Archive for 2009
January 8, 2009
KARMA: CNN DISSES JOE THE PLUMBER — then has to yank fake video from Gaza. What’s their experience, again? What are their credentials? Oh, yeah. Right. Those. Nice work, guys.
A BUNCH OF MARKDOWNS on exercise and fitness gear.
PERSECUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS IN BRITAIN. We have similar problems in the United States.
DOUBLE STANDARD: Why doesn’t Israel have the same right to self-defense as other nations? Because much of the world wants Israel to die.
“DISMAL:” Retailers report dismal December sales, confirming that holiday season was weakest in decades. I guess the problem is that now Americans are saving too much. You can’t win.
JOURNALISM: A staged scene in a Gaza hospital? If so, it wouldn’t be the first such fakery.
TRAILERS FOR Inkheart and a remake of Friday the 13th.
A DEFICIT SPENDING “BLOWOUT:” The looming red ink is unlike anything in U.S. peacetime history. Stimulus, or looting the treasury?
The Congressional Budget Office released its latest budget forecast yesterday, and we now really do have red ink as far as the eye can see. Thanks to a 6.6% decline in revenues due to recession, a spending increase of some $500 billion or 19%, and assorted federal bailouts, the U.S. deficit for fiscal 2009 (ending September 30) will nearly triple to $1.19 trillion. That’s 8.3% of GDP, which CBO says “will most likely shatter the previous post-World War II record high of 6.0 percent posted in 1983.” It certainly blows away any deficit this decade, not to mention the Reagan years when smaller deficits were the media cause celebre.
But there’s more. None of that includes the new fiscal “stimulus” that President-elect Obama has promised to introduce upon taking office in two weeks.
Nobody seems to be paying close attention to where the money is going . . . .
UPDATE: Reader Dart Montgomery emails: “Or where it’s coming from or how on earth it’s ever going to be repaid.”
OF BRAIN SCANS and undying love.
JOHN KASS: OBAMA SLAPS THE SENATE, press misses the story:
But today’s news is that Obama, often treated by the national media as the gentle Mr. Tumnus of American politics, got privately hardball with Reid over the Tombstone issue.
According a story in the Tribune by Rick Pearson and Mike Dorning, Obama didn’t want the Chicago Way on parade in Washington, less than two weeks before his inauguration, when he formally becomes the agent of the change we can believe in. Obama is perfectly within his rights to try to wriggle out of an embarrassing political situation, and what could be more embarrassing for him than to have Illinois political corruption constantly on the news in Washington? People might start asking questions, wondering how Obama could come out of a city run by the wrought-iron fists of the Daley machine but smell like the neck of a baby after a bath.
I’m still wondering.
Yet Obama was tricky, not mentioning his phone call to Reid when talking to reporters Wednesday. . . . Obama almost wasn’t asked anything about Burris on Wednesday. One reporter barely tossed it up at the end, after others asked him about the war in the Gaza Strip (Obama still can’t comment about Gaza because he’s not yet president) and the economy (though he’s not president, you can’t stop the guy from commenting on that one).
What Obama forgot to mention is that he ordered the Tombstone issue settled because it became his problem. So he told Reid to cave.
Read the whole thing.
SCANDALS SHOW NEED FOR LIMITED GOVERNMENT:
In 2006, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her Democratic colleagues regained congressional control after campaigning against what she famously called a Republican “culture of corruption.” Her description resonated with voters that year and again last fall, when frustration with Republicans helped then-Sen. Barack Obama win the presidency.
Obama won on the promise of cleaner, better government run by Democrats. But a funny thing happened when the 111th Congress opened this week: The Democratic clean-up crew arrived splattered in mud. . . . The taint of infighting and scandals extends well beyond the Chicago Democratic machine. Obama’s nominee for commerce secretary, Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, bowed out this week after leaks that a grand jury is investigating a possible pay-for-play scandal in Richardson’s administration.
Accusations of financial impropriety also continue to surface against Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-N.Y., the House Ways and Means Committee chairman being investigated by the House Ethics Committee. Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, continues to dodge questions about his sweetheart mortgage deal from Countrywide Financial, a company implicated in the nationwide mortgage collapse. And several other Democratic congressmen are facing media scrutiny for suspicious financial deals and earmarking practices. . . .
Given how poorly many of our national political leaders handle the perks and purse strings they already control, we should think twice before giving them free rein to exponentially expand government and manage even more of our money. At a time when a $1 trillion stimulus package barely raises eyebrows inside the Beltway, it’s worth remembering that no political party or leader is immune from the temptations that accompany absolute power. And no populace is as vulnerable to granting that absolute power as one racked by fear and seeking a savior.
Indeed.
RIDING SHOTGUN in the Mazda RX-8 hydrogen car.
ZACH WAMP AND LINCOLN DAVIS: Oak Ridge has its bets hedged.
NOBODY TELL JOHN SCALZI: Bacon! Bacon!
AN ELECTRIC-VEHICLE Ford Focus?
IN THE MAIL: From Richard Nisbet, Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count.
HEY, I JUST NOTICED that I was nominated for a Weblog Award.
UPDATE: No, don’t vote for me. I already won one. Vote for somebody who didn’t. I didn’t even look until someone emailed me, because I thought I was ineligible now.
THE WEEK: Why Democrats Recoil from Gaza. “First, Democrats are just generally less likely to support military actions by any nation, including the United States. A 2005 MIT poll found that only 57 percent of Democrats would support the use of American troops even to destroy a terrorist training camp. (Compared to 95 percent of Republicans.) Second, Democrats hold an inexhaustible faith in the value of negotiation.”
ON PJTV: Michelle Malkin and I talk about how happy we are that Barack Obama was elected President. No, really!
