The term "bully pulpit" stems from President Theodore Roosevelt's reference to the White House as a "bully pulpit," meaning a terrific platform from which to persuasively advocate an agenda. Roosevelt often used the word "bully" as an adjective meaning superb/wonderful.
The Bully Pulpit features news, reasoned discourse, opinion and some humor.
(CNSNews.com) - Massive quantities of algae are now blooming in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, where the federal government has just spent $34 million in stimulus money to make the pool "sustainable" and "improve the quality and appearance of the water."
(By JOEL B. POLLAK, Big Government) - It remains unclear whether President Barack Obama's lies about attacks on U.S. embassies will cost him re-election. One thing is certain, however: whatever ambitions Secretary of State Hillary Clinton once held to run for president in 2016 have been damaged beyond repair. Obama was literally asleep when the proverbial "3 a.m. call" came, but Clinton--who bears responsibility for embassy security--was asleep on the job for weeks.
(By Doug Powers, MichelleMalkin.com) - The 2008 presidential campaign brought us Peggy. But this year a capable replacement has been located in Cleveland:
(BY DANIEL HALPER, The Weekly Standard) - The Obama campaign has created a series of electronic greeting card aimed at women voters. "President Obama summed up the Republican Party’s approach to women’s health when he said 'they want to take us back to the policies more suited to the 1950s than the 21st century,'" the Obama campaign website reads: "Send an eCard to say you won’t go back."
Perhaps the oddest card in the series, though, is this one...
(By Mike Flynn, Big Government) - Over the years, I've generally had little patience when partisans make the "polls are wrong" argument. I've usually found it to be the last refuge of campaigns which were clearly struggling. Sure, individual polls can be wrong and some can occasionally produce a crazy outlier, but a collective average of polling produced a roughly accurate snapshot of the state of a race. This year, however, is different. The overwhelming majority of media polling this election employ such absurd assumptions about turnout this November that they not only misrepresent the presidential race, they are actively distorting it. I also believe it is intentional.
(By Kirsten Powers, Fox News) - "Disgusting and reprehensible." said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. "Truly abhorrent," an outraged White House official told an international conference. Were they talking about the murder of four Americans in Libya? Or perhaps the hoisting of an Islamist flag over the U.S. Embassy in Cairo?
No. For that they stuck to diplomatic speak. For the president, the harshest language was: "I strongly condemn the outrageous attack." For Clinton it was that the US is heartbroken and she condemned "this senseless act of violence." But "disgusting and reprehensible" and "truly abhorrent " were reserved for an amateurish and silly film by someone nobody has ever heard of.
In fact, what is "disgusting and reprehensible" is that there are people in the world who think they are justified in attacking and killing people because someone hurt their feelings or offended their sensibilities. The US government should not act as a validator or enabler of this upside down worldview, which is exactly what the Obama administration has done repeatedly as they have responded to these abhorrent attacks against the United States.
(By Jeff Poor, The Daily Caller) - On Hugh Hewitt’s radio show Thursday night, National Review columnist Mark Steyn, author of “After America: Get Ready for Armageddon,” said President Barack Obama gave an embarrassing performance Wednesday during his campaign swing through Las Vegas, Nev., in the wake of attacks on U.S. diplomatic stations in Libya and Egypt.
“I thought that thing last night with the president saying he had ‘a tough day’ and comparing the dead Americans in Libya to campaign supporters, which he did — I thought was one of the most disgraceful, inept and embarrassing performances by a head of state or government that I have ever seen,” Steyn said. “Every American should be ashamed of their president.”
(By Alex Pappas, The Daily Caller) - A top official at a liberal super PAC with the goal of eradicating tea partiers from Congress is telling activists that it’s more effective to label Republicans as racists than criticize their policies.
According to an audio recording obtained by The Daily Caller, Matthew “Mudcat” Arnold, the national campaign manager of the liberal CREDO super PAC, told a gathering of supporters in Aurora, Colo., on Sept. 8 that they’ve realized “policy did not move voters.”
He used Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King as an example.
“When we said that Steve King … is pro-life and believes in cutting Social Security and voted for the Ryan budget, no one cared,” Arnold said. “When we said Steve King’s a racist, Steve King believes that immigrants ought to be put in electric fences, people moved.”
On 'Morning Joe' this morning, the neutered, chickified moderate (as Rush calls him) Joe Scarborough basically admitted that the lamestream media didn't properly cover Libyan security failures.
Oh, but it didn't stop there. He had to blame someone for the media's irresponsible behavior.
He blamed Mitt Romney.
That's right. It's Mitt Romney's fault that the media didn't do its job. This according to Joe Scarborough.
Obama tells Americans the terrible things the Republican will do to them. The Republican remains silent about what he would do.
(By Kimberley Strassel, Wall Street Journal) - In the classic 1968 film "Once Upon a Time in the West," a villainous Henry Fonda shoots one of his lackeys, in part for the sin of wearing both a belt and suspenders. How do you trust a man, muses Fonda, who "can't even trust his own pants?"
Mitt Romney is slipping in the polls because, when it comes to his own policies, he is once again wearing a belt, suspenders, and even some elasticized waistbands. The bold Romney who picked Paul Ryan as a catalyst to run on ideas has been ousted by the return of the careful Romney who wants this race to be about Barack Obama. And America is unwilling to trust a man who seems unwilling to trust his own agenda.
The re-emergence of the well-belted Romney began at the GOP convention, where he delivered a speech that had been pared away to nothing but a fleeting reference to his policies. It was on vivid display, too, in Mr. Romney's Sunday appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press," in which he managed to use 30 minutes of prime time to talk mainly of flotsam, as well as (news flash!) how bad Mr. Obama had made the economy.
(By Noah Rothman, Mediaite) - The United States and President Barack Obama have suffered a pretty bad week, but for varying reasons. The U.S. was dealt a heavy blow Tuesday when the American Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, was brutally murdered in a coordinated attack on a consulate in Benghazi. But the focus of most of the press has, to their disgrace, been on the appropriateness of the timing of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s attacks on the president over this incident. In the space of the last 24 hours, however, the president has committed two offenses against both etiquette and policy that should be reported on extensively.
(Fox Nation) - Mark Levin says that Romney’s handling of the embassy attacks are perhaps his finest hour of the campaign, saying that he has handled himself in a very Reaganesque manner.
(By Katie Pavlich, Townhall.com) - Last night on Hannity, Michelle Malkin completely destroyed the Obama administration's response to the murder of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and called out the violent behavior by radical Muslims who are continuing their rioting in the Middle East today.
"Every Friday in the Jihad world is riot Friday against anything Western."
(By Meghann Evans, The Stokes News) - Opponents and supporters of a proposed bioremediation facility for the Big Creek community have been gearing up for a planning meeting on Sept. 27, but that meeting has been canceled after the application for a special use permit was withdrawn.
According to Stokes Planning Director David Sudderth, last week Kent and Pam Fulp withdrew their application for a special use permit for property off of Frye Road. If approved, the permit would have allowed the couple to continue their plans for operating a “land farm” on their property in the northern end of the county, where contaminated soil would have been trucked in and spread over the land to be treated by microorganisms in the soil.
The Fulps could reapply at a later date, said Sudderth, but they would have to restart the entire process. A call to the Fulp residence was not returned Tuesday.
(Fox Nation) - On the ‘Factor’, O’Reilly spoke with Dennis Miller about his recent appearance on ‘The Tonight Show’ with Jay Leno when he was asked about the ‘war on women’.
Miller sounded off on Sandra Fluke and the liberal's 'war on women', saying ‘stop whining about birth control'.
(Fox Nation) - [Thursday] night’s speech by Barack Obama was a weak plea for another four years to decimate our economy, retard our energy security future, and reduce the greatest fighting force known to the world.
It was a complete and utter failure.
In Barack Obama’s own words he stated that if he could not turn this economy around in four years he would be a one-term proposition. He also stated that he would cut the deficit in half, yet we have had four years of trillion-dollar-plus deficits. [Yesterday] morning we found out, again, that we are still at 8% or higher unemployment for 43 straight months. This comes knowing that we were promised by Barack Obama unemployment never higher than 8% with the almost trillion dollar stimulus. We have the lowest workforce participation rate in 31 years...Obama will tout a decrease in unemployment from 8.3% to 8.1%, but that is a scam. We have 368,000 people who have been dropped from the labor accountability rolls. We only added 96, 000 jobs to our economy in August. If America reelects Barack Obama to a second term, we deserve all the pain and misery that will ensue.
(By WILLIAM BIGELOW, Breitbart) - For those who would think tax cuts are an integral part of economic recovery, Obama’s patronizing attitude is insulting. But then, virtually everything Obama does conveys a basic contempt for the kind of common sense that most Americans have about their finances. It’s all smoke and mirrors for him.
(By JOHN NOLTE, Breitbart) - It's like a corrupt media ritual. The moment a Republican enters the Oval Office, America's homeless are suddenly discovered, dragged before news cameras, and used as props to prove how heartless the current administration is. But as soon as a Democrat assumes office, the homeless suddenly disappear; presumably to a place with chocolate rivers and peppermint trees that only Democrat presidents are able to magically manifest as soon as the oath of office is complete.
AUSTIN, TX (AP) - Texas will soon open a stretch of highway with the highest speed limit in the country, giving eager drivers a chance to rip through a trip between two of the state's largest metropolitan areas.
The Texas Transportation Commission has approved a speed limit of 85 mph for a 41-mile toll road several miles east of the increasingly crowded Interstate 35 corridor between Austin and San Antonio.
"I would love it," Austin resident Alan Guckian said. "Sometimes it's fun to just open it up."
(By Paul Miller, The Carmel Pine Cone) - After a week as topic No. 1 in American politics, former Carmel Mayor Clint Eastwood said the outpouring of criticism from left-wing reporters and liberal politicians after his appearance at the Republican National Convention last Thursday night, followed by an avalanche of support on Twitter and in the blogosphere, is all the proof anybody needs that his 12-minute discourse achieved exactly what he intended it to.
“President Obama is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” Eastwood told The Pine Cone this week. “Romney and Ryan would do a much better job running the country, and that’s what everybody needs to know. I may have irritated a lot of the lefties, but I was aiming for people in the middle.”
(By Stanley Kurtz, National Review Online) - Overall, the Democrats put on an effective show. With the possible exception of the McGovern convention, this was the most left-leaning Democratic gathering in memory. Some of that may have been counterproductive, particularly on social issues. To the extent that Republicans dismiss this convention as either a failure or relatively meaningless, however, I think we’re fooling ourselves.
This election could go either way. If Obama squeaks by, he will have done so with the help of a Democratic Party that has taken a large, open, and disturbingly leftist turn. I think we’re missing the significance of that. It is completely accurate to say that the Democrats are pushing a bogus reformulation of the American way of life–slapping a bunch of flags on their Julia ad and turning classic conceptions of civic and religious community into covers for a cradle-to-grave welfare state. Unfortunately, this way of thinking is becoming the new normal in this country, and Obama and his convention have only helped to cement the change.
Conservatives can puncture these arguments all we like, but we can’t cut through the media filter. More than that, the conservative case can’t break through the left-controlled education system that has profoundly shaped the Millennials. True, youth unemployment is giving many second thoughts about Obama, yet it’s been more a matter of sapping Millennial enthusiasm than of changing attitudes and ideas.
(By David Martosko, The Daily Caller) - The Democratic Party chairman of a Florida county said Wednesday at the Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte, N.C., that he believes Christians want to see Jews either killed or converted to Christianity.
Palm Beach County Democratic Party chairman Mark Alan Siegel, a Boca Raton attorney and former eight-term New York state assemblyman, told Patriot Update video reporter Scottie Hughes that Christians who profess support for Israel are “the worst possible allies with the Jewish state.”
“The Christians,” Siegel said, “just want us to be there so we can all be slaughtered and converted, so they can bring on the second coming of Jesus Christ.”
(By Katie Pavlich, Townhall) - Sandra Fluke, the woman who asked taxpayers to foot the bill for her birth control in February, just wrapped up her speech at the 2012 DNC. Her remarks were brief but typical, arguing a Romney presidency would set women back and leave women to die "preventable deaths in emergency rooms."
Fluke has become a center piece of the Obama campaign and is being used to represent women. She embraced a second term for President Obama saying, "In which our president stands with all women.”
But does President Obama really stand with "all women?" Fluke shot to fame after radio host Rush Limbaugh called her a slut, for which he later apologized. President Obama called Fluke to offer his support, yet failed to call Sarah Palin, Bristol Palin or Michele Bachmann when "comedian" Bill Maher called them much worse.
(By Guy Benson, Townhall) - We wrote about the extreme 2012 Democratic platform this morning, noting that it excludes God and Jerusalem, yet includes taxpayer-funded late term abortion. Even the media found these decisions slightly unusual, leading to a noisy chorus of criticism that eventually built to a critical mass. The decision was made to uproot the platform and undo the controversial language and omissions. The problem? The platform was formally adopted yesterday. Democratic officials couldn't just quietly tweak the document behind closed doors; they had to put the modified platform up for another vote. When they did so, chaos erupted. In three separate voice votes, delegates were asked whether they supported the inclusion of God and the recognition of Jerusalem in their party's guiding policy document. Three separate times, loud shouts of "no" grew in volume and intensity. A flummoxed Chairman Villaraigosa ultimately just declared that the "ayes" had it -- even though multiple reports indicated that the consensus was nowhere hear the requisite 2/3 majority. As God and Jerusalem were inserted back into the Democratic platform, the hall exploded in boos -- a humiliating disaster for the party. The stunning video:
(By Ann Coulter, The Daily Caller) - Apparently, Monday, Aug. 27, was opening day for Hysterical Liberal Sanctimony About Imagined Republican Racism. During this first round, The New York Times, The Atlantic and the TV networks each put in a splendid showing.
Today, we will focus on the outstanding individual performance of the man who, since the departure of Contessa Brewer, is widely regarded by his colleagues as the stupidest on-air personality at MSNBC. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Chris Matthews.
(By Billy Hallowell, The Blaze) - Some shocking claims are coming from church leaders in Charlotte, North Carolina. Select congregations are alleging that the Democratic National Committee banned dozens of houses of worship from giving gifts and writing letters to convention attendees over the fact that they hold views that run contrary to the party’s platform.
The incident came as a surprise to Charlotte714, a local religious movement comprised of more than 100 churches. Most recently, the group came together to pray for the convention and its participants. As a result of its efforts, 9,000 people joined together in worship and prayer last Sunday, just two days prior to the Democratic National Convention’s launch.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (By Alex Pappas, The Daily Caller) — Republicans reacted to the news that President Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Committee on Thursday is being moved away from the large Bank of America stadium to a smaller indoor venue because of the weather by questioning whether it’s really because the Democrats are worried about attendance.
“Problems filling the seats?” Republican National Committee spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski asked reporters in a Wednesday email.
Kukowski argued that “the Democrats continue to downgrade convention events due to lack of enthusiasm.”
(By Charles C. Johnson, The Daily Caller) - In an academic article published last year, contraception advocate Sandra Fluke made the case that private health insurers should be required to pay for sex change operations.
Fluke has become a vocal surrogate of the Democratic Party and is scheduled to address the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., Wednesday night. On Tuesday afternoon she appeared at a Planned Parenthood “Yes We Plan” rally outside the convention venue, where condoms in anti-Republican packaging were distributed.
(By Justin Sink, The Hill) - Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.) appeared to botch American and Brooklyn political history during an appearance on "The Colbert Report" that aired Tuesday night, saying that slavery in the United States persisted under the Dutch as late as 1898.
Colbert was quizzing Clarke on the history of her borough.
"Some have called Brooklyn’s decision to become part of New York City 'The Great Mistake of 1898,' " Colbert said. "If you could get in a time machine and go back to 1898, what would you say to those Brooklynites?"
"I would say to them, 'Set me free,' " Clarke said.
Pressed by Colbert what she would be free from, the black congresswoman responded, "Slavery."
"Slavery. Really? I didn’t realize there was slavery in Brooklyn in 1898," Colbert responded, seemingly looking to give the lawmaker a chance to catch her error.
(By Allahpundit, Hot Air) - Yes, rest assured, Romney and the GOP are already working on ads about this. It’s the GOP that cut the clip and circulated it, in fact. Mitt himself evidently can’t wait to get started...
