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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Talk Is Cheap

Charles Krauthammer reminds President Obama what America's real legacy vis a vis Muslims has been the past "20 or 30" years:

Is it "new" to acknowledge Muslim interests and show respect to the Muslim world? Obama doesn't just think so, he said so again to millions in his al-Arabiya interview, insisting on the need to "restore" the "same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago."

Astonishing. In these most recent 20 years -- the alleged winter of our disrespect of the Islamic world -- America did not just respect Muslims, it bled for them. It engaged in five military campaigns, every one of which involved -- and resulted in -- the liberation of a Muslim people: Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq. The two Balkan interventions -- as well as the failed 1992-93 Somalia intervention to feed starving African Muslims (43 Americans were killed) -- were humanitarian exercises of the highest order, there being no significant U.S. strategic interest at stake. In these 20 years, this nation has done more for suffering and oppressed Muslims than any nation, Muslim or non-Muslim, anywhere on Earth. Why are we apologizing?

[...]

Every president has the right to portray himself as ushering in a new era of this or that. Obama wants to pursue new ties with Muslim nations, drawing on his own identity and associations. Good. But when his self-inflation as redeemer of U.S.-Muslim relations leads him to suggest that pre-Obama America was disrespectful or insensitive or uncaring of Muslims, he is engaging not just in fiction but in gratuitous disparagement of the country he is now privileged to lead.

And to further demonstrate what a punk President Obama is, Mr. Drudge directs our attention to this:

US President Barack Obama's offer to talk to Iran shows that America's policy of "domination" has failed, the government spokesman said on Saturday.

"This request means Western ideology has become passive, that capitalist thought and the system of domination have failed," Gholam Hossein Elham was quoted as saying by the Mehr news agency. "Negotiation is secondary, the main issue is that there is no way but for (the United States) to change," he added.

Punk or not, Sydney Brillo Duodenum wants to see President Obama succeed with respect to Iran. Obama is courting bitter failure by continuing with this charade that talking and meeting and backchanneling are going to lead to strategic US success in keeping Iran bottled up. The only thing Iranians understand at present is force, as demonstrated by their backing off in Iraq when we started identifying and assasinating their agents. Now, it may be that President Obama does not believe any of his own crap regarding direct conversations with America's most bitter enemy, but that would require believing that President Obama understands that Iran is our most bitter enemy and has been a central source of anti-American action since 1979. But the evidence strongly suggests that Obama doesn't know what he believes. Or he believes his own rhetoric that only he can go to Tehran, in the way that only Nixon could go to Beijing, forgetting that Nixon actually had some bona fides when it came to dealing with the commies. So, from what position of strength is Obama proceeding in his attempt to have tea with Mahmoud Imabadbondvillian?

President Obama's first foreign policy forays have been: to admit "guilt" in the War on Terror by closing down the prison housing the fruits of battlefield action; to grant his first formal interview as president to Al Arabiya, the so-called moderate Arab television network, wherein he proclaimed that the United States is set to rectify this, that and the other dhimmhi transgression; to launch a trial balloon (exploding worse than the Hindenberg) that the administration will send a letter to Iran's Supreme Leader in an affort to warm things up in Preparation H for some kind of formal sit down; to reaffirm that there are no preconditions for sitting down with Mahmoud Imadinnerjacket; to look cool by implying that Obama's people have been working the backchannel with Iran since before the Inauguration; to state that Iran knows what it has to do before talks can take place, but in no circumstances does that imply any kind of precondition to a meeting; to dickswagger lamely that all options, e.g., military action, remain on the table (oooh, scary); and to state that the administration doesn't know what it's going to do in any event because it still hasn't appointed a special envoy to handle the "Iran portfolio", because apparently Hillary Clinton is too important to muddy her hose on this seconary issue.

So, it all looks like one big clusterfuck as Obama tries obstinately to distinguish himself as a master diplomacist. The kid from Chicago. Like all things Obama, it's all form over substance and a complete waste of time.

First Taste - Grozet

Grozet Gooseberry and Wheat Ale

Brewer: Heather Ale Ltd, Scotland, UK

Marketing BS: "Grozet - Auld Scots for Gooseberry. Since the 16th Century Scots monks and Alewives have brewed special concoctions from a blend of malts, wild spices and ripe gooseberries. Bringing together these various ingredients in a beer the brewer attempts to offer a drink which is refreshing, full of flavour and a pleasure to consume. Amongst the Scots literati of the 19th Century the Green Grozet was immortalized as "a most convivial drink."

Marketing Translation: Dinnae mess wi' th' scots, ye dobber.

Setting: Couch in front of television showing a NASA moon buggy of some sort disgorging an astronaut in front of President Obama's Inaugural viewing stand.

Bottle/Label: Brown bottle for brew preservation. Label is some horrible New Age/Druid nonsense designed by Glasgow School of Art students and is supposed to borrow from 1st millennium Celtic maze design. Looks like an amputated ear.

The Pull: Whisper soft, like the heather blowing on the moors.

Alcohol Content: Absolutely pathetic at 5%.

Method of Imbibation: A POM pomegranate recyclable glass.

First Swig: Cloudy, heather gold. A sufficient head. Sweet and refreshing. Drinks easy. But where are the spices? And where is the bogmyrtle hiding in the quaff? Hey, wait a minute, just what the hell is bogmyrtle?

Competition: Well, if must have fruit in your beer, then Samuel Adams Cherry Wheat

Recommendation: No, not really. SBD likes his beer to taste like beer, not a goddamned fruit.

Note: This post should have been put up last week, but it was lost in a toxic haze of violent vomiting and gatrointestinal mayhem brought on by Post-Inaugural Stress Syndrome. -- SBD

Steele!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sydney Brillo Duodenum is pleased to hear that Michale Steele, former Lt. Gov. of SBD's home state of Maryland, has been chosen to the lead the Republican National Committee. This is very good news for the Republican Party. He is as close to a fresh face as the Republicans could hope to muster. We should fully expect Democrat asshats to claim Steele is some kind of cynical race card the Republicans are trying to play, but don't buy into that crap. Steele is a solid, proven conservative.

Steele is essentially the anti-Obama. Whereas Obama was raised by a socialist flake in Hawaii, Steele's mother was a hardworking laundress in working class Maryland. While Obama was testing out various pharmaceuticals, Steele was studying to be a priest. Whereas Obama learned his political skills in the unchallenging leftist environment of Chicago, Steele plied his conservatives principles in Bluetard Maryland. Based on watching him these past couple of years on Fox, he can represent conservative principles and knows how to push back on jackasses like Bill Maher and Steve Colbert and Alan Colmes and the rest of the nitwit liberal brigade. Having been head of GOPAC, we know he can raise money. Steele lost his Senate run to the unsufferable Ben "Bloomberg" Cardin in 2006.

Steele has nice shirts, but his tailor should consider reducing the amount of suit jacket material around his underarms, as it tends to bunch up when he appears on TV. Also, his mustache is a little cheesy, but we're looking past that right now. He also wears Sarah Palin glasses.

But if Steele doesn't deliver the money and the message, his ass needs to be thrown into the street.

Message in a Bottle

Hugh Hewitt interviews Mark Steyn, at present the keenest chronicler of the decline of western civilization, who sums up Obama's Middle East policy:

HH: [A] lot of people have missed the Obama appeal to Arabiya, and the fact that he didn’t bring up its gender apartheid, Christopher Hitchens calls it. It’s where gays are executed. And he made no rebuke to these societies. I found it astonishing, Mark Steyn. What did you think?

MS: Well, you don’t have to be gay, an oppressed homosexual about to be executed. You don’t have to be a woman who’s being sold to an arranged child marriage. You just have to be a moderate, centrist Arab intellectual in, say, Cairo or Amman, and you listen to Obama sucking up to these creeps, and there’s nothing for you in it. What he’s doing is he says, he’s saying to hell with the Bush freedom agenda. We just want to get back to schmoozing the feted Arab dictatorships and the mullahs in Tehran all over again. And so if you’re a gay or a woman, you’re out of there. And as I said, if you’re a moderate Arab who just would like to have a free society in Cairo or Amman or wherever, you’re out of it, too. You’re on the Obama horizon. It was a pathetic, disgraceful Jimmy Carter speech.

[...]

I think in fact, on that al-Arabiya interview, he just sounded basically way out of his league. And I hope someone brings him up to speed soon, because going around giving those interviews, as I said, he was talking about getting us back to thirty years ago. Well, thirty years ago, they were taking Americans hostage in Tehran. Thirty years ago, Jimmy Carter was communicating weakness to the world, and the Ayatollah rightly concluded these Americans are pushovers. And Obama shouldn’t be doing that message all over again.

Haiku

Rush puffs one more Punch

Bipartisanship gets served

O's waffle is cold

Dear Mahmoud

dEr Mahmoud:
jst dropping U a qix nOt 2 sA hA & dat Im l%kin 4ward 2 getin 2 knO U.
We hav a lot of wrk 2 do clEnN ^ ChimpyMcBushHitlers meS. I knO U & d Iranian ppl hav Nuttin bt d best intentions & jst wnt 2 live n (-<-) untl d 12th Iman shOz ^. My man Mitchel iz goin 2 GIV U caL on d qt 2 c wot U nEd 2 kEp tngz shhh 4 awhile so I cn focus on my powR 2 d ppl progrm bak n d st8z. n NE case, letz tink bout a White hows vzit 4 U & d Mrs. n d sprNg, mAbE rownd Eastertime.Uh, oh, dat Pelosi btch iz clng me on my othR line. I gota go.

yor buddy,
prez Obama

Sent Via My Blackberry

Employees of the Month

Good Company

League of Extraordinary Economic Gentlemen leader, Timothy Geithner, arises to the post of Secretary of Treasury upon satisfaction of a voice vote in the United States Senate. Geithner joins the small club of luminaries to hold that roll - Hamilton, Taney, Chase, Folger, Mellon, Morganthau, Shultz, Regan, Baker, Bentsen, Rubin, Summers, O'Neil, Snow and Paulson, to name too many.

Based on information brought to light during his confirmation hearings, Secretary Geithner joins another group of luminaries - Abbott and Costello, Joe Louis, Sammy Davis, Jr., Pete Rose, Redd Fox, Wesley Snipes, Leona Helmsley, Al Capone, Willie Nelson, Marc Rich, Webster Hubbell, and Charlie Rangel, to name too few.

Those would be tax cheats.

A Ramble on Failure

Failure is much in discussion these days. Banks, administrations, stocks, businesses, bureaucracies, teams, marriages, armies, movies, CEOs, jet engines, governors, software, trust. It's a great big fail fest out there. Failure is the great big excuse now. It's the new predicate. Obama is elected because supposedly Bush and Republicans failed so horribly to do, well, something about everything. There were many successes but from the perspective of certain people, they are failures. For example, the liberation of 50 million or so damned souls, regardless of the reason why, is one of George Bush’s most unforgivable failures. The fact that the United States did not experience a major terrorist attack on its soil since 9/11 is not a Bush success, but a terrorist failure. Prescription subsidies for old folks is a huge failure because they have to pay a bit of the cost, as opposed to getting full ride. No Child Left Behind is a failure because it causes schools to fail because of its heartless standards setting. A full-service prison holding scum taken from the battlefield is deemed a failure and must close. With so much failure in the air, one would think that a success here or there would be cause for hope. Who doesn't love success? Lots of people. This headline is indicative:

“Girls Basketball Coach Fired After 100-0 Win”

One might surmise that the coach of the team that lost to another team by 100 unanswered points was the poor slob cast into the unemployment line. Nay. The coach of the winning team was fired.

“The coach of a Texas high school basketball team that beat another team 100-0 was fired Sunday, the same day he sent an e-mail to a newspaper saying he will not apologize "for a wide-margin victory when my girls played with honor and integrity."”

Surely the coach said or did something to warrant this response. He failed to do something, but what?

On its Web site last week, Covenant, a private Christian school, posted a statement regretting the outcome of its Jan. 13 shutout win over Dallas Academy. "It is shameful and an embarrassment that this happened. This clearly does not reflect a Christlike and honorable approach to competition," said the statement, signed by Queal and board chair Todd Doshier.

Oh, he simply failed to be like Christ. Good lord. SBD does not remember where in the New Testament Christ spotted the Devil 20 points in competition. I seem to recall the devil going 0 for 40 in some desert challenge with Jesus.

"In response to the statement posted on The Covenant School Web site, I do not agree with the apology or the notion that the Covenant School girls basketball team should feel embarrassed or ashamed," [Coach] Grimes wrote in the e-mail, according to the newspaper. "We played the game as it was meant to be played. My values and my beliefs would not allow me to run up the score on any opponent, and it will not allow me to apologize for a wide-margin victory when my girls played with honor and integrity."

But as we drill down, we find a bit of information regarding the other team, the losing team, the failed team.

“Dallas Academy has eight girls on its varsity team and about 20 girls in its high school. It is winless over the last four seasons. The academy boasts of its small class sizes and specializes in teaching students struggling with "learning differences," such as short attention spans or dyslexia.”

These are the real heroes -- the genetic failures, as it were – not the boastful score runneruppers. They deserve great applause for playing the entire game, for not whining, for persevering, for failure to not bailout in the midst of crushing, in your face defeat. They signed up to play and they played. They are a success for that reason. Their teachers, coaches, administrators, what have you, could have pulled the plug and stormed off and taken righteous umbrage and in today’s climate they would get some kind of bailout – in the coin of sympathy and cooing salves to their punished little egos. But that hasn’t happened too much. In other words, they made a particular commitment to an endeavor – in this case basketball - bounded by set of constraints, rules and opportunities. They have stuck to this plan for four years and have yet to find success, but they continue on, finding success in the effort itself. We should root for them and hope they find a win.

Back on the national stage, we find a similar mindset. President Obama is to engage in a series of escapades designed to deliver us from the successes, as it were, of the Bush years. We have been instructed to wish him success in his efforts. But he can’t be allowed to fail, we are told by fairies in the air. He must score 100 points! His detractors must fail miserably; they must be squashed, humiliated, excoriated for their intemperance in the face of divine wisdom, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Now, Sydney Brillo Duodenum embraces the culture of failure as much as the next cynic. The fact that he has time in the middle of his day to post about failure is indicative of a certain amount of failure in his own life. SBD is a tiny wheel in the great clock that is Stateus Corruptus. SBD expects that a good deal of President Obama's agenda will fail miserably. History and data indicate so. Obama will not revive the economy. Government will not revive the economy. Bureaucrats will not revive the economy. Technocrats most certainly will not revive the economy. Americans will revive the economy with their effort to succeed for their own selfish reasons. Leave them their money, stay out of their affairs, allow them to fail or succeed. If they score 100 points. Cheer them wildly. If they score none, pat them on the back and tell them to get ready for the next game. There is always a next game – if you want to play. They will not have a chance, though, if they too much buy into Obama’s drivel that the government is the answer to all the nation’s ills (although he will not admit that it is responsible for half of them). Obama will tell you that 50 points is enough for you and he will give a certain number of points to your opponents, depending on how pathetic they are.

Rush Limbaugh states that he “hopes” President Obama fails. SBD doesn't see a need for hope. Obama is programmed to seek state centralization of economic power; to redistribute from success to failure; to create governmental programs and policies run by people who have never in their lives run a profit-loss center and who have not an entrepreneurial cell in their body; to takeover business too large to fail and thus by definition proving they should fail. By the principles and foundings of our great Republic, socialism is by definition a failure. By the science of economics, socialism is a failure. SBD is not ready to declare the Republic a failure. He knows that Obama will fail. He doesn’t need to hope for it.