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?