As I noted earlier, free-lance journalist, former NPR reporter/Miss North Dakota/Fargo North alum Roxana Saberi is being held incommunicado in Iran.

Ed at Hot Air notes:

This puts Barack Obama’s “smart power” foreign policy to the test. If Saberi’s case gets a lot of attention, the State Department will feel the pressure to get her released. This happened a few times during the Bush administration, which succeeded in all but one case to gain the release of arrested Americans.

Of course, Congress is frequently the engine of the “attention” that needs to be paid.  What is the position of NoDak’s two Senators, arch-liberal Obama supporters Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan?

There was a time we could have counted on Norm Coleman to be a voice for justice in these cases.  God willing, we will again.

Where is Amy Klobuchar, figuratively (and where is Al Franken, literally)?  Do either of our Senators/would-be Senators have the falafel to smack down the mullahs?

I’ve said for quite some time; if Bobby Jindal becomes a contender (and his performance last Tuesday didn’t help, but he’s got a lot of time, in political terms, to fix things), “Apu the convenience store clerks” will become de rigeur.

As Brad Carlson shows us, from my blog to Joe Biden’s mouth.

Along with that, look for South-Asian Americans – diligent, hard-working, education-oriented – to get shunted into the same “not-really-authentic-minority” status that the left gives Asian Americans.

I dreamt that John McCain was President last night.

I know, I know…he’s not the most Republicanny Republican and all, but think about it for a moment.

We’d have three highly qualified candidates waiting in line to be Commerce Secretary instead of Obama’s “sometimes it takes three tries to get it right.”

…yah, I am sure you think that sounds pretty smart Obammy, but I’d like to know what Michelle thinks of that.

I think you meant it takes three tries to find someone desperate enough to put “Obama Administration” on their resume knowing full well what his policies are going to do to with what’s left of “commerce” in America.

It’s why we don’t have a Titanic II. No one would want to be Captain, let alone sail on her.

If John McCain were President, we would have a cabinet packed with people that actually pay their taxes, have actually started business (vs. reading about it in a textbook), hired employees, owned homes and paid mortgages – versus trading favors with a Chicago criminal to put a roof over their head.

There’d have been no speculation of Oprah’s official capacity either.

As for the speech last night, McCain would probably have dissapointed us ala the debates been less inspiring…from a show-business sort of perspective. Not a lot of charisma or flash. Not a lot of big words. Very little emoting.

We’d have his nervous ticks instead of Obama’s sweeping, graceful poise.

…and no Hopey Changey Messiah talk.

But McCain’s math would have been better.

Obama’s Math:

Socialize Health Care

+ Cap and Trade

+ Increase Taxes on Those That Actually Pay Taxes The “Rich”

+ Halve The National Debt Deficit

= Fatal Error. Please Reboot.

Either way, we’d still have Nancy Pelosi’s assenine permagrin dental work burned into our pixels (I actually had coffee with someone this morning that had to put a towel over the right side of the TV screen last night so he could watch Obama’s sermon).

If John McCain were President, Congress would still be hashing out the “Stimulus” bill under threat of a veto, and chances are in the end there would have been less pork hanging on it’s bones – it would still be a terrible mistake, but to a lesser degree.

…and we’d all actually have some true hope for the economy and our dollar.

McCain would be fighting for government policy that might actually have a chance of stimulation, like cutting taxes to corporations, business owners and consumers, and forcing government to do more with less, like the rest of us poor saps that have the audacity to pay our mortgages, live within our means and respect our commitments and responsibilities.

As it stands, the only thing Obama has proposed to cut is military spending – in the era of the only successful terrorist attack on American soil – barely a footnote in Obama’s monologue last night.

John McCain’s speech would have been shorter. He’d be less talky-talky and more worky-worky. He would have ended his campaign once elected. Obama can’t stop his.

John McCain likely would have tackled our nation’s issues like the decorated hero/servant that he is. He’d likely have picked the most urgent, pressing target, (it’s the economy, stupid) trained his sites and directed his resources and political capital in a focused campaign dedicated to it’s destruction, and we’d have some semblance of a plan right now.

Contrast that with Obama’s reckless design to force-feed thirty years of pent up and failed liberal agendas, without regard for the timing or capacity of our economy to absorb the costs or overcome the additional friction borne by the conduct of commerce.

The President and his book-learned liberal turd-squad think you can make a train start moving again by building more track and adding more cars. McCain would feed the boiler with more coal.

In all fairness, neither President would have a clue how exactly to solve an unprecedented, systemic and global financial and credit crisis; but one would have the good sense of what not to do right now.

…but he’s still the Senator from Arizona.

A guy can dream, can’t he?

First things first;  it’s good to see Jay Reding is back to writing more regularly.  He’s one of the better policy bloggers out there, and has been for years.

And he dips into a subject

I’ve been dying to write about for weeks:  the idea of the “shovel ready” job:

What we need is not a bunch of make work jobs. Exactly what would Mr. Herbert’s plan look like? Should we take an unemployed financial analyst from Manhattan, hand him a shovel and have him dig a ditch or fix potholes on I-95? Is that really an effective use of his skills? Of course it isn’t- it’s a waste of human capital.

Leaving aside the undeniable Schadenfreud many would feel at the idea of Bernie Madoff pushing a wheelbarrow full of broken cement (or, to be honest, that I’d feel to watch my the guy who wrote my ARM five years ago cleaning the ape cages at the Como Zoo in July), I’ve wanted to ask – beyond the absurdity of thinking one can take unemployed auto workers and bank workers and put ’em out on the prairie fixing roads, has anyone noticed that building roads is a completely different operation than it was seventy years ago?  That it doesn’t involve armies of guys with shovels and pickaxes hacking the roadbed down to size?

Here’s where the standard argument about government jobs comes in: “but you’ve built a road!” they exclaim. Great, you have a road. Does that mean anyone will use that road? Sure, that road would be nice for all the trucks that aren’t going anywhere to take all the goods that aren’t being produced, but here in the real world just building a road produces a strip of concrete that may or may not get used. “If you build it, they will come” is a line from a movie, it’s not a theory of economics.

So, what do we really need? We really do need jobs, and we really do need infrastructure fixes. But those are two different problem with two different solutions.

If we want to get out of this mess, we need to tear down walls rather than build them up. The first bill that President Obama signed into law was an act that dramatically expanded liability for employers. You want to create jobs? Try not hobbling the people who create them.

The tax holiday is looking better and better.

And the earliest shot for one of those is 2013.

Hang in there.

Remember when allowing for indefinite detention of terror suspects without access to American constitutional legal protections was the greatest moral crime of all time?

No worries:Either does the Obama administration:

In Holder’s view, then, we are engaged in a war that started years before we noticed it and may never end, at least not in any definitive way. The enemy is not simply the guy who shoots at you on the battlefield, who can be readily identified; he can be anyone, anywhere who helps anti-American terrorists. He could be a guy captured in the Philippines suspected of funneling money to Al Qaeda, or (presumably) he could be the employee of an Islamic charity in the U.S. that is accused of sending money to Hezbollah.

He even brings new meaning to the “Fairness” Doctrine:

Given Holder’s invocation of cyber and mental battlefields, the enemy could even be someone accused of fomenting terrorism through incendiary online criticism of the U.S. government. The implication is that any of these people could be held in military custody without trial until the cessation of hostilities, i.e., indefinitely.

Remember when Mark Gisleson and Steve Perry fretted that the Bush Administration was going to toss them all into re-education camps by the end of his term?

As with much lefty projection, it looks like it’s a possibility – now that they are in power.

…on hearing that The One planned to appoint Gary Locke to Commerce…:

President Barack Obama’s likely third pick for Commerce secretary is former Washington Gov. Gary Locke, a senior administration official said Monday.Locke, a Democrat, was the nation’s first Chinese-American governor when he served two terms in the Washington statehouse from 1997 to 2005.

…was to wonder “what did he do wrong?”

When liberals confront recession, their first – and usually disastrous – impulse is to print more money  (Which sparks inflation and devalues the currency).  Yes, it’s Keynesianism; just because it has an academic name doesn’t change the fact that its record is fairly abysmal.

So if you’re a liberal, it’s a short jump from printing money to printing political power.  Democrats want to add a Representative to the District of Columbia:

The concept of the District, as outlined by the Founders, was that it should be autonomous and not subject to the whims and outside pressures of a state government. Those reasons, as articulated by James Madison, Elbridge Gerry, and George Mason at the Constitutional Convention, are just as relevant today as they were over 200 years ago.And while statehood supporters cite the famous American rallying cry “no taxation without representation,” that is a false analogy. The entire Congress represents the interests of the District, because every single member of Congress works in the District.

The piece is by Hans Spakovsky at NRO.

And it is the equivalent of printing money – or in this case, printing Democratic votes.

This is not an attempt to secure representation for District residents’ interests, then, but a raw grab at political power. It will establish a new, permanently Democratic seat in the House of Representatives. The bill attempts to balance that by adding a second seat as well (bringing the total number of representatives to 437), and giving that seat to Utah. But unlike D.C.’s seat, Utah’s extra seat is guaranteed only until next year’s Census — after which each state will be assigned seats in proportion to its population. The extra seat will almost surely be transferred to a Democratic state like California or New York.

Suddenly – shamefully – Garrison Keillor’s “ideas” don’t seem so absurdly far-fetched.

Barack Obama has a new web site…with some handy graphics too.

Recovery.gov

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will be carried out with full transparency and accountability — and Recovery.gov is the centerpiece of that effort. In a short video, President Obama describes the site and talks about how you’ll be able to track the Recovery Act’s progress every step of the way.

Where is Your Money Going? (click on the graphic for more detail)

*Wealth Transfers, Political Payback and the Installment of Socialism

Eight Billion Dollars. Gone.

…all you can offer is “Other“?

Al Franken has spent most of the time since the election far outside the state he purports to want to represent in the US Senate.

But he’s got time to go on Marty Owings’ “Radio Free Nation” tonight.

Might be worth a call.  See if he remembers anything about the state he wants to “represent”.

When you have some downtime today, I have an assignment for you.

Jeff Rosenberg at the Daily Liberal looks at the bill apportioning Minnesota’s share of the Porkulus spending, and asks “Where’s the pork?”

It’s interesting to see Minnesota Republicans not just adopting the national Republicans’ strategy, but also their talking points.

[Ahem.  Grrrrrrr.  Ed]

And of course, they do it even when it doesn’t make sense. Session Daily reports:

Rep. Keith Downey (R-Edina) was one of several Republicans who criticized the bill as being hastily constructed and potentially filled with “pork.”

Pork? Really? You might disagree with those spending priorities, but are they really pork? Or is this just another example of the word “pork” being used as a meaningless political buzzword?

I have an idea. I’ll post the entire text of HF 680 below; it’s actually not too long. Righties, please tell me where you think the “pork” is.

Jeff asked for help.  We should lend it to him.

Jeff helpfully posts the entire bill.  Why not skip on over there and show Jeff – not a bad guy, by the way – where the pork is?

I’ll see you over there.  Over lunch, anyway.  Time to run to work.

Since pitchers and catchers are working out down south – you know what I’d like to see this baseball season?  I’d like to see all of the teams in the major leagues work together, so that all of them win the World Series this season!

Absurd?  Of course.  To most of us.

But to those who fuss over “bipartisanship”? Not as absurd, as Thomas Frank points out in a partly-correct series of observations in the WSJ:

The way I remember it, the No. 1 issue in the election was the collapsing economy, followed at some distance by the Iraq war. On both of these questions, Mr. Obama prevailed because he was the candidate who promised most convincingly to reverse Republican policies — not because he planned to meet the GOP halfway across the charred ruins of American prosperity.

The reason the Washington media think bipartisanship is the top issue, even when economic disaster stomps Americans like Godzilla, is because of the way it reflects their own professional standards. They are themselves technically impartial, and so it’s only natural for them to wish for a hazy millennium in which everyone else in Washington is impartial, too.

As anyone familiar with the incestuous relationship between the media and the left in Minnesota knows, Frank has it only partly correct.   The media do see themselves as technically impartial, but they’re not; they’ve merely redefined their own biases as “the norm” as far as the public is concerned.

“Bipartisanship” means “everybody working together to do things our way”; see every Lori Sturdevant column ever written for prime examples of how this manifests in real life.

Frank does get this part right:

It is supposed to be high-minded stuff, this longing for a bipartisan golden age. But in some ways it is the most cynical stance possible. It takes no idea seriously, since everything is up for compromise. The role of the political parties is merely to cancel each other out, so that only the glorious centrists remain, triangulating majestically between obnoxious extremes.

…before proving that he is himself from Planet Beltway:

What’s more, bipartisanship’s boosters can’t even discern friend from foe. The Republican caucus in the House of Representatives, which seems to be growing even more conservative as its numbers shrink, has clearly resumed the strategies of the early Gingrich era — obstruction, bomb-throwing and more obstruction. But to the mainstream media, the angry Republican pols seem to mainly discredit Mr. Obama, who failed to win over the GOP. Which will, of course, encourage the bitter-enders to obstruct even more.

Never has Beltway orthodoxy looked as clueless and futile as it does today. Confronted with the greatest failure of economic ideas in decades, it demands that the president make common cause with people for whom those failed ideas are still sacred. To think we can solve our problems in this way is like hoping to chart a route to the moon by water.

That’d be the cheap irony of this situation; the Republicans spent the last four years as they did the years from 1936 to 1976; governing like Democrats.

We have political parties because people believe different things; while at the end of the day people will reach a compromise (provided they don’t run back to their corner of the country and grab their followers and their weapons – and after 233 years, we’re still avoiding that fairly well), the point, as I wrote last year, is not to cast away the highlights of ones own beliefs cheaply, but to pull like mad for them to affect and inform the final compromise.

In other words, “Bipartisanship” comes after you reach the final result of everyone pulling for their partisan beliefs.
They say “politics isn’t bean-bag”; it’s not just because some people ignore common civility.  “Politics” comes from the same root as “polite”; it’s not just the art of compromise,but the art of advantageous compromise; of “Getting to Yes”.

I’m going to give a wedgie – rhetorically, probably – to the next idiot “journalist” to carp about “bipartisanship”.
(Via Chad the Tweeter)

Will any of you that paid your taxes please turn out the lights?:

There could be tax troubles on the horizon for White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who reportedly has lived rent-free in Washington for five years but hasn’t paid taxes on the imputed income from that, according to reports.

He’s the latest in a growing list of President Obama’s nominees to have been involved in tax issues, according to those tabulating the tally in Washington.

Calls to Vice President Biden asking if these officials are “unpatriotic” have gone unanswered.

Since signing up for a forum on “Obama.com” last year, I’ve been indundated with email from various functionaries in the campaign.  Most of it was pretty typical “send us money” boilerplate.
But this past week, they asked me – all of us, really to “Share our about the Economic Crisis”

I figured, how many chances like this does a guy get?  To send my story directly to the President?

I had  to respond!

I work for a company that depends on the free and open flow of commerce, and a robust business market. My “economic crisis”is that, while I’m one of the 93% of Americans who ARE working (knock wood), my company’s business is going to get hobbled by the hiked interested rates and jacked-up taxes the “Obama” (really Pelosi) plan will foist on us all.  The “cure” might be worse than the disease.

Please stop mortgaging my childrens’ future.

That’s my crisis story.  You should put yours up there, too.

Barack Obama likely would have won the presidency without the unrestrained, tingly-legged adoration of the mainstream media.

Or course he?  We don’t know.  We’ll never know – because the press was utterly in the bag for The One.

But what’s the best way to piddle away fawning press coverage?

DTake the press for granted.

Dana Milbank at the WaPo reports that David Plouffe, Obama’s former campaign majordomo, gave a speech at the National Press Club – but tried to have it kept off the record:

Plouffe was listed as the keynote speaker at the luncheon yesterday for “Transition 2009,” sponsored by Georgetown University and Politico. The public was invited to the event — students free of charge and everybody else for a fee. But at the last minute, Georgetown announced that Plouffe’s speech would be “closed press,” even though the speech was being given in the National Press Club ballroom, described on a plaque at the door as “the sanctum sanctorum of American journalists.”National Press Club President Donna Leinwand fired off an e-mail to Plouffe and his agents stating her “strong opposition” to the press banishment from its own club. “If Mr. Plouffe wants to keep secrets,” she said, “Mr. Plouffe should stay at home.”

It’s not nice to tweak the MSM.  They might start reporting on you:

This sort of mess has become a trademark of the former Obama campaign manager. Plouffe still keeps his Obama ties — over the weekend he sent out an e-mail in his name to millions from barackobama.com titled “Urgent message from President Obama” — yet he is also profiting from them. He is reported to have received as much as $2 million for his forthcoming book, “The Audacity to Win,” and he can’t give his material away in public speeches.Plouffe’s Audacity to Cash Out caused some embarrassment for him over the weekend, when he flew to Azerbaijan to give a speech to a group tied to that country’s repressive leader. The title of that speech, “The Power of Democracy,” took on an ironic meaning when journalists were ordered to leave the auditorium before it began.

I’m sure the MSM’ll get over it.

Still, we’re not even a full month into the honeymoon yet.

Senator Judd Gregg disses Obammy and makes it crystal clear why he said “Thanks, but no thanks” withdrawing his nomination as Commerce Secretary for the Obama Abomination Administration.

“It has become apparent during this process that this will not work for me as I have found that on issues such as the stimulus package and the Census there are irresolvable conflicts for me.”

Gregg’s withdrawal is yet another in a string of embarrassments for Mr. Jimmy’s team of fools and serves to underscore the utter folly that is the “Stimulus” bill and portends a brewing census scandal.

At least a dozen candidates turned the prestigious commerce secretary’s post down before President Obama came up with Gregg, after assuring him that the Democratic governor in his home state would appoint a Republican to take his seat. Obama even joked about the difficulty of “finding a commerce secretary” to the media.

But the real reason why Gregg pulled out is probably that he found there isn’t any real place for commerce in the new administration. With President Obama saying things like “only government” can save the economy, Gregg learned quickly he was unlikely to have any power or influence on behalf of the private sector.

The current approach has been to use business and bipartisan Republicans like Gregg as window dressing. But no one’s fooled.

Well, actually, about 52.9% of us are still being fooled. Meanwhile Obammy’s back to begging someone to take the job.

Prestigious commerce secretary post? Not so much. In another time and on another team, maybe. It appears no Republican is willing to go down with the bipartisanship.

Look – “Obamessiah” was just a figure of speech; a reaction to some of his more overwrought, hyperbolic (?) supporters.  To stuff like Michelle Obama saying he was the only thing that could save this nation’s soul – that kind of thing.

So try to track me here:  Just because we joke about something doesn’t mean you have to live down to it.

Please tell me it’s a fiendishly-effective photoshop.

Please.

That is all.

The Brits deny Geert Wilders – critic of Islamofascism – entrance to the UK because it might upset Moslems who are busy picking on Jewish kids.

US Senators jump on board for a reprise of the “Fairness Doctrine”.

And a dictator messes with a hero who’s already notched one dictatorship:

Nobel laureate, former Polish prime minister, and hero of the Cold War Lech Walesa will not be allowed to visit Venezuela ahead of that country’s referendum on extending the rule of Hugo Chavez. El Jefe told Venezuelan media that Walesa was unwelcome in Caracas, where he was set to meet with opposition student groups, and would be prevented from entering the country. After Walesa cancelled his visit, Chavez claimed that he would, in fact, be allowed through customs but would be “closely monitored” on his visit.

The left’s chattering classes around the world can not handle criticism of them or those they deign to protect.

By the way, look for Jon Stewart or Keith Olberman to start bagging on Lech Wałesa sooner than later.

Judd Gregg tells Pres. Obama I’m doing my hair for the next four years:

New Hampshire Republican Sen. Judd Gregg withdrew from consideration as Commerce secretary Thursday, saying his differences with the Democratic White House ran too deep.The announcement was a fresh embarrassment for an administration rocked by a number of setbacks. While his recent predecessors each lost one or two early cabinet nominees, Mr. Obama has lost three less than a month into his term. And Mr. Gregg’s withdrawal comes two days after a bank rescue plan was widely panned by financial markets and lawmakers from both parties, partly because of its lack of detail.

Note to Oly Snowe, Arlen Spector, Sue Collins et al:  if he’s smart enough to spit out the Kool Aid, aren’t  you?

…for harm to befall others, I think it’s forgiveable to hope that dogs and tasers were used in this FBI raid:

The FBI searched the Virginia headquarters of the PMA Group in November, according to the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. PMA was founded by former Murtha aide Paul Magliochetti and specializes in winning earmarked taxpayer funds for its clients.

Good government groups have long criticized Murtha’s cozy relationship with a handful of lobbyists and defense firms, ties that see millions of dollars in government spending go out from Murtha’s office, and hundreds of thousands in campaign donations come in. Murtha has said his earmarking has helped revive his economically depressed district.

And maybe that cool battering ram tank they have in LA.

The initial in this article, in ordinary times, would seem just a tad premature:

Has Barack Obama’s presidency already failed?

Of course, these are not ordinary times:

In normal times, this would be a ludicrous question. But these are not normal times. They are times of great danger. Today, the new US administration can disown responsibility for its inheritance; tomorrow, it will own it. Today, it can offer solutions; tomorrow it will have become the problem. Today, it is in control of events; tomorrow, events will take control of it. Doing too little is now far riskier than doing too much. If he fails to act decisively, the president risks being overwhelmed, like his predecessor. The costs to the US and the world of another failed presidency do not bear contemplating.

What is needed? The answer is: focus and ferocity. If Mr Obama does not fix this crisis, all he hopes from his presidency will be lost. If he does, he can reshape the agenda. Hoping for the best is foolish. He should expect the worst and act accordingly.

It’s a philosophy I’m comfortable with.

Yet hoping for the best is what one sees in the stimulus programme and – so far as I can judge from Tuesday’s sketchy announcement by Tim Geithner, Treasury secretary – also in the new plans for fixing the banking system. I commented on the former last week. I would merely add that it is extraordinary that a popular new president, confronting a once-in-80-years’ economic crisis, has let Congress shape the outcome.

And that’d be the problem.

Look – I don’t know that President Obama ever was more than a pretty package into which the left poured its energy after eight frustrating years out of the White House.  In normal times – and with the benefit of a little gridlock – that can be a good thing.  It’s what made the ’90’s so relatively tolerable.

But today, Obama seems like nothing so much as Nancy Pelosi’s hired goon bringing the executive branch into line.

I joked for years during the Ventura Administration that if you walked into the governor’s office, you’d see a big curtain in the corner – and behind that curtain sat Dean Barkley and Tim Penny, pulling the strings and pushing the levers that made Ventura do everything (except talk and embarass the state, Ventura’s only real talents and organic duties).

It’s been less than a month, but I’m struggling to see more than that out of The President these days.

It doesn’t really make any difference to me that Barack Obama won the election.  Oh, it does mean that I gotta get down to business selling an alternative vision for 2010, but that’s just politics.

I’m still an American.

For that matter, had Socialist Gloria La Riva or wackjob Cyn McKinney won, I’d still be an American.  A disappointed and (to say the least) very politically motivated one, but an American nonetheless.

With that in mind, I’m going to depart from my traditional genial civility to say – and I say this with all due respect – every single person on  this website can eat sh*t and die a painful death.

That is all.

 Oh, who am I kidding.  No, it’s not.

I mean, weren’t these the same self-adoring nutslaps who got the vapors everytime they felt someone was “questioning their patriotism?”

I guess I’m not just writing this to be snarky or mean. Sitting as I am on the “out of power” side of things, I’m pondering the road back.  And I listen to stories like this woman, Rachel Zucker, whom I heard on American Public Media’s “The Story”.   The woman – an “artist”, a poet in this case – has lived her entire life in a society that has enough surplus wealth to afford her the opportunity to be an “artist”, rather than a farmer or a filth-shoveler or a prostitute.

And yet she had the gall to go on “The Story” and say that the Bush years “filled me witha profound sense of disenfranchisement”.  Actually, you should listen to the whole piece; the “Listen” button is at the bottom of the page.  It’s clogged with cringe-worthy moment, the kinds of thing I’d hope Ms. Zucker will find embarassing someday, but somehow doubt it’ll happen.

We try to share a country with these crybabies.

UPDATE:  OK, not everyone can undertake what I suggested; there are more than a few hoax signatures.  Including mine. 

Last Saturday, whilst appearing as a guest on Marty Owings’ internet talkradio show “Radio Free Nation“,  a liberal caller said that Obama’s stimulus package wasn’t pork, because the Merriam-Webster definition of “pork” was something that a lawmaker put into a bill to benefit his constituency,and the President wasn’t a lawmaker, so it couldn’t be pork.

I sat back and let that sink in for a bit.

And I made a mental note; being a longtime observer of liberals in action, I knew among lefties, memes are like whack-a-mole.  If they pop up in one place, they’ll soon pop up everywhere else.

And sure enough, it did.

A look at some of Obama’s claims in Elkhart, Ind., and the news conference called to make his case to the largest possible audience:OBAMA: “Not a single pet project,” he told the news conference. “Not a single earmark.”

THE FACTS: There are no “earmarks,” as they are usually defined, inserted by lawmakers in the bill. Still, some of the projects bear the prime characteristics of pork — tailored to benefit specific interests or to have thinly disguised links to local projects.

For example, the latest version contains $2 billion for a clean-coal power plant with specifications matching one in Mattoon, Ill., $10 million for urban canals, $2 billion for manufacturing advanced batteries for hybrid cars, and $255 million for a polar icebreaker and other “priority procurements” by the Coast Guard.

Obama told his Elkhart audience that Indiana will benefit from work on “roads like U.S. 31 here in Indiana that Hoosiers count on.” He added, “And I know that a new overpass downtown would make a big difference for businesses and families right here in Elkhart.”

So it’s not pork.  It’s pancetta.

Obama’s pessimistic rhetoric may be backfiring:

While President Bush was accused shortly after taking office in 2001 of “talking down the economy” – and for saying the economy was “slowing down” – Mr. Obama is using ever-heightening hyperbole to hammer home his message. But the strategy brings great risk for the “Yes, We Can” man, who just three weeks ago told America in his inaugural address that despite “a sapping of confidence across our land,” his election meant Americans had “chosen hope over fear.”

“Mr. Hope has to be careful not to become Dr. Doom,” said Frank Luntz, a political consultant and author of the book “Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear.”

“The danger for him is using the Jimmy Carter malaise rhetoric, particularly for Mr. Obama, who was elected because people thought he was the solution. There’s only so much negativity they will tolerate from him before they will feel betrayed,” Mr. Luntz said.

Remember how the really great leaders – FDR, Churchill, Reagan – led with optimism, giving people an excuse to pull together cheerfully rather than hunker down resentfully?

No?

Me either.

…on the bottom of the screen on CNN in our lobby as I type:

Delay Means “DEEPENING DISASTER”

Guess who?

Pass the Pork Package…

…or else! (Shivers should have just gone down your spine)

While we Republicans fight to make sure our own party doesn’t cross over to the dark side on the biggest act of intergenerational larceny in history, it’s important to remember that since Obama is basically getting the “Stimulus” terms dictated to him from his party’s left wing, there is a fair number responsible, centrist Democrats who aren’t thrilled with the idea of saddling our next generation with trillions in debt, either.Mike Brodigan has a good list to start with – 47 of ’em to be exact.  I’ll reproduce the whole list below the jump.

Of regional interest (to my largely regional readers) – All my Minnesota readers should call Collin Peterson – he’s in a fairly conservative district, and by Democrat standards is one of the good guys.

If in the Dakotas, naturally, Representative Earl Pomeroy of North Dakota is on the bubble, as is South Dakota’s Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin.

But wherever you are, check the list.
(more…)