The Fox and the Chicken House ..............

One of the biggest mistakes that this White House has made in the past 13 months was to attack Fox News. Not that I care one way or the other and I certainly don’t have any skin in the game but the furor caused people to take a look at the cable news channels.

And that included Fox, of course, but while they were in that part of the media spectrum, some viewers took a look at CNN and MSNBC as well. Well that backfired didn’t it? Fox is, and has been for the last 2 months by far the leader in terms of market share.

Honestly, and I do try to be honest, I think there are at least 2 reasons for that. For a start, when the viewers punched that station up on their remote, they found news. Admittedly it had a conservative slant but the alternatives were even worse. And their alternatives are what? Heck, even Headline News beat out CNN even with their resident Al-Jazeera apologist.

So now we come to MSNBC. Way back we had little Chrissy Matthew’s tingly leg. Then he outdid himself last week with the “temporary Black amnesia” bit.

But MSNBC hasn’t nearly run out of kooks yet while they still have Keith Olbermann who has to be one of the most angry people in the world except for Barney Frank and, perhaps, Obama’s wife.

Anyway, Olbermann refused to be outdone and so he has just pronounced the “Anointed One”, as one of the thousand top brains in this country.

Now I really felt better. But only for the briefest of moments. Because that was when I started looking at Obama’s budget.

The total bill is, according to Obama, $3.8 Trillion and I won’t bore you again by some meaningless exercise about what a trillion really looks like. Instead though I had a flash-back to the 2008 campaign trail when Obama, just before he fed the masses with an impossibly small number of loaves and fishes, declared that President Bush’s latest deficit was “unsustainable”.

That deficit was under $500 billion while today’s projection is $1.6 Trillion. More than 3 times the “unsustainable”.

But he did announce cuts, all of which will cost jobs. Probably to the tune of more than 500,000. Does Wal-Mart need that many more “greeters”?

For a start, manned space flight is off or we’ll just have to thumb a ride from the Russians or somebody. NASA, it seems, is destined to monitor “Global Warming” which we know is bad science, failed science, disproved science but the myth fits Obama’s agenda which is all about control.

I spent the bulk of my working life in the computer industry and we’ve all seen the rooms full of processors and disk drives and printers and consoles which constituted the mainframe era.

But now you have your PC or Mac at home. You have your DVR. You have your iPhone. Put just your home PC and your DVR and your cell phone together and also add the processors in your car and you have way more computer cycles than all that room-full of equipment. And the driving force was NASA and the need to build smaller, faster, smarter

Now they won’t get it, but when the mouth-breathing liberals tell you that the only positive things to come out of the NASA programs were Tang and Velcro and pens that write upside-down, tell em,

Send me a text message!.

And then ask 'em how it was going to to get from them to you.

Duh! And the eyes glaze over!

Petering Out ............

Anyone who has worked in commerce or industry anywhere in the World knows all about the “Peter Principle” although readers outside these United States may know it by some other label. And so, in order that we all sing from the same song sheet, let me state my definition.

This is that when a competent person is promoted up through the ranks, he or she will eventually find themselves at a level where they are no longer competent. In truth, they become incompetent, sometimes to the point of being downright dangerous. A corollary of this theory is that being found to be incompetent does not necessarily rule out further promotion as it’s often easier to get rid of incompetence by promoting it out of the way which simply foists the problem off on someone else.

This latter strategy seems to be prevalent in the Military, Government or the Civil Service or when political correctness might prevail for legal reasons in cases of Affirmative Action.

For those from Lake Havasu and from across the Atlantic, this outrageous policy was established to give a helping hand to minorities who, it was argued, had been held back by discriminatory practices in terms of education and/or employment. In the beginning there was almost certainly some justification but I contend it has long since “passed its ‘Sell By’ date”.

Whether it has or whether it hasn’t isn’t really at issue here but the fact remains that the practice continues to this day either by statute or because of cowardice on the part of those who allow it.

We need look no further than Obama himself. He got his start in Education and then in Academia partly, at least, because of Affirmative Action. This was followed by a stint as a “Community Organizer” but, more accurately as a strident activist and rabble rouser. Even after that he never held a real job in his life but instead he wound up in the Illinois Senate where his major claim to fame was voting “Present” more than anyone before or since. See, that way, you don’t have to think, you don’t leave a clue behind of that which you do hold dear but, most importantly, you leave no “audit trail” that can be used against you on your next campaign.

And that next campaign led him to the United States Senate where he served about 150 days or less. Then, the Peter Principle kicked in again and he was elected to the Oval Office. H.L. Mencken put it best when he opined that “Nobody ever went broke by underestimating the stupidity of the American people” and add a lousy choice of candidate from the GOP side and the outcome was foregone. But the problem for Obama, as his popularity tanks, is that he can’t be promoted out of the firing line. Well not until the title of Supreme Inter-Galactic Commander comes into being.

So what to do instead is obvious. First blame someone else which he did again last Wednesday evening and the other tactic in the best traditions of the Chicago “Junk Yard Dog” is to attack.

As a jurist, he should never have launched on that scurrilous attack on the highest Court in this Land. The tradition is that the nine Supremes are present at every one of these speeches and the traditions are also that they don’t comment on the policies presented and, by the same token, the President does not take them out to the wood shed.

So, we are forced to the conclusion that Obama is not a sound jurist and neither is his Attorney General, Eric Holder. Consider this drive by the White House to move the trial of the 911 terrorists to New York City. Whether that will happen or whether it won’t remains to be seen but what is clear is that the grounds for mistrial or summary dismissal are so obvious and so blatant. When Obama and Holder, both jurists remember, guaranteed a fair trial and eventual conviction, appeal lawyers began beating their plowshares into swords.

Then today, Obama’s mouthpiece, Bobby Gibbs went even further on one of the Sunday shows by promising a death penalty verdict.

Remember Mr. Obama, the “Buck Stops with You” as you said but there’s one difference between President Truman and you.

He meant it.

Chris Matthews forgot Obama was Black last Night.

Obama still doesn’t get it.

And he should, because the one thing Obama spent some time doing was to study law. And American law has two foundations largely equal but separate. One is the English Common Law which harks back to Magna Carta and beyond.

But the other is the United States Constitution.

I don’t know when they teach this stuff in school anymore but I learned it when I was about 14 and I was at an English school. And that’s when I began to suspect that my destiny lay here. In fact, as some witnesses could attest, within 2 days of my arrival in this land, the greatest country on this planet, I knew I had been born in the wrong place.

The key that Obama does not, will not, recognize is that, when all else fails, the American Constitution prevails. To him, it’s not a document and an ethos to be revered. To him, it’s a series of constraints on his power and he’s right because that’s how it was designed. He and his cabinet and his czars and his liberals, both in and out of Congress, hate that.

Obama would love to scrap the entire fabric starting with the Supreme Court. And he tried to start it last night on Capitol Hill when he attacked that very body.

Does Obama not know that he is the head of just one of three branches of Government? Frankly, no he doesn’t. When he was accorded the title of “Commander in Chief”, he took it literally and assumed that he was now the “King” or the “Messiah”.

But, he’s not.

Greater than he, Greater than us all, is the might and the right of the Constitution and long may that continue.

So, when Obama started on his tirade last night against the Supreme Court’s ruling of last week I was appalled and so should anyone who believes in our system of Government.

Perhaps, the dirty little secret that Obama chooses to ignore is that Jefferson and Madison et al were not nearly as stupid as he seems to believe.

There is a mechanism to remove a Justice of the Supreme Court of these United States from their bench even though, typically, it’s a lifelong appointment. And for good reason, which is that they are seated in order to rule according to the Constitution and not according to the whim or prejudice of the head of another of the 3 branches. Just ask Samuel Chase. He was impeached.

There is a way to remove a member of the House and Senate and their constituents will take care of that.

It is most unseemly for a President to go into Chicago-style attack mode especially at a State of the Union message.

And while Obama may not have thought this through, the Court are unlikely to respond directly to his outrageous attack but they will remember the next time there is a matter before them that Obama holds dear. I suppose it’s called winning the battle and losing the war.

But, let’s face it that’s all Obama knows. He’s from Chicago which was home to Leroy Brown.

Meaner than a “Junk Yard Dog”.

And there’s a couple of ways to remove a president.

The State of Obama .......

On 9/11, President Bush was given the news about the attack while sitting in a grade school classroom and he was derided for the way he tried to protect the students from any anxiety. Consider how much more virulent would have been the derision if he’d been using a teleprompter. And imagine how loud the cries would have been from the media and liberals about his IQ or the lack of it.

So, where was this same outrage when Obama went to talk to a class of sixth graders last week? Because he did not go alone. Nope! He took along one large podium, complete with Presidential Seal, and two teleprompters. To talk to sixth graders?

One can only assume either that the teleprompter is like Linus’ blankie or he’s scared of sixth graders or he’s practicing for his first State of the Union appearance. If he needs 2 of ‘em for a classroom in Virginia, how many will he need for a joint session of Congress?

What device does he use to talk to his family?

But now we’re into tomorrow’s speech we know 3 things about the content.

One; Obama will blame Bush.
Two: Obama will pretend to have received the message.
Three: Obama will announce he’s going to freeze discretionary spending.

OK Obama, try the Copenhagen Climate Summit for a start. And much of that which follows stems from a CBS study, hardly a friend of the political Right in this country.

“Cameras spotted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at the summit. She called the shots on who got to go. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and embattled Chairman of the Tax Committee Charles Rangel were also there. They were joined by 18 colleagues: Democrats: Waxman, Miller, Markey, Gordon, Levin, Blumenauer, DeGette, Inslee, Ryan, Butterfield, Cleaver, Giffords, and Republicans: Barton, Upton, Moore Capito, Sullivan, Blackburn and Sensenbrenner. That's not the half of it. But finding out more was a bit like trying to get the keys to Ft. Knox.

Many referred us to Speaker Pelosi who wouldn't agree to an interview. Her office said it "will comply with disclosure requirements" but wouldn't give us cost estimates or even tell us where they all stayed. Senator Inhofe (R-OK) is one of the few who provided us any detail. He attended the summit on his own for just a few hours, to give an "opposing view." "They're going because it's the biggest party of the year," Sen. Inhofe said. "The worst thing that happened there is they ran out of caviar.

Our investigation found that the congressional delegation was so large, it needed three military jets: two 737's and a Gulfstream Five -- up to 64 passengers -- traveling in luxurious comfort. Along with those who flew commercial, we counted at least 101 Congress-related attendees. And all for a summit that failed to deliver a global climate deal.

As a perk, some took spouses, since they could snag an open seat on a military jet or share a room at no extra cost to taxpayers. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) was there with her husband. Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) was also there with her husband. Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) took his wife, as did Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI). Congressman Barton -- a climate change skeptic -- even brought along his daughter. Until required filings are made in the coming weeks, we can only figure bits and pieces of the cost to you.

· Three military jets at $9,900 per hour - $168,000 just in flight time.
· Dozens flew commercial at up to $5,000 each

Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense, wasn't against a U.S. presence. But he said, "Every penny counts. Congress should be shaking the couch cushions looking for change, rather than spending cash for everybody to go to Copenhagen." Nobody we asked would defend the super-sized Congressional presence on camera. One Democrat said it showed the world that the U.S. is serious about climate change while others including Tim Ryan (D-OH) defended the expenditure in part by saying they hadn’t seen the tab.

Now let’s talk about lodging.

Apparently, the hotel of choice in Copenhagen was the 5-star Marriott and, because it’s not stupid, the hotel demanded a 6 night minimum. More than 95% of the American attendees only stayed for 2 but still you and I were stuck with the tab. And did I mention that a whole bunch of spouses went as well?

And did I mention that part of the American contingent included a “Protocol Consultant” whatever that is? And another bunch of official attendees were American medical doctors. Is not European Socialized healthcare good enough?

And the irony of it all was that the conference started within 2 weeks of the disclosure that the global warming premise is a hoax. Perhaps that’s why the attendees didn’t feel bad about producing enough climate-stunting carbon dioxide to fill 10,000 Olympic swimming pools.

And did I mention that this parade of waste was just the Congressional boondoggle? The cost of Obama's entourage is over and above all of this.

You might want to bear all this in mind when you file your taxes on April 15 or ask your resident Obama fan.

That'll make you feel better!

Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa ..........

I post this article without comment because none is necessary except to announce that the authoress is Jill Dorson and her medium is a site called “Real Clear Politics”.

I know it sounds a bit like the first step in a famous 12 step-program and perhaps it is.


"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. And not a very good one at that.

Before John McCain unwittingly picked a tabloid-magazine cover girl for his running mate, I was leaning toward going Republican this time around. I did the second time Bush was on the ballot and I very nearly did the first time, too. But as soon as Palin climbed out of her igloo and onto the national scene, well, there was no turning back for me.

You see, I felt my choice was to risk McCain dropping dead and letting the world's most well-known hockey mom run this country, or to believe that Obama would surround himself with educated people and that he was smart enough to take their advice.

I was right. He is smart enough to seek counsel. I'm just outraged at the counsel he's seeking these days. Key financial leaders who are tax cheats come immediately to mind, but as the recent terror attack made clear to me, the idea that a president of the most powerful nation in the world could think it was OK to have a Homeland Security chief with such a loose grasp of what terrorism is and how it works is troubling.

I was right there laughing when George W. Bush struggled with the names of countries around the world early in his tenure. And while my knowledge of foreign policy is limited, I thought Bush's was lousy, too. But after Sept. 11, I saw a man with no charisma step up and fight for this country, its citizens and its freedom. Bush became a leader.

Seven years later, I am ashamed to say that I was blinded by charisma. 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.

But McCain made it easy. He's a smart man, I don't doubt that. But between picking Palin, suggesting that the first debates be delayed and, well, picking Palin, he made it easy for Obama to win. As Election Day drew near, all Obama had to do was keep his mouth shut to win.

All that changed when the Obama campaign became the Obama administration. I was a small business owner during 2008 election and my business ultimately failed under the weight of a horrendous economy. I am not ashamed. I worked hard. But I believed that Obama would try to level the playing field between big business and small, between thieves and honest business people, between greed and moderation. Instead, he bailed out the most wicked and left the rest of us fail.

I watched with horror as Obama followed Bush's lead in bailing out banks, auto makers, insurance companies, all of those companies deemed "too big to fail." What does that mean? My small company got thrown under the bus and my savings were ravaged - perhaps Wall Street is using them for bonuses this year.
Not to mention President Obama is recklessly spending our country's future into oblivion.

It was clear after just 90 days what a mistake I'd made. My taxes have gone up and my quality of life has gone down. Hope has given way to disgust and I see now that change is simply a euphemism for "big government."

Like many others, my view is narrow. I vote for the candidate I think will be best for me. I often define myself as a fiscal conservative and a social liberal. But above all, I want to feel safe and I don't want to feel that I am being ripped off.

I want a president who inspires me and cares about my contribution to the fabric of the country. I want a president with experience and savvy, a Commander in Chief who puts our country and its citizens first.

I only hope the Republicans can find him the next time around."


And so do I.

How about you?

The Karate Kid

It’s been a bad week for liberals and I suspect that the weeks and months ahead are unlikely to be little better.

When I spoke to an avid Obama supporter last Tuesday evening and it had become clear that the Democrat had lost the election in Massachusetts, the person was almost in tears. Not for the hapless Ms. Coakley nor for the loss of “Teddy’s seat” but for Obama who, it was claimed, had worked so hard on the healthcare issue and that it now may all come to naught.

The person seemed unaware that, in fact, Obama had done very little work on the issue and had left it to the legislators in the House and in the Senate. The fact remains that there is no “Obama Healthcare Bill” or if there is I’ve seen no mention of it and I challenge anyone to produce it. Obama just wants to sign something, anything that he can claim as his signature issue. Then maybe, we'll get a "State of the Union" appearance.

Furthermore, despite claims from the left that “so many people demand such a bill", the polls are clear. No more than 35% of the people in this country want anything to do with either monstrosity and the potential combination of the House and Senate measures augurs to be even worse. You know the old definition being that a camel is a “horse designed by a committee” and you get my drift.

It seems to me that Government Healthcare is not about Healthcare at all but is all about Government.

And the election of Scott Brown reminded a few incumbents of their own upcoming contests and, to paraphrase William Wordsworth, recalled for them certain “Intimations of Mortality”. So it was not surprising that within a day or two both Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi conceded that for now, at least, the matter was, if not dead, decidedly moribund.

For me that was a mixed blessing because, while I wanted to see the abomination killed, I see it as an excellent weapon to use against the liberals in general and Obama in particular. It was for this reason that I silently applauded the demands of the Service Employees union who insisted that the effort go forward. Let’s face it, that group gave more than $60 million to the Obama campaign and they are the ones most likely to benefit by expanded governmental control over healthcare. And they’d already succeeded in getting their own “Cadillac benefit” exempted from the 40%tax due to be levied on such plans.

I’m no “Jackie Chan” but I do understand that a key component of some martial arts is the ability to use the opponent’s own weight against him and I was looking forward to the opportunity to do just that to Obama. Never mind, I have the feeling that if we just let Obama be Obama he’ll present us with more issues in the future because he just can’t help it.

So what else befell the liberals this week? Well Air America is finished and will file for Chapter 7 protection next week. And you can always rely on the loony left when all else fails.

For a start, that “brilliant” scientist, Danny Glover announced that the earthquake in Haiti was all President W’s fault because nothing had been done about “Global Warming”. And, not be outdone, Hugo Chavez contradicted this fatuous claim with his own that the disaster had been triggered by a secret American weapon as a rehearsal for an attack on Iran.

You couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried even with the assistance of certain “recreational chemicals”.

As Mr. Rogers used to say, “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood”.

The Storm Before the Calm!

I have been accused by liberals of making things up.

Moi?

So I thought today I’d start with some numbers you can check for yourself if you care to take the time to do the research and the very simple math. If, on the other hand, you don’t want to do either, well, I guess you’ll just have to take my word for it.

Tomorrow marks the first anniversary of the Obama “immaculation” and so I took a look at how the Great One stacks up against his recent peers. On average he has enjoyed a 57% job approval rating. Of course, it’s way lower than that today but at the start it was much higher and so that’s the average over the 12 month period.

Wanna’ take a guess how that compares with the last 10 presidents? Well, he places next to last and the one worse than he was not, as the liberals would expect, President George W. Bush. Nope, it was Bill Clinton at 49%.

In light of this It’s important that, before the outcome of the Coakley-Brown contest is known, we take stock of how things are going for the Democrats since they took control of the Federal Government. Regardless of the winner of Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, Americans are beginning to understand what they actually have to show for a year’s worth of life under a Government completely controlled by the Democrat party.

In short they’re not impressed.

Democrats have made a living out of vowing to hold everyone else accountable for our troubles; from Wall Street ‘fat cats’, to black-hearted and greedy insurance companies, to automakers in bed with money-grubbing big oil tycoons, to Wal Mart, to Al Qaeda… and even George Bush (who has been out of office for an entire year). Democrats have long-enjoyed that liberating feeling of pointing the finger at everyone around them for all that has gone wrong in this country…even since Barack Obama came to power.

In fact, the only folks you don’t hear the Democrats actually holding accountable for any of the evils in America are Democrats themselves. Apparently, the party that insisted they were the answer to our problem has, in point of fact, actually become the problem. That Kennedy’s seat is even in play in Massachusetts in the dawn of our Liberal enlightenment speaks volumes about the state the Democrats find themselves in.

Unemployment is up, troop deployments for two unpopular wars are up, the budget deficit is up, retail prices are up, fuel prices are up, the national debt is up, trade deficits are up, foreclosures are up…everything bad is up in America even while everything good continues to go down. Not what the Democrats had in mind, I’m sure, when they begged us to give them a majority in the hallowed halls of Congress so they could do the “People’s work”.

News that the bottom has fallen out of Coakley’s campaign in Massachusetts or that Brown might actually win this thing outright comes as the Democrats scramble to find a suitable explanation that they hope protects Obama from taking any of the blame for it. This suggests that the Democrats are, as is Obama himself, in a "damned if they do, damned if they don’t" situation one year shy of the midterm elections.

And, if you’re a Republican politician right now, the temptation to tie a Republican victory in Massachusetts to a larger referendum on Obama’s healthcare fiasco has become too great to resist. I suggest here, however, that McConnell (and all the others out there using Coakley as a one-issue whipping-post) couldn’t have it more wrong. A Coakley loss, heck, even a razor thin win, will be a referendum on the liberal agenda and its leadership by the Democrats themselves. Virginia and New Jersey should serve as two cases in point. In suggesting, recently, that “Democratic Policies Hinge on Massachusetts”, Obama has offered us a look into the future…one that ties his own fate to those same policies facing an ever-increasing rejection by a disgruntled and dissatisfied constituency.

The news coverage in Massachusetts is leaving out the laundry list of offenses committed by the Democrats to put themselves where they are today. However much Americans might like or dislike this bill or that bill, most of us (the reasonable among us at least) are turning against the way in which Democrats have chosen to govern. From 2,000 page monstrosities that no one is allowed to read, to invoking super-majority rules to create artificial victories, to parliamentary rules changes designed to block the minority from engaging in reasoned debate and amendment, to single-party closed-door reconciliation negotiations, to shifting bills to a different status, to lower the bar for gaining passage, to quitting while they’re ahead and abandoning any further action at all, choosing instead to go headlong right to the President’s desk for signature,

Democrats have shown they are sincere about winning without regard to the pain and suffering they might inflict on those of us who will be destroyed at the hands of their “governance by desperation” approach to running the country.

This disconnect between what we need and what Democrats and Obama want for themselves is fairly well described in a Noonan op-ed at the WSJ and worth highlighting here:

“You want a competent chief executive with a deep and shrewd sense of the people. Americans want him to be on the same page as they are. But he’s on a different page, and he may in fact be reading a different book.The real story is that his rhetorical and iconic detachment are harped on because they reflect a deeper disconnect, the truly problematic one, and that is over policy. It doesn’t really matter how he sounds. It matters, in a time of crisis, what he does. That’s where the lack of connection comes in.

The people are here, and he is there. The popularity of his health-care plan is very low, at 35% support. Someone on television the other day noted it is as low as George Bush’s popularity ratings in 2008.

Yet—and this is the key part—the president does not seem to see or hear. He does not respond. He is not supple, able to hear reservations and see opposition and change tack. He has a grim determination to bull this thing through. He negotiates each day with Congress, not with the people. But the people hate Congress! Has he not noticed?”

No Ms. Noonan, he has not. Nor have the Democrats on Capitol Hill. Interestingly, again looking to Coakley-Brown, Massachusetts voters have noticed and we’ll hear from them soon enough on how they wish to proceed.

Beyond that, 2010 mid-terms loom, and it’s safe to say American voters are going to hold their Legislators accountable in ever-increasing numbers for where they find themselves now.

And we're only 12 months in to the Hope and Change promised.

Heaven preserve us from another 36 months of the same?