Logical Lady Peggy Noonan was one of those center right folks that actually bought the President's centrist rhetoric when he was then candidate Obama.  Now she is singing a different tune.

Something's happening to President Obama's relationship with those who are inclined not to like his policies. They are now inclined not to like him. His supporters would say, "Nothing new there," but actually I think there is. I'm referring to the broad, stable, nonradical, non-birther right. Among them the level of dislike for the president has ratcheted up sharply the past few months.

It's not due to the election, and it's not because the Republican candidates are so compelling and making such brilliant cases against him. That, actually, isn't happening.

What is happening is that the president is coming across more and more as a trimmer, as an operator who's not operating in good faith. This is hardening positions and leading to increased political bitterness. And it's his fault, too. As an increase in polarization is a bad thing, it's a big fault.

While it is good to see Ms. Noonan and the rest coming  around, it is a bit of cold comfort to those of us who were looking at the President's sparse record as a State and US Senator and saying "WAIT - I don't think he is what he says he is....."

The latest "trend" in employer over-reach (when interviewing prospective employees) has been to ask for their social media passwords - something that is a gross invasion of privacy if you are not an employee of a company.  But what about when you are already employed by that entity?  That is the question that is now being played out in Michigan.

Kimberly Hester, a grade school teacher's aide in Michigan, was fired for refusing to hand over her Facebook password to her supervisors. Hester posted a picture of a co-workers' shoes and pants bunched around her ankles on Facebook in April 2011 with the caption, "Thinking of you." She posted the picture in jest, but a parent who's on her Facebook friend list saw the image and reported it to Frank Squires Elementary where Hester was employed, prompting the investigation.

Seriously - that was a stupid thing to post - ESPECIALLY if you had student's parents on your Facebook page.  Ms. Hester really does deserve a resounding "what the HAIL were you thinking when you posted that?" but fired?

Yeah - I was slacking last week....if you call slacking not home for more than two hours a night because your family has you going one place or the other.  I am going to try to make up for it with a little volume this week.

First up is this post from Walter E. Williams.  Professor Williams is an economics professor at George Mason University and just about one of the smartest men out there....oh and he happens to be an African American male.  He wrote "A Minority View" on racial profiling that is indeed one of those articles that makes you stop to think.

Right now, there isn’t enough known about the circumstances surrounding the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, a black, by George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old part-Hispanic, during his neighborhood watch tour in an Orlando, Fla., suburb. If evidence emerges that Zimmerman’s actions were not justified, he should be prosecuted and punished; however, there’s a larger issue that few people understand or have the courage to acknowledge, namely that black and young has become synonymous with crime and, hence, suspicion. To make that connection does not make one a racist. Let’s look at it.

Those of us who are of a certain age remember Richard Jewell.  He was the security guard at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics who discovered (and was later accused of planting) the pipe bomb that Eric Robert Rudolph had planted in the Olympic Village.  Those of a younger generation will remember the Duke Lacrosse Team Scandal from 2006.  Both stories had one thing in common.  A media whipped frenzy that had indicted, tried and convicted people of a crime before the investigation was even complete.  Well we now have two more stories to add to the pantheon of media whipped frenzies....first comes this from State College PA.

More than a decade before former Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky was charged with more than 50 counts of child sex abuse, a psychologist warned university police that his actions fit that of a “likely pedophile’s pattern.”

The finding by State College, Pa., psychologist Dr. Alycia A. Chambers, the therapist for one of Sandusky’s alleged victims, was contained in the internal Penn State files of a 1998 police investigation of the former coach for showering and bear hugging her client and another young boy in the school’s athletic locker room.

Based on one man's testimony, the media tried and convicted former Penn State Coach Joe Paterno of allowing a pedophile run loose in his program.  They accused him of enabling Sandusky - saying that he should have somehow done more - even though he did what he was supposed to do....reported the one incident he knew about to the University (his employer).  It is clearer than ever (based on this new report) that the ADMINISTRATION at PSU failed those boys AND they set up their long time coach to be the scape goat for their misdeeds.  

In an interview yesterday with Marketplace.org President "Not My Fault" Obama put out a real whopper.

Marketplace's Kai Ryssdal : With all respect, it was kind of a gutsy move I think to come to a solar facility. Your administration has staked a lot on clean technology, green jobs. The biggest item most people know about that strategy is, of course, a company named Solyndra, which your administration gave loan guarantees to, that then went bankrupt and has been the subject of many investigations. Are you doing your "all of the above" strategy right if that's what we have to show for it -- Solyndra?

Obama: We are doing the "all of the above" strategy right. Obviously, we wish Solyndra hadn't gone bankrupt. Part of the reason they did was because the Chinese were subsidizing their solar industry and flooding the market in ways that Solyndra couldn't compete. But understand: This was not our program, per se. ..

Emphasis mine.  Not your program?  Really????  Even the leftish leaning Annenberg Foundation couldn't let that go unchecked.

President Obama exaggerated when defending his administration’s approval of a $535 million loan guarantee to Solyndra, a now-defunct solar company.

Obama referred to Solyndra’s loan at an Oct. 6 press conference as “a loan guarantee program that predates me.” That’s not accurate. It’s true that the Energy Policy Act of 2005 created a loan guarantee program for clean-energy companies developing “innovative technologies.” But Solyndra’s loan guarantee came under another program created by the president’s 2009 stimulus for companies developing “commercially available technologies.”...

...The loan guarantee program that provided financing for Solyndra, however, does not predate Obama.

For the second time in one year - the Supreme Court has delivered a stunning blow to the Obama Administration.  In a 9-0 ruling, SCOTUS said that the EPA had over stepped it's authority in blocking an Idaho couple from building a home on property that they owned.

Mike and Chantell Sackett took their land dispute against the EPA all the way to the United States Supreme Court and found out Wednesday morning they won.
The couple learned Wednesday that the land's highest court sided unanimously in their dispute with the Environmental Protection Agency.

"It's been five years of our life that has been basically on hold so it was a little emotional day at our house," Mike Sackett said shortly after learning about the court's ruling.

The Sacketts bought six-tenths of an acre on the west side of Priest Lake in 2005 with plans to build a home. They obtained a building permit and started laying gravel, but then the EPA came in, claimed the property was a wetland and threatened them with fines of up to $75,000 a day.

The EPA claimed they were violating the Clean Water Act and could build on the property only after purchasing a wetland building permit that would cost around $200,000. The couple contested the claim but the EPA denied their request; the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals told the Sacketts they needed to go through the wetlands permit process.

The couple said they hired soil scientists and hydrologists who proved the land is not in fact a wetland.

Emphasis mine.  Average citizens did what was right by the law and were still told that they had no recourse by an unelected, unaccountable bureaucrat....in America....

Today's Deseret News ran a piece (written by Charles Krauthammer) on the reason for the high gas prices we are facing.

Yes, of course, presidents have no direct control over gas prices. But the American people know something about this president and his disdain for oil. The "fuel of the past," he contemptuously calls it. To the American worker who doesn't commute by government motorcade and is getting fleeced every week at the pump, oil seems very much a fuel of the present — and of the foreseeable future.

President Obama incessantly claims energy open-mindedness, insisting that his policy is "all of the above." Except, of course, for drilling

— off the Mid-Atlantic coast (as Virginia, for example, wants),

— off the Florida Gulf Coast (instead, the Castro brothers will drill near there),

— in the broader Gulf of Mexico (where drilling in 2012 is expected to drop 30 percent below pre-moratorium forecasts),

— in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (more than half the size of England, the drilling footprint being the size of Dulles Airport),

— on federal lands in the Rockies (where leases are down 70 percent since Obama took office).

But the event that drove home the extent of Obama's antipathy to nearby, abundant, available oil was his veto of the Keystone pipeline.

The President, out on the campaign trail again, has been going from stop to stop bragging about how oil production is up under his watch.

Logical Lady Peggy Noonan is at it again with a great piece on who is really waging a "war on women".

There is a war against women. It is something comparatively new in our national life, and we have to start noticing it.

It is not a "Republican war on women." It has nothing to do with White House attempts to paint conservative efforts to protect religious liberty as a war against women's rights to contraceptives. That is a mischievous fiction, and the president's polls this week suggest it isn't working. Good.

But the real war is against women in American public life, in politics and media most obviously, but in other spheres as well. In this war, leaders who are women are publicly demeaned and diminished based on the fact that they are women. They are the object of sexual slurs, and insulted in sexual terms. The words used are vulgar, and are meant to tear down and embarrass.

Every woman in American public life knows of it. They talk about it in private. They've all experienced it.

Earlier today John Hinderacker wrote a rather tepid defense of Utah's Senior Senator's re-election campaign.

Orrin Hatch is one of the veteran Republicans in the Senate, and, if the GOP retakes the Senate in November as many expect, he will play a key role in that body. Hatch has always been regarded as a solid conservative, but this year there are activists who want to nominate someone else; someone who ostensibly is more conservative than the incumbent.

This strikes me as an amazingly stupid and destructive move. I can understand conservative activists trying to knock off the ladies from Maine, or maybe Richard Lugar. But Orrin Hatch? You’ve got to be kidding! Hatch is one of the most effective conservatives in Washington.

First off, I would like to point out to Mr. Hinderacker that it is more than just a few "conservative activists" who are of the belief that 36 years in Washington DC is a titch too long.  There are quite a few non-activists who have become involved in part because of this race. 

Saul Alinksy wrote (in the Progressives handbook "Rules For Radicals" that the best way to fight was not to fight abstractions like bureaucracies and corporations but to "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it.".  It is a tactic that they used well in 2008 to get Barack Obama elected President and what they are doing today to try to marginalize any and all who not  just have different points of views, but against those who happen to associate with those that have different views.  William Jacobson, at Le-gal In-sur-rec-tion documents out some of the less obvious examples of this that have happened of late.

Welcome To Total Political War

And I’m not talking about the attempt to get advertisers to stop advertising on Rush Limbaugh’s show, or Fox News, although that would be bad enough.

I’m talking about the second-tier of the warfare, the attempt to intimidate those removed by one or more degrees of separation from the dispute, and to use them as tools against the target.

We have seen it a number of times in the past couple of years.

When King & Spalding agreed to represent the U.S. House of Representative after Obama changed positions  and announced that the Justice Department no longer would defend DOMA in court, there were not only protests against King & Spalding, but threats to picket and protest clients of the firm who had nothing to do with the dispute.  The threat that clients of the firm who were completely unconnected to the dispute would be harrasseed was enough to cause the firm to withdraw the representation.

For those that have forgotten here is video of Bill Maher's greatest "hits"....oh and this is someone who just donated a cool million dollars to President Obama's campaign.

I am waiting for President Obama to send a message to ALL our young people....and return Bill Maher's million dollar donation.  After all - as he said these kinds of remarks don't have a place in "civil discourse".....RIIIIIGGGGHHHTTTTT???????????

For the last week Democrats and the media (pardon the redundancy) have been yammering incessantly about a comment that Rush Limbaugh made on the air about a 30 year old moocher who seems to think that everyone else needs to pay for HER birth control pills because she is too arrogant (or something) to go to a Planned Parenthood branch or Target or (gasp) Wal-Mart for her pills and thus pays $3000.00 a year for birth control instead of the $1200 a year most intelligent people pay.  Rush, rather foolishly, called her a "slut" and wondered how she got any studying done because $250.00 a month sure can buy a heck of a lot of condoms.  The reason I said the comments were foolish is because it took the focus off of the fact that this was a made for TV event staged by House Democrats for the media in front of a 3/4 empty room.  It also took the focus off of the real issue (which is 1st Amendment religious freedom) and made it about the big, bad, evil Limbaugh attacking this poor, young defenseless co-ed (who at 30 is well beyond her  "co-ed" years).

And yet for all the left's yammering about the right wing "war on women", the media willfully ignores similar comments that are made by left wing media entertainers (like Bill Maher, Keith Olbermann and Ed Shultz who have taken pot shots at conservative women like S.E.Cupp, Laura Ingraham, Michelle Malkin and of course Sarah Palin).  But all of that pales in comparison to the level of new tone civility that is being leveled at one female member of the Minnesota State Legislature.  I'll let my friend Mitch Berg tee up the back story.

Just a quick update.  There may be some down time in the course of the next few days.  There have been some major issues with our hosting company (Site 5) .  Because of that, there will likely be some down time.  Posting may be light as well until I know more fully what the migration schedule will be.  Meanwhile, I will be working on a few things for publishing as soon as things settle down.

And if you have followed this blog long enough you know exactly what I am talking about.  One week from tonight, Utah Democrats will be holding their precinct caucuses.  Caucus locations can be found on the Salt Lake County Democratic Party website.

One week from Thursday the UT GOP is holding their precinct caucuses.  Salt Lake County caucus locations can be found here.

Republican or Democrat you need to be there - ESPECIALLY if you are a Democrat.  Your voice will never be heard if you don't show up!  It's only 2 hours of your precious time (unless you run for county or state delegate and then it is only a couple of days a year) and it really does allow you to have a say in how things are run.

Plan on attending and bring friends.  If your friends are not registered they can register that night (they can only participate if they register for the party that is caucusing that night - no GOP registerees can't caucus with the Dems (and vice versa).   

Make sure you plan to be there next week.  It really is an exercise in democracy.

The New York Times is noticed, as many DC Staffers and Utah residents have noticed, that now that he is up for re-election, Senator Hatch is running to the right of himself.... 

As Senator Orrin G. Hatch looked on in May 2010, delegates to Utah’s Republican convention booted out Robert F. Bennett, his three-term Senate colleague and Republican mainstay, chanting “TARP, TARP, TARP” to make clear that Mr. Bennett was being punished for backing the Wall Street bailout that both Utah senators had supported. 

Ever since, Utah’s senior senator has been working to make sure his quest for a seventh term this year does not meet the same fate. As a result, Mr. Hatch’s voting record has shifted decidedly rightward. After receiving an 88 percent rating from the Club for Growth political action committee in 2009, he jumped to 100 percent in 2010 and then 99 percent in 2011, far surpassing his lifetime score of 78 percent.