Cy Thao – a state senator from Saint Paul – earned what (in a just world) would be a footnote in history two years ago, when he summed up the true meaning of socialist/fabian statist/Big-L “Liberal” government as concisely as anyone in history:

When you guys win, you get to keep your money.

When we win, we take your money

Cy Thao (DFL St. Paul), 2007

Seriously – this is Bartlett’s-grade stuff.

Yesterday, on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, Tom Brokaw gave The Interview That Will Live In Infamy, on Meet The Press.

Money quote (among many – this one closely paraphrased from memory):

BROKAW: “Whoy nault teik thus ulpurtoonitty tull raise thul taxes un gaaaus to fower dullars uh gaullon, luyeek peopull wurr prupared tull pay?”

Literal Translation:  “Why not take this opportunity to raise the taxes on gas to $4/gallon, like people were prepared to pay”.

Ethical Translation, from Condo-Pink Limo-Liberal to English:  “Neither of us have paid for gas in years, and if you jacked the income tax to levels that even choked the Swedes to death I’ll still be netting seven figures; why not sit down at the great Drum Stool of Power in the White House and imitate Keith Moon?”

Unless it’s my pork!

Barack Obama on “Meet the Press:”

“What we need to do is examine: What are the projects where we’re going to get the most bang for the buck? How are we going to make sure taxpayers are protected?

“You know, the days of just pork coming out of Congress as a strategy, those days are over.”

Yeah! All Pork will now emanate from the White House.

“We are not going to simply write a bunch of checks and let them be spent without some very clear criteria as to how this money is going to benefit the overall economy and put people back to work. We’re not going to be making decisions on projects simply based on politics and — and lobbying.”

You know, like I did when I was a Senator.

“It makes no sense for us to shovel more money into the problem if you have not seen an auto industry that is committed to restructuring — restructuring that, frankly, should have been done 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago,” he told reporters.

“It makes no sense for us to shovel more money into the [economy] if you have not seen a [Federal Government] that is committed to restructuring — restructuring that, frankly, should have been done 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago,” he [should have] told reporters.

Despite the nation’s massive debt, Obama said he won’t be focusing on building a balanced budget at the start of his administration.

…or the middle of his administration.

…or the end of his administration.

“We understand that we’ve got to provide a blood infusion to the patient right now to make sure that the patient is stabilized. And that means that we can’t worry short term about the deficit. We’ve got to make sure that the economic stimulus plan is large enough to get the economy moving,” he said.

Let’s dissect what Mr. Jimmy just said. We have to make sure to print and/or borrow so much money that the economy will have to get better?

“But the overall thrust is going to be that 95 percent of working families are going to get a tax cut and the wealthiest Americans … are going to give up a little bit more,” Obama said.

Over 30% of Americans already have a zero federal income tax liability. Ah, there’s the problem, Mr. Oprahma sir.

You can’t do math.

Since Barack Obama’s entry into the presidential horserace, and especially since the election, the number of legitimate reader comments winding up in my “moderation queue” – the place where my blog’s publishing software stacks up comments that have “questionable content” – has skyrocketed.

Now, if you include links in your comments, your comment automatically winds up in this blog’s moderation queue; many/most “spam” comments include links in an attempt to crank someone‘s traffic up.

But lately, there’ve been more link-less comments ending up in moderation – indeed, quite a few.

It has a lot to do with the fact that the economic philosophy that many on the right would accuse the President-Elect of espousing – socialism – has embedded within it the name of a rather common anti-impotence drug that is the subject of a hell of a lot of spam.  It’s one of the good-sized list of keywords that my blog filters just to make sure the comment is legit.
So if you plan to write comments about “socialists” and so on, either don’t be alarmed if it doesn’t get published until the next time I get online…

…or call it something like “fabian statism”.

Thanks.  That is all.

They say you can tell a lot about a man by the company he keeps, or in this case, appoints. President-Elect Barack Obama may acknowledge his lack of executive or business experience but will he recruit to reinforce these deficits?

Not as of yet.

Where are the advocates for businesspeople and investors in President-elect Barack Obama’s incoming administration? So far, not one of his cabinet appointments, especially those dealing with the economy, has any significant business experience, and there is little to be seen on the résumés of the likely candidates for as-yet-unfilled positions.

Some might argue that the business background of key members of the Bush administration — from the president himself to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson — did no good for the economy.

But going to the other extreme — totally ignoring experience in how the business world works — is unlikely to be good for the country as a whole or for investors. This is particularly true for the senior economic-policy team.

The Obama economic team so far is dominated by academics with no real-life experience, from his choices for Treasury secretary to chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to secretary of commerce.

If the business community was overrepresented in the Bush administration, it looks to be underrepresented in the incoming Obama administration.

As they say, stupid is as stupid does. If Barack Obama is to be judged by his selections thus far, the economy and the business community that represents its only hope for recovery will soon be in the hands of a cadre of theorists and academicians that won’t have a clue about what to do with it.

Worse yet, and I fear more likely, is that Obama’s economic team may actually think they know what to.

Obama’s campaign monologue displayed a remarkable dearth of any understanding of basic economics and a veiled disdain for business and capitalism. Joe the Plumber made headlines for this very fact. Obama’s most recent appeal, to create the largest welfare program in the history of America under the guise of “investment” and “job creation” is a patent example of liberal lunacy and may be the undoing of what is left of America’s economy.

You can’t creat jobs by taking more money from taxpayers.

Obama will apparently not be governing as close to the center as the media had been reporting, as recently as this past week.

A liberal only has one lever to pull and Obama plans on pulling it with all his might.

Infect everyone else.

The unions are largely to blame for a crisis that it appears will cost taxpayers between $15 and $25 Billion but not for the reason you think.

Even if a deal for a $15-billion to $17-billion preliminary bailout comes together this weekend to keep carmakers afloat into 2009, they will continue to be dogged by their most significant competitive disadvantage: a high-priced, unionized workforce.

And yet there is nothing inherently unsustainable about employing a high-priced, unionized workforce. The crisis of Detroit’s wage bill is entirely relative. Specifically, their labor costs far exceed the low-cost, nonunion American workforce at the U.S.-based, foreign-owned plants of competitors Toyota, Honda, Nissan and Subaru.

If the UAW really is to blame at all, then, it is because of the union’s utter failure to unionize any of the transplants. What has the UAW been doing all these years? Isn’t it the responsibility of any good union to protect union employers from competitive labor disadvantages by organizing wall to wall, throughout the industry? How could it have left these transplants unorganized? As is now clear, when the UAW exposed the Big Three to insurmountable competitive disadvantages, it cut its own throat.

The UAW is to blame for the Big Three Crisis. Not because they sucked the Big Three dry. Because they didn’t suck everyone dry.

Foreign automotive manufacturing transplants here in America produce some of the highest quality cars in the world, subject to the same safety and emissions regulations as the Big Three, and historically with some of the most satisfied workers in the industry. Honda has and Toyota will soon export product from here.

They’ve proven it can be done profitably; in America with Americans, and without the UAW.

What is being posited here is not a foreign concept (no pun intended). Force successful automakers to drag the dead weight of the failed strategies of the Big Three.

Mr. Obama calls it “spreading the wealth.”

I call it Socialism.