Links and Minifeatures 2009 03 16 Monday

Carnival of Personal Finance

Obama Takes a Dive on Earmarks

President Obama has vowed to curb the number of earmarks, also known as pork, in future spending bills. A commendable promise, had his number been zero. Unfortunately, the president wants to deal with an unsavory dish by cutting the portion size.

If a given earmark cannot survive upon the merits of the project, irrespective of who gets the money or where the work is performed, we have a problem. Obama promised to cut earmarks. Thus far we have lots of soaring rhetoric on the subject from him, but no actual action.

Wrong Move: Obama's Liberal Agenda

Obama's proposed budget shows all the vision, restraint and grace of a grasping committee chairman, using the cover of a still-unresolved banking crisis to push through a broad liberal wish list before anyone notices its costs and complications. The pledge of "responsibility" has become the massive expansion of debt, the constant allocation of blame to others and the childish cultivation of controversy with conservative media figures to favorably polarize the electorate. The pledge of "honesty" and "sacrifice" has become the deceptive guarantee of apparently limitless public benefits at the expense of a very few. The pledge of "bipartisan" cooperation has become an attempt to shove Republicans until their backs reach some wall of outrage and humiliation.

I tried to tell people why Obama was selling us a phony bill of goods but people had their fingers stuffed into their ears. Now we're stuck with this clown for four years (unless we can catch him doing something impeachable - in which case we're stuck with Gormless Joe Biden, an even bigger idiot, difficult as that may be to believe. But at least Gormless Joe doesn't have religious worshippers getting tingles up their leg every time he speaks, so he wouldn't be able to do as much active damage.)

The Brokest Generation

Just between you, me, and the old, the late middle-aged, and the early middle-aged: Isn't it terrific to be able to stick it to the young? I mean, imagine how bad all this economic-type stuff would be if our kids and grandkids hadn't offered to pick up the tab.

Well, okay, they didn't exactly "offer" but they did stand around behind Barack Obama at all those campaign rallies helping him look dynamic and telegenic and earnestly chanting hopey-hopey-changey-changey. And "Yes, we can!"

Which is a pretty open-ended commitment.

Read the whole thing

Even Richard Nixon didn't focus-group his enemies list.

Team Obama -- aided by Clintonistas Paul Begala, James Carville and Stanley Greenberg -- decided to attack Rush Limbaugh after poring over opinion research. White House senior adviser David Axelrod explicitly authorized the assault. Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel assigned a White House official to coordinate the push. And Press Secretary Robert Gibbs gleefully punched the launch button at his podium, suckering the White House press corps into dropping what they were doing to get Mr. Limbaugh.

LISTEN TO THE GITMO FIVE

Desperate to placate its blame-America supporters, the Obama administration has clamped down on news from Guantanamo. Why? After their lurid criticisms of Gitmo, the Dems now have the world's worst killers on their hands.

And they don't know what to do. Responsibility sucks.

Today's imbecile measure by the Administration?

Obama administration says it will no longer use one of Bush's key phrases: enemy combatant

I am not making this up. I wish I were.

It's not Bush's phrase. It's a technically defined term under the Geneva Conventions. It denotes someone who has conducted armed operations against this country. And Obama thinks we're treating the poor widdle babies too harshly by keeping them contained in a prisoner of war camp with all the comforts except the freedom to kill Americans.

I just hope that the lives these bozos take when (not if) they attack again belong to the idiots who made the decision to release them. Alas, such is extremely unlikely. But they will kill Americans.

Morally Unserious in the Extreme

Restoring? The implication, of course, is that while Obama is guided solely by science, Bush was driven by dogma, ideology and politics.

What an outrage. George Bush's nationally televised stem cell speech was the most morally serious address on medical ethics ever given by an American president. It was so scrupulous in presenting the best case for both his view and the contrary view that until the last few minutes, the listener had no idea where Bush would come out.

Obama's address was morally unserious in the extreme. It was populated, as his didactic discourses always are, with a forest of straw men. Such as his admonition that we must resist the "false choice between sound science and moral values." Yet, exactly 2 minutes and 12 seconds later he went on to declare that he would never open the door to the "use of cloning for human reproduction."

Does he not think that a cloned human would be of extraordinary scientific interest? And yet he banned it.

This was strictly red meat for the "We hate Bush!" crowd, because there is no case made as to the morality of the change, and the case that can be made is sabotaged by what he did on cloning. Purely political.

PJ O'Rourke, himself suffering from cancer, rips the President's argument to shreds.

For the first time since Grover Cleveland, a president is going to skip the Gridiron dinner: Gridiron singed by Obama no-show

"I don't think he understands the implications of not coming to the club in the first year. It's not your ordinary state dinner. I think it would be helpful for him and his relations with the Washington establishment to come to the club."

Here's the issue, skirted around in the article and never confronted head on: traditionally, the Gridiron dinner is a celebrity roast with the President as the roastee. The presidents have long expected to tell jokes about themselves (President Bush did very so very well), and sit through a series of speakers and skits whose object is to skewer the President (whatever party he may belong to).

President Obama has decided he's not willing to serve as a target, either out of an inflated sense of self-importance or because he expects at least a few of the barbs to hit too close to home. Furthermore, it gives journalists the idea that the President is a regular guy with foibles and capable of making mistakes, an impression team Obama has been doing its best to pretend is not the case (when's the last time a Presidential candidate designated their own official seal? Not in my lifetime!), and he definitely doesn't want to encourage the idea that it's okay to make jokes about him - too many good jokes there, of a sort that would do real political damage.

The excuse that Michelle Obama decided otherwise is transparently thin. That's not the real reason, and everyone in Washington (and those who pay attention outside the capital) knows it. This decision came from the President himself. He can't face even light satirical criticism. It would show him up for the lightweight he is.

If familiarity breeds contempt, Barack Obama is the best case in point I've encountered since at least Jimmy Carter. I keep thinking nobody can really be that bad, and I keep finding out I'm wrong.

Now Obama Tells Us?

I can't see him getting elected to the White House if he had given a speech honestly disclosing what he intended to do upon inauguration.

My imam father came after me with an axe

Actually, it's worse than that: After beating her repeatedly from the age of 5 on, and repeatedly raping/molesting her, he came after her with a gang of men armed with axes, etcetera.

Oh, and this didn't happen in some nameless village in the 'stans. It happened in England. Read the whole thing.

Ed Morrissey on how Obama is getting burned by a fire he stoked: The bailout backlash problem

The angry populism in the electorate didn't begin with the bailouts, or the economic crisis. Democrats spent the last two years -- really, the last six years -- stoking that anger and attempting to turn it into electoral gold.

Hot Air also rips the president to shreds for wanting to offer government health care to everybody while wanting to offload the care for wounded veterans onto private insurers.

What's that I said above? "I keep thinking nobody can really be that bad, and I keep finding out I'm wrong." Here's another example. These men and women earned that care - and they already paid for it in terms far more precious than cash. And after wasting $1.6 Trillion dollars in the last two months, our President can't come up with the little bit extra to meet the obligations we have accepted?

Do you really need me to spell out how penny wise and pound foolish this is? Or what the likely effects will be on our armed forces?

I just found a reason why I'm sure I want him impeached and out of office if we can find a way. Gormless Joe Biden may be an incompetent idiot, but better an incompetent idiot who can't get anything done than one who can get all the wrong things done.