...to 58% approval...Five months in and the bloom is off the rose...Gallup reports that Obamanon is hemorrhaging independents over his fiscal policies and health care proposals...
Kobe is vindicated...he won a ring without Shaq. A sincere congratulations from this veteran Lakers hater is in order...
1. There's no money.
There's a statistic in today's Wall Street Journal poll that should send chills through The Obamanauts...
A plea to A.B.C....do not let yourself be used as an infomercial for Obamanon...don't let the bias show through THAT much...
One more reason to salute and revere the achievements of Roger Maris...
Watching Bill O'Reilly's verbal assault on Salon editor Joan Walsh last night, I fully expected (and hoped) that this century's Joe McCarthy would stroke out in mid-rant. Alas, Fox News' prize bully is alive and ranting as of this writing. Fully living up to Ms. Walsh's earlier description of him as "vile," O'Reilly's unhinged verbal thuggery reflected his apparent belief that the bile duct is the seat of all wisdom, and that, to paraphrase Barry Goldwater, discourtesy in the pursuit of ratings is no vice. It was also a vivid manifestation of why conservatism is currently in such disrepute. Finger-jabbing, foam-mouthed vitriol is as unpersuasive as it is alienating, and O'Reilly's junior high locker room persona will not win converts to the cause. I've never agreed with Ms. Walsh on any issue, and last night she had my complete sympathy and support. I'm just mystified as to why she assented to appear on that poor excuse for a program in the first place.
At this point in his life, Bill O'Reilly probably makes too much money to experience sensations like shame and embarrassment, but nonetheless, Joseph Welch's words of reproach to the senator from Wisconsin are equally appropriate for Joe McCarthy's twenty-first century reincarnation..."Have you no sense of decency sir? At long last, have you no sense of decency?"
Today's polls from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times show a five point decline in Obamanon's job approval. WSJ pegs the president's job approval rating at 56%, down from 61% two months ago. The paper of record shows His Worship falling from a lofty 68% two months ago to a still-impressive 63%.
Both polls show a public increasingly nervous about the president's fiscal incontinence.
According to this afternoon's Sacramento Bee, a U.C.L.A. economist has said that state worker layoffs will add four-tenths of a percentage point to California's double-digit unemployment.
At the moment, California has 11% unemployment, the worst in 70 years. Push that up to 11.4% or 11.5%, and you have the eighth largest economy in the world pulling down the the biggest.
Politically, Obama cannot afford to have that statistic linger in the double digits...
A comic, a very left-wing comic, finally did what is months overdue...he opened up a can on Obamanon...
Bill Maher came at Obama in spectacular fashion on his June 12th HBO program, skewering His Worship for five months of opulent overexposure on the telly...True, Maher was primarily ticked that Obama is not fulfilling his liberal agenda, but the real point is that the acerbic HBO host stepped up to the plate and did what every comic in a post-Kennedy, post-Vietnam,post-Watergate, post-Iran-Contra, post Lewinsky America is supposed to do to a president...tee off on him. Unleash the iconoclastic dogs of war. We elect presidents, not popes.
Go on Youtube for the full five minute clip.
I salute Maher for his great comedy and courage. A liberal Obama fan had the stones to call out His Worship on the orgy of self-worship...Well-done and long overdue...
You can stop worrying about California's budget crisis...
According to today's Washington Post, the Obama Administration is waiting in the wings to bailout the Golden State should the current legislative impasse genuinely imperil California's economic condition. Obamanon & Co. fear that we could drag the rest of the nation down into recessionary oblivion should we actually impose steep budget cuts.
The money quote is below...
"The administration is worried that California will enact massive cuts to close its deficit...aggravating the state's recession and further dragging down the national economy."
"After a sereis of meetings, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, top White House economists, Lawrence Summers and Christina Romer, and other senior officials have decided that California could hold on a little longer and should get its budget in order rather than rely on a federal bailout."
"These policymakers continue to watch the situation closely and do not rule out helping the state if its situation significantly deteriorates, a senior administration official said. But in that case, federal help would carry conditions to protect taxpayers and make similar requests for aid unattractive to other states, the official said. The official did not detail those conditions."
So there you have it...Obamanon is clearly leaving the door open for a federal infusion of cash to forestall significant cuts in California's welfare state. They see California's economy as inextricably intertwined with the health of the overall economy, and their own political fortunes. It is in Obama's most intimate political interest to bailout California, and he just tipped his hand in a big way.
Knowing that, why would California's Democratic state legislators agree to any spending cuts? Why would the state's Republican legislators agree to any tax hikes? Just hunker down and wait for the state's economic situation to get so bad that Obama will rush in with aid.
What will be interesting to see is if Obama tries to use the Golden State's fiscal desperation to leverage major political changes in state government, namely, the evisceration of Proposition 13. Will state Republicans revolt and refuse federal rather than give up their minority control of the state budget process? What if Obama says that in exchange for federal aid, California has to give up its two-thirds majority legislative approval requirement for every state budget?
What we do know is that there is no incentive for the California Legislature to pass a budget. In the final analysis, Obama will do for California what he has done for the car companies...bailout with strings...the federalization of California's budget process looms...
make me so nostalgic for Bill Clinton...
You want to worry about something?
Worry about California going broke because its uber-dysfunctional state government won't pass a plausible budget in a semi-timely fashion. We're talking total shutdown.
Worry about an eruption of inflation as a result of Obamanon's nonchalant spending binge as he blithely sets about outdoing The New Deal and The Great Society. Deficit spending on steroids.
Worry about when we're ever going to realize that our nation-building in Southwest Asia will work out about as well as our nation-building in Southeast Asia did four decades ago.
My recently married brother has requested a post on North Korea's latest round of nuclear blustering. Not only will I gladly oblige with a pontification on that particular issue, I will also toss in The Hermit Kingdom's deranged associate in A-Bomb ambitions, The Real Estate Formerly Known as Persia, Iran.
There has been much bipartisan handwringing and angst over the possibility of these impoverished and antediluvian regimes procuring the tools of the apocalypse. Anxiety over Iran and North Korea has climbed to crescendo proportions of late, with President Obama confronting the conundrum of what to do about nuts with nukes.
There are two basic questions about this situation that have two simple answers. The answer to the first question is seemingly stark and terrifying. The answer to the second question is equally stark and eminently reassuring.
Question #1: Is there anything that the U.S. can do to prevent either of these nations from getting the weapons they so feverishly crave?
Answer #1: Nope.
Question #2: Does it really matter to the U.S. if either or both of them have these weapons?
Answer #2: Nope.
Think long and hard about a third question...what would Iran do with a nuclear bomb? Attack Israel? Why? Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons with a wide array of efficient delivery options. To attack Israel with nuclear weapons is to invite annihilation. Furthermore, assuming Iran manufactured a nuclear bomb, how would it deliver it?
The same rationale can be deployed with regard to North Korea. So you got a big bomb. What are you going to do with it? Blast South Korea? Do that and you kill U.S. troops stationed at the 38th parallel. That triggers a U.S. nuclear response, which in turn means the national suicide of Kim Jong Il's Malnutrition Paradise.
These weapons are almost totally useless in a world where the U.S. possesses THOUSANDS of nuclear bombs and a dizzying assortment of ways in which to deliver them. Our first strike advantage over the Soviets during the Cold War was staggering. Are we really going to dignify these moral and economic pygmies with a fear that we erroneously reserved for the USSR during the overhyped days of the Cold War?
I'll never forget the words of Cold War scholar Timothy Naftali when he spoke about the paranoid assumptions that led us into the tragedy of Vietnam. Naftali said that Americans in the post-World War II era have the recurring tendency to wildly underestimate their power in relation to the rest of the world, and this tendency is matched by an absurd overestimation of the power and peril posed by other nations.
Why do the North Koreans and the Iranians want these bombs that they can never use? Why are nations that cannot adequately feed and fuel themselves expending precious resources mining for the iron pyrite that is nuclear weaponry? I really don't know. Prestige? As Calvin Coolidge said (or should have), you can't eat prestige. Won't make your cars run. To give to terrorists? Seriously? You go to all that trouble to make one of these things, and you're going to hand it off to other random nutjobs? Not likely.
There is a comforting historical precedent to our current situation with Iran and North Korea...Red China in the early 1960s...
JFK was so concerned about the prospect of Mao getting The Bomb, he contemplated a pre-emptive air strike on the Chinese to prevent their acquisition of nuclear weapons. Like Ahminejad and Kim today, Mao was publicly terrifying with his rhetoric about launching full-blown nuclear war to achieve the triumph of his demented ideology. Privately however, Mao was quite rational and pragmatic about having a bright, shiny Nuke. It was a bargaining chip. Red China got The Bomb, and nothing bad happened. Nothing. Today the Great Nuclear Bogeyman of the early 60s is the Great ATM for the debtor empire that is the U.S.
Choosing to worry about Iran and North Korea getting the Bomb is a waste. Deterrence renders the acquisition of such thermonuclear toys utterly pointless.
Worry about something else...
Gallup has a poll out today, showing once again, that self-identified conservatives outnumber self-identified liberals by a margin of two-to-one.
Color me skeptical...cynical even...For over forty years conservatives have outnumbered liberals by roughly two-to-one in annual surveys such as these, and yet, somehow, in spite of this whopping ideological advantage, the federal government has swollen in size and power to elephantine proportions...
Psychologists would politely call this "cognitive dissonance." In a generous moment, George Will described it as "rhetorical Jeffersonianism, operational Hamiltonianism." His more accurate and acerbic assessment was "rampaging infantilism."
I just think it's a fusion of hypocrisy and ignorance. Forty percent of Americans call themselves conservative, and eighty percent of those want to conserve The New Deal, The Great Society, and all the subsequent expansions of the welfare state that transpired under ostensibly conservative Republican presidents (Nixon, Reagan, and Dubya).
...had better hurry up and finish that A-bomb...it looks like he's going to have to use it on his own people...
The Great Letterman-Palin Pseudo-Controversy of 2009 breaks down like this...
1. David Letterman made some unfunny and unkind jokes about Sarah Palin and her daughter.
2. Sarah Palin objected to the jokes most strenuously.
3. David Letterman apologized at great length in public for his remarks.
4. Sarah Palin refused to accept Letterman's apology, preferring to harp on the slight.
5. Overall, Sarah Palin remains as dumb as a post.
6. Republicans who remain fixated on this dope as their Great Hope deserve powerlessness.
Why do we want the federal government controlling medicine and health care? Do we really want to be like Canada?
There is no money for it...None...
Let's all be clear about this little point...there is no money to pay for universal health insurance in the U.S.
We are already unable to adequately finance Medicare, a program running massive yearly deficits...Why on earth would we add to the manifestly insolvent program that's already dragging our budget into fiscal oblivion?
