United Liberty

During an interview on Face the Nation, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley was asked by Bob Schieffer if the country was better off today that it was four years ago. O’Malley, who is thought to be looking at a presidential run in 2016, stunningly admitted that it’s not:

No,” replied O’Malley, a prominent Obama surrogate, adding “but that’s not the question of this election.”

“Without a doubt, we are not as well off as we were before George Bush brought us the Bush job losses, the Bush recessions, the Bush deficits, the series of desert wars, charged for the first time to credit cards — the national credit card,” he added, according to a transcript.

At least part of his initial response was honest, that being that the country isn’t better off. He’s since backed off that statement. But look, there is not question that Bush is responsible for huge budget deficits, but President Obama hasn’t exactly done anything to put an end to the river of red ink flowing from Washington. If fact, with four years of $1 trillion budget deficits, he’s made it worse.

As I’ve reported before, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, as the leader of the Democratic Governors Association, is a leading candidate for the 2016 nomination.

But in the last 24 hours, it appears O’Malley has been locked deep in the underground in Team Obama’s torture chamber where he recieived the Cory Booker treatment. In that amount of time, O’Malley flipped on the main question posed to voters by Mitt Romney’s campaign: “Are you better off than you were 4 years ago?”

Sunday (9/2) on Face the Nation:

Monday (9/3) in the National Journal:

A day after saying, no, the country was not better off than it was four years ago, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley reversed course on Monday and said, yes, indeed it was.

“We are clearly better of as a country because we’re now creating jobs rathare than losing them,” O’Malley, a Democrat, said on CNN’s Starting Point. “But we have not recovered all that we lost in the Bush recession. That’s why we need to continue to move forward.”

He then motioned to a panel that included Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, among others. “Is there anyone on this panel that thinks we’ve recovered all we lost in the Bush recession? Clearly we’re moving forward, we’re creating jobs, unemployment is down, job creation is up. And that job creation would not happen without the president’s leadership.”

O’Malley later took to Twitter to reiterate his point.

Yeah, I realize that I’m a bit late on this, but I’ve been busy today and haven’t had a lot of time to catch up on my blogging. I did manage to catch Rep. Paul Ryan’s speech last night from the bar at the Hyatt, not far from the Times forum, which is hosting the Republican National Convention.

Ryan hit a homerun last night. There’s no question about it. No, I don’t agree with everything he said. I don’t agree with his record. But he came across as a decent, concerned guy. Everyone in the bar, mostly Republicans, were glued to the TV, clapping at some of the more direct lines attacking President Barack Obama.

Ryan hit familar notes, noting the mounting fiscal problems that faces the United States. He explained the cronyism of the Obama Administration, the failures of the stimulus bill and unemployment, and cuts to Medicare.

But he also noted his background. Ryan lost his father at an early age and pointed to his mother as a strong influence in his life, which reminds me of my background. And I’m not afraid to admit that it made me think of my mother and what she did for me after my dad passed away.

So-called “fact-checkers” have, of course, ripped into Ryan. Some of the items are legit, others are, well, incredibly wrong. For example, Ryan made a remark about a General Motors plant that closed after Obama took office, something the then-candidate promised wouldn’t happen in 2008. Fact-checkers said that the plant closed in 2008, before Obama took office. Well, the “fact-checkers” got it wrong, as Reason explained. Another example of media bias or lazy reporting. You pick, but it’s not the worst example from this week, that’s for sure.

The anti-war movement has all but disappeared. You would think that with both major party conventions coming up, they would take the opportunity to demonstrate, especially with the media being concentrated at the conventions. However, there are no plans to demonstrate and in fact you don’t hear a whole lot about the war in Afghanistan anymore. Short of putting Cindy Sheehan’s face on a milk carton, we really need to find where the anti-war movement has gone because 2,000 American soldiers have now died in Afghanistan. If war was bad when George W. Bush was president, why isn’t it bad now that Barack Obama is in the Oval Office?

Not only has Obama expanded the war in Afghanistan and kept Bush’s Iraq withdrawal timeline; he even started a new war in Libya. Plus, the Obama administration appears to heading down the road to war with both Syria and Iran. Obviously, the wars have not stopped. American soldiers have not stopped dying overseas and drone strikes certainly haven’t stopped all over the world. Why has the press and so-called anti-war activists ignored the ongoing wars?

The only unfortunate conclusion to make is that the anti-war movement were either at best pawns of the Democratic Party or they really don’t have a problem with war in general, but only with wars launched by Republican presidents. This isn’t just a phenomenon confined to the left, because the right only generally believe in limited government when a Democrat is president. All this means is that when a Republican is elected president and decides to go to war, it will be easy to dismiss war opponents as partisan hacks. It will be just a way to silence debate and opposition by the War Party.

President Obama may not understand economics, but his team knows the costs involved in buying MILLIONS of Twitter Followers.

From the NY Times:

Twitter followers are sold in two ways: “Targeted” followers, as they are known in the industry, are harvested using software that seeks out Twitter users with similar interests and follows them, betting that many will return the favor. “Generated” followers are from Twitter accounts that are either inactive or created by spamming computers — often referred to as “bots.”

Buyers and sellers see nothing wrong with it. “Buying followers generated by bots is against Twitter’s terms and frowned upon by the public,” Mr. Mitchell said. “However, it is perfectly legal.”

The practice has become so widespread that StatusPeople, a social media management company in London, released a Web tool last month called the Fake Follower Check that it says can ascertain how many fake followers you and your friends have.

The tool examines Twitter relationships, said Rob Waller, a founder of StatusPeople. “Fake accounts tend to follow a lot of people but have few followers,” he said. “We then combine that with a few other metrics to confirm the account is fake.”

While the focus of just about everyone has been on Todd Akin, the Missouri Republican running for United States Senate who made some ignorant comments about rape and abortion, there is some good news for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. At the Washington Post, Aaron Blake notes that the Republican ticket has made some small gains in all important battleground states against President Barack Obama:

[Yesterday’s] trio of swing state polls from Quinnipiac University, CBS News and the New York Times are the latest to show a little movement toward Romney.

Here’s a recap:

- Wisconsin: Romney trailed by three points in a Marquette University poll released Wednesday and led in two automated polls conducted last week — his first lead in the state since mid-June. And the new Quinnipiac poll shows him reducing a six-point deficit from earlier this month down to two points in his new running mate’s home state.

Citizens United, a group made famous thanks to a 2010 Supreme Court case dealing with free speech, put together some good stuff about the Left in the United States. They will soon be released Occupy Unmasked, which documents the crazy that we know as Occupy Wall Street.

Another documentary, The Hope and the Change, they’ve put together looks at the thoughts of some Democrats and independent voters who supported Barack Obama in 2008, but have been disappointed in his presidency:

This documentary, which is out now on DVD,  will be among those offered by Citizens United for a free screening during next week’s Republican National Convention in Tampa.

There is a reason that Democrats are focusing on just about any issue other than the economy. Despite promises that the unemployment rate would be 5.6% today with the passage of the 2009 stimulus bill, it’s actually at 8.3%. Many have pulled out of the labor market entirely and economic forecasts are constantly being revised downward.

With all of that, it’s odd that anyone from President Barack Obama’s campaign would claim that they’ve been good on jobs. It’s even more odd that Stephanie Cutter, a spokewoman for Obama’s campaign, would say that the current recovery is better than that of Ronald Reagan (emphasis mine):

Well, I think that worker probably has a good understanding of what’s happened over the past four years in terms of the president coming in and seeing 800,000 jobs lost on the day that the president was being sworn in, and seeing the president moving pretty quickly to stem the losses, to turn the economy around, and over the past, you know, 27 months we’ve created 4.5 million private sector jobs. That’s more jobs than in the Bush recovery, in the Reagan recovery, there’s obviously more we need to do, and as I said to Mika at the at beginning of the program, I think that unemployed worker probably sees one person in this race trying to move the country forward and that’s the president.

While surfing through Reddit last night, I caught this humorous photo from Reuters. It looks like Obama’s teleprompter has become self-aware.

If you’e heading down to the Republican National Convention next week in Tampa, you may run into Vice President Joe Biden. That’s right, folks, the Obama campaign’s worst spokesman, just two weeks after saying that the Romney-Ryan ticket would allow Wall Street to put African-Americans “back in chains,” is going to be in a city crowded with Republicans:

Vice President Joe Biden has plans to be in Tampa during the Republican National Convention next week, the Obama campaign said Tuesday. Biden has events in Tampa and in other cities next Monday and Tuesday, the campaign said.

In addition, “a strong bench” of surrogates will be in the Tampa area as well.

While visiting a Minneapolis high school Tuesday afternoon, Biden seemed to embrace his role in Tampa turning to reporters traveling with him, “Who’s going to Florida with me? Any of you going to be in Florida?

“Well I’m the speaker at the convention,” he continued to laughs. “I’m going to be down there.”

What could go wrong?

As noted earlier this week, American Crossroads launched a rather snarky ad endorsing Biden for Vice President, as opposed to someone else on the Democratic Party ticket, because of his proclivity for gaffes: