's alleged "go-it-alone course that upset its European allies", but when, just weeks later, it was finally proved that those "European allies" hadn't been "upset" so much as unwilling and unable, and it turned out that supposed presidential "go-it-alone-ism" hadn't entered into it, The Herald again declined to make the point.

Doctor Who and the British imperial impulse

Surely I can't be the first to make this point, but I'm not typically an appreciator of science-fiction and I managed to mostly avoid Doctor Who until a matter of months ago, and the question is screaming out at me: Is not Doctor Who in some part a science-fiction stand-in for the British Empire? If you strip away the science-fiction elements of it, are you not left with a fellow who seems very much like a typical Englishman, venturing far and wide, encountering all sorts of exotic tribes, and saving the world?

Sometime between the world wars, the Empire fell out of fashion with the British elite; after the second war, the progressives who were elected to erect Britain's dismal welfare state couldn't wait to evacuate the Empire, which incidentally led to a very predictable civil war between what became Pakistan and India; and by the 21st Century, any British elite calling himself "conflicted" about the Empire, instead of condemning it absolutely, would no doubt be suspected of crypto-imperialism and black-balled. As if a half-millennium of British history was all just a terrible mistake. Niall Ferguson, a few years back, advanced an apologetic sort of defense of the Empire, along the lines of, the Empire was redeemed in the end by the fact that Britain drained itself and its Empire defeating aggression and fascism in the world wars. But even that is a defensive argument, and a far cry from what was generally accepted until living memory, which is that the Empire was a mostly noble enterprise that made Britain great and elevated all Britain's possessions at the same time.

That is to say, the Empire is right out in Britain today, or at the very least it's out among the sort of people who make television shows for the BBC. And so I can't help thinking that Doctor Who is the sort of thing you'd wind up with if you were cut from the same cloth as Rudyard Kipling and Chinese Gordon and Cecil Rhodes -- you shared their impulse for adventurism and exoticism and world-saving -- but at the same time, you accepted every one of the nostrums of the 21st Century British elite, with all its political correctness and cultural relativism and pacifism and the rest of it.

(On that pacifism point: I suppose the sort of people who make television shows for the BBC couldn't very well arm The Doctor with some Time Lord equivalent to the Brown Bess or the Lee-Enfield Mk III, so they've given him a "sonic screwdriver" which conveniently does nearly anything he needs it to do in any given situation. They've created The Doctor as a pacifist of sorts, though apparently with some blood on his hands from the great and final Time War between his own race and the Daleks. One can't fault the makers of the show for keeping their hero's hands clean, and it is a family show, after all, but I have to say, it's easy to be a pacifist when the villains are imaginary and some ingenious and fantastical science-fiction story-writing can save the day.)

In the show, The Doctor has taken it upon himself to tirelessly and thanklessly patrol and save the universe; Rudyard Kipling called it "taking up the white man's burden". The Doctor encounters alien races and civilizations across time and space, some war-like and some peaceable, and all exotic and fascinating; so today it's the "Ood" or "Zocci", where in centuries past it might have been the Narragansetts or Hottentots of whom accounts were written and pictures drawn.

And for all the ecumenical effort in Doctor Who -- rendering the Earth as just one fairly inconsequential civilized planet in a universe full of them, preferring to treat all of humanity together rather than as individual nations or groups, etc. -- it is as parochial and England-centric (I use the terms affectionately) as any old imperialist ever was, rolling his cricket pitch someplace in India. The Doctor is the last of an alien race called Time Lords, and yet he seems uncannily like an Englishman, even unto the point of caricature in the current and excellent incarnation, played by Matt Smith, with his bow-tie and tweed jacket, and eating fried fish and custard. Take even the pairing in this current and excellent series: The Doctor a seeming Englishman in tweed with his plucky red-headed Scottish lieutenant, venturing far and wide and saving the universe. If anyone had proposed that as a formula for a story of the British Empire, it'd have been rejected as hackneyed.

The Doctor's time machine/space ship, the TARDIS, has assumed the form of the British blue police box, and if those blue police boxes were any more British, George Formby would have sung a song about them.

The only human enterprise capable of monitoring and combatting extra-terrestrial intervention in earthly affairs is called Torchwood, which is a covert agency of the British government -- established by Queen Victoria herself, it turns out. (And one can't help noticing that this Torchwood bears some resemblance to MI5 or MI6, or maybe Room 40 in the First World War or Bletchley Park in the Second.)

I expect I could go on, if I knew more about this show which is still new to me, but suffice it to say Doctor Who looks to me like it owes almost as much to Rudyard Kipling as to H. G. Wells. And so I can't help thinking, even after decades of institutionalized self-loathing and self-flagellating, the Empire's in 'em still.

Less a "historic victory" than a Pyrrhic one

President Obama and his Democratic Congress have made history, only not the kind they have in mind. They have become the only president and Congress to enact a leviathan social program altering the life of every American -- against the wishes of those American people, over the threatened opposition of three-fourths of the state legislatures, with not a solitary vote from the minority opposition, and by arcane parliamentary maneuver.
　
When it comes to pass that a Republican unknown wins the special election for U.S. Senate in religiously-Democratic Massachusetts, to replace Ted Kennedy, no less, and after vowing daily to be the 41st vote to kill the Democrats' health-care bills, then it may well and truly be said that the American people do not want this "comprehensive health-care reform."
　
A month after the Massachusetts comeuppance, the CNN poll found just 25 percent of Americans supported the Democrats' health-care bills, to 73 percent who wanted Congress to either start from scratch or quit health-care altogether. And yet within a month of that, House Democrats voted to make the 2,700-page Senate bill the law of the land, and passed a "reconciliation" bill which actually builds on the Senate monstrosity and annexes the entirety of the student loan system to the federal government while they're at it.
　
Three days before the House vote, Obama's job approval rating went net negative in the Gallup poll for the first time, and Congress' approval hit 16 percent, just two points up from the lowest recorded in 36 years of Gallup polling on the question. The day before the vote, the Rasmussen poll of likely voters put Obama's job approval rating at 43 percent; it took five years for George W. Bush to fall so low.

By the time the House vote was called, 38 of the 50 state legislatures had indicated an intent to challenge the new law. And on the day of the vote, the only bipartisanship was in opposition to the new law: 34 House Democrats joined every Republican in voting "nay."

That looks less like a "historic victory" than a Pyrrhic one.
　
The undeniable good that is done by this "reform" could have been written up in a relative few pages and passed with wide margins and popular support the best part of a year ago, and the legitimate, hard-case uninsured could have been accommodated for a fraction of the $1.2 trillion that Obama and his Congress blew on their worse-than-useless stimulus and omnibus bills alone, without upsetting the system for the 80 percent who call themselves satisfied with their health-care as-is. This "comprehensive health-care reform" is something quite apart from help for folks who've fallen through the cracks and a curbing of the odd insurance industry abuse.
　
Obama's own chief actuary for Medicare and Medicaid Services had to report that the Senate bill would raise the price of health-care in America by $234 billion in ten years, that its savings "may be unrealistic," and that there was "a very serious risk" of its new insurance scheme becoming "unsustainable."
　
The Congressional Budget Office ruled the Senate bill would drive the cost of health-insurance premiums "10 percent to 13 percent higher in 2016 than...under current law," that it would lead employers to dump 5 million Americans net from their current coverage, and that even a decade after passage, it would leave 16 million Americans uninsured still, plus 8 million uninsured illegals.
　
The new law includes something called the "individual mandate" -- a legal requirement to buy federally-approved, comprehensive health-insurance, enforceable by the IRS -- which is probably unconstitutional and certainly unpopular, and which Obama attacked Hillary Clinton for proposing in the Democratic presidential primaries.
　
The new law establishes 159 new bureaucracies of all sorts, and hires 16,500 new IRS agents to police the new regime of taxes, regulations, and mandates.
　
The new law is supposed to be paid for by something like $500 billion in new taxes over ten years, plus another $500 billion in cuts to Medicare. And the accounting of the bills is as fraudulent as Enron's. Over $200 billion in spending was moved out of the bills, to be passed separately in what is called the "doctor fix," so as not to be counted in the official Congressional Budget Office scorings, and ten years of tax increases and spending cuts are counted against six years of benefits.
　
And nowhere in those thousands of pages is there any attempt at the obvious, common-sense reforms like opening the health-insurance companies to competition from out of state, enabling bare-bones insurance policies, or restraining the tort lawyers who make practicing medicine in America a legal hazard.

House Democrats passed the Senate bill only on the understanding that their "reconciliation" bill would then be passed in the Senate by 50-percent-plus-one budget reconciliation, to circumvent the Senate's 60-percent threshold, which is without precedent for legislation of this nature and scale, and which is the sort of thing Obama and his party denounced as affront to American democracy until they came to see it as a neat trick for getting their way.
　
It's not until 2014 and later that the new law goes fully into effect; there will be national elections this November and in November of 2012. By having it all their own way, against the national will and around the legislative rules, Obama and his Congress have only hastened the day when a very different government sits in Washington. The Left in America may never be entrusted with such unchecked power again for a generation.

--A slightly earlier version of this published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

More indulgence and incompetence of the Canadian Press Washington bureau (and Chronicle-Herald)

(There aren't enough hours in the day for my duties as self-appointed watchdog of the Canadian Press Washington bureau, so this post will have to be a shorter one.)

Any parody I could come up with could hardly be any more caricaturish than the actual dispatches of Lee-Anne Goodman, the lone American correspondent of the lone Canadian newswire service. March 9, top story, national news, Halifax Chronicle-Herald: "Palin's family sought medical care in Canada; Gosh darnit: Ex-governor's claim about 1960s prompts scrutiny, ridicule."

By the time that dispatch of the Canadian Press Washington bureau appeared in The Herald, it had long since been mooted thoroughly. The Associated Press had interviewed Sarah Palin's father for a report on the subject the day before, and explained everything: "There was no road out of there [Skagway, Alaska, where Palin lived at the time].... The ferry schedule was very erratic. ... The plane schedule was very erratic. ... We had no doctor in Skagway. ... We much preferred to use our facilities because my insurance didn't cover anything in Whitehorse. And even though they have socialized medicine, I still had to pay the bill, being an American citizen."

So the scandal was a faux-scandal and the story was a non-story, and had been demonstrated as such long before it got into print, in news and opinion outlets including the very Associated Press, which is sluiced through the Canadian Press under an absolutely typical Canadian scheme whereby the Upper Canadian monopoly headquartered in Toronto is granted exclusive rights to distribute the superior American product to its hostage market in the provincial hinterlands like Nova Scotia. But that AP report with the facts of the story from Palin's father never appeared in The Chronicle-Herald.

To print the Associated Press report would have been to repudiate not only the Canadian Press Washington bureau, but The Chronicle-Herald which promoted the CP story to the top of its national news and joined in on the sneering ("gosh darnit"), and whose editorial cartoonist rendered the junk as his latest anti-Palin cartoon the following day. The Canadian Press Washington bureau story was sustainable only in the absence of the facts. Palin had only related the anecdote to demonstrate her closeness to Canada, there was not the slightest hypocrisy in it, and to make a top-story scandal out of it necessitated an obliviousness to the facts, if not also a smugness, elite prejudice, and an inordinate and obsessive malice for Sarah Palin.

It's one of the features of the Canadian Press Washington bureau, documented here many times before, that it is typically familiar with only the leftist line on any given story, and quite oblivious to the other half of the story. So for instance, when the Left picks up on a hoax that a Palin rally attendee called out "Kill him" when the subject of Barack Obama was raised, the Canadian Press Washington bureau will credulously repeat that hoax, even seven months after it's been comprehensively debunked by the Secret Service. That's perfectly fine in a person who just doesn't much care to be confronted by conservatism, and a leftist does have the luxury in the 21st Century of passing her life without ever really being exposed to conservatism except as a caricature and object of scorn, while we conservatives are confronted by leftism when we go through our public schools and our universities, or every time we try to sign into our online e-mail accounts and are greeted with an unsolicited "In the News" box of selected "mainstream" headlines, or when we try to watch Comedy Central with its daily recitations of Democrat Party talking points delivered in the style of glib, too-cool-for-school, pop comics. But the obliviousness to the conservative side of the story does become a problem in a person who's elevated to the post of lone American correspondent for the lone Canadian newswire service, covering what is after all a profoundly conservative country.


The junk reporting on Sarah Palin came just four days after the latest Canadian Press Washington bureau effort in its service as defender of the president of the United States against unkindnesses. The March 5 dispatch was headlined in The Chronicle-Herald, "Senior Republican: Obama like The Joker." That "senior Republican" was some "finance director" of the Repulican National Committee whom I'd never heard of, and his supposed outrage was an internal RNC Powerpoint presentation which used the ubiquitous Obama-as-The-Joker photo.

That's news at the Washington bureau of the Canadian Press and in The Chronicle-Herald of Halifax, Nova Scotia, which counted the story as "World" news. But here is some of what was not counted as news -- a partial list of developments dominating American politics in the day or two before that report ran:

-Suspicion by even House Democrats that Obama's promise, and the Senate Democrats' assurance, that the Senate health-care bill would be "fixed" through budget reconciliation if it's passed as-is by the House, would become just another of Obama's broken promises, that he would simply sign the bill into law and declare victory, and the Senate Democrats would conveniently discover some compelling reason against reconciliation which somehow never occurred to them earlier.
-Suspicion that Obama's appointment of Scott Matheson to a federal appellate court was influenced by the fact that Matheson's brother Jim is a Democrat Congressman who voted "no" on the health-care bill in November, and who Obama was at that moment inviting to the White House to be persuaded to change his vote to "yes".
-The recalling of quotes by Candidate Obama and Senator Obama denouncing the sort of thing he's now proposing as president, to enact his health-care monstrosity against the will of the people by 50-percent-plus-one parliamentary device.
-Charlie Rangel, the Democrat Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, forced to surrender his chairmanship in light of Ethics Committee findings in its investigation of him for corruption; Democrat Congressman Pete Stark lasts just a day as replacement chairman, on account of his being a hateful, deranged radical, most recently famous for telling a conservative constituent at a town hall meeting that he wasn't "worth wasting the urine." (That incident also unreported in the CP and Herald.)
-Democrat Congressman Eric Massa announces his retirement after the Ethics Committee is informed of allegations he had "made unwanted advances toward a junior male staffer."
-Democrat Congressman Bill Delahunt becomes the lastest in a long parade of veteran Democrats announcing their retirement as of the end of this Congress, avoiding a re-election campaign in what promises to be a very unkind November for Democrats.

But none of that qualified as news at the Canadian Press Washington bureau or The Chronicle-Herald. Instead we were given a report scrutinizing some unknown finance director of the Republican National Committee for an internal committee Powerpoint presentation. All those serious stories, involving the governing party and government policies, in just the day or two before the Canadian Press Washington bureau passed them over for its unknown-Republican-functionary-calls-Obama-The-Joker story. The Eric Massa story exploded to a new order of magnitude on March 8 and was the biggest thing in American politics on the 8th and 9th, and has carried over into the 10th, but still the name "Eric Massa" appears nowhere in The Chronicle-Herald. The Massa story combines a Democrat sexual harassment scandal with Democrat allegations of abuse of power against fellow Democrats. And yet when some unknown back-bencher from the Republican minority opposition called out "You lie" during Obama's partisan, hectoring health-care address to a joint session of Congress, which was itself a gratuitous abuse of the office of president, The Herald ran half a dozen reports calling the powerless Republican nobody to task, one of them from the CP Washington bureau.

The dispatches of the Canadian Press Washington bureau ought to make the CP's "Editor-in-Chief" cringe. But he presides over a monopoly: there is no alternative newswire service in Canada, and the CP's network of client news outlets are a captive market that'll take what they're given. And the journalistic offenses of his Washington bureau only flatter the prejudices of a Toronto elite: all the junk reporting, all the scrutiny of the powerless and stroking of the powerful, all the conspicuous neglect of big stories and disproportionate elevation of trifles in their place, all the obliviousness to at least half the story -- the effect of it all is uniformly to scorn conservatives and congratulate leftists, so it must be very difficult indeed for any Toronto bigwig to see the problem in it. And anyway, if the Canadian Press truly were "serious about the news", it would never have posted a hysterically-partisan glorified gossip columnist to Washington as its sole American correspondent in the first place.

(Much more on the Canadian Press Washington bureau here, here, here, here, and here.)

The revolt against "remaking the nation"

"No peace in health reform; Obama vows to continue despite Republicans," a Chronicle-Herald headline read. But President Obama's problem isn't the Republican Party so much as the American people: Not two days before that Associated Press report ran, a CNN poll was released showing just 25 percent of Americans supported the Democrats' health-care bills, to 73 percent who wanted Congress to either start from scratch or quit health-care altogether.

And when it comes to pass that a Republican unknown wins the special election for U.S. Senate in religiously-Democratic Massachusetts, to replace Ted Kennedy, no less, and after vowing daily to be the 41st vote to kill the Democrats' health-care bills, then it may well and truly be said that the American people do not want this "comprehensive health-care reform," which was the centrepiece of Obama's project to "remake the nation."

Obama's problem isn't "misinformation," or "the venal tone of the arguments against reform," as the Canadian Press reported matter-of-factly in this newspaper. It isn't that "Republicans continue health care scare tactics," as the Herald headline on one Associated Press story had it. And the public outrage isn't "town hall nonsense," as another Herald headline editorialized on one of many contemptuous Canadian Press reports (like "U.S. racists direct hateful messages at Obama," painting the "teabagging protests" as crypto-racist) scrutinizing the powerless minority opposition, and the American people saying their piece in the town squares and town halls, instead of the unchecked president and his super-majorities.

Even after the health-care bills had been repudiated by Ted Kennedy's old voters, the Canadian Press in this paper persisted in describing them as "legislation that would have provided millions of Americans with health insurance," but surely if that was all there was to it, then the bills would have become law long since with wide margins and popular support. Obama's problem is that his "comprehensive health-care reform" is comprehensively abominable, and the people plain don't want it.

After the Massachusetts comeuppance, Obama himself briefly conceded, "some of the provisions that got snuck in might have violated that pledge" that "if you want to keep the health insurance you got, you can keep it, that you’re not going to have anybody getting in between you and your doctor in your decision making." So those "Republican scare tactics" weren't so "misinformed" after all.

The very "chief actuary" for Medicare and Medicaid Services had to report in December that the Senate bill would raise the price of health-care in America by $234 billion in ten years, that its supposed savings "may be unrealistic," and that there was "a very serious risk" of its proposed new insurance scheme becoming "unsustainable."

The health-care bills include something called the "individual mandate" -- a legal requirement to buy government-approved, comprehensive health insurance, enforceable by the IRS -- which is probably unconstitutional and certainly unpopular, and which Obama attacked Hillary Clinton for proposing in the Democratic presidential primaries.

The bills are supposed to be paid for by something like $500 billion in new taxes over ten years, plus another $500 billion in cuts to Medicare. And the accounting of the bills is as fraudulent as Enron's. Over $200 billion in spending was moved out of the bills, to be passed separately in what is called the "doctor fix," so as not to be counted in the official Congressional Budget Office scorings of the bills, and ten years of tax increases and spending cuts are counted against six years of benefits.

The bills are as bad for what they don't do as for what they do. Nowhere in those 2,000-plus pages each do they institute the obvious, common-sense reforms like opening the health insurance companies to competition from out of state, enabling bare-bones insurance policies, or restraining the tort lawyers who make practicing medicine in America a legal hazard.

Not to mention that the "50 million uninsured" boil down to something closer to 15 million legitimate, hard cases, which could have been accommodated for a fraction of the $1.2 trillion that Obama and his Congress blew on their worse-than-useless stimulus and omnibus bills alone, without upsetting the system for the other 289 million Americans. Indeed, 80 percent of Americans in a September Gallup poll were satisfied with their health-care as-is, which makes a good start on explaining the resistance to any system-wide overhaul.

Democrats now propose to enact the 2,700-page Senate bill without putting it to a vote in the House, "deeming" it passed by "self-executing rule." It is absolutely without precedent for legislation of this scale, if not also an Article I, Section 7 violation of the Constitution. The understanding is that the monstrosity would then be "fixed" in the Senate by 50-percent-plus-one budget reconciliation, to circumvent the Senate's 60-percent threshold -- also without precedent for legislation of this scale. So to bring their Frankenstein's monster to life, Obama and his Congress are perfectly prepared not only to spurn the express will of the American people, but also to suspend the legislative process of American democracy.

Fourteen months into this "Age of Obama," Obama and his Congress have been reduced to "remaking the nation" by arcane parliamentary maneuver. It's been apparent for the better part of a year now, outside the alternative universe of the elite, monopolistic newswires and newspapers: Obama and his Congress are in collapse, and the American people are in revolt.

The indulgence and incompetence of the Canadian Press Washington bureau

It's been a while since anybody at Canada's newswire monopoly has tried to call the law down on me, wipe my little website from the internet in whole or part, or otherwise try to stifle some nobody who presumed to call them out on their abuses for once, so I thought I'd update my documentation of the abuses of the Canadian Press Washington bureau. (In this installment: "Selectivity and Sarah Palin", "Junk reporting and Tea Parties", "Sneering and Scott Brown", and "Incompetence and the filibuster")

Selectivity and Sarah Palin.
So. The Washington bureau of the Canadian Press can cite American polling after all. In just this past couple weeks it's reported on polls showing the unfitness for office of a conservative Republican, Sarah Palin, and the apparent wild popularity of a liberal Democrat government policy, to allow open homosexuality in the fighting forces. Judging by the Canadian Press Washington bureau, the American people must be repudiating conservatives and champing at the bit for their leftist government to "remake the nation", and this Age of Obama must be going swimmingly.

I almost thought, from the past half year or so, that it might be CP policy to never cite American polls. American polls have been unrelentingly bad news for the president and Congress of the United States, their governing party and nearly everything they hold dear, since sometime in the summer of '09, which might be the sort of thing a person would mention if she were, say, the sole American correspondent for the sole Canadian newswire service. And yet that half-year's worth of dismal news for the actual president and Congress, and their project to "remake the nation", seems scarcely to have made it into the dispatches of the Canadian Press Washington bureau. (I surveyed some of those poll findings as of August in a Chronicle-Herald Opinions piece that was a better predictor of the following half-year of American politics than anything that appeared in the Canadian Press or the Herald World News section in that time.)

The February 13 dispatch of the Canadian Press Washington bureau was built entirely around a poll: "Poll: Palin not viable 2012 contender." I could have told you as much, without the aid of any poll and long before February of 2010. In fact, I did, here. But if Sarah Palin is a complete no-hoper for president, and considering that she's never held national public office, then how does the Canadian Press Washington bureau justify devoting such an extraordinary, prolific body of reportage to scrutinizing her, even unto the point of abusing its position with an entire report scorning her powerless 18 year-old daughter? (I wrote on that piece here; it ought never have been published in the news sections of the newspapers of Canada, and might even have been grounds for reassignment at a more serious news agency than the Canadian Press under Scott White.)

Lee-Anne Goodman, February 13, 2010: "New polls suggest the majority of Americans -- including conservatives -- have no confidence she's got what it takes to make it to the Oval Office. A Washington Post/ABC News poll suggests only 37 per cent of Americans have a favorable impression of Palin -- an all-time low. Fifty-five per cent view her unfavourably -- an all-time high."

The lowest ever! The highest ever! The chapter-and-verse on the poor Palin numbers went on for several paragraphs. Incidentally, "all-time" may not be the best usage for polling history covering only the 18 months since Sarah Palin has been known beyond Alaska. And a low approval rating will often correspond with a high disapproval rating, so it's not some confluence of especially bad luck that an "all-time low" positive impression would coincide with an "all-time high" unfavorable one, as if those are two completely independent findings. In any case, all the Palin-polling in the world counts for nothing, because Sarah Palin holds no public office, has never held national office, and was never going to be Republican nominee for president anytime soon.

(UPDATE, Feb. 16: Now here's a poll on electability -- not for some office-less punching bag, but the actual, sitting president and Congress of the United States. CNN, February 16: "44 percent of registered voters say Obama deserves re-election, with 52 percent saying the president does not deserve a second term. ... 34 percent feel that current federal lawmakers deserve re-election. ... That's the lowest number ever recorded for that question in a CNN survey. ... 51 percent feel their member of Congress should be re-elected -- also an all-time low in CNN polling." And that usage of "all-time low" refers to a period of longer than 18 months, including the last two midterm election years when control of both houses of Congress changed hands. But that's not the sort of thing that qualifies for news at the Canadian Press Washington bureau, which reported in January that Diane Sawyer's questioning Obama on the prospect of a one-term presidency "seems a premature topic of conversation".)


The Canadian Press Washington bureau had only just invoked a Gallup poll a week and a half earlier, in aid of a report claiming, "U.S. military wants to lift ban on gay serving openly."

Lee-Anne Goodman, February 3, 2010: "A Gallup poll taken last spring suggest the vast majority of Americans are opposed to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, even conservatives and weekly church-goers."

Now, that same Gallup poll in July of '09 found that Obama's job approval rating ranked "10th among the 12 post-World War II presidents at this point in their tenures," and he's been stuck at or near the bottom in the Gallup poll archives for the most part since. Considering that the Canadian Press Washington bureau could barely type "Bush" without gratuitously appending "wildly unpopular" or "one of the most unpopular presidents in U.S. history" (as it happens, Bush worked out to be 7th in overall job approval of the 11 completed presidencies so far in the the Gallup poll), anyone might have thought that half a year's worth of bottom-of-the-heap presidential polling would rate a mention at the Canadian Press Washington bureau. But no. Indeed, when the CP Washington bureau brought up the subject of Obama's polls in September, it was to report -- twice in the same article -- that he was still a hit in Canada, without a hint of how he was faring in the one country where a president's public approval actually counts for anything.

But the Canadian Press Washington bureau got around to that. As in a passing reference, developed no further, to Obama's "sagging approval ratings" -- in late January, after Obama's gal had already lost "Ted Kennedy's seat" in religiously-Democratic Massachusetts, two-and-a-half months after Obama's men had lost gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, both of which Obama had carried exactly a year before, and six months after Gallup first reported that Obama was down to 10th of the 12 presidencies since the advent of the Gallup presidential job approval rating. And Obama's approval rating wasn't "sagging"; that's just more aping of hackneyed newswire cliches, and too euphemistic to be descriptive. Obama's approval was scraping the basement floor, and had been for half a year before that glancing admission in the direction of reality.

The CP took the same line as the AP had taken a day or two earlier, explaining away Obama's troubles as public upset over high unemployment and so on, don't you know. Then the Canadian Press Washington bureau added a specious claim that part of Obama's difficulty was his "escalation" of the Afghan War. But Afghanistan is at this time one of the few issues where Obama scores a net-positive approval rating, but you see, the CP Washington bureau reported back in its heady days of covering the ascension of Obama that he had "pledged to peacefully end America's two unpopular wars." Of course, by that point the Iraq War had been won and the American withdrawal agreed by the U.S. and Iraqi governments, and as for Afghanistan, what Obama had pledged was precisely to escalate the war. It may be Obama's lone kept promise. For now, anyway. (Incidentally, how on earth can a war be "peacefully ended"? Wars are won or lost, or very occasionally stalemated; there is no painless alternative of "peacefully ended".) So when the CP Washington bureau blames Afghanistan for Obama's troubles, it says much more about the CP Washington bureau and the leftist elite than about American public opinion. The day may come when Obama falls down on Afghanistan, but at this point it's one of the few areas where he's still above water. Anyway, the jobs line does make a good start on explaining Obama's troubles, but it's more excuse-making than reporting.

To that end, and lest anyone imagine that there might not have been anything else worth mentioning in the Gallup poll, I offer these shock findings from Gallup, released five days after the open-homosexuality-in-the-military story invoking the Gallup poll, and a week and a half after Obama's State of the Union address, with its attendant "bump" in presidential approval. Gallup, February 8, 2010:
-more Americans disapprove than approve of Obama on six issues out of nine
-approval on the deficit down to 32 percent, with 64 percent disapproving
-approval on the economy at 36 percent to 61 percent
-approval on health-care at 36 percent to 60 percent
-approval among independents down to 24 percent on the deficit, 29 percent on the economy, and 24 percent on health-care

And Gallup's sample is "all adults", which is typically the most sympathetic to the Left. So Obama was underwater on six issues of nine, just a year in, with every elite on earth sheltering and flattering him, in the most friendly polling sample, and just after his first official SOTU address commandeering American primetime television for an hour and a half. The high unemployment is just the start of it; Obama's bigger problem is that the American people don't much agree with him, though you'd never guess it from reading the Canadian Press Washington bureau.

But back to this latest entry in the isn't-Sarah-Palin-just-the-worst series of the Canadian Press Washington bureau. When I made the case last May that the CP Washington bureau was excessively and obsessively scrutinizing Sarah Palin, the very "Editor-in-Chief" of the national newswire monopoly involved himself and justified every bit of the coverage on the grounds that Palin had been "touted" as a presidential nominee. As I wrote at the time, I do not accept that being "touted" as a putative nominee for president of the United States in 2012 or 2016 or 2020 warrants regular and uniformly-critical coverage in the newpapers of Canada in 2009, but that is the publicly-stated Canadian Press rationale for its excessive and obsessive scrutiny of Sarah Palin, and now the very headline on a dispatch of the Canadian Press itself informs us that Palin is not a "viable contender". The Canadian Press has defeated its own only stated justification for its Sarah Palin vendetta.

The Canadian Press Washington bureau devotes exquisite detail to those poor poll findings for Sarah Palin, but the Palin numbers are the irrelevant consolation of a leftist elite existing in denial of the historic collapse of Obama and his project to "remake the nation". Those Gallup numbers I sketched summarily above actually bear on the state and direction of American politics and government and on actual policies actually being pursued by the actual government of the United States, and they are positively calamitous for Obama and his agenda. They are also not even intimated anywhere in the dispatches of the lone Washington correspondent of the lone Canadian newswire service. How is anyone better off for their newspaper being turned upside down into an escape from reality? -- and worse, a denial of reality?

What do you call it when a writer cites those polls that affirm her own prejudices, and conspicuously ignores more than half a year of relentlessly contrary polling? Opinion journalism? Delusional? The Canadian Press calls it "the news".

Junk reporting and Tea Parties.

It was the same with the Tea Parties, which became the defining political movement of 2009. They began in February but when the Canadian Press Washington bureau treated them in May, it was only to sneer and to demonize, even declining to call them by their obvious and proper name, preferring instead to repeat the pornographic leftist taunt "teabagging protests".

To the Canadian Press Washington bureau, the defining movement of American politics in 2009 was just another clump of rednecks, only "ostensibly" concerned with policy, and in fact crypto-racist enemies of the state, to be demonized in the CP Washington bureau series on the theme. One of the early entries in the series was actually headlined "U.S. racists direct hateful messages at Obama". (I documented some of this at the time, here and here.) A single, serious report on the Tea Parties would have painted the most descriptive and predictive picture of American current events in 2009 and beyond, but the Canadian Press Washington bureau deals too much in the crudest caricatures of the average American to have been capable of understanding the Tea Partiers as anything other than latter-day lynch mobs, which is bad enough in any Canadian elite, but considerably more problematic in the sole Canadian newswire correspondent in America.

One of the reports in that Canadian Press Washington bureau series, supposedly uncovering murderous racism behind the opposition to Obama, repeated the claim -- found in a single book -- that death threats to the president had risen some "400 per cent" since Obama took office. What was that they taught in J-school about needing at least two sources for a claim? It turned out the claim was bogus. That "400 percent" was off by just about 400 percent.

The very Director of the Secret Service, Mark Sullivan, testified to Congress in December that "the threats right now ... is the same level as it has been for the previous two presidents at this point in their administrations. ... I have heard a number out there that the threat is up by 400 percent. ... I'm not sure where that number came from."

I know where it ended up, among other places: in my newspaper's World News, from the Canadian Press in Washington. Just more junk reporting from the Canadian Press Washington bureau, reproduced in the newspapers of Canada as fact, in aid of a storyline putting Obama up on the cross and turning the protesting American citizen into a suspect, and the record never corrected.

Earlier in its "Obama opposition nothing more than vicious, murderous racism" (not an actual headline, but it might as well have been) series, the Canadian Press Washington bureau reported on an imaginary death threat against Obama at a Sarah Palin rally -- seven months after it had been debunked by the Secret Service. (I documented the case at the time here.) Crap CP Washington bureau reporting, never corrected, repeated and amplified across Canada through the CP's monopoly network.

The implication in those Canadian Press Washington bureau reports was that the opposition to Barack Obama was illegitimate, and indeed, that is precisely the assumption of a 21st Century leftist elite. The assumption is that conservatism must necessarily be the result of ignorance, "intolerance" (in the political sense, not the dictionary sense), racial hatred, greed, stupidity, etc., while leftism in the same assumption isn't so much an ideology as the obvious conclusions of educated, intelligent people of good will. That is the worldview of a 21st Century leftist elite, and it is the worldview of the Canadian Press Washington bureau, which is a problem, because the worldview is bollocks, and because it precludes any possibility of impartiality, particularly in reporting on the Western world's most profoundly conservative and anti-elitist nation.

Sneering and Scott Brown.

The Canadian Press Washington bureau also reduced newly-elected Republican Senator Scott Brown to the sneer "onetime pin-up boy". Apropos of nothing. I suppose it wasn't absolutely necessary to mention Brown's 30 years' service in the National Guard or rank of Lieutenant Colonel, his three terms as a state senator or three terms as state rep, his law practice, etc., etc., and another CP Washington bureau report on the same general subject did at least acknowledge he'd been a state senator. But "pin-up boy" alludes to Brown's posing for an issue of Cosmopolitan magazine 28 years earlier -- at age 22. That's the sort of thing you get when you send a gossip columnist to cover Washington.

The gratuitous "pin-up boy" slight was common on the bitter Left, as in "pin-up boy for the teabaggers" (Huffington Post), and among the kind of people who write things like, "GOP Nazi Pin-Up Boy Exploits Voters' Frustration." The only instance of "pin-up boy" or "pinup boy" I could find anywhere in the Associated Press was in a quote from a bitter leftist who said she voted for the Democrat Coakley "to make sure the pinup boy doesn't get into office." At the Canadian Press Washington bureau, the bitter leftist is the one writing the newswire copy.

Incompetence and the filibuster.

And apart from the gross bias of the Canadian Press Washington bureau, there's the question of basic competence. Following is the CP Washington bureau's definition of the filibuster. I repeat, this is the definition of filibuster by the Washington bureau for Canada's newswire monopoly, and not a junior high social studies presentation: "The filibuster, a Senate rule that is a peculiarity of American politics, essentially gives the minority party the power to stop any legislation dead in its tracks".

That looks to me very much like a political science definition by someone with absolutely no aptitude for political science:
1. The filibuster is not peculiar to the United States. The U.S. Senate filibuster may be an extreme form of the phenomenon, but the filibuster is found in the Westminster systems including even the Ontario Legislative Assembly, which I was given to believe the Canadian Press Washington bureau was supposed to know something about.
2. The filibuster is not a "rule". It is pursuant to a Senate rule, and we even refer to the "filibuster rule", but the filibuster is a procedure or mechanism, or maneuver or tactic, not a "rule". Calling the filibuster a "rule" is subliterate.
3. It is not "the minority party" that is empowered by the filibuster, but any combination of senators totaling at least 41 percent. A couple weeks after that CP report ran, Senators Blanche Lincoln and Ben Nelson -- Democrats both -- joined Republicans in filibustering the confirmation of Obama's radical nominee for National Labor Relations Board.
4. And this business of "stopping any legislation dead in its tracks" could hardly be more crude. The filibuster blocks bills from being put to a vote. Before a bill can be voted on in the Senate, it must pass a cloture motion with at least 60 percent -- "cloture" referring to the closing of debate -- and that's where the filibuster comes in.

So if the Canadian Press wanted a one-line definition for the U.S. Senate filibuster which didn't look like it was written by an uninterested junior high schooler, it might have gone something like, "a parliamentary procedure whereby a minority of at least 41 percent can block legislation from coming to a vote." The CP's definition of filibuster is like defining a tank as "essentially a metal thingy that army men ride in", only not as accurate. That definition is an embarrassment, or it ought to be. Shouldn't a firm grounding in political science, not to mention war and economics, be a job requirement for anyone posted as the lone Washington correspondent for the lone Canadian newswire service? The average concerned citizen or letter-to-the-editor-writer could do at least as well, and very probably a sight better. Whatever credentials and cirricula vitae and contacts can these elites have that count for more than knowledge and accuracy and the capacity to present a complete story?

All of which is why Fox News -- which the Canadian Press Washington bureau has referred to as the "notoriously right-wing Fox News" -- recently became briefly the highest rated channel of any kind in all American cable television. Fox News is the antidote to the elite press that holds the American people in contempt, refuses to scrutinize the president and Congress so long as they are Democrats, and shuts out at least half the story. Fox News now has more viewers at 3 AM than CNN has in primetime. FNC's 3 AM ET comedy Red Eye -- which the press and government of Canada pathetically waged war against a year ago -- is now beating each of CNN's primetime heavyweights in the 25-54 demographic.

But that's just another telling snapshot of the nation that you'll never read in the Canadian Press Washington bureau, incapable as it is of reflecting reality in a conservative nation, and presenting instead a kind of delusional alternative universe of "the world as it ought to be" according to Canadian leftist elites. Anyone would be further ahead knowing nothing at all than reading the coverage of the Canadian Press Washington bureau and imagining it to bear any resemblance to reality. For over a year in this Age of Obama, the Canadian Press has been silent on the scandals of the Obama administration, the abuses of the Democratic Congress, the historic collapse of Obama and his Congress, and the tectonic shifts of the American people. Anyone depending for their coverage of American current events on the Canadian Press would have been oblivious to the great, relentless rightward realignment of the nation over the past year, and would have been nonplussed by the unthinkable Democratic defeats, which would have appeared to them to be quite without explanation. The Canadian Press Washington bureau belongs on the opinions pages or else not in the newspapers at all.

(Much more on the Canadian Press Washington bureau here, here, here, and here.)