Question for Kevin Graham about Obama

[_bcspace]

Attacking Obama's intelligence is a no win for you guys

I'd like to see his support for his (implicit) assertion that Obama is highly intelligent

There is no support for intelligence in Marxism.

[_Jason Bourne]

So releasing tax returns, which is standard protocol for Presidential candidates, shouldn't be expected of Romney because?

However, releasing "academic credentials," which isn't expected nor is it typical of politicians, must be produced by Obama simply because a tiny minority of paranoid daily caller readers, would feel much better about having them.

Do I have that right Richard?

Your complaints are petty and downright stupid. I already covered much of this in the past, as "Austrian" is a common description of the language spoken in that country. At least this Austrian websiterefers to its own language as "Austrian." It seems Austrians like to distinguish their language from traditional German, and they do so probably in the same way we refer to "British" to distinguish from American English, even though it isn't technically a language either.

Trying to use this to smack Obama is just pathetic. And I'd bet you never bothered to read his speech in Cairo, but instead just took for granted some lame synopsis by Hansen.

I have to agree with the points above. It is not commonly expected for a politician to release his academic records. Also, when someone speaks in public a lot they will make mistakes. I can cut Obama a break on that too.

But one question. Kevin are you saying that Americans refer to the English spoken in the UK as British rather than English? Personally I do not recall anyone ever making such a reference. I will have to ask my linguist daughter about this.

[_richardMdBorn]

What strikes me about Obama's prepared addresses is the combination of bad logic and faulty history. He uses straw men all the time in attacking his opponents and his grasp of history is tenuous at best. This Steyn column gives examples of the historically illiterate points Obama uses to support his ideological agenda.

Our lesson for today comes from George and Ira Gershwin:
They all laughed at Christopher Columbus
When he said the world was round
They all laughed when Edison recorded sound
They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother
When they said that man could fly
They told Marconi wireless was a phony . . .

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers sang it in the film Shall We Dance? (1937). Seventy-five years on, the president revived it to tap dance around his rising gas prices and falling approval numbers. Delivering his big speech on energy at Prince George’s Community College, he insisted the American economy will be going gangbusters again just as soon as we start running it on algae and windmills. He noted that, as with Wilbur and his brother, there were those inclined to titter:

Let me tell you something. If some of these folks were around when Columbus set sail — [Laughter] — they must have been founding members of the Flat Earth Society. [Laughter.] They would not have believed that the world was round. [Applause.] We’ve heard these folks in the past. They probably would have agreed with one of the pioneers of the radio who said, “Television won’t last. It’s a flash in the pan.” [Laughter.] One of Henry Ford’s advisers was quoted as saying, “The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a fad.” [Laughter.]

The crowd loved it. But President Algy Solyndra wasn’t done:
There always have been folks who are the naysayers and don’t believe in the future, and don’t believe in trying to do things differently. One of my predecessors, Rutherford B. Hayes, reportedly said about the telephone, “It’s a great invention, but who would ever want to use one?” [Laughter.] That’s why he’s not on Mount Rushmore — [laughter and applause] — because he’s looking backwards. He’s not looking forwards. [Applause.] He’s explaining why we can’t do something, instead of why we can do something.

It fell to Nan Card of the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Ohio to inform the website Talking Points Memo that the quotation was apocryphal. Hayes had the first telephone in the White House, and the first typewriter, and Edison visited him to demonstrate the phonograph.

But obviously Rutherford B. Hayes isn’t as “forward-looking” as a 21st-century president who believes in Jimmy Carter malaise, 1970s Eurostatist industrial policy, 1940s British health-care reforms, 1930s New Deal–sized entitlements premised on mid-20th-century birth rates and life expectancy, and all paid for by a budget with more zeroes than anybody’s seen since the Weimar Republic. If that’s not a shoo-in for Mount Rushmore, I don’t know what is.

I was interested in the rest of Obama’s yukfest of history’s biggest idiots. Considering that he is (in the words of historian Michael Beschloss) “the smartest guy ever to become president,” the entire passage sounded as if it was plucked straight from one of those “Top Twenty Useful Quotes for Forward-Looking Inspirational Speakers” websites. And whaddayaknow? Rutherford B. Hayes, the TV flash in the pan, the horse is here to stay — they’re all at the Wikiquote page on “Incorrect Predictions.” Fancy that! You can also find his selected examples at the web page “Some Really Really Bad Predictions About the Future” and a bazillion others.
Given that the ol’ Hayes telephone sidesplitter turned out to be a bust, I wondered about the others. The line about television being a “flash in the pan” is generally attributed to “Mary Somerville, pioneer of radio educational broadcasts, 1948.” She was a New Zealand–born lass who while at Oxford wrote to the newly founded BBC with some ideas on using radio in schools. By the Seventies, the educational programming she had invented and developed was used in 90 percent of U.K. schools, and across the British Commonwealth from the Caribbean to Africa to the Pacific. She apparently used the flash-in-the-pan line in a private conversation recounted some years after her death by her fellow BBC executive, Grace Wyndham Goldie, a lady I knew very slightly. It was in the context of why she was pessimistic about early attempts at educational television. Mary Somerville would not have been surprised by American Idol or Desperate Housewives, but she thought TV’s possibilities for scholarly study were limited. If you remember Leonard Bernstein giving live illustrated music lectures on Beethoven on CBS in the Fifties, and you’ve lived long enough to see “quality public television” on PBS dwindle down to dreary boomer nostalgia, lousy Brit sitcoms, Laurence Welk reruns, and therapeutic infomercials, you might be inclined to agree that as an educational tool TV certainly proved “a flash in the pan.” And that’s before your grandkid gets home from school and complains he’s had to sit through Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth again.

What was Obama’s other thigh slapper? Oh, yes. “The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a fad.” The line is generally attributed to “the president of the Michigan Savings Bank” in 1903. That would be George Peck, born in 1834 on a hardscrabble farm in Connecticut. Due to a boyhood accident, he was unable to use one arm and so was no good for agricultural labor. So at the age of 16 he started as the lowest paid clerk in a Utica dry-goods store. From this unpromising start, Peck built one of the largest dry-goods businesses in Michigan. Was he, as the president said, one of those men “who don’t believe in the future”? Not at all. He was president of the Edison Illuminating Company, named for the guy who invented that light bulb the United States government has banned. Henry Ford was Peck’s chief engineer. Peck set his son and Ford up in a shop on Park Place in Detroit to work on their prototype horseless carriages. After Ford departed, the first porcelain spark plug was baked in Peck’s shop.

Christopher Columbus? Once upon a time, your average well-informed high-schooler, never mind the smartest president in history, understood that Columbus was laughed at not because everyone believed the world was round: Educated Europeans of his day accepted that the earth was spherical and had done since Aristotle’s time. They laughed because they thought he was taking the long way round to the East Indies. Which he was.

So let’s see. The president sneers at the ignorance of 15th-century Spaniards, when in fact he is the one entirely ignorant of them. A man who has enjoyed a million dollars of elite education yet has never created a dime of wealth in his life sneers at a crippled farm boy with an eighth-grade schooling who establishes a successful business and introduces electrical distribution across Michigan all the way up to Sault Ste. Marie. A man who sneers at one of the pioneering women in broadcasting, a lady who brought the voices of T. S. Eliot, G. K. Chesterton, and others into the farthest-flung classrooms and would surely have rejected Obama’s own dismal speech as being too obviously reliant on “Half-a-Dozen Surefire Cheap Cracks for Lazy Public Speakers.” A man whose own budget officials predict the collapse of the entire U.S. economy by 2027 sneers at a solvent predecessor for being insufficiently “forward-looking.”

A great nation needs successful self-made businessmen like George Peck, and purveyors of scholarly excellence like Mary Somerville. It’s not clear why it needs a smug over-credentialed President Solyndra to recycle Crowd-Pleasing for Dummies as a keynote address.

They all laughed at Christopher Columbus, they all laughed at Edison . . . How does that song continue? “They laughed at me . . . ”
At Prince George’s Community College they didn’t. But history will, and they will laugh at us for ever taking him seriously.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/ ... steyn?pg=2

[_Bond James Bond]

Romney's birth certificate, let's see it.

Romney's grades in college, let's see them too.

If you get past that let's see his tax returns.

[_richardMdBorn]

Romney's birth certificate, let's see it.

Romney's grades in college, let's see them too.

If you get past that let's see his tax returns.

Obama's supporters claim that he is a genius. I'm asking for support for this assertion. Obama became a US senator in part because people at the Chicago Tribune managed to get the divorce records of Blair Hull and Jack Ryan. It's interesting that the LA Times has not released the Obama-Khalidi tape from 2004. The mainstream media has a double standard about not releasing or even being interested in Obama's records.

[_richardMdBorn]

So releasing tax returns, which is standard protocol for Presidential candidates, shouldn't be expected of Romney because?

However, releasing "academic credentials," which isn't expected nor is it typical of politicians, must be produced by Obama simply because a tiny minority of paranoid daily caller readers, would feel much better about having them.

Do I have that right Richard?

Last year, Rick Perry announced his candidacy, and within a few days, reporters had released his college grades. This article (link following) discusses his academic records and those of George W. Bush, John Kerry and Al Gore. We also know about John McCain's academic career at the Naval Academy. Why don't we have the comparable records of Obama's academic career?
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011 ... minees.php

Kevin stated, in an argument which led to this thread, that "attacking Obama's intelligence is a no win for you guys." He asserted this, yet neither he nor I know basic facts about Obama because Obama has kept these records sealed. Why isn't Kevin the least bit curious about this? It's the left that has been peddling the "Obama's a genius" argument for the last five or six years. If so, why aren't they interesting in getting his academic records when we have them for all of the other presidential candidates from 2000-2008. I guess we're paranoid for wanting to know these basic facts about Obama.

[_Analytics]

The Harry A. Bigelow Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, Douglas G. Baird, said the following on the issue:

The idea that Obama had lousy grades is demonstrably untrue. He graduated magna from Harvard Law, which means that he was at least in the top 15 or 20 percent of his class at HLS. Most of the exams are blindly graded. I don’t want to argue about the relevance of grades, but the idea that they weren’t very good is just not right.

It also mischaracterizes his position at Chicago to say that he was only a part-time instructor. Not being full-time was a matter of his choosing. (He wanted to pursue a political career. Our efforts to persuade him to teach fulltime at Chicago didn’t succeed. With respect to this, I should emphasize that I’m not speaking with second-hand knowledge. As dean at the time, I was the relevant decision maker.) Moreover, he was a “senior lecturer.” This is not your typical part-time instructor. At the time, it was a position reserved for people who would otherwise be full-time faculty, but who choose not to. (He got full medical benefits, large office, secretary, and faculty-type perks that were given only to [Richard] Posner and [Frank] Easterbrook [who are vastly distinguished appellate federal judges as well as senior lecturers at the law school], and not any other adjuncts.)

To say that some professors hated him because he was unqualified is mystifying. His credentials (president of HLR and magna) are completely traditional law professor credentials. His classes were consistently popular. He spent relatively little time schmoozing with faculty or hanging out with them (and this, at least in retrospect, has made at least one conservative colleague speak ill of him), but this is different from him being unqualified.

Someone who says Obama is not smart is someone who hasn’t met him. I’m completely confident you wouldn’t like him if you met him and you would think him ideological and not warm and fuzzy, but I would be stunned if you didn’t think he was smart.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/ ... aw-school/

[_cinepro]

If you get past that let's see his tax returns.

I honestly can't imagine why anyone cares about Romney's tax returns. We already know he's really rich, and if there were anything unusual or illegal in them, the people at the IRS are pretty good at figuring it out.

And even then, what standard are we aspiring to that allows Timothy Geithner or Charlie Rengel to hold public office?

[_Kevin Graham]

Richard you are the one arguing from silence here, demanding that we conclude Obama is an absolute moron until he reveals his "sealed" academic transcripts. You sound like a blathering idiot who is more interested in entertaining wild theories originating from bitter Right Wing bloggers, than someone who is actually interested in a common sense approach to the subject. Besides, Analytics already shot your argument out of the water by posting those comments from Obama's dean.

Cinepro, are you serious? You really can't understand, let alone "imagine" why anyone would want to see Romney's tax returns? This isn't about determining whether or not he is "rich."

Please tell us you're joking here. You guys just can't divorce yourselves from your double standards. Romney himself argued for quite some time that releasing tax returns for multiple years was a necessity if someone wants the American people to take them serious. But suddenly he exempts himself from a long tradition by political candidates. Why do you think this was a tradition at all if no one would "imagine" a reason why it would be important to do so?

Romney is obviously hiding something. His own wife admitted this but said it would hurt his campaign because he would be attacked for it. This proves there is something to attack. The American people have a right to know what that is, but because of his elitist, privileged background, he thinks he gets to play by different rules. He thinks he gets to just get away with flipping the finger to the rest of us so long as he has a smile on his face and his wife tells us that "you people" have all you're going to get.

How can you be so obtuse about this?

[_Jason Bourne]

Romney is obviously hiding something. His own wife admitted this but said it would hurt his campaign because he would be attacked for it. This proves there is something to attack. The American people have a right to know what that is, but because of his elitist, privileged background, he thinks he gets to play by different rules. He thinks he gets to just get away with flipping the finger to the rest of us so long as he has a smile on his face and his wife tells us that "you people" have all you're going to get.

How can you be so obtuse about this?

Ann Romney admitted her husband was hiding something? I think not. Here is this from one of your favorite sources:


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/1 ... 78376.html

Ann Romney said that releasing more details on the family's taxes would merely give the Obama campaign "more ammunition." The Romneys' wealth is rumored to be as much as $250 million, and since much of Mitt Romney's earnings come from investments, he would pay a lower effective tax rate than many lesser-off Americans. But as for whether the campaign is trying to withhold embarrassing information, Ann Romney told NBC "there's nothing we're hiding."

All she said was releasing the returns would give their enemies more fodder. She certainly knows that they returns are complicated and the criticism for their legally low rate was already being hammered.

Now lest Kevin cry foul by me an accuse me of not being fair and looking at all sides of things I will say I agree that Romney should release more tax returns. But his wife did not admit there was something amiss.