Thursday, January 28, 2010

The State of O

I watched the 70+ minutes of vapid promises and childish tantrums last night that was billed as the "State of the Union."  This morning, I have perused the news (domestic and international) and the blogs (conservative and liberal) and across the board, no one is happy with what was said.  I won't drag you through the long list of proposals, but here in bullet point format are some notes and thoughts:


  • The speech felt cobbled together...it was a strange mix of focus group verbiage from both liberal and conservative groups.  The table scraps he was throwing to the center and right were strained coming off his tongue, and strange to hear: "nuclear power," "drilling off-shore," "capital gains tax cut."  All of these are throw aways, he knows the Congress will never take these up.
  • Stop whining!  I counted twenty plus times in the speech that Obama referred to all the problems he inherited.  He's like the crybaby in the play yard - "It's not my fault!"  Hey Barry - you wanted the job, you got the job, grow up and do your job.
  • A direct tongue lashing of the Supreme Court justices sitting directly in front of him for their decision in the Citizens United v. FEC case was shocking.  This is reminiscent of the thug tactics used by South American dictators, totally inappropriate to the Office of the President.
  • Ditto, his combative almost street-ball banter with the Republican side of the chamber.  Taunting them about not standing and applauding his line about tax cuts was, to be candid, immature.
  • He continued the Clinton/Bush strategy of a machine gun chamber emptying barrage of "proposals."  I am exhausted by this and, I expect, so are the American people.  It would be wise to heed the advice of Sophocles: "What you cannot enforce, do not command."  A President should lay out his priorities and then get out of the way.
  • Promises, promises.  Now that he has been on the world stage for a couple of years everyone should have learned the lesson that it matters not what this man says, it is what he does.  He flat out lies, like the whopper he told about "not being part of the health care back room deals."  Bwa ha ha ha ha!!  Or how about this one: "I didn't need to have a health care bill signed to give this speech..."  ROFLMAO.
  • He did not "pivot," or "change course" except with some crumbs thrown to the middle class and younger voters about college credits and forgiving college debts.  He actually demanded that the Congress take up the healthcare bill and move forward with cap and trade!  My guess is a good number of these folks have had it with the magic of O and those two are DOA.  When the car is headed for the cliff, it is a bad idea to slam the accelerator to the floor.
In all, it was tiresome.  The technique - the three seconds to either teleprompter head swivel - has already grown old.  This may well have sealed his fate as a one term president.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Israel


Very powerful.

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Back Door Cut to Take Away Your Guns




If you are a believer in the 2nd Amendment, you need to watch this.


Hat tip BT.

Monday, January 25, 2010

Citizens United Versus FEC Versus Stupidity

I've heard a lot of phooey about how corporations are now going to ruin elections in the wake of the Supreme Court deciding for Citizens United against the Federal Election Commission.  This short film by Cato Institute puts the argument in perspective:




What are we afraid of?  Why do so many of you need the gov'ment to tell you what you should or should not listen too?  Have we no faith in our own ability to discern whether an ad is misleading or not? Note, the decision must be a good one if Obama and the rest of the Democrats are trying to figure out ways of achieving the same end, now that they have lost the judicial argument.


Who knows, maybe if this ruling had been in place before the last election, Obama would not have been elected!  Then we could avoid emotional train wrecks like Jill Dorson's piece over at Real Clear Politics:

I am a registered Independent. I voted for Barack Obama. And for that, I am sorry.

I'm not sorry for you. I'm sorry for me. Because I voted for Obama for me, not for you. I voted for hope and change and all the intangibles that Obama was peddling in the wake of the financial crisis, Sarah Palin, Sept. 11 and all the other ills that shook our country in the last decade. I wanted something new. Something different. What I got was, I suppose, exactly what I voted for - a spin doctor. 
After fighting off the urge to want to puke on the keyboard or reach through the screen and choke this twit who equates Sarah Palin with 9/11, I calmed down and read on hoping to perhaps understand the thinking of an Obama voter.  It's rich:
 Obama was so convincing that I stopped caring about what he knew and started getting caught up in the euphoria. Imagine having a president who came from a broken home, who had money troubles, who did grass-roots community service? A young father. The first black president. It pains me to admit I got caught up in the hoopla.
The comments that follow this sanctimonious twaddle are hysterical!  Point of all this, is what we need is MORE free speech, not less.  The fate of a republic depends on a well educated populace.  This piece by Dorson is illustrative of what the nanny state can produce for voters.  Hope and change and feelings! Oh, oh, oh, feelings...we are living through the Mencken adage: "The American people deserve what they get and they are going to get it good and hard!"

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Free Falling

The Financial Times gets it right this morning with an article titled: "White House Nightmare Persists." The gist of the article is this:


  1. No supermajority, no Obama agenda.  (NB: If this damned policy was supposed to be so great, what do you need a supermajority for??)
  2. Populist tack of attacking the banks is backfiring - the folks don't like their 401K's getting battered even further, and a free-falling stock market costs him further support on the Hill.
  3. His party is in panic post Scott Brown.  Blue Dogs are set to either a) vote for Pelosi and Reid measures and retire or b) defy the leadership and get re-elected.
  4. His financial team of Bernanke and Geithner are in TROUBLE.  Losing the tax cheat Timmy G would probably help him, but failure to re-appoint Ben could spell enormous trouble internationally as stock markets around the world would go into free fall.
  5. Both the liberal and the slightly less cooky liberal wings of his party are starting to grasp that this guy is toxic.  His appearance did great things for Coakley and Corzine, to say nothing of Chicago and Copenhaaaagen. 
And then theirs this:



Those of us who never drank the Koolaid, are merely seeing a shooting star flaming out.  I weep for the damage this man has already done to this great nation and pray what further damage his Incompetence will do will be minimal.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

The World Says Goodbye To Barry O

Great headline from across the pond this morning: "The World Bids Farewell To Obama" - the folks at Der Spiegel do a round robin of European opinion.  Everything from the practical and realistic:


Scott Brown campaigned on two promises, both of which apparently struck a nerve with the electorate. He wants to block health care reform and he wants to find ways to reduce the enormous budget deficit. It is here where the roots of dissatisfaction with Obama are to be found. His reform agenda, in its current form, is highly suspect to Americans. And they have the impression that, if he continues piling up debt, he will be gambling away the country's future.


to the rabidly fever-touched crazy:



"For everyone else in the world, this means that they will have to bid farewell to a candidate for whom the hopes were so high. They will have to say goodbye to the charisma they fell in love with. Obama will be staying home after all."


Umm, right...it's that kind of coverage that makes us Americans want to (in the words of S.E. Cupp) "stick our fingers in our eyes and swirl them around."


They at least got part of it right - "the charisma they fell in love with" - that was all it was.  The rest?  Teleprompter and empty suit.  I mean this rank amateur was just on the radio in an interview saying that the Middle East problem is "harder than I thought."  Harder than you thought???  WTF???  Did you really believe that you would get sworn in and the oceans would begin to recede like you said?


We on the right have said all along that this guy is no messiah, but the folks on the left that believed must be feeling some degree of the anguish that the Jews who believed in Jesus must have felt when they saw him on the cross.  One big difference, the latter proved he was divine.  Barry?  He's just another hack out of the Chicago political machine.  Done.

If the Shoe Fits...



Hat tip GS.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Obama Probably Failed Lunch



OK, so this has been done on everything from the Cowboys not making it into the playoffs to Alabama beating Florida in the SEC Championship...but this is funny!

Hat tip DB.

Can You Hear Me Now?



All was well in the Rumblehouse last night as Scott Brown put the hapless Martha Coakley away in a landslide.  Hurrah to the good folks of Massachusetts!  Watched a focus group of all Democrats who had voted for Obama as part of the coverage, and some interesting points emerged:

1. Even though they are lefties, there was still a sense of fairness - they did not like the process that the DC Dems have taken to try to accomplish their aims.

2. They were very worried about the spending.

3. They felt Obama was not up for the job and was being dragged around by the leftloons in the Congress.

Pretty much right on all counts.

Like the first American Revolution though, this is only the Battle of Concord.  A very long war is ahead to win back the hearts and minds of the American people - no, actually to win back the government - and prevent us from tilting into that dark night of Eurosocialism.  At least we have a beach head now...

The Real China



The real cost of statism is often only discovered after years of being covered up by apologists in the West.  Such was the case of the "miracle" of the Soviet economy, which we later learned was a total sham.  We also learned that the Soviets turned large swaths of the countries they occupied (especially Lithuania and Latvia) into industrial dumps.

So now we have the Red Dragon - the Chinese economy - a wonderful mix of communism and capitalism...a workers' paradise!  Take a hard look at the photo above, and then browse this website: China Hush, and think again.  (Note, that site is not for the faint of heart.)  If you want to know how China can garner market share so cheaply, understand that there is a very heavy price being paid by the Chinese people.  One wonders how long that can last.

Just as the Soviet nuclear subs that had to replace their crews after each deployment because of rampant radiation sickness due to poor shielding (or none if they thought they could make the boat go faster!), this ecological nightmare will catch up with the Chinese.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

The Beagle in the Coffee Cup

Some years ago, our first (sadly now deceased) beagle, Scamp, acted like a Democrat.  Scamp was fond of dairy products, and warm milk was irresistible to our little scent hound.  My wife, who takes milk in her coffee, had left her coffee cup full of warm milk and coffee on a side table, just above her briefcase before she left for work.  Remembering something she needed, she left the living room where the mug was located and ventured back to the bedroom.  Scamp, who had been feigning a nap, struck.  She stood on her hind paws and inserted her snout into the mug, turning it over into the briefcase.  Milk, coffee, paper - a mess.  As my wife returned to the room, Scamp accelerated her efforts to lap up as much coffee milk as she could, inserting her nose deeper into the briefcase.  As my wife closed on the beast, Scamp continued to try to gather the liquid even as the "NO!'s" were being screamed and she was being pulled out of the briefcase.

Now, a normal dog, concerned about self preservation, would have at first sound of footfall, beaten a hasty retreat and then looked puzzled at the resulting catastrophe.  No, Scamp's love for milk overpowered her common sense.  And so we now have the spectacle of the Democrats, whose "milk" is this God-awful health care bill.  Whether Scott Brown goes on to win in Massachusetts or not, the message from the American people is clearly "NO!"  But instead of retreating, they are conjuring up all manner of ways to get this monstrosity passed.  The Pelosinator has already said that "we will pass health care regardless of what happens (in Massachusetts)..."  She may even force her House Dems to vote on the Senate bill to avoid a cloture vote in the other chamber.  Barney Frank has recommended changing the rules of the Senate so there can't be a filibuster, and Harry Reid has suggested bringing the bill through on appropriations.

Look, when you are scheming to this level, your nose is in the briefcase...oh, and you are about to get whacked.  The American people are trying to whack you and even if we fail, thank God we have the Constitution.  As an editorial in Investors Business Daily points out, this bill faces an enormous uphill battle of Constitutional law.  That will tie it up long enough to get these louts voted out once and for all.

The bottom line is this: these clowns in Congress and our rookie President grossly mis-read the results of the 2008 election.  It was not about bringing a socialist utopia to these United States.  It was about wanting a change in Washington; sadly though, the urge to get the country out of its perceived frying pan has landed it squarely in the fire.

The Massachusetts Miracle

Here's to praying for Massachusetts today:




Make us proud!

Hat tip BT

Friday, January 15, 2010

Crony Capitalism

Great report by John Stossel, excerpted here:



Note to Pella, Marvin and the gang: the message is clear, pay up or you don't get to play!  It's the Chicago way.

Hat tip GS.

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Haiti's Descent Into Hell

The tragic earthquake that struck this island nation is only the latest in a series of catastrophes dating back two hundred years.  This column from the Guardian is a fine precis of events that have shaped this country: "Haiti's Long Descent Into Hell."

The situation will not get better there ANY time soon - essentially there wasn't much of an economy before this monster quake struck...many of the citizens eked out an existence making charcoal and selling it to provide food for their families.  As a result, huge swaths of the island have been almost completely deforested compounding the typical flooding problems that Caribbean nations have.  There is little law and less order; not much incentive for a corporate relocation.

The millions that the United States has spent on Haiti through the years ($426 million in the last nine years alone) usually end up back in Miami banks thanks to corrupt officials.  I don't know what the solution is, short of some sort of UN Receivership, but in the near term we must all keep these wretched people in our prayers and give in whatever ways we can to help them out of their misery.

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

The Enemy Within

So this is disturbing, but not surprising...



As for the cleric mentioned...




Oh yeah, more from the religion of peace.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Barrack Obama, The Musical

I kid you not - those whacky Germans!  First they come up with that whole World War I thing...and then the sequel.  Well, now to add to the heritage of Beethoven and Mahler comes Barrack Obama: The Musical!

Called "Hope!"  It begins:

Wearing a knitted cardigan and crooning into his microphone, Barack Obama paces around the stage, wooing Michelle with a love song. In another number, now clad in a suit, Jimmie Wilson who plays Obama, struts up and down, clasping his mike and leading a euphoric gospel chorus of "Yes We Can."

Dear Lord, I can't wait for the U.S. tour...oh wait, that's already happening.  And they called Reagan a "B-Movie Actor!"

And the Government Said: "Be Healthy!"

Tax on fast food,  outlawing sweets, limiting trans-fats on it goes.  This is what is already happening in Europe according to Der Spiegel in an article titled "Outlawing Obesity: European Governments Seek to Mandate Healthier Diets."  Of course they do!  If you have to pay for everyone's health insurance, it sure helps if everyone is healthy.  And guess what will happen if the gnomes of Washington get their health care "reform" bill passed?  This is the shape of things to come...no pun intended.

And where does this movement come from?  From whence the hysteria over heft? It's our old friends at the Communi - err "Green Party:"


 In a Monday interview with the Rheinische Post, Green Party floor leader Renate Künast wants to ban advertising for sweets aimed at children.
"Aggressive advertising campaigns aimed at children 12 years and younger should be forbidden," Künast told the paper. "Food commercials, which are mostly ads for sweets, should not be broadcast during children shows. We need a ban."

Of course you need a ban!  And you need to tell us what color of underwear we are allowed to wear.  You statists are all the same, whether you are a "Green Party" member or a Democrat or a Communist - you want to dictate how we can or cannot live our lives.

I am all for healthy eating.  The Rumblediet is modeled on the Mediterranean diet with limited amounts of red meat...not because I have nightmares about cow flatulence, but because I don't think it is good for you.  But I make that decision...and if I want to slide over to Rotier's for an unbelievably good double cheeseburger, I will make that decision too.  I do not want the local Community Health Tsar standing in the door telling me I have had my quota for the year.  This monstrosity of a bill is all about the restriction of freedom and greater government control.  I stand firmly, unequivocally on the side of freedom.

The People's Seat



Gurgen's question is so obnoxious, yet emblematic of the entrenched mentality in Washington...those seats, every one of them belong to the people and if there are any brains attached to the tushes sitting in those seats, they had better understand that we are NOT happy with what they are doing.  REAL change is on the way, how fitting if this new American revolution could begin in Massachusetts!  Go Scott Brown!

There's another truly irritating angle to that question.  If a bill is so onerous and bad, so ill crafted and has such little public support.  If the only way you can get it passed is to rely on your super-majority and bribe for votes along the way, doing nothing is far superior to just getting a bill passed.

Monday, January 11, 2010

First Year Foreign Policy Failure

Great summary piece over at the Wall Street Journal this morning titled "Taking the Measure of Obama's Foreign Policy."  Quick precis of the article: Obama foreign policy = failure.  Two of the money shots:

The lovely town of Copenhagen staged not one, but two humiliations: the first when the Olympic Committee delivered the bad news that the president's effort to play hometown booster had failed utterly, before he even landed back in the U.S.; the second when the Chinese once again poked the U.S. in the eye by sending minor officials to meet with Mr. Obama, as they, the Indians and Brazilians tried to shoulder him out of cozy meetings aimed at sabotaging his environmental policy.
Then this line:
Saying that the U.S. will "bear witness" to abuses and brutality around the world is, in effect, to say that we will send flowers to funerals.
Well worth the read, though painful to recount this amateur's performance in a half-page article.

Twenty to Thirty Years of Cooling

I know many of you are still trying to keep the tootsies warm - it's 27 here right now, up nicely from the 14 this morning when I walked the dog.  Some real scientists are looking at the data and trends and are projecting that we may be entering a mini-ice age for the next twenty to thirty years.  Recognize this geographic shape?


Why that's jolly Ol' England as seen from a satellite last week.  The scientists are monitoring deep ocean cooling and warming patterns and finding far stronger correlations to climate change than the witch doctor brew of data that the UN and the wonderboys at East Anglia use.  Here's an interesting factoid from the article:

If you are worried about the polar bear (if you are, you are either a) gullible or b) stupid):

According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007 – and even the most committed global warming activists do not dispute this.



Now, can we puhleeze stop with the "CO2 is a poison gas and man is  all to blame" meme?  Settled?  Science, by definition is about pursuit of the truth.  If facts don't fit your theory, time to review the theory.  Let's stop this insanity!



Soaring Debt a Problem

In the "golly you think so?" department comes a study by some academics that shows the historical pattern of countries that have soaring debt not to be so good.  As our local rag, the Tennessean (AKA "Pravda on the Cumberland") notes in an article titled "Soaring U.S. Debt Could Limit Growth, History Suggests," a recent study of 200 years of economic data shows that "When a nation's debt exceeds 60 percent of its GDP, its growth rate slows precipitously, the study found. When that ratio exceeds 90 percent, nations' economies barely grow and can even contract."

Considering our ratio is at 84% and we are "racing towards 90%," that shouldn't be a problem right? Seems like a good time to pile on some more debt with more bailouts and yummy social programs.

I am not saying that it is inevitable for history to repeat itself, but any student of Econ 100 knows that it is the producers who fund the government.  At some point, they either a) stop producing or b) move.  It is time for this madness to end.

Friday, January 8, 2010

Thursday, January 7, 2010

The Package Delivery Czar

This Is Just Wrong!




Take a look at this...do you see a problem with this?  If not, answer me this: where does the money to pay the "government employees" come from?  Think about it, I'll wait.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Perspective from a Muslim Psychiatrist

Interesting article from the Sydney Herald: "Eternal Loneliness of a Long-Distance Bomber."  In it, the author, Tanveer Ahmed readily acknowledges that profiling makes sense:
I am regularly pulled aside at airports for ''random checks''. It is a source of amusement for my wife. I am a young Muslim doctor of South Asian ancestry; it makes more sense than searching little old ladies or stray toddlers, which would occur if the searches were truly random.

More importantly though, he paints a picture of the suicide bomber that is attempting to attack the west.  It is not a poor, downtrodden Palestinian type - it is most likely a middle class youth, who feels alienated and is captured in almost cult like fashion by radical Muslim clerics:


Abdulmutallab was the son of a prominent Nigerian banker and educated at University College London. The Somalis arrested in Australia were also tertiary educated. Their version of jihad had more to do with the immature romanticism of revolution.


This last part is particularly interesting too - the bomber is more likely to be akin to a young Trotskyite than a religious fanatic.  They are typically lonely folks - the panty bomber had apparently been rejected by a number of American universities before he decided to enroll at Islamocrazy U in Yemen.  There is some revealing thinking in this that should sharpen our profiling of potential threats:

The attackers are lonely outcasts whose social disconnection is preyed on and invested with meaning by groups such as al-Qaeda. They are reactions to wider society and often the backward traditionalism of their ethnic communities. Focusing entirely on the battle of ideas argument implies the actors' actions are rational and not rooted in a yearning for belonging and meaning.


Worth the read.

Monday, January 4, 2010

"Not Just Incompetence, but incomprehension..."

Great line from a piece by Charles Krauthammer, one of the few sane pundits left in the greater Metro DC area: "...not just incompetence, but incomprehension."  I can not do justice to commenting on Dr. Krauthammer's piece - go read it here: "Hollow Words on Terrorism."

He IS the Smoking Gun...

Kristol nukes the silly palaverization of the O folks - "not serious about the war."

Don't Call It By It's Real Name!

Great piece over at the Jerusalem Post this morning: "Name the Enemy."  A pox on all the houses of our leadership that refuse to call the enemy by it's real name and instead wander off into linguistic fun houses with sayings like "religion of peace," and "man caused disasters."  From the article:
The clear, present and continuing danger posed to Western civilization by the worldwide Islamist terror network cannot be overcome while the American, European and other freedom-loving peoples are neither mobilized nor steeled for the sacrifices ahead.

We want to keep (pardon the expression) "whistling past the graveyard" with phrases from our current great leader like "this was a random, senseless act,"  (more on that anon) or believe that we can (as our former great leader thought) convert these folks to democracy.  Democracy is antithetical to Islam...you cannot have "equal representation" when right out of the gate the religion treats half their believers (women) as something only slightly above dogs.  As for the "random" and "senseless" label...how many acts have to be committed by people screaming "Allah Achbar!" before we admit that perhaps there is a pattern and that it is not "random?"  As for senseless - yes, "senseless" to us in our civilized western mind-set, but to a pre-Mideival religion, killing oneself for the greater glory of God makes pretty good sense.

As someone that travels frequently, I am sick and tired of taking my shoes off...and now I face the prospect of being electronically stripped.  Not much to see here mind you, but I sure don't like the Rumblewife and Rumblebairns being subjected to same.  Nope, it's time for profiling, it's time for naming names, it's time to absorb the fact that we are in for a VERY long haul.  No amount of hopey-change is going to fix that.  Victory will come, if we are willing to commit to it, when they view their kids going wearing a cap and gown graduating from college as a superior alternative to wearing a bomb vest and offing themselves.  The article concludes:


EVEN IF Western leaders did mobilize their societies, the struggle against the Islamist menace would remain wearying. This is an enemy that is often embedded among civilians and enforces allegiance by beheading those it suspects of disloyalty. Citizens need to know this, to understand why innocent children are sometimes accidentally killed in military operations conducted by allied forces.
Obama needs to tell Americans and Europeans willing to listen that, though the overwhelming majority of Muslims are not terrorists, pretty much all terrorists are Muslim, hence the need for profiling.
An overstretched army, supported by a weary home front, against an ill-defined enemy, does not offer a viable strategy for success. Better to tell people that the enemy is radical Islam, which wants to spread its religion using the sword, and that defeat would mean an end to Western values of pluralism, minority rights and democracy.