If you have health insurance, you know about Coordination of Benefits; if you have a family and have a spouse or partner who might have health insurance, your plan wants to get their plan to chip in for part of the costs.  It’s understandable…

…when treating run of the mill illnesses.

The Administration wants to extend this idea to veterans; he wants the Veterans Administration to coordinate benefits with veterans’ civilian healthcare providers to help pay for care of vets’ service-related conditions.

The commander of the American Legion is not amused:

It became apparent during our discussion today that the President intends to move forward with this unreasonable plan,” said Commander David K. Rehbein of The American Legion. “He says he is looking to generate $540-million by this method, but refused to hear arguments about the moral and government-avowed obligations that would be compromised by it.”The Commander, clearly angered as he emerged from the session said, “This reimbursement plan would be inconsistent with the mandate ‘ to care for him who shall have borne the battle’ given that the United States government sent members of the armed forces into harm’s way, and not private insurance companies. I say again that The American Legion does not and will not support any plan that seeks to bill a veteran for treatment of a service connected disability at the very agency that was created to treat the unique need of America’s veterans!”

I’m a tax hawk, who is all about finding ways to cut government spending and privatize government functions.

I also believe in restricting government to the places and functions that it’s supposed to be dealing with.

One of those – one of the few, really – is defense.

And so while I’ve mercilessly mocked those stupid “happy to pay for a better Minnesota” signs, and am very penurious about taxes as matter of principle, taxes related to defense, and to taking care of those who volunteer to defend this country (especially their service-related injuries) are among the very few I’ll pay without a whole lot of pushback.

It’s a stupid plan.

And I’m trying to picture what would have happened if a Republican administration would have suggested it.  Thousands of addlepated leftybloggers would launch “Why Does The President Hate Veterans” posts; Jon Stewart would snark and smirk; Anderson Cooper would furrow his brow and scowl.

But now that it’s The One?

Worries about the Administration’s competence are metastasizing across party lines:

The tag of incompetence is powerful precisely because it is a nondenominational rebuke, even when it yields a partisan result. It became the strongest argument against the GOP hammerlock on Washington and, over two elections, gave Democrats their turn at total control.But already feelings of doubt are rising again. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid were never held in high regard, so doubts about their motives and abilities are not surprising.

What matters more is the growing concern about Obama and his team. The longest campaign in presidential history is being followed by a very short honeymoon.

Imagine Hurricane Katrina – only across the entire economy and nation!

Polls show that most people like Obama, but they increasingly don’t like his policies. The vast spending hikes and plans for more are provoking the most concern, with 82% telling a Gallup survey they are worried about the deficit and 69% worried about the rapid growth of government under Obama. Most expect their own taxes will go up as a result, despite the President’s promises to the contrary.

None other than Warren Buffet, an Obama supporter, has called the administration’s message on the economy “muddled.” Even China says it is worried about its investments in American Treasury bonds. Ouch.

Note to Liberals: be less concerned about those who may or may not hope Obama (or his long-term goals, sure) fail.  Be more concerned over whether he’s going to be an epic failure.

In the months leading up to inauguration, I said – tongue firmly in cheek – that I thought Obama could be the worst president of my adult lifetime on inauguration day.  While I was joking, this past six weeks can’t make his supporters feel all that confident.

Just as people who move to New York from elsewhere become the most preening, arrogant New Yorkers, some of us who come to conservatism from liberalism are the most vituperative about our rejection of vast swathes of our former beliefs.

So I don’t give liberals a whole lot of credence on economics.

Still, it can be useful to see what they’re telling themselves.

Jeff Rosenberg shut down “Twin Cities Daily Liberal” to join “MNPublius” last week.  Congrats to both Jeff and the MNPublii; one hopes the hire was accompanied by  Aaron Landry being perp-walked from the MNPublius office as jeering onlookers pelt him with rocks and garbage.

But I digress.

Jeff’s a good guy, and he’s made the odd good point in his oeuvre – but Emperor’s Clothes-watchers should perk up at this bit from MNPub yesterday, titled “Under Obama, the stock market is stabilizing“.

Of course it’s “stabilizing”.  As long as companies still produce things that people need to buy, some companies will retain some value, and that value will be reflected in the equity market for their stocks.  Until this nation resorts to being a subsistence-farming economy with a barter currency system, companies will be worth something.

Yes, I know conservatives say the stock market is experiencing a catastrophic collapse under Obama, but they also said the fundamentals of the economy were strong under Bush.

And both are true.  If the former were not true, the market would, tautologically, not be off 43% in the past year; if the latter weren’t fact, there’d be no talk of recovery, no matter who to thank.  “Strong fundamentals” – a capable workforce, a currency capable of supporting commerce, management that can find and exploit opportunity – are the reason that 70-90% of us are not subsistence farmers, as our anscestors were 100-300 years ago, and why we’re unlikely to revert to that, even now.

You have to take conservative arguments with a grain of salt.

(Although not due to anything you’ll read here – but I digress.  Ed.)

The truth is that, in Obama’s first six weeks, the market’s volatility has decreased, and though the declines of the Bush economy haven’t stopped, they haven’t become worse, either.

That’s because, short of complete monetary collapse and reversion to barter and subsistence farming – in short, as long as there’s a market out there – then there is a bottom.  Where is that bottom?  As a theoretical matter, when the market capitalization of publicly-traded companies is equal to their physical and financial assets; when the combined value of alll the hundreds of millions of shares of 3M stock, for example, is the same as the value of 3M’s buildings, computers, inventory and bank accounts – presuming that any of those things have worth at all (again with the “forestalling monetary collapse and not heading to the woods with your rifle and your bag of oat seeds”).  The real bottom, presuming the fundamentals of the economy are strong enough to see us into a recovery, is somewhere north of that, depending on the  potential investors see or, paradoxically, less than that for companies that have no future.

The trouble is that conservatives and the media like to use charts like this, which ignore even the recent past [courtesy of Media Matters]:

The trouble is that liberals use charts from Media Matters.  Let’s break it down:

But the truth looks more like the chart below. Under Bush, the Dow Jones lost 6,000 points, or about 43 percent of its value, from its peak in 2007. That includes about 3,000 points lost since September 2008. Under Obama, the Dow has continued to slide, but it is only down about 1,000 points since its low during the Bush administration.

Which makes sense, until you get into the “why” of it all.

The first 3,000 was the impact of the collapse of the housing bubble.  No question about it: it was a financial catastrophe.  And while the Bush Administration and Congressional Republicans did try to beat back some of the governmental idiocy that subsidized the inflation of the bubble in the first place (the systematic socialization of risk and privatization of reward – read “distortion of the free market” – that allowed the bubble to grow and put Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac on the hook to clean up when it popped), there’s plenty of blame to go around; the failure of the Bush Administration to expend the political capitol needed to turn the idiocy back; the Dems complete ignorance of the issue going back to 1998, when the Clinton Administration started instituting the policies that led us to disaster, and so on.

That’s 3,000 points over a little over a year; figure about 250 points a month.

Which, by many accounts (and let’s be honest; if you put 100 economists into a room, you’ll get 175 theories) pretty much covered the correction from the housing bubble.

Then, from September – in the waning months of the Bush Administration, when it became pretty clear that Obama and his socialist, interventionist policies were going to hold sway, and when the (frankly) spendthrift Bush Administration did its level best under Henry Paulson to speed the transition to government funding of the whole mess, the market justifiably reacted – through January, the market shed another couple thousand points. That’s around 400 points a month, depending on where you demarcate your starting and finish lines.

And in the past 45 days, the market has reacted to Obama’s his full-throttle power-dive into a socialist command economy, his tax-hiking, and (I think it’s fair to say) indications of his administration’s incompetence, and burned through over 1,000 points, speeding to what may or may not (the coming weeks will tell us) be close to the Dow’s hard bottom.

You do the math; that’s a 401K-shredding 600-point-per-month pace.

So yes, Jeff – while “sloughing off all value to the point where the market is down to not much above asset value” is a form of “stabilization” (in the same sense that a crashing airplane doesn’t get much below ground level, provided the ground below the plane doesn’t open beneath it and swallow the plane up whole), Obama has “stabilized” the market.

By your leave, we’ve had enough of this kind of “stability”; we’d like him to stop before he “stabilizes” healthcare, home values, Americans’ net worth, and our foreign policy.

By your leave.

CORRECTION: TC Daily Liberal, not MN Liberal Report.  To be fair, Twin Cities leftyblogs sorta run together after a while. MNBlue, MNSpeak, MN Liberal Report, Daily Liberal, Powerliberal, PowerMonkey, Daily Monkey, MNObserver, MNObsessive, MNCompulsive…who’da thunk “branding” was the one thing Mark Gisleson (“Norwegianity”) would excel at?

Chas Freeman withdraws from the bid for chair at the National Intelligence Council:

“Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair announced today that Ambassador Charles W. Freeman Jr. has requested that his selection to be Chairman of the National Intelligence Council not proceed.  Director Blair accepted Ambassador Freeman’s decision with regret.”

Ed Driscoll notes:

Freeman has been under fire for quite some time, though the White House has had little to say on the matter.

It’s Limbaugh’s fault, obviously.

Four years ago, I and most thinking Americans had a field day, roundly ridiculing a couple of risible strains of “liberal” whinging:

• Stars who claimed they’d “move to France” if George W. Bush won the election.
• Vacuous lefty blog-gerbils who yapped about the Blue States seceding from the union and joining to form “The United States of Canada”, and leaving the red-voting “Jesusland” states to themselves (I had particular fun with this, as well as pointing out the political and historical illiteracy of the idea; most of Canada west of Ontario is as red as Montana).  I had extra-special fun with these morons.
• Acres of “He’s Not My President” bumper stickers.

These were many of the same people, by the way, who tearfully demanded that conservatives “stop questioning their patriotism”, by the way.

But I digress.  The vacuous snivelling hamsters got their president finally.

It’s the other side I’m concerned about now.

We got a call on the show last Saturday from a guy who’s question echoed one I’d heard from not a few people on blogs, on Twitter, and around about in recent months – itself a reprise of something I heard a lot back in the seventies and, just a bit, in the early nineties.

“When should we stop talking and start the active resistance?”

I often ask these people – why?

“It’s never been worse than this!”

I’m starting to lose patience with some of them.

Whenever anyone says anything is “the worst ever”, they’re almost always wrong.  They almost always really mean “the worst I’ve seen”.

Politics is not the dirtiest and nastiest it’s ever been (that’d be the Jackson/Adams contest in 1828, or any election where the Hearst papers uncorked their smear machine); this is not the worst unemployment since World War II (not even close, not yet)…

…and if you’re a freedom-loving American, the Obama administration is shaping up to be a bad one, perhaps a horrible one.  But it’s by no means the worst we’ve seen on any count.

Spending?  Roosevelt’s New Deal was worse.  So far.

Gun control?  While Obama’s record is bad, he hasn’t done anything yet; Democrats from FDR through Clinton all took their swipes at the Second Amendment, from Roosevelt’s prohibitory taxes on automatic weapons (which eliminated gang warfare!) to Clinton’s “1994 Crime Bill”, which did for many less-fashionable liberties what Bigfoot does to junked cars.

Civil Liberties?  Three words; J. Edgar Hoover.  FDR, Truman, Kennedy and LBJ got away with things that’d make any of the ofay gerbils that were protesting George W. Bush’s “Abuses” gag up their skulls.  Nixon invoked executive orders that gathered unprecedented “emergency” powers unto the executive – which has had libertarians chattering amongst themselves for almost forty years.  Obama bears watching; the Dems in Congress bear even more of it.  But so far, the threats are minimal (while still intolerable).

Repackaging vacuity as “change” and “audacity?”  OK, there Obama’s in a league of his own.

Overall demoralization of the parts of this country that matter?  The seventies were worse.  They had everything we have today and more – instability, out-of-control government, the Middle East going nuts, stagflation, Jimmy Carter – and a nation that was coming off of Vietnam, which, if you don’t remember it (and I only do through the prism of a 12 year old’s memory) was the most demoralizing thing to happen to this nation since the mid-thirties.  I don’t know if anyone ever ran the numbers, but Carter’s “Malaise Speech” must have prompted more population-wide suicides than any other single event in American history (shaddap about Oberlin undergrads popping too many Valium after Kerry lost).

And even that wasn’t the worst it’s gotten.  In my father’s lifetime – well within my grandparents’ early adult lives – there were those in the mainstream who seriously considered socialism, communism, even pre-war Naziism viable models with much from which we could learn, even much to emulate for our own good.  There were those in positions of great power who actively sought to incorporate “the best” of these ideologies into our own.

The point being that, so far, the Obama Administration isn’t the worst thing our constitution, our economy and our society has faced – yet.  And while the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and the Founding Fathers well-recognized the possibility that Americans might need to throw off another tyranny someday, this isn’t it.

Not yet.

It’s a big government, and it’s getting bigger.  It’s a not-ready-for-prime-time government, run by a lot of very canny people who buffaloed a lot of our nation’s not-too-bright with a lot of breezy platitudes, and which rode to office on an almost-but-not-quite-unprecedented wave of discontent with the status quo.  It’s a government full of poltroons and ideological three-card-monte sharks.  But it’s not a communist dictatorship.

It was elected, for better or worse.  And we have three years and eight months to make the case that it should be thrown out of office and – this is the important part – nobody’s changing that.

If they do?  Well, get back to me then; it’ll be then you should think about putting on the camo and grabbing Grampa’s Garand and heading into the north woods.

Until then?  It’s still America.

As Douglas Adams said, “Don’t Panic”.

On the one hand, I feel for the Obamas; they took a lot of flak from our British friends and allies over their choice of gifts for Gordon Brown during his recent state visit.

Now, I’m a guy.  I don’t always have impeccable insticts when it comes to gift giving.  Of course, I also don’t have a State Department with a full-time protocol staff, but work with me here; I’m not the kind of guy who’s going to hoot and holler over this sort of thing (like the media would have done had it been President Bush, for example).

Still, I’d have rather had him plead “I’m a guy”, or “I’m a naif from flyoverland” with the critics of his performance with PM Brown, than have his handlers gush that, really, this president isn’t ready for prime time.

His excuse is the same one every high school sophomore tries to pull.  He’s tired:

Sources close to the White House say Mr Obama and his staff have been “overwhelmed” by the economic meltdown and have voiced concerns that the new president is not getting enough rest.

But isn’t there a staff to deal with this sort of thing?

British officials, meanwhile, admit that the White House and US State Department staff were utterly bemused by complaints that the Prime Minister should have been granted full-blown press conference and a formal dinner, as has been customary. They concede that Obama aides seemed unfamiliar with the expectations that surround a major visit by a British prime minister.

But Washington figures with access to Mr Obama’s inner circle explained the slight by saying that those high up in the administration have had little time to deal with international matters, let alone the diplomatic niceties of the special relationship.

Not every person in the Administration is “dealing with” the “meltdown”! 

How “not ready for prime time” is he? (Emphasis added):

A well-connected Washington figure, who is close to members of Mr Obama’s inner circle, expressed concern that Mr Obama had failed so far to “even fake an interest in foreign policy”…The American source said: “Obama is overwhelmed. There is a zero sum tension between his ability to attend to the economic issues and his ability to be a proactive sculptor of the national security agenda.

So (if the “well-connected figure” is right), Obama can’t multitask? He can’t lead a country in a time of immense international peril and deal with the economy?  In other words, he can’t do the job that he convinced 53% of the American people he was perfect for?

Why, it’s almost as if being a one-term Senator and “community organizer” isn’t adequate background for the most powerful, responsible job on earth!

[NOTE to liberal commenters: As an excuse for Obama’s shortcomings, “Oh, yeah?  Well, Dubya was stupid!” is rapidly approaching the end of its shelf life.  Be advised.]

…You’re only a Year Awaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!

Barack Obama is tough on earmarks! Just like he campaigned.

White House budget director Peter Orszag says the Obama administration isn’t happy with the billions of dollars aimed at lawmakers’ pet projects – also known as earmarks. Obama had campaigned on changing the way such money is appropriated by Congress.

Gosh darn it. The President’s not happy. So he’s going to use his Veto power, right?

Nope.

Yet Orszag says Obama doesn’t want to revisit the spending bill Congress put together before he was elected and wants to move on. Next year, according to Orszag, when Obama is fully involved in the next budget from the start, earmarks will be handled differently.

Sure they will. It takes more than a year to grow a spine does it?

That’s Change^® you’ll just have to wait for.

I hope your effort to institute socialilsm fails, too.

 In fact, I hope it fails even more than Rush does!

By the way, all of you – my show is the Northern Alliance Radio Network, Volume II, heard every Saturday from 1-3PM Central on AM1280 in the Twin Cities, or at Town Hall for podcasts.

No, really. Fail fail fail. Not you, Mr. President, personally, but your policies, yes. Definitely.

Feel free to sic your dogs on Ed and I. Really. Please hop to it!

One side effect of the Democratic campaign against Rush Limbaugh has been to increase — dramatically increase — the talk show host’s ratings.

This morning I asked Rush if he had any numbers he could share on just what effect the increased visibility has had on his business. This is his response:

The latest numbers I have are for January, well before this kerfuffle began, and they are through the roof — six shares in NY, for example. There are daily ratings taken now in about the top 15 markets but I have not seen them yet. All I can tell you is that as of January, we booked 80 percent of all our 2008 revenue and we’ll be over 2008 by the end of this month.

Given those numbers, it’s clear that the most decisive economic stimulus produced by the Obama administration so far has been at the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.

Socialism bad!

You’re Nancy Pelosi’s lapdog!

You’re destroying the market!

Who the hell does Michelle’s hair? T

hat should give you and your staff plenty to respond to. Please see to this. Thanks.

Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the Obama Bear Market, named for it’s cause.

“It’s the Obama bear market,” said Dan Veru, who helps oversee $2.8 billion at Palisade Capital Management in Fort Lee, New Jersey. “We don’t know what the rules are in so many different areas the government is touching.”

In all fairness, the market had been sinking long before Obama won the election, but looked to be turning a corner, maybe even establishing a bear market low, after November 20th. The market gained double digits after that day, then Obama started making his plans known, and Jimmy Carter II took it down another notch.

Traders continue to cite the Obama Administration’s plans as the primary driver of stocks — and while miracles cannot be achieved overnight, investors have been left wanting by what they’re interpreting as inaction or an effort, through additional funds provided to zombie institutions, to kick problems a ways down the road.

The stock market is a collective of our wealth and a predictor of the health of our economy. Barack Obama is making all the wrong moves and we are all paying for it.

Had we seen tax cuts and a simple shoring up of “safety net” programs, like unemployment insurance, social security and medicaid, already in place for times like these, we’d already be on our way to a recovery and the market would be reflecting that.

As it stands, the American people are getting all the things from Barack Obama that so-called extreme conservatives warned us about, and to which the media turned a blind eye and a tingling leg.

A massive and poorly-timed stimulus package that will have absolutely no immediate benefit to the economy, and a tax increase for Americans best positioned to pull us out of this recession.

So is the very real question of whether the $787 billion stimulus plan is sufficiently robust or properly focused. The new spending pathetically “repeats the mistakes that got us here,” says Robert Albertson, a principal at Sandler O’Neill and a former Goldman Sachs banker.

“After 18 years of record spending, much of it on credit, consumers must and will de-lever and save the next $1 trillion to $2 trillion of income. Only private businesses create job multiplication and true future spending power,” says Albertson. “That requires a savings and investment program, not a doomed spending program. The latter tact ate up the resource base for six years during the 1930s Depression, with little or no effect on unemployment.”

But Obama sees our would-be saviors, business owners, investors and risk-takers as the enemy. The market disagrees.

Earlier in the week, Bespoke Investment Group analysts observed that the Dow has never had this poor a beginning of the year in its history.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 20 percent since Inauguration Day, the fastest drop under a new president in at least 90 years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

…and that is no coincidence.

“President Obama said Tuesday that he is not intently focused on the ‘day-to-day gyrations of the stock market,’ comparing the downward roller-coaster on Wall Street to the fickle nature of political polls,” the NYT reports.

” ‘You know, it bobs up and down day to day,’ Mr. Obama said. ‘And if you spend all your time worrying about that, then you’re probably going to get the long-term strategy wrong.’ “

You’ve already taken care to accomplish that Mr. President. The next falling index, sir, shall be your approval numbers. We don’t need Jim Cramer to tell us that.

…but I wish I could short them right now.

That hope that may now become a reality as the American people come to realize what the WSJ observed today…

The dismaying message here is that President Obama’s policies have become part of the economy’s problem.

Americans have welcomed the Obama era in the same spirit of hope the President campaigned on. But after five weeks in office, it’s become clear that Mr. Obama’s policies are slowing, if not stopping, what would otherwise be the normal process of economic recovery. From punishing business to squandering scarce national public resources, Team Obama is creating more uncertainty and less confidence — and thus a longer period of recession or subpar growth.

I don’t have time today to elaborate but this picture is worth a thousand syllables…

…and why?

[Jimmy Carter II] has chosen to spend his scarce resources on income transfers rather than growth promotion. Most of his “stimulus” spending was devoted to social programs, rather than public works, and nearly all of the tax cuts were devoted to income maintenance rather than to improving incentives to work or invest.

The powers in Congress — unrebuked by Mr. Obama — are ridiculing and punishing the very capitalists who are essential to a sustainable recovery.

That’s Change^® you’re going to lose your job over. Hopefully not you – the President.

The press is doing its job, asking the Administration the tough questions.

Like How do Michelle Obama’s arms get so fabulous?

The Obama effect has been that women of all ages have been inspired to take responsibility for their health and their body,” said Duggan. “As the first lady of the United States, at 44 years old, and with two young children, Mrs. Obama has shown the world that you are never too busy to take care of yourself and look good doing it too,” he said.

Ooh.  That’ll leave a mark.

And how about that crucial question – what soft drink does the Administration prefer?

Is Pepsi actually the choice of the Obama Administration?

My reporting at the White House suggests the answer is a resounding no. Several senior Administration officials are committed cola drinkers, and without fail they spend their days sipping from a can of Diet Coke, a product of Pepsi’s chief competitor, Coca-Cola.

The American media; “defending freedom” since 2000 until 2008.

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?”

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“?

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.

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?

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.

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.