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The Election: What’s “Like” Got to Do With It?

By Selwyn Duke

“I like Obama,” said a man I know of when explaining his support for the president. His sentiment isn’t unusual, as Barack Obama is, we’re told, a likeable man. In contrast, we hear that people have trouble “connecting” with Mitt Romney, that he’s an overly-starched blueblood who can’t relate to the common man.

Of course, it’s hard for people to connect with you when the only connection they have to what you say and do is through a media that hates you. In contrast, when that same media smoothes out your rough edges and whites out damning comments you make, it’s a lot easier to be likeable. This certainly is the case with Obama, a man who has called traditionalist Americans “enemies,” said that they “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them…,” and considered his brief time in the corporate world as a case of “working for the enemy” (he seems to have a very unlikeable habit of viewing fellow Americans as “enemies”). And based on what I’ve heard through the grapevine, the real Obama exudes an arrogance that’s anything but appealing.

Let’s say, however, that I’m wrong and Obama is just the most affable bloke around. Is this really meaningful? Could it even be a red flag?

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When Michelle Obama Starts Starving the Kids

By Selwyn Duke

Unprecedented school-lunch regulations have just gone into effect, and they suggest a new answer to the question “Where’s the beef?”: not on students’ plates— or on their bones. The regulations are a result of Michelle Obama’s “Healthy and Hunger Free Kids Act,” which was passed by the lame-duck, Democrat-controlled Congress in December 2010. And the result has been wasted food, endangered health, and hungrier kids.

The problem is that, in typical nanny-state style, the regulations not only prescribe foods many children find unpalatable, they also apply unrealistic calorie restrictions on students: “650 calories for elementary-schoolers, 700 for middle-schoolers and 850 for high-schoolers,” writes Suzanne Tobias of the Wichita Eagle.

Yet more perspective is gained when you consider that the government’s dietary limitations wouldn’t be out of place in a wartime prison camp. For example, writes PJ Media, “Current regulations limit servings of protein, which could be anything from a hamburger to a side of beans, to 1.5 ounces two days a week and 2 ounces the other three days.”

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