A cloth coat and a Cocker Spaniel

Since the days of Richard Nixon we have been treated to some fine spin, courtesy of television.

And the run up to the tax day protest is no exception. There’s a parade forming; get out in front of it.

Ripped fresh from the fax machine, a cute blonde reporter from Fox News Chicago stood there on camera on the April 14th 9 o’clock news with the scoop that Cook County Board President Todd Stroger was proposing a reduction of sales tax by 25%! She had no clue what she was saying and the brains behind her had no time to make sense of it by writing a script.

Actually, Todd was proposing at 0.25% drop in the sales tax, making it only a penny larger than what they charge in LA County. Oh no, Todd is the taxpayer's friend. We don’t want any signs at the tea party with his name on them.

But Obama took the “I feel your pain” approach with his 1 o’clock press conference. Yessir, the White House would have something to say about taxes to diffuse the protests.

His message? No one likes April 15th and the tax forms are too complicated. And he’s going to cut taxes (to help pay for all the money he’s handing out, I suppose).

Here is the official White House photo of the meeting, tagged by the administration as “hero_taxday.” (At least they were openly declaring their intent.):

And here we have the press conference with real Americans behind the President, standing shoulder-to-shoulder behind the man and his message:

It sort of reminds me of this photo of Blagojevich during his January 9, 2009 press conference. See all these commoners he's helped while helping himself to the power of corruption?

Where do they learn this stunt? Is it something they teach in the Chicago School of Political Games?

Reading the comments on the news articles it appears that Obama has snookered many into believing that government is good for us so we can have roads and schools.

And taxes aren't so bad. In fact, they are going down. Why, you wouldn't believe how many people are getting refunds this year.

Media coverage

Just a couple of thoughts on media coverage of the Chicago Tea Party. I was there.

One TV station showed the rally site at about 10:30 am, an hour and a half before it was to begin. They never mentioned the size of the crowd. Someone watching that station would have the impression that there were about 100 people at the rally, not 2,500.

It would be like sending a photographer to the Easter Service to take pictures a half hour before it began, leading people to believe no one goes to church on Easter any more.

The Young Republicans rented a tall ship and sailed from Navy Pier. It was a great visual, but the TV reporters were obsessed with the EPA. They kept explaining that the crates didn’t really have any tea in them and would be retrieved from the harbor.

They showed over and over again the crates tethered with ropes as they were tossed over the side of the ship.

The coverage was on the logistics, not so much the protest itself.

A movement or just BS

The progressives among us see the tea party as a manipulation by the rich to protect themselves against the Obama agenda. The theory goes that this grassroots movement is Astroturf, that corporate America has mobilized the minions in an effort to keep the left from taxing the rich.

Well, from where I sit the left is jealous and a bit frightened by what happened yesterday. Why, even celebrities were stepping up to the microphone to complain about government. And there was some media attention about it.

In contrast, let’s look at the May Day parades on immigration staged by the left. People are gathered from throughout Cook County at Catholic Churches mostly and bused in to Chicago. The bus is free. The food is free. There might even be a stipend of some sort.

When they arrive they are handed a preprinted sign, courtesy of the union. Clearly there is no permit problem or any effort to cancel the event due to security reasons. Why? Because Mayor Daley and Congressman Gutierrez and Cardinal George and Senators Obama and Durbin will be addressing the crowd.

But the tea party met with resistance from Chicago. Get your permits. Stay off the sidewalk. Let people pass. Move the van from the sound equipment company. Not quite as welcoming, was it?

And, by the way, you pay your own way. The bus was $16, bring a sack lunch, make your own sign. That was the order of the day at the tea party. (Gee, you would think something sponsored by corporate America would have had more perks.)

As for the idea that the tea party was a manipulation, I think not. For one thing, the crowd wasn’t exactly in agreement on what we were protesting. There were some Ron Paul folks there, some Libertarians, Repubicans, Democrats, some advocates of simplifying the tax code, some dismantle the Federal Reserve people, some anti-illegal alien groups, flat taxers, anti-stimulus protesters, gold standard advocates, transparency seekers…somehow this didn’t have the look of centralized organization.

The central message is that government is too big, too expensive, and too beholden to special interests.

Remember back in 2007 when they were trying to pass the immigration reform package? Remember the politicians who were complaining about talk radio. Here’s a refresher course: To The Washington Post, Lott had said, "I'm sure senators on both sides of the aisle are being pounded by these talk-radio people who don't even know what's in the bill." To the New York Times, he had offered: "Talk radio is running America. We have to deal with that problem."
-Washigton Post June 20, 2007

In the same article Senator Trent Lott was complaining about all the phone calls he was getting, some of them from other states. Maybe that’s why I was out there.

Cue the violins

The victim articles are coming on fast and strong. They must be priming the pump for another run at amnesty.

There was an article on-line at the Daily Herald about the poor people who have been deported even though they were here legally. The poster child is Pedro Guzman, born in the United States but deported to Mexico.

Pedro is mentally ill, spoke only Spanish and is illiterate. He signed the waiver for deportation and wound up in Mexico. It took the family three months to find him. That was news back in 2007 when it happened. It is still news today.

Latino activists say there have been 55 cases of wrongly deported in the past eight years. ICE admits to ten cases. (It's funny they didn't mention the 600,000 fugitives who were ordered deported and failed to leave. Or the 12 MILLION who are here illegally and know it.)

The take home message is that we should stop all deportations.

Article number two (also in the Herald) was a rehash of the fake data that 90% of weapons used by Mexican drug lords comes from the United States. (As earlier reported, the real number is about 17%.)

The take home message is that we (The United States) are to blame for the trouble in Mexico so we should spend a billion on the problem and go easy on the illegals who came here to escape the violence.

And the Gutierrez roadshow, designed to elicit tears as we hear tales of separated families in the aftermath of deportation. I do hope they have finished their 16 city tour.

And perhaps the best of all is the theory that we need the illegal aliens to fuel our economic recovery. That one is a stretch. Obviously their advocates aren't economists, unless they came from the Bush White House. What part of "income transfer" don't they understand?

All I'm saying is be prepared for the onslaught of pity pieces as a run up to the May Day rallies around the country. And they are only a dress rehearsal for the Obama administration as they pretend to hear a mandate for amnesty.

House-broken promises

This may be the unrecoverable error of the Obama administration. Americans can forgive him for his decision to expand abortion, free terrorists, appoint tax dodgers, send greetings to Iran, take over private industry, approve embryonic stem cell research, apologize all over Europe, publicly embrace Islam at the expense of Christianity...

...but you don't mess with dog lovers. Perhaps you heard that the Obama's have a dog, a Ted Kennedy dog. His name is Bo. And he wasn't rescued from a shelter. There's the rub. He promised to get a mutt. Instead he's sending a check to the SPCA and getting a purebred.

The self-proclaimed Mutt got an ivy league dog.

The name was chosen by the children and is fraught with racial overtones. Why if Cal Thomas had suggested such a name he would have been banished from journalism. And what a field day they would have had with Rush Limbaugh.

But it's OK.

I was listening on the scanner yesterday. During the shift change the Secret Service chimed in, "Be careful where you walk in the residence wing. Don't step in the Bo-diddly."

Reality TV

The reality show "The Biggest Liar" has come to Washington.
In the first season, Karl Rove and Joe Biden are the contestants.
It may be anti-climactic, but I think this one will end in a tie.

Another Bush Remake

In the run-up to a fresh campaign for “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” in a couple of months, the Obama administration, through Border Patrol statistics and latino activist, has gone back to the first 100 days of the Bush administration.

That was then…
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
May 25, 2001
Statement by the Press Secretary
The President called Mexican President Vicente Fox this morning to express deep sadness and condolences to President Fox, and the Mexican people, over the horrible deaths of 14 Mexicans in the Arizona desert earlier this week.
The Presidents reaffirmed the importance of our ongoing efforts on border safety and migration, to ensure that tragic events such as this do not happen again. They noted we are making steady progress, and pledged both sides would work hard to carry this process forward.

This is now…
Border deaths up despite apparent dip in crossings
By ARTHUR H. ROTSTEIN, The Associated Press
11:44 a.m. April 8, 2009 San Diego Union Tribune

TUCSON, Ariz. — Illegal immigrant deaths are continuing to rise along the U.S.-Mexico border despite a nearly 25 percent drop in Border Patrol arrests that suggests far fewer people are entering the country unlawfully.

The number of migrant deaths along the roughly 2,000-mile border increased by nearly 7 percent between Oct. 1 and March 31, the first six months of the 2009 federal fiscal year. The biggest increase occurred in the patrol's Tucson sector, the nation's busiest corridor for illegal immigrants coming through Mexico.

In all, the remains of 128 people were found, compared to 120 in the same six-month period the year before, according to just-released Border Patrol statistics.

And this segues into a call to do something. This is Cardinal material. We must grant amnesty and increase the number of guest worker visas into the USA so these good people won’t die trying to come here illegally.

Remember the “90% of weapons are from the US” hoax I blogged about last week? Well, there is another reliability issue here as well. Further down in the AP article it says: Dr. Bruce Parks, the medical examiner in southern Arizona's Pima County, said more than half the bodies his office examined were skeletal remains, meaning they had not died recently. But that is down from first half of fiscal 2008, when 75 percent of the cases involved skeletal remains.

"Many of them are people that died sometime earlier, and it could be more than a year or two in some cases," Parks said.

But in our Postmodern world, truth is irrelevant.

In fact, come summer if the discovery of bodies increases, the libs may be able to parlay this into a twofer. Problem #1- Lack of immigration reform. Problem #2- Global warming. Imagine all the conferences and grant writing that news would afford us.