A Few Insolent Questions

President Obama has stopped all oil well drilling in the Gulf of Mexico until we find out the reason(s) for the failure at the BP oil rig.  My question is: how come BP is still allowed to drill the two relief wells to stop the oil from coming out of the original well that exploded?  Do not these relief wells carry the same risks as any other wells that were being drilled? 

Others have also asked these questions:
- If one airliner crashed, would we stop all airline flights until such time as we knew exactly what happened?
- What if we never find out the reason(s) for the explosion, does that mean that we never will be able to drill again for oil in the Gulf?
- What about other countries that are drilling in the Gulf (China, Mexico, Iran), does this order apply to them?  And, if so, how do we enforce it?  And, if not, aren't we being economically foolish? 
- If, as a result of this moratorium, these oil rigs pick up shop and move elsewhere in the world, how do we entice them to come back?
- Who will insure that the extra-legal $20 billon slush fund just pledged to Obama by BP is spent wisely ... and who will keep it from becoming a huge Democrat honey pot?

Being Deferential

In the southern United States, whenever a funeral procession nears, all the cars on both sides of the road, pull over in respect to let the it pass. This type of behavior is archetypically deferential. May I suggest that this seems to be the type of treatment that Barack Obama has experienced most of his adult life. People have been deferential to him at college, in his community-organizer life, during his stints in state and national legislatures, throughout his campaign for President, and even now as POTUS.  He has respectfully been given the benefit of the doubt by the public and the media … very likely because of his race, certainly because of his oratorical skills, possibly due to his attractive family, and, to summarize, as Joe Biden bluntly said it, he is “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”

Now things are beginning to unravel for our ass-kicker-in-chief (see: Ass Kicking). He seems to be unable to demonstrate his management skills to the degree that voters expected when they overwhelming elected him about twenty months ago. I have previously detailed his numerous crisis management failings in another of my blogs: Crisis Management. But, herein I want to briefly explore why he may be so inept administratively. To me, all indications point to the fact that his preparation for the Presidency has been sadly bereft of management experience and successes.

When he was the head of the Law Review at Harvard, he never had to express his own legal adroitness in writing … as was customary for such a position. The fact that his academic records in college have been sealed suggests that there are also some damaging personality failings therein. College professors (rather “senior lecturers” as was the case for Obama) are notoriously unable to manage their associates and departments. (This is why former college professors often make lousy college presidents.) And community organizers seldom have to deal with serious management crises. And lastly, continuously voting “present” in his legislative career suggests that Obama too frequently opted to hide under his desk rather than face difficult governance issues.

Yes, Obama did successfully run (with the help of the Chicago political machine) a stellar campaign for President in 2008. But again, I suspect that he let the wave of deferential media enthusiasm carry him into office rather than having to fight hammer-and-tongs through an even-up political battle. One gets the distinct impression that, now that the exigencies of running the most powerful nation in the world have imposed themselves on his previously unflappable universe, he is in way over his head. His early apology tour of the world, in which he seemed to want to curry favor … particularly with many of our adversaries ... by proudly fouling his own nest … has bought him only a fistful of guano dust. Nowhere has this humble-pie foreign-policy reset solved any of the United States's stickier diplomatic issues. One may argue that he has made most of them far worse. He has kept his own counsel all too frequently and now can only point at others instead of confessing to his own bad advice.

The only hope for us as a nation is that Obama is a quick-study and can mid-course correct while on the job. If not, we will likely suffer some very painful two and a half more years of “hope and change.”

Optics

These days, television, in particular cable TV, seems to be increasingly able to shape public opinion. Be it the Israeli commandos rappelling down on a Turkish ship running the Gaza blockade … or a live shot of that broken British Petroleum “containment valve” one mile down spewing a cloud of evil oil into the pristine Gulf … or President Obama kneeling down on a Gulf of Mexico beach to examine a tar ball … it is all about the visuals that the news editors can effect on their viewing audience. The term that has gained current popularity for this phenomenon is “optics”. And, I don’t know about you, but I am getting a little tired of seeing that same ten yards of Gulf Coast wetlands with the BP oil slick lapping on its marsh reeds or those same Turkish militants (soon to be martyrs) wailing on the Israeli commandos. And now we are beginning to see oil coated pelicans (pelican?) consigned to bird heaven … covered in immoral BP petroleum.

These visuals can’t be the whole story by any stretch, but the gullible American public seems to be wedded to this form of information pabulum. I may be swimming against the tide here (so to speak), but 45 days into this BP drilling rig explosion, there seems to be remarkably little ecological damage (numerous pelicans die every day from shark attacks) relative to what we have been led to expect by the hysterical video and copy editors. (This morning on Morning Joe they graphically extrapolated the oil slick moving into the Atlantic and polluting shorelines all the way up to Cape Cod.) “A majority of Americans see the massive oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico as a major environmental disaster.” (The Pew Research Center on May 11th)

These dire predictions may in fact transpire if this leak is not contained for months to come, but I for one am skeptical … particularly when I see the environmentalist and politicians expeditiously stepping in to take advantage of the publics’ angst. Viz: President Obama has shut down all drilling for oil in the Gulf for six months (a far bigger economic disaster) and the Democrats in Congress are smacking their lips about using this incident to push through their Cap and Trade (read carbon tax) legislation this summer.

May I suggest that famous Clintonista line? “Let’s all step back and take a deep breath.”

Associative Illogic

The Obama administration has tapped James Cameron (the Director of Avatar) as a consultant on how to solve the Gulf oil-spill crisis. This is because he has had some experience with submersibles, presumably during the filming of Titanic. Now this seems to me to be the ultimate in thinking outside the box on the part of the White House. As a consequence, I have the following suggestions for future administration appointments:

- George Lucas (creator and director of Star Wars fame) to help us plan for NASA’s future after our last space shuttle flight this fall.

- George Lopez (Mexican-American comedian and star of The George Lopez Show) to opine on how to solve our illegal immigrant problem.

- Homer Simpson (star of The Simpsons) to help us plan on how to expand the number of our domestic nuclear power plants … and get rid of our nuclear waste.

- Ray Croc (deceased McDonald’s founder) on solving our unemployment problem.

- Suze Orman (financial consultant and host of The Suze Orman Show) on solving the U.S. national debt crisis.

- Kevin Costner (of The Untouchables fame) to help us wipe out organized crime.

- George Soros (billionaire monetary speculator and former Nazi collaborator) on unwinding the world’s monetary crises.

- Kiefer Sutherland (of 24 fame) on preventing future domestic terrorist attacks.

- Peter Shin (Korean-American and director of The Family Guy) on how to pacify North Korea’s nuclear belligerency.

- Christiana Amanpour (Iranian-American, CNN newsreader and future anchor of NBC’s This Week) on convincing Iran to give up their nuclear ambitions.

- Barbara Streisand (star of Yentl) to help us solve the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.

The Cover Up

“It’s never the crime but the cover up that takes politicians down.” Now, the triumvirate of Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Joe Sestak have short-order cooked up a whopper of a story to explain away Sestak’s three-month-old allegation of being offered a job in Obama’s administration (Navy Secretary?) in exchange for dropping out of the Pennsylvania Democrat Senatorial primary race in favor of Arlen Specter.

I’m not even going to parse all the inconsistencies and suspicious circumstances surrounding this pre-Memorial-Day rationalization of this possible White House felony. I’m just going to say that this cover up is so transparent as to be embarrassing. I herein predict that this sophomoric mendacity is now the beginning of the end to this mob of Chicago thugs’ jack boot on the throat of the American populus. It may take into 2011 for this all to transpire, but I’ve seen this B-movie too many times before.

Crisis Management

President Obama has had more than his share of crises. To whit:
- near domestic financial meltdown
- Gulf of Mexico oil spill crisis
- escalating medical-care costs crisis
- collapsing Euro crisis
- North Korea belligerency (including torpedo attack)
- multiple domestic terrorist attacks
- South/Central America swinging left
- Pakistan/Afghanistan insurgency crisis
- illegal immigrant crisis (including new Arizona law)
- Iran going-nuclear crisis
- unemployment crisis
- continuing Arab/Israeli crisis
- looming U.S. national debt crisis
- a critical shortage of wagyu beef

The question poses itself: How well has he and his administration handled these crises?

 ala Keystone Kops
 “it’s all Bush’s fault”
 used as an opportunity to push their agenda
 with aplomb
 very professionally/all under control

Please cast your vote from the above … or chose your own designation.

The Bear Trap

Let me start by saying that I am not a Libertarian. Libertarians too often take stands that are so pure and theoretical that they appear loopy ... and thus fall into rhetorical traps. But, without agreeing, I do think I halfway understand Libertarians. Yesterday Rand Paul, the newly selected Republican candidate for the Senate from Kentucky, fell into one of these bear traps set by Rachel Maddow from MSNBC. Ms. Maddow asked Rand Paul whether the civil-rights decisions of the 1960's were right in removing the then-prevalent Southern exclusion of blacks from sitting at lunch counters (a clever semantic twist recalling Selma, Alabama sit-ins ... can we call this Rachel-profiling?). Mr. Paul, with typical Libertarian naïveté did not directly answer this question by first vigorously decrying such segregation (as do I) but, instead, replied with some twisted logic about whether restaurant owners had the right to exclude gun-toting patrons from their "private" premises.

I think I know what Rand Paul meant to be saying (but didn't). To whit: although it was proper for the federal government to force the integration of public accommodations, now governments of all ilks have taken this prerogative to increasing anti-Libertarian extremes ... first smoking was banned in restaurants, then trans-fats, now some localities are even trying to exclude the use of salt. Even the EPA has recently decreed that carbon dioxide, which all of us exhale and which is essential for plant survival, is an air pollutant ... of all things. I do think Libertarians justly rankle at such extreme governmental intrusion into our private lives and thus lumber into such semantic pitfalls as Rachael Maddow set for Rand Paul yesterday. Unfortunately, our knee-jerk video media does not allow for explanations that take more than two sentences ... and thus, politicians, who take principled positions, are continually snared.

It will be interesting to see whether Rand Paul today is given the time and leeway to better make his Libertarian case by the media talking heads, particularly those on MSNBC.

Are We Nuts?

Whilst perusing the Homeland Security website here, I came across the fact that, in 2009, the United States granted permanent residency status to these numbers of immigrants from the following countries:

Pakistan         21,555
Iran                 18,553
Somalia          13,390
Iraq                  12,111
Venezuela      11,154
Afghanistan     3,165
Yemen               3.134
Syria                   2,442
Saudi Arabia    1,418
North Korea          67

We even granted permanent residency status to 1,366 people whose former country was unknown.  I don't know about you, but this doesn't make me feel very homeland secure. And given what has happened recently with the Times Square bomber being a recently naturalized U.S. citizen from Pakistan, the obvious question comes to mind for Janet Napolitano: Are we cuckoo-pie nuts?

P.S., for those who believe that we are not doing enough to help our impoverished southern neighbor, we issued 164,920 green cards to Mexicans in 2009.

Flood …

 

Insurance?  We don’t need no stinking flood insurance!

Our neighbors just received over $7,000 from FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) to compensate them for the basement flood damage they received in the recent 50-year record rainfall here in Massachusetts. They really did suffer considerable damage: a new furnace, a new hot water heater, a long motel stay, etc. but could not persuade their insurance company to pay for their losses … even though they had a flood rider. Other friends got an unspecified (but possibly equivalent) FEMA recompense for considerably less real damage … but here they had no flood insurance coverage. We also got a $2,000 FEMA settlement for redoing a basement floor and other tradesmen visits. We also had no flood insurance.

Now the question that rises out of this largess is: why would anyone buy flood insurance when the Federal government is willing, nay eager to pay citizens for loss of this type? Since our government seems prone to declare disasters much more readily than in times past, I would suggest that private flood insurance has been usurped by taxpayer-funded vote buying. I surmise that, in the first instance mentioned above, the insurance company was reluctant to pay anything out to our neighbors since it knew that a federal disaster had been declared and therefore FEMA could step in its stead.

While we are not now ready to give this $2,000 FEMA settlement back, I do suffer from a guilt pang for helping, in our small way, to push our federal debt load into the multi-multi-trillion dollars. I rationalize this angst by mimicking Rush Limbaugh (“exhibiting absurdity by being absurd”) in that, “I decry greed by being greedy.”

Green with Envy

Green cards are the way that immigrants can enter and stay in the U.S. legally.  In 2009, we issued 1.1 million green cards to legal immigrants ... to me an astounding number.  See Green Card Influx  (You can also click through to the Homeland Security website for a breakdown by years and by country of these green card recipients -- 18,553 to Iranians in 2009 alone no less!)  Now, yes, these numbers are somewhat typical of recent years, including Bush's latter years, but remember this is occurring in the same year 3 million resident Americans have lost their jobs.

Now admittedly, most of these green cards were issued to family members of legal U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents, but still this seems to place an undue burden on this country's currently strained resources.  Now, exhibiting my continued political paranoia, I have to suspect that this spate of new green cards during an economic downturn and a period of increased national turmoil might possibly be motivated by reasons other than pure charity.  What do you think?

Climate Change

The huge eruption of a volcano in Iceland has disrupted airline flights all over Europe. Heathrow airport near London is closed for the rest of the day at least. And, all this fly-ash in the upper atmosphere is quite likely to cool down our northern climes for at least this summer ... much like Pinatubo's eruption in the Philippines did in 1991. So, rather than pass the proposed onerous "Cap and Trade" carbon-tax legislation in the Senate this year, why can't we just take all the oratorical effluent being produced in Washington and shoot it into the stratosphere? This should keep us gelid for at least a decade.

Tea Party

Boston is hosting (rather, enduring) a Tea Party on Boston Common this morning with Sarah Palin speaking no less. I find the tea-party movement to be a remarkable political phenomenon ... primarily because of the vitriol it elicits from many liberals:

- being called "tea-baggers" (a lewd reference to a homosexual act). My reaction to anyone using this epithet is utter revulsion. This population unfortunately includes many on network and cable news programs.

- being castigated for not having enough blacks in attendance (Obama did get 96% of the black vote for heavens sake) ... ergo they are racists. This is akin to calling Israelis xenophobes for not having any Iranians in their Knesset.

- being labeled radical right-wing nutty moon bats. I thought "moon-bat" was a word reserved for those who think Republicans stole both Bush elections.

- being named "Astroturf" (i.e., rent-a-mob) by the White House to denigrate the tea party's grassroots origin.

- being compared to Tim-McVeigh-style terrorists. Is it accidental that MSNBC is running a Tim McVeigh retrospective at this time?

- being labeled "birthers" (those who believe that Obama wasn't born in the U.S.A.). There is a group of lefties who have even threatened to infiltrate tea-party rallies with signs to this effect ... and to the other slimes mentioned above.

As far as I can ascertain, these tea parties are a genuine grass-roots reaction to the fiscal excesses of the current (and past) administrations. And any politician who ignores or disparages this movement does so at considerable career risk.

Hold That Tiger

Tiger Woods is back playing golf in the Masters this weekend in Augusta, Georgia. I might in fact watch some of this august tournament ... but whereas, in the past, I would be rooting for Tiger to win ... this time I will be hoping that he loses.

"What immortal hand or eye, dare frame thy fearful symmetry?" -- William Blake

The Poker Game

President Obama has unilaterally given away another big pot in the poker game of world hegemony. He has shown our hand to many of the other players and, as is his all-too-frequent wont, gotten nothing in return. See NY Times Article. He now boasts that the U.S would not use nuclear weapons in a number of situations where, in the past, our enemies were wary of how we would react ... and were therefore constrained. Now these other players have been gifted many more degrees of freedom in there strategic planning. Why Obama pulls these bone-headed moves can perhaps be explained by his over-weaning ego. He may indeed believe in his demigod invincibility: "What if I give up some minor game advantage, since I know that my vision of a world utopia is ordained by my birthright?"

Or, can it be that he is just plain stupid?

A Sign of the Times

Relativity

Recent threats of violence levied against those who voted for Obamacare are to be condemned ... and I herein heartily do. Such behavior is childish and misbegotten. But there have been other public death threats made in the past that were not taken so seriously. Witness Rahm Emanuel's knife-wielding outburst back in 1992 ... see the nutty left. Why is this dismissed as political theater while tea-party activists are chastised for generally more benign expressions of outrage? ... such as: the nutty right. I guess Einstein was right ... everything is relative.

The Nose Knows

There have been a number of "promises" made to the American public that would occur as a result of the passage of Obamacare legislation. These vows are:

- it would not increase the federal deficit

- it would not cause anyone to lose their existing health-care insurance

- it would not increase taxes or fees for anyone earning less than $250,000 per year

- it would not include the plethora of sweet-heart deals (explicit or implicit) made in secret with legislators

- it would not cause existing health-care insurance premiums to increase

- it would not provide for taxpayer funding of abortion

- it would not cause any reduction in healthcare treatments or Medicare coverage

- it would not federally-subsidize healthcare insurance for illegal immigrants

- it would reduce Medicare and Medicaid waste, fraud, and abuse by tens of billion dollars

None of these pledges, in fact, will transpire as a result of this just-passed bill. Yet, politicians and political pundits continue to mouth them with a straight face. To me, these group-think prevarications are staggering. And, add to these downsides, the fact that the federal government will now become the only provider of student loans ... and Congress will still exempt themselves from these healthcare insurance constraints ... all this makes for a large case of dyspepsia for this blogger.

But then 26-year old "children" can still be covered on their parents' health insurance policies. This makes it all worth while.

Demon Pass

This Sunday it seems will bring us some interesting national legislative chicanery. The U.S. House of Representatives will be asked to pass a set of changes to the Senate's health-care bill. This House bill has been misnamed a "reconciliation" bill. In this bill will be a provision that the Senate bill will be "deemed to have passed" by the House. At this point, the Senate bill will be separated from the House's hoped for changes and sent to the President for his signature. The House changes will then be sent back to the Senate to deal with (or not deal with) at their leisure. Voila! Barack Obama will win his signature achievement and his Presidency will have been snatched from a monster defeat (after Scott Brown's recent election in Massachusetts removed the Democrats' Senate filibuster-proof majority).

Then, House Democrats, who voted for the "Deem and Pass" back-door way of giving Obama his proto-socialized medicine, will hope that they can hide behind this legislative trick to escape voter retaliation in the Fall. This may be true. But. personally, I kind of hope that this process goes exactly the way Obama's Chicago RICO thugs want ... augmented by that consigliore, Pelosi. This wish of mine seems a little foolish, but hear me out:

First, the Obama/Pelosi tag team will have stuck a stick into a huge hornet's nest of super angry voters and I don't think they have any concept of the national retaliation (not just at the polls) that might be served to them as dessert to their orgy of fiscal irresponsibility.

Second, I believe that the U.S. Supreme Court will overturn this unconstitutional "law" in a New-York second.

And lastly, this slimy process has, I believed, opened the eyes of many otherwise naive Americans as to just how fragile our American Democracy is ... and what diligence must be observed to keep it from slipping away.

Choice Cuts

Sarah Palin arouses strong feelings on both sides of the political spectrum. She has shown that common sense can go a long way toward making government work ... but also that sophistication seems a requisite for acceptance by the media elites. And Barack Obama has once again demonstrated why a pedagogical demeanor makes a lousy management style ... but can easily capture the hearts of the utopians. I'm afraid the question Americans may have to answer in less than three years is: Would you rather be governed by an honest rube or a nuanced charlatan?

My only true hope is that our misguided political process will, next time around, give us two rational choices. Choices that will restore my faith in what our forefathers had in mind when they created a government that would not fritter away our greatness. Choices that would demonstrate strength in both mind and heart. Is that too much to ask?

Arrogance

The President held his health care summit yesterday and, as is his wont, dominated the process ... grabbing most of the face time, continually interrupting many Republicans when they managed to squeeze in a few salient points, slipping Senator Paul Ryan the sly finger when he had questioned Obama's arithmetic, and reminding John McCain that it was he who had been elected President. (Oh, how I wish that McCain had said, "could I have a Mulligan on that?") Our President's hubris is becoming his signature characteristic ... just like Gerald Ford was defined by his clumsiness, Bill Clinton, by his mendacity, and George W. Bush, by his oratorical ineptitude. Why Obama is so arrogant is a subject for historians, but may I suggest that his disdain meter often reads all the way over to "hatred" ... hatred for conservatives, hatred for this country's exceptionalism, hatred for our middle and upper classes, hatred for many of our industries and companies, and maybe even hatred for capitalism itself. And this haughtiness, I suggest, may well be his undoing. I would not be that unhappy with this outcome

Now onto a sidebar brought out by yesterday's subject. Howie Carr, a talk-show host here in Boston was taking calls about health care. Someone phoned in from Bangor, Maine and said that the parking lot at the East Maine Health Center in Bangor told the story better than any of these Congressional debates. He said that his cruise through this parking lot showed that at least half the license plates were from Canada. (Also note that the Premiere of Canada also traveled to Florida to have heart surgery ... as opposed to subjecting himself to the vagaries of Canada's socialized health care.) What if Obama and the Congressional Democrats manage to clone the Canadian health-care system here in the United States? To where then are we going to travel to get better health care ... Mexico?

Off Balance

The current sovereign-debt crisis in Greece is apparently caused by unfunded off-balance sheet transactions (reportedly aided and abetted by Goldman Sachs ... so what else is new?) I am over seventy years old and I can't remember a single financial crisis, either private or public, which was not caused in whole or in part by off-balance-sheet shenanigans -- last year's banking crisis, Mexico's near collapse in 1994, the Enron scandal, AIG, Tyco, etc. ... the sliminess goes on and on. How can the accounting community, which has created such a beautiful mechanism for faithfully representing the fiscal health of corporations, charities, and public trusts, continue to allow these entities to subvert this process with off-balance-sheet transactions of any type? It is as though the Swan Lake ballet was being danced in a garbage dump ... or Mozart was being played with kazoos.

Until such time as veracity is returned to the accounting profession, we will continue to enjoy a conga-line of financial crises into the forever future. And this, unfortunately, includes how we, as a nation, keep our own books.

Do You Know ...

where your children (and grandchildren and great grandchildren) are? This woman has built candy-covered gingerbread houses all over California ... just waiting to lure our innocents into her fiscal oven. She is using promises of free-health-care gumdrops, no more carbon-dioxide spinach, chocolate-covered civilian trials for terrorists, and ice-cream-sundae federal deficits into the hereafter to seduce them to their doom. And when she has corralled all our little ones and turned them into cinnamon cookies, she will use their rendered baby fat to keep her ruby-red lips pouty. Please! please! do not let your children again vote for this cackling crone.

"Corpse Man"

Dan Quayle could not have said it better than Barack Obama at yesterday's Prayer Breakfast ... referring (three times) to a Navy corpsman. I didn't see or hear these Presidential snafus on any news show this AM. Amen.

Tortured Logic?

Indulge me the following scenario: A Muslim man in his early twenties is picked up in Boston because his cell phone has been the source of a series of suspiciously encoded text messages to a known Al Qaeda operative in Yemen ("The pumpkin pie is in the oven," etc.) These intercepts were done by the NSA under the aegis of the American Patriot Act. (Trust me, they can do this.) He is then found to be in this country illegally ... and when his clothing is scanned by a Geiger Counter it exhibits a dangerously high level of radioactivity. His laptop computer is also found to have detailed and credible diagrams of a suitcase nuclear weapon. Other notable intelligence suggests that an illicit atomic bomb has been smuggled into the United States and is now hidden somewhere, ready to be detonated.

For you Pollyannas who believe that such an event is impossible, please explain 9/11. Now, how do you, as our head of Homeland Security, deal with this captured Muslim man to find out the who, what, when, where and how of this possible devastating terrorist attack ... knowing that it might kill hundreds of thousand of Americans and set back our economy for possibly a generation? And, obviously, time is of the essence. Would you immediately and continuously waterboard him until he spilled the beans or, perhaps, read him his Miranda rights and lawyer him up?

A Stopped Clock Is Twice Right

President Obama occasionally gets things right. In his State of the Union address he called for more "safe, clean nuclear power plants." And yesterday he called for $54 billion of federal loan guarantees to those who would build this new generation of nuclear power. See: Loan Guarantees. IF we can take him at his word (the big "if" is on purpose), then this would be an important step forward in the U.S.'s attempt to achieve energy independence. In this speech he also mentioned more offshore drilling for gas and oil. This would be wonderful if it happened, but my cynicism takes over here and such a development (ANWR too?) I'm afraid, is even more suspect.

It would seem to this author that the real path to our nation's energy independence might require the following steps:
1) Build as many new nuclear power plants as can be economically financed and open up Yucca Mountain for long-term nuclear waste disposal (if required).
2) Aim to generate all our electrical needs from nuclear energy (east and west coast) and from coal-fired plants (middle America). No more natural gas and oil-fired electrical power plants should be given permits.
3) Encourage all Americans to heat their homes with natural gas and help build the infrastructure and offer the tax incentives to accomplish this. The objective should be no more oil-heated homes.
4) Specify that kerosene, diesel fuel, and gasoline are the most desirable fuels for transportation vehicles (air, rail, and ground). Offer the necessary incentives to achieve better mileage in these vehicles (including hybrid technology). Investigate liquefied coal as a long-term vehicular fuel option.
5) Set a national goal of ceasing all foreign oil imports within ten years (using the above methodologies and including oil recovery from our vast oil shale deposits.) I predict that the price of Mideast oil would plummet as a consequence of just such a goal setting.
6) Stop wasting federal funds on solar, tidal, geothermal, and wind-power projects and use these funds instead on the above items. Let the private sector fund any of these "green" projects that make any economic sense (likely very few).

I can dream can't I? Tick ... tick ... tick.

Pinocchio

Barack Obama is sure to try to dazzle us with his State of the Union address tonight. I doubt that any attendee will be shouting out "You lie!", but I still suspect that mendacity will creep into his rhetoric. Ben Shapiro has written an insightful piece in "Town Hall.com" to help us decipher what will oil its way out Obama's cigarette-stained lips tonight. See Obama's Lexicon of Rhetorical Devices. This is one of the funniest columns I have read in quite a while. May I suggest that you print it out and keep it by your side if you plan to watch or listen to Obama's teleprompter tonight. (Thanks to Howie Carr for pointing this column out to us.)

Stealth Socialism

While our nation's attention is diverted toward the Scott Brown upset victory in Massachusetts, the White House and the Senate are quietly pushing forward more of their stealth socialist agenda. Not satisfied with owning two auto companies, keeping the banking industry under its thumb, attempting to become the country's only health-care insurer, and maneuvering to tax the U.S. utility industry out of existence (with Cap-and-Trade), the Obamites are now on the verge of grabbing the $100 billion per year student loan business. See student loan takeover ... and also please click through to the "Wall Street Journal" article to read more of the details.

This sotto voce move by Tom Harkin (with the clear approval of President Obama), will finish what comrade Nancy Pelosi started back in September and will surely squeeze the private sector out of the student loan business in a very few years. To paraphrase P.J. Clark, "If you thought student loans cost the U.S. taxpayers a lot of money, wait until our government runs everything."

By the bye, what makes these transplanted Chicago thugs who currently run our Obamafied government think that they can ever manage the U.S.'s $14 trillion economy when they have never have run so much as a corner candy store?

Head(s) Should Roll

President Obama recently called it a "screwup" in the U.S. intelligence community over the Nigerian Islamic terrorist's attempted crotch-bombing of an airliner over Detroit. Now our President is pointing his finger at these same intelligence agencies for their inability to connect the dots. But as the old canard goes: "When you point your finger outward, three more fingers point back at you." By this I mean that Obama's National Security Czar, John Brennan, after a dismal performance on Fox News this past Sunday (see: Dodge and Weave), has, up until now, evaded any culpability for these "systemic failures" (also Obama's words).

But, what hasn't been generally reported is that John Brennan was the primary person responsible for the software and database that was built to connect these dots, see: the Rest of the Story. He,"having designed and built our multi-agency terrorist threat integration center", now is charged by our empty-suit (but stuffed-shirt) of a President to fix things. From 2005 to 2008 he was the CEO of Analysis Corp. (see: The Analysis Corporation) which spent $50 million of taxpayers funds to build the terrorist-screening system that was supposed to be the ultimate in dot-connectors. Oops.

May I humbly suggest that John Brennan's head clearly should be the first to roll ... closely followed by Janet Napolitano's.

Signal Flags

How is it that the Bush/Chaney administration carried this country through seven years terrorist-attack free while the Obama/Biden duo has had three serious events in its first eleven months? Personally, I don't believe that our operational intelligence apparatus has appreciably changed. However, what has changed is the signals that this administration is sending to Al-Qaeda, viz: the planned closing of Gitmo, no more waterboarding, turning terrorist acts into criminal offenses, renaming the "war on terrorism" into "overseas contingency operations", the non-existence of our "High Value Detainee Interrogation Group" (HIG) ten months after Obama announced its creation, making a Girl Scout leader the head of Homeland Security, closing down military tribunals, moving the KSM trial to New York City, the president's slow, low-key responses to each terrorist act, sending Chinese Islamic terrorists to Bermuda, refocusing our government on global-warming/health-care/fire-hose domestic spending, and finally blaming everything that goes wrong on Bush.

One other point that needs to be reiterated: during the Bush years the war in Iraq was a magnet that drew disenchanted Muslims from around the globe to sacrifice themselves there in the name of Allah. Now, that Iraq is being deemphasized, many more venues have become attractive to would-be martyrs ... including unfortunately the U.S.A. This last reason clearly is not of Obama's doing alone, but our haste to leave Iraq may turn out to be a gigantic mistake ... witness the dramatic increase in terrorists bombings there recently.

So, it may be that style is just as important as substance in combating the terrorist threat we suffer. And, if Obama does not do a convincing 180-degree turn in his rhetoric, we may be in for three more years of "isolated incidents".

Surf's Up

Never being one to resist an opportunity to criticize Barack Obama I note that he has just decreed that many previously classified government documents shall be open to public scrutiny ... even over any objection by our intelligence community. See: Classless Declassifying

Our ever alert administration in its war on "overseas contingency operations" (as exemplified by its surf's-up response to Al-Qaeda's recent attempt to take down a Detroit-bound airliner) has once again softened our country's defense posture (need I list here all their linguine-spined, knuckle-headed moves?). The question I have is (actually its a question my wife had this AM when we heard this news on "Morning Joe") -- Does this declassification by Obama also apply to the thousands of pages of text of our new health-care legislation?

Ye Olde ...

My 50th college reunion is coming up and one of the ideas to entertain us crotchety old men is to publish a list of things that weren't around when we were pea-green freshmen -- personal computers, GPS systems, etc. I, on the other hand, believe that an equally entertaining compendium would be those things that were there then but now are missing. So, I have attempted to recall a number of them in hopes readers will follow suit. Basically, the game is to list things that were commonplace in the 1950's but are now not to be (or at least rare).

Here goes: dial phones, Blatz beer, crinolines, white-wall tires, canasta, Uncle Miltie, Ipana toothpaste, women's girdles, the Rhinegold girl, rabbit-ear antennas, statesmen politicians, the "Hit Parade", real silver U.S. coins, seamed stockings, portable typewriters, S&H green stamps, necker knobs on steering wheels, motor scooters, belt-in-the-back chinos, DUZ ("does everything"), 45/78 vinyl records, white-buck shoes, radio soap operas ("Portia Faces Life"), "Gunsmoke", Vitalis hair tonic

What do you reminisce about?

Merry Christmas ...

or the Holiday of your choice.

(Painting by Grandma Moses)

Snow-Bound

"Within our beds awhile we heard
The wind that round the gables roared,
With now and then a ruder shock,
Which made our very bedsteads rock.
We heard the loosened clapboards tost,
The board-nails snapping in the frost;
And on us through the unplastered wall,
Felt the light sifted snowflakes fall.
But sleep stole on, as sleep will do
When hearts are light and life is new;
Faint and more faint the murmurs grew,
Till in the summer-land of dreams
They softened to the sound of streams,
Low stir of leaves and dip of oars,
And lapsing waves on quiet shores."

John Greenleaf Whittier

Pity Citi

Citigroup has just been granted a $18 billion tax break by the IRS (Treasury Dept.) in order that it might repay its TARP loan with a massively reduced tax liability. See Citi Tax Break. Now the fact that Tim Geithner is the Secretary of the Treasury (and an admitted personal tax cheat) and is a long-time protege of Robert Rubin who is attached at the waist with Citigroup (a former Chairman of the Board) and picked Geithner for his job has nothing to do with this Treasury travesty. Basically it appears to this blogger that our government is effectively giving Citigroup money so that it then can turn around and give it back while at the same time eliminating much of its TARP liability. This is absolute BS with a capital "B.S." When are we, as those wimps electing these political poltroons, going to rise up and say "NO"? Geithner should not only not enjoy his august status in Washington, but he should be the first prisoner in that high-security prison that our other corrupt Washington pols are buying in Illinois (co-incidence) to house the Gitmo prisoners.

What is even more gratingly hilarious is that the current Chairman of Citigroup, Richard Parsons, just stiffed Barack Obama (along with the heads of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley) when they were supposed to meet with Obama in the Oval Office to discuss increasing loans to small businesses. And Geithner's allowing Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to become "banks" as opposed to investment banks is another of his mortal sins. As a result, both Morgan and Goldman can now borrow money from the New York Federal Reserve (which Geithner previously ran) at effectively no cost ... and then turn around and speculate in the Credit Default Swap and Interest Rate Swap markets with this ill-gotten pelf (as opposed to giving loans to businesses). I want to throw up.

Gate-Crashing-Gate

All the TV networks, cable shows, and the print media are currently obsessed with the White House gate crashing of the Salahis into Obama's first state dinner ... these "15-minute-of-famers" were on the Today Show this morning spinning their self-serving scenario. Other than the apparent lapse in Secret Service security surrounding the President, I find this another preposterous non-story story. Why does our country relish such cotton-candy events with such fascination when there are so many other under-reported and under-analyzed earth-changing events taking place? -- Iran's nuclear ambitions, Climate-gate, the Afghanistan surge, 10%+ unemployment, huge federal deficits, the growing mortgage crisis, Eric Holder's boners (terrorist's NYC trial, continued funding of ACORN, etc.), Charlie Rangel's malfeasance, and so on.

We Americans need very much to get our heads screw on properly and re-prioritize our need-to-know news interests.

CRU Cut

"CRU" stands for Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University in England which has been the wellspring of much of the "research" done on global warming. Recently, its computers were hacked by party or parties unknown and 156 megabytes if embarrassing information (e-mails and computer programs among others) were posted on a Russian server. At first, there was much focus on the e-mails (see: UK Telegraph) which displayed a decidedly non-scientific approach to this subject ... exhibiting hubris, obfuscation, mendacity, and cold-heartedness. But soon thereafter, more damaging information came to light as people started sifting through the programmer's code comments (see: Climategate).

Now, having been painted into a corner, the CRU critters have decided to make public the data that was used to arrive at their world-wrenching conclusions about man-made global warming. They should also come clean on any and all of the processes they used to arrive at their results along with the statistical details of their regression models (goodness of fit measures, etc.). We should then see if their results are reproducible by acolytes and skeptics alike. I personally think that there are a lot more things that make the world's temperature go up and down ... many, I believe, much more consequential than CO2. The fact that "man-made" CO2 has become the political focus of the "climate-change" worrywarts is, I believe, another "Madness of Crowds" canard. Man, as it turns out, has a very small effect on CO2 levels ... see this rather old but revealing reference: Man's Effect)

These revelations have hopefully brought about a hiatus ... one that should cause us all to step away from the groupthink that now prevails and which has carried the world's political lemmings to dangerous economic conclusions ... until such time as we know better scientific truths (if in our lifetimes).

O-bow-ma

I'm oh so very sorry about Hiroshima ...

Deficit Hawk

What is $400 billion between friends? Recently, in this blog, I reported that the federal deficit for fiscal 2009 was $1.4 trillion. Well, I was wrong. Bernie Madoff has nothing on the U.S. Treasury Department when it comes to financial shenanigans. It turns out that our country's real deficit is closer to $1.8 trillion ... see The Real Deal. This was because our Government is treating bail-out funds as though they are not money down a rat hole ... kinda like the way Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, et alii dealt with all their "investments" in Credit Default Swaps. This is not just irresponsible, I think it may well be criminal. If Geithner can't figure out his personal income taxes, how can we expect him to keep our federal finances straight? I predict that Obama, on his up-coming visit to China, might have to bob and weave through this deficit legerdemain over his King Pao chicken.

O-bomb-a

- Unemployment at 10.2%
- 2009 deficit at $1.88 trillion
- $820+ billion of stimulus down a rat hole
- Dithering on Afghanistan military policy
- Profligate government spending
- Ultra-liberal White House inner circle (czars)
- Increasing domestic terrorism
- Multitude of proposed higher taxes
- Deteriorating Iraqi situation
- Russia/Iran nuclear kiss-up ... producing nada
- Guantanamo terrorist prisoner fiasco
- Independent uncovering of ACORN's festering corruption
- Inept response to vast Midwest flooding and power outages
- Trillions of dollars of pork to financial institutions
- Screwing Poland and the Czech Republic on missile defense
- World speaking tours to poor-mouth the U.S.
- Tepid support of Iranian election protesters
- Attempted government takeover of healthcare
- Nationalization of 2/3rds of the U.S. auto industry
- Total lack of promised administrative transparency
- Amateurish delays in delivering H1/N1 flu vaccine
- Support of a constitutionally-deposed Honduran despot
- White House usurping control of the 2010 census
- Attacks on the non-liberal media (Fox News, Rush Limbaugh)
- Cambridge police "acted stupidly" comment

All in just ten months. Did I miss any?

Hobson's Choice

He's alive (and not talking)! Now to find out what's what (accomplices, foreign contacts, future plans, etc.), should it be water-boarding or a polite and giggly interview on David Letterman?

Red Roof Inn

In the nine months since Barack Obama has been our President there have obviously been quite a number of visitors to the White House. Recently, the list of said guests has been released and it contains some interesting tidbits. The Drudge Report mentioned George Clooney, George Soros and Oprah. See: Visitor Records.

I however found a few even more interesting names (number of visits is in parens after the name.) They are Angela Davis (2), Bill Ayers (2), Jesse Jackson (6), Michael Moore (8), Al Sharpton (2), George Soros (4), and Jeremiah Wright (1). (The actor, Will Smith, was there an astounding 33 times. Is there a movie in the offing?) Nor does this list contain many other names ... excluded because of security or first-family privacy purposes. And it is not clear (perhaps purposely so) what all these visits involved or whom was met. However, in every case the leaving time was 11:59 PM which suggests to me that these were overnight stays. I'm sure more on this will come out over the ensuing days in the NY Times and Boston Globe.

Perhaps we should change the name of the White House to the Red Roof Inn?

Flu Fleecers

Walgreens and CVS are selling seasonal flu shots for around $30 a pop ... and this program has proved so popular that both store chains are running out of flu vaccine (and their stock prices are moving up). See: Flu Vaccine Shortage. The purpose of my comments here is to chastise Walgreens and CVS for their sleight-of-hand in offering this program during the public panic about the H1N1 flu outbreak. These drugstores do not make it abundantly clear that these flu shots do not protect recipients against the "swine flu". I conjecture that the vast majority of the public sheep who are getting these seasonal flu shots do not realize that they are not protected against the H1N1 virus and that the vaccine against this strain of the flu virus will not be available to the general public for at least one month.

Also many of these ovines could get this very same seasonal flu shot at their workplaces, HMOs, local community clinics. or fraternal organizations for free. I welcome readers to watch these drug store's ads on TV or read their road signs and find an explicit caveat emptor that these flu shots do not protect against the swine flu. These stores may reveal this fact to those Babbitts in line to be vaccinated ... but, by then, it may to be too late. The Walgreen and CVS Judas goats have already lead these sheep into spending their $30 for something that they think they are getting ... but are not.

Nobly Nobel

In the proud tradition of Jimmy Carter, Mohamed El-Baradei, Al Gore, Kofi Annan, and Yasser Arafat. For more names and irrationales see: Powerline's Take

Horns of a Dilemma

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has just scored the latest Baucus Senate health-care bill and said that it would be revenue neutral -- producing a $81 billion return to the Treasury over a ten year period. This has been a requirement that Obama has imposed on any health-care reform plan ... otherwise he would not sign the bill. However, the CBO also included in its calculations a $404 billion cut to Medicare benefits over this same period (see: Medicare Cuts) -- something else that Obama has vowed to oppose in a well-publicized AARP meeting (see: Obama Vows No Cuts).

So Obama is now on the horns of a dilemma. Does he, with the help of the main stream media, ignore these draconian Medicare cuts hoping that AARP and the U.S. public will not focus on this fiscal slight-of-hand (in my Google search I could find only one news article that even mentioned these Medicare cuts -- the Wall Street Journal)? Or does he refuse to sign the Baucus bill and keep his promise to America's seniors? And, even more interestingly, does AARP campaign against the Baucus bill, pointing out how its membership will bear much of the burden of health-insuring an additional 21 million non-elderly Americans? I think I know how this story will progress ... how about you?

Rush to Judgment

I am frequently derided for listening to Rush Limbaugh ... often by my blog readers. Even my wife makes me switch stations on the car radio if Rush is on. However, looking past Rush's ego and bombast, almost every day I get a novel insight from his talk-show commentary. For instance today he opened his show by pointing out how the government (including Obama) is now saying that Al-Qaeda has been substantially weakened even to the point where they are no longer a factor in Afghanistan ... see: Obama disses Al-Qaeda.

Rush, in an ah-ha moment, perceptively pointed out that, as little as nine months ago, the main-stream-media, Congressional Democrats, Eleanor Clift, and Obama were continuously and vociferously pointing out that the U.S. invasion of Iraq, our Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (aka, torture) and our Guantanamo prison were the best recruiting tools that Al-Qaeda has ever had ... thousands upon thousands of Islamic youth were flocking to sign up for their amorous date with those seventy-two virgins. Excuse me, you can't have it both ways my little-furry-friends-who-follow-each-other-into-the-North-sea. Either the Bush administration was right in fighting Islamic terrorism the way it did ... or Obama is talking up his sleeve when he says Al-Qaeda is on life support (perhaps to grease the way for his capitulation in Afghanistan?)