Friday, February 27, 2009

Note to the Wall Street Journal

Sydney Brillo Duodenum, after long and careful consideration, and taking into full account his spoiled nature and demand that all things be efficient, right and functional, and with complete understanding that "media" cannot stand still and certain age-proven models of information presentation need to be questioned and reshaped now and then, is of the firm opinion that the new Wall Street Journal web site sucks owl pellets. What was once the equivalent of Clint Eastwood in Gran Torrino - a wizened, experienced no nonsense man beating down punks with his simplicity and understanding of timelessness of certain human values has morphed into a fat, lethargic, overfed, Hawaiian shirt wearing guy from New Jersey standing in the middle of Main Street, Disney World, sucking on a soda while studying a map and making it difficult for everyone to get their fastpasses to their favorite ride and stake out a position on the parade route. Slow does not begin to describe this lumbering unresponsive over served beast, and network connections, user error, browser choice nor a generally dyspeptic cranky attitude explain the problem.

There is but one thing to be said: Fuck You, Rupert Murdoch. Other than this small quibble about the utility of one of the great tools of western civilization, you're doing a great job.

Today's Potshot

President Barack Obama furrowing his brow before Congress:

I intend to hold these banks fully accountable for the assistance they receive, and this time, they will have to clearly demonstrate how taxpayer dollars result in more lending for the American taxpayer. This time, CEOs won’t be able to use taxpayer money to pad their paychecks or buy fancy drapes or disappear on a private jet. Those days are over.


Byron York reporting in the DC Examiner:

It didn't make most of the papers or the TV newscasts, but Desiree Rogers, the new White House social secretary, caused a bit of a stir recently when she appeared at New York's Fashion Week shows, sitting next to Vogue Editor Anna Wintour as she took in the latest from designers Carolina Herrera and Donna Karan.

[...]

At first, it wasn't clear whether Rogers was hanging with the fashionistas as part of her official White House duties or not. Then New York magazine quoted a White House aide saying, "Desiree was in New York on a fact-finding mission. She's acting as a cultural liaison for the White House; she's researching fashion and music."

[...]

I asked whether the first lady considered Rogers' hitting the fashion shows a little frivolous, given the seriousness of our times. "I think you're assigning a value judgment to the fashion industry," I was told. "She doesn't think it is frivolous at all."

[...]

Rogers was also treated to lunch at the chic Four Seasons by the interior decorator Michael Smith. You might have heard Smith's name because he was the man chosen by the now-departed Merrill Lynch Chief Executive Officer John Thain to handle Thain’s notorious $1.2 million office redecoration project. President Barack Obama condemned that sort of excess, but then hired none other than Michael Smith to spruce up the White House. And then Smith honored Rogers at the Four Seasons.

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Underdog


Sydney Brillo Duodenum has spent the better part of his lunch hour searching the web for any mention of Al Sharpton's outrage over this obviously racist, stereotypical treatment of President Obama during Germany's main Carnival celebration in Dusseldorf (?!?!). Perhaps the good reverend is en route to Dusseldorf to collect money from German Chancellor Angela Merkel for his protection services against race mongerers.

(SBD's initial reaction to the photo was that it was some kind of statement (racist, of course) about President Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi).

Luxury Tax



Here we see Sydney Brillo Duodenum's newly acquired (or soon to be) yacht! Friends may be surprised to find that SBD is financially positioned to set sail at will, but these are new times. Of course, SBD does not have full ownership in this yacht. He has a fractional ownership, somewhat like that offered by those evildoers at NetJets. Unlike NetJets, SBD's use of the yacht will not cause the slow strangulation of the planet under a cloud of bilious carbon gases.

And you may ask, "SBD, how did you come into this fractional yacht ownership? Last we checked, your friends were picking up the tab for $200 bottles of wine at dinner parties you arranged!"

True enough, but in the new Omnibus spending bill, there is an earmark of $238,000 to the Polynesian Voyaging Society (Honolulu, HI). Earmarks are federal tax payer dollars. SBD is a federal tax payer. Hence, SBD is now a fractional owner in a Polynesian yacht.






Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Crystal Ball


This is not a picture of your host, but if the next four years are anything like the past month, then he and SBD shall be indistinguishable.

Monday, February 23, 2009

U.S. City Micro Review: Denver

Denver is really scorching hot in the summer. Downtown it’s really dirty. I don't like to eat so I don't know how the food is. They have a lot of avalanches in the mountains. And a lot of people are dying because they are skiing into trees. -

-- Saul Menowitz Jr., Age 8 and recent transplant to Denver

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Celebrity Sighting!!!

Sydney Brillo Duodenum had occasion to be in New York City yesterday. While strolling about Columbus Circle, he spied none other than Dustin Hoffman, the Actor. Mr. Hoffman was hustling towards the Time Warner Complex. He gave a curt brush off to an autograph seeker (not your host). He was carrying a small white bag, the merchant unknown.

Strangely, he refused to turn around at the loud call of "Hey, Rainman, Rainman, how many bricks are there in the pavement of Columbus Circle!"

Photographic proof is displayed below.


Friday, February 13, 2009

Do Our Business In the Light of Day . . .

President Obama, Inaugural Address:

The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. Those of us who manage the public's dollars will be held to account — to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day — because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.


Washington Post:

Despite the brokered deal, confusion reigned in the Capitol's hallways. With no text circulating 30 hours after Reid's announcement, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's office sent out a half-joking e-mail to reporters last night making light of Democratic accusations that Republicans were blocking the legislation -- since none yet officially existed.

Lawmakers had warned of the complications involved in drafting such a large bill in such a short time. Earlier versions had nearly 800 pages. When House and Senate negotiators sat down Wednesday evening to formalize an agreement, their aides wheeled in drafts of the bill on a cart. That version was dated Feb. 9, before the Senate centrist compromise that gutted more than $100 billion from the legislation.

Piles of paper, bound by metal clips, sat next to the old drafts, representing the new versions of the legislation.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Guard Duty

This is what you get when your son asks you innocently if he can drill a few holes into one of his action figures; he borrows some Styrofoam from the trash; and he finds the craft paints.





A teachable moment, as the insufferable say?

Indeed. What do we know about guards? First, nobody really respects them. We mock private security guards. Other than our military volunteers, most Americans do not interact with Privates holding sentry. Hollywood has spared no celluloid in filling our minds with decades of lowly anonymous schmoes, some good, some bad, pulling guard duty. From the cookie cutter German guards in the Dirty Dozen movies to the strangely, identically dressed henchmen in the employ of SPECTRE in the Bond classics to man-of-the-future "red shirt" guys of Star Trek to the shlubs guarding the Nakatomi Plaza before Hans Gruber's similarly expendable employees tap them out with silenced rounds to the legions of black ops turncoats buckling at the hands of Jack Bauer on 24, they all have the following in common: cold, swift termination and barely a mention in the closing credits. Sometimes, they have to pay hard and will have their throats cut, kidneys punctured, or guts disemboweled, or all three as appears to be the case in the picture above.

One of the most important things that Sydney Brillo Duodenum can impart on Sydney Brillo Duodenum Junior is the understanding that he too will pull guard duty for some part of his life or for all of his life, and in either case he must avoid ending up like the guard in his diorama. Junior imagines he's the stealthy, albeit flashily dressed, Ninja, mercilessly dispatching the guard standing between him and the entrance to the secret government experimental nuclear Styrofoam laboratory. Few of us get to be Ninjas.

We all pull guard duty. Day after day, night after night, we watch over our jobs, our homes, our children, our little bank accounts and nest eggs, and our lawns. Guard duty is often tedious, unsung work; it can be soul crushing, but it's the mainstay of our society. We protect the entrances to the facilities that keep our society functioning. On any given night or day, that Ninja bastard may appear and simply take us out in a brief moment of befuddlement and stifled exhalation. All we can do is walk our lines, keep our eyes open, our safeties off, and constantly brush up on our grappling skills. Sometimes a guard is just too badass, like the ones guarding Area 51.

These days, too many of us have become distracted from our guard duties. We're wandering and complacent. The doors to the things we care most about are wide open because we decided to drop a deuce in the bushes at the wrong time. And, these days, the Ninjas are out in force.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Pictures That Explain What's About to Happen to Joe the Taxpayer and His Kids

In this picture, placed by destiny in this website for this very day, we see Chuck Connors playing the role of Big Government and we see some kid actor about to play the role of the little American taxpayer.




[H/T James Lileks]

Just What the Hell Do the Economists Think?

GMU Economics Professor Jim Boudreaux:

“Conventional wisdom in Washington is that we must do something regardless of how wise or prudent it is,” said Boudreaux, the keynote speaker at an economic recovery event cosponsored by Heritage and the Club for Growth. “It’s taken as a matter of course that we must spend wildly.”

Instead, Boudreaux said, history offers a lesson that shows massive spending programs, such as those advocated by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as part of the New Deal, do not work. “FDR’s policies put the ‘great’ in Great Depression,” Boudreaux said. He cited unemployment, which never dipped below 14%, and comments made by FDR’s own treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, who lamented that spending didn’t work. Should the United States fall into a deeper recession or depression, Boudreaux said, it would be the result of economic policies like those Obama is pursuing as part of his stimulus proposal.


New York University Assistant Economics Professor Mario Rizzo:

New York University assistant economics professor Mario Rizzo kicks off the second morning panel “Market-Based Solution.” He begins by taking fire at the macroeconomists who are claiming they know exactly how many jobs each version of Obama’s Trillion Dollar Debt Plan will create.

Rizzo says:Unfortunately, much of the policy advice offered recently by commentators, including many economists, is shockingly superficial. It is reminiscent of the simple prime-the-pump ideas of the early Keynes and does not acknowledge Keynes’s own cautions and qualifications after the General Theory was published.” Rizzo then went onto stress that the microeconomic realities were the key to real economic recovery: “I wish to emphasize the resource allocation issues that characterize both the current situation and its underlying causes. The macroeconomic way of thinking ignores the complexity of our system and generates
policies that will not bring lasting recovery.”

Turning to solutions, Rizzo recommends: First, allow the market adjustments to take place. When economic agents are confident that prices will be allowed to equilibrate, they will begin to take action in both financial and economic areas. Second, the current atmosphere of uncertainty has created an increase in a reluctance to lend, borrow, invest, and consume. Neutral stimulation can do some good. The only way stimulation can be neutral is through tax cuts, because only they encourage economic activity in accordance with voluntary decisions of economic agents.

Temporary cuts like the one in Obama’s plan will not work just like the rebates in Bush’s 2001 tax cuts do not work. Permanent and across the board cuts are needed and a cut in the corporate tax rate would be the most helpful. But these tax cuts must come with credible commitments to cut back on future government spending or they stimulative effects will be canceled by expectations of future interest rates.



Economist Arnold Kling:

Kling begins somberly: “I think about the stimulus as an economist but I feel it as a father. Barack Obama is destroying my daughters’ future. It is like sitting there watching my house ransacked by a gang of thugs. That’s how I feel, now back to how I think.”

Kling says this is a big bill, but not a big stimulus. There is nothing timely, targeted, or temporary about it. It is a simple transfer of money from one set of people to favored interest groups of the Democratic Party.

If economists had designed a plan, instead of Democratic politicians, it would look a lot like Greg Mankiw’s plan which calls for an immediate and permanent reduction in the payroll tax, financed by a gradual, permanent, and substantial increase in the gasoline tax.

Kling stressed that profits are the key to economic recovery. Profits and losses are signals in a market economy. Huge losses in the financial sector signal that that sector needs to shrink. Instead Obama is talking about buying and insuring toxic assets. They think they can force the financial sector to lend. But if businesses are not profitable then it makes no sense to lend. Cuts in payroll tax would make businesses more profitable.



Heritage Institute Senior Fellow JD Foster:

JD also predicted that President Obama’s Trillion Dollar Debt Plan will only deepen the recession. The CBO has already said so, noting that “in the long run it will lower aggregate output (GDP) by 0.1 percent to 0.3 percent.” Foster believes it will actually be worse. He explains that the unprecedented levels of debt required to fund Obama’s spending binge will drive up interest rates across the board. It well send our debt to GDP ratio soaring by 25%-30%. This will in turn drive up interest rates by a full percentage point by 2010. This debt will be a millstone around our economic necks for years to come.

Finally, responding to a question from the audience, Foster said that it was insane that anyone could think an economy could recover while staring down the barrel of a 12-gauge tax hike … like the ones scheduled for 2010. Not to mention the ones needed to pay for all of Obama’s reckless borrowing.


Gary Becker (1992 Nobel economics laureate) and Kevin Murphy (University of Chitown Economics professor):

In a full-employment situation, increased government spending would largely replace private spending, so the net stimulus to GDP would likely be quite small. In the present environment, however, with growing unemployment of both labor and capital, the net stimulus would be larger since the additional government spending would put some unemployed resources to work.

[...]

[O]ur conclusion is that the net stimulus to short-term GDP will not be zero, and will be positive, but the stimulus is likely to be modest in magnitude. Some economists have assumed that every $1 billion spent by the government through the stimulus package would raise short-term GDP by $1.5 billion. Or, in economics jargon, that the multiplier is 1.5. That seems too optimistic given the nature of the spending programs being proposed. We believe a multiplier well below one seems much more likely.

[...]

The evidence of past expansions of government programs is [that] [o]nce created they tend to survive and grow over time, even when the increases initially were said to be temporary. The underlying reason for this is that interest groups develop around new and expanded programs, and they lobby to keep and expand those programs.

This implies that the spending programs in the stimulus package will continue to some extent after the economy has returned to full employment. The multiplier at that time will surely be much closer to zero. Looking several years ahead, then, the average stimulus from the expansion in government spending will be smaller, perhaps much smaller, than the short-term stimulus.

[...]

Whatever the merits of other government spending, the spending in this package is likely to have less value. A very large amount of money will be spent quickly over a two-year period: $500 billion amounts to about one-quarter of the total federal government annual spending of $2 trillion. It is extremely difficult for any group, private as well as public, to spend such a large sum wisely in a short period of time.

In addition, although politics play an important part in determining all government spending, political considerations are especially important in a spending package adopted quickly while the economy is reeling, and just after a popular president took office. Many Democrats saw the stimulus bill as a golden opportunity to enact spending items they've long desired. For this reason, various components of the package are unlikely to pass any reasonably stringent cost-benefit test.

[...]

The increased federal debt caused by this stimulus package has to be paid for eventually by higher taxes on households and businesses. Higher income and business taxes generally discourage effort and investments, and result in a larger social burden than the actual level of the tax revenue needed to finance the greater debt. The burden from higher taxes down the road has to be deducted both from any short-term stimulus provided by the spending program, and from its long-run effects on the economy.

Heck of a job, Timmy!

The S&P


The NASDAQ




The Dow

A Quick Note About Vice President Biden

Sydney Brillo Duodenum has certainly carried his tune well in the chorus of mockers of Vice President Joe Biden. It’s an easy tune to carry up and down the scale. Nevertheless, SBD does not expect President Obama to stand in the baritone section and sing along. It’s odd that SBD would need to remind President Obama that HE chose Joe Biden as his running mate and thus no matter what Vice President Biden may say, one does not expect the President to mock him, as he did so ungraciously at his White House Stimulus Campaign Stop, er press conference. President Obama would have us believe that Vice President Biden is the Fredo Corelone of his administration. It is also odd that SBD would need to remind President Obama that the reason HE chose Joe Biden as his running mate is because of Biden’s 30 long years on Capitol Hill displaying his big foreign policy sack and extolling the virtues of the nanny state. In reality, President Obama chose Joe Biden because he has experience greatly lacking in himself. Again, President Obama comes off as a callow punk.

Mr. President, leave the mockery to us ideologues.


Future Caption: Oct. 2011 - President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden go fishing on Lake Tahoe.

President Obama Wants Your Mother and Father to Die Sooner Than Later, And He's Going to Help Them Do It

The Hudson Institute's Betsy McCaughey:

Republican Senators are questioning whether President Barack Obama’s stimulus bill contains the right mix of tax breaks and cash infusions to jump-start the economy.

Tragically, no one from either party is objecting to the health provisions slipped in without discussion. These provisions reflect the handiwork of Tom Daschle, until recently the nominee to head the Health and Human Services Department. Senators should read these provisions and vote against them because they are dangerous to your health.

[...]

One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions. These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do
About the Health-Care Crisis.” According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.”

[...]

Hospitals and doctors that are not “meaningful users” of the new system will face penalties. “Meaningful user” isn’t defined in the bill. That will be left to the HHS secretary, who will be empowered to impose “more stringent measures of meaningful use over time.” What penalties will deter your doctor from going beyond the electronically delivered protocols when your condition is atypical or you need an experimental treatment? The vagueness is intentional. In his book, Daschle proposed an appointed body with vast powers to make the “tough” decisions elected politicians won’t make.

The stimulus bill does that, and calls it the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research (190-192). The goal, Daschle’s book explained, is to slow the development and use of new medications and
technologies because they are driving up costs. He praises Europeans for being more willing to accept “hopeless diagnoses” and “forgo experimental treatments,” and he chastises Americans for expecting too much from the health-care system.

Elderly Hardest Hit

Daschle says health-care reform “will not be pain free.” Seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them. That means the elderly will bear the brunt. Medicare now pays for treatments deemed safe and effective. The stimulus bill would change that and apply a cost- effectiveness standard set by the Federal Council. The Federal Council is modeled after a U.K. board discussed in Daschle’s book. This board approves or rejects treatments using a formula that divides the cost of the treatment by the number of years the patient is likely to benefit. Treatments for younger patients are more often approved than treatments for diseases that affect the elderly, such as osteoporosis.

In 2006, a U.K. health board decreed that elderly patients with macular degeneration had to wait until they went blind in one eye before they could get a costly new drug to save the other eye. It took almost three years of public protests before the board reversed its decision.

[...]

The stimulus bill will affect every part of health care, from medical and nursing education, to how patients are treated and how much hospitals get paid. The bill allocates more funding for this bureaucracy than for the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force combined.

Hiding health legislation in a stimulus bill is intentional. Daschle supported the Clinton administration’s health-care overhaul in 1994, and attributed its failure to debate and delay. A year ago, Daschle wrote that the next president should act quickly before critics mount an opposition. “If that means attaching a health-care plan to the federal budget, so be it,” he said. “The issue is too important to be stalled by Senate protocol.”

[...]

The health-care industry is the largest employer in the U.S. It produces almost 17 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. Yet the bill treats health care the way European governments do: as a cost problem instead of a growth industry. Imagine limiting growth and innovation in the electronics or auto industry during this downturn. This
stimulus is dangerous to your health and the economy.

Monday, February 9, 2009

We Are France!? Noooooooooooooooooooooo!!

Well, well, well. The magazine that featured Commissar Obama on its cover no less than 14 times since February 2008, now informs us that “We Are All Socialists Now.” And it blames Bush!

Question: will those of us who warned that Obama is a socialist and that his administration would rush this country into the wholesale - permanent - takeover of key parts of the economy by the government receive an apology from all those people who told us we were crazy McCarthyite conspiracy hounds?

Sydney Brillo Duodenum will accept a Starbucks gift card in lieu of a written apology.

Friday, February 6, 2009

Iron Maiden

Saul Menowitz, who never visits this pathetic outpost on the Intertubes anymore, reminds us today of the sharp wisdom of the Iron Lady:

The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money to spend.


She also said:

To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects.

Intellectual Collapse

National Review's Rich Lowry:

Barack Obama, a reputed master of the persuasive art, has settled on his central argument for the stimulus bill: I won.

That Obama is reduced to this crude appeal is a symptom of the intellectual collapse of the case for his stimulus bill, a congressional spendfest untethered from its stated goal of providing a rapid “jolt” to the economy.As far as political arguments go, “I won” has its power—provided it’s made on behalf of an agenda ratified by the American electorate. But Obama didn’t campaign on a sprawling, nearly $1 trillion new spending plan. If he had pledged in October to double federal domestic discretionary spending in a matter of weeks—including increasing the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts by a third, spending hundreds of millions more on federal buildings and throwing tens of billions on every traditional liberal priority from job training to Pell Grants—he’d have been hard-pressed to win at all.

The president should read the transcript of the third presidential debate. He claimed his program represented “a net spending cut.” He called himself “a strong proponent of pay-as-you-go. Every dollar that I’ve proposed, I’ve proposed an additional cut so that it matches.” He added, “We need to eliminate a whole host of programs that don’t work.”

Now, circumstances change, and no president can adhere to every jot and tittle from his campaign, but the “I won” argument only works if the campaign program matches the governing program. Obama himself seems confused on what exactly “I won” means.

[...]

When Barack Obama ran last year, he didn’t say he’d engage in faith-based economic policy on a grand scale. He didn’t say he’d toss aside the normal processes of governing. He didn’t say he’d quickly act to add waste to the federal budget. And he didn’t say he’d try to brush away criticism with the mere
assertion of his victory. On the stimulus, when Obama says “I won,” he’s out of better arguments.

Soaked


Thursday, February 5, 2009

Intervention Time

Either Christian Bale

http://www.aolcdn.com/tmz_audio/020209_christianbale.mp3

or

the US officer featured in this video:

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/282401.php


need about 15 minutes alone in the Oval Office with President Obama.

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Thinking Inside the Box

News out of Johns Hopkins:

Healthy Kidney Removed Through Donor's Vagina

ScienceDaily (Feb. 2, 2009) — In what is believed to be a first-ever procedure, surgeons at Johns Hopkins have successfully removed a healthy donor kidney through a small incision in the back of the donor’s vagina.

“The kidney was successfully removed and transplanted into the donor’s niece, and both patients are doing fine,” says Robert Montgomery, M.D., Ph.D., chief of the transplant division at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who led the team that performed the historic operation.

The transvaginal donor kidney extraction, performed Jan. 29 on a 48-year-old woman from Lexington Park, Md., eliminated the need for a 5-to-6-inch abdominal incision and left only three pea-size scars on her abdomen, one of which is hidden in her navel.

[...]

The Jan. 29 operation is one of a family of new surgical procedures called natural orifice translumenal endoscopic surgeries (NOTES) that use a natural body opening to remove organs and tissue, according to Anthony Kalloo, M.D., the director of the Division of Gastroenterology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the pioneer of NOTES. The most common openings used are the mouth, anus and vagina.


Sydney Brillo Duodenum NOTES that it is only a matter of time before some genius decides that the elastic properties of the male urethra are sufficient to support these types of procedures in the future.

Cherry Picking President Obama's First 14 Days*

Photo: Matt Bites


Signed Executive Order directing the closure of Gitmo in one year without the benefit of any ind of plan about what to do with the assholes stored there
Signed Executive Order closing CIA detention facilities overseas, by definition crippling intelligence efforts
Signed Executive Order imposing Army Field Manual interrogation requirements on all US security personnel targeting terrorists overseas, by definition crippling intelligence afforts
Signed Executive Order allowing Obama administration to release secret documents from previous administrations, allowing for the selective use of politically sensitive information and politicization of intelligence information
Signed Executive Order limiting participation of lobbyists in the executive Branch, with the exception of whomever President Obama wants to pick in violation of his own EO

Signed Memorandum mandating increasing fuel economy at a time when American automobile manufacturers are at or near bankruptcy
Signed Memorandum granting states the right to set their own emissions standards, thus leading to the creation of multiple emissions standards and thus driving up the cost of producing automobiles at a time when American automobile manufacturers are at or near bankruptcy
Signed Memorandum lifting restrictions on use of federal funds by NGOs to perform abortions overseas

Made many speeches of raising the ethics bar in Washington and then proceeded to as follows:

Nominated tax cheat Tim Geithner for Treasury (confirmed and sworn)
Nominated tax cheat Tom Daschle for HHS (withdrawn)
Nominated tax cheat Nancy Kellefer for Chief Performance Officer (withdrawn)
Nominated scandal ridden Bill Richardson for Commerce Secretary (withdrawn)
Nominated perjurer and pardons-for-terrorists supporter Eric Holder for Attorney General (confirmed and sworn)
Nominated serial corruption target, junior Senator and international affairs neophyte Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State (confirmed and sworn)
Nominated hider-of-her-fiduciary relationship with a major pro-labor group Rep. Hilda Solis as Secretary of Labor

Has championed a “stimulus bill” full of statutes supporting pent up Democrat special interest giveaways, increased government meddling, and which will add over $300 billion going forward to the annual baseline federal budget.

Gave first official interview as President to Arabic network, during which he apologized for all US actions to date in the Muslim world; hearkened back to the good old days when Saddam Hussein was in power, mullahs were invading US embassies, and terrorists were bombing US facilities with abandon

Has been told by Iran that talk is cheap and useless until the United States changes everything about itself

In the spirit of bipartisanship, told a room of Republicans disputing provisions of the stimulus bill, “I won.”
* SBD understands that it has been 15 days since the Ascendance, er Inauguration, of the the Chairman, er President, but nothing happens on Day 1, so SBD is spotting President Obama a whole day.

Monday, February 2, 2009

Liberal Duplicity

Michael Ledeen:

He lectured us about "virtue" in his Inaugural Address, and he was quite right to do it. But ever since, he has thrown virtue under the campaign bus—an attorney general who lied under oath, tax cheats at Treasury and HHS, and now (h/t Instapundit), despite all the pious talk about putting an end to torture, he seems to be retaining what is arguably the worst component of our "interrogate the terrorist" programs: rendition.

I well remember the first time I heard about this noxious practice. An intelligence-community official told me, with evident satisfaction, "We're sending these guys to places where they don't have Miranda rights. Or lawyers." I didn't like it then, and I
don't like it now. It's a total moral copout: We enable torture while claiming to have abolished it.

This is what appears to be the SOP of the Obama administration—moral lectures, immoral practices. They pose as virtuous citizens and tell us what to do in myriad ways, and then install serial offenders in the highest positions. They pose as human-rights defenders, and then turn over our prisoners to some of the worst human rights offenders.

This is a prescription for moral and political disaster, because either the electorate will figure it out, and deliver a stinging rebuke to Obama and his people (with considerable disruption at a time when we need to seriously address our many problems), or there will be an immoral free-for-all, to the ruin of the common good.

Starbucks Thought of the Day