In the wake of last night’s blasphemous-but-hilarious South Park, George Will’s piece on Obama’s emerging authoritarianism on the economy is perfectly-timed.

…the Obama administration, judging by its cavalier disregard of contracts between Chrysler and some of the lenders it sought money from, thinks contracts are written on water. The administration proposes that Chrysler’s secured creditors get 28 cents per dollar on the $7 billion owed to them but that the United Auto Workers union get 43 cents per dollar on its $11 billion in claims — and 55 percent of the company. This, even though the secured creditors’ contracts supposedly guaranteed them better standing than the union.

That’d be some of the “change” for which some of President Obama’s supporters had “hope”; the law no longer means what it says it means.

Among Chrysler’s lenders, some servile banks that are now dependent on the administration for capital infusions tugged their forelocks and agreed. Some hedge funds among Chrysler’s lenders that are not dependent were vilified by the president because they dared to resist his demand that they violate their fiduciary duties to their investors, who include individuals and institutional pension funds.

Not only trampling the law himself, but demanding that the hedge fund managers do the same?  In for a penny, in for a buck, I guess.

This is not gross, unambiguous lawlessness of the Nixonian sort — burglaries, abuse of the IRS and FBI, etc. — but it is uncomfortably close to an abuse of power that perhaps gave Nixon ideas: When in 1962 the steel industry raised prices, President John F. Kennedy had a tantrum and his administration leaked rumors that the IRS would conduct audits of steel executives, and sent FBI agents on predawn visits to the homes of journalists who covered the steel industry, ostensibly to further a legitimate investigation.

It’s appropriate that President Obama is paying homage to the last president who was more demigogic legend than fact.

I’ll add emphasis on the home stretch:

The Obama administration’s agenda of maximizing dependency involves political favoritism cloaked in the raiment of “economic planning” and “social justice” that somehow produce results superior to what markets produce when freedom allows merit to manifest itself, and incompetence to fail. The administration’s central activity — the political allocation of wealth and opportunity — is not merely susceptible to corruption, it is corruption.

The arrogant abuse of government power to ignore laws and manipulate the economy?

Finally, a problem the Administration can’t blame on the previous one…

President Obama campaigned on the promise he would end earmarks, one of the political lead balloons that brought Republicans from the sky and confused the electorate as to who the conservative party is.

Obama promised to change…

Mr. Obama had campaigned against earmarks, even saying he would cut them back to levels before 1994, the start of the Gingrich-GOP interregnum. Now here was Obama as president signing a bill soaked in earmarks.

…his mind. Again.

The Teleprompter-in-Chief offers this unmasked subterfuge:

“Individual members of Congress understand their districts best, and they should have the ability to respond to the needs of their communities.”

In a short 100-some days and counting, the President has broken promise after promise, putting a spit shine on and extending Bush policies he rallied voters against and clearly establishing his status as a another garden-variety liberal politician (save the magnitude), making chumps of those who voted for him and leaving the rest of us wondering:

Where is the rage now? Where is the outcry?

And…where’s the Change^®?

For those of you who think Nan Pelosi, despite her being speaker of the House and a longtime powerful figure in the Democratic Caucus, only dipped her toe into the torture issue?

Bon appetit! (it’s a video with audio).

I’ve been doing this blog for over seven years.  I’ve written somewhere north of 10,000 posts in that time.  Most of them are gone and forgotten – it’s an ephemeral medium – but I have a few favorites.

And so do other people. I have a few posts I’ve written through the years that still get the occasional commenter, years after they were written; they turn up prominently on Google, so they have a bit of a life of their own. Posts about Plain Layne, Bill Frist, Ann Nelson (North Dakota’s sole 9/11 victim), Kathleen Soliah, the Vikings Sex Cruise and Garrison Keillor still draw hits.

Brad Carlson has has a bit of a brush with this phenomenon.  Here’s now it starts:

I am still receiving comments on a post I put together last month. In that one, all I did was cut and paste an e-mail I received from AM 1500 KSTP where they announced the dismissal of talk show host Bob Davis.But the one which really takes the cake is a post where I made a throwaway comment about a long forgotten former Twin Cities sportscaster.

Read the post and see how it ends.

I’m not one of those conservatives who necessarily piddles on third parties.  They exist for a reason – or, really, two:

1. They provide a place for people who are vastly more into ideology than the mechanics of politics to ply their hobby (see also the Constitution Party, the Libertarians)
2. Occasionally, they give voice to protests against some aspect or another of the big parties. Of course, they usually remove the protesters from one of the major parties, sometimes decisively influencing elections (the Greens in 2000

Minnesota’s “Independence” Party, an offshoot of Ross Perot’s “Reform” Part from the ’92 election, has lately been a third category all by itself; “the thing that wouldn’t leave”. An irrelevant collection of wonks lost in the wilderness until Jesse Ventura won the flukey election of 1998, the IP has been clinging to its misbegotten “Major” status ever since.
First Ringer at TvM notes that the IP is has been swirling the drain since Ventura walked offstage pouting, leaving on the the question “when will it die?”

Despite a strong field of statewide candidates in 2006, arguably the best and certainly most experienced IP slate ever to appear on a ballot, the party barely crested the 5% minimum to mantain major party status and thus state funding.  And while in 2008, the last minute candidacy of former appointed Senator Dean Barkley gained a respectable 15% of the vote, the same year had the IP only running 13 candidates for various offices – its lowest total since Jesse Ventura’s 1998 win.

The answer, despite the protestations of the IP’s dwindling clot of partisans – the IP was never an independent political party.  It was, indeed, never anything more than a small support staff for Jesse Ventura’s vanity project.  And they tipped their hat when Ventura was elected to office; the people who pulled his strings, Dean Barkley and Tim Penny, were former DFLers (Penny a former Congressman, from the 2nd District); when Ventura took office, with no legislative traction whatsoever, he ran to the DFL, and governed like a mildly-apostate DFLer.  The only other significant IP official, State Representative Sheila Kiscaiden, was a very moderate Republican (some would say RINO, but not me) who’d stabbed the party in the back on many issues and was best parted with.

So what’s happening with the IP today?  Ringer has the story, or at least one that doesn’t begin with “who” and end with “cares”:

Since “shocking the world” that November night 11 years ago, the Reform/Independence Party remains fixated on lightning striking twice. Instead of focusing on building from the ground up – the IP only endorsed three candidates for local office in 2008 – the party continues to place its future on the slim hopes that one of its dwindling few candidates for major office will win.  This indie modus operandi focus has stayed with the party over its numerous transformations, from one built on personality in 1998, to a way station for misfit pols in 2002 to finally a warming house for center-left policy wonks in 2006.

Perhaps the IP will finally drop out of major party status.  Their influence has soaked up far too much Minnesota time, money and spotlight. None of it’s been earned since about 2002.

To: Distribution List (below).

From: Mitch Berg

Re: 15:01

If you are listed below, your fifteen minutes of pop-culture/reality show fame are officially over.  Please depart the public eye until the unlikely event you are asked to return. 

1. Omarosa
2. Gene Simmons
3. Ozzy Ozbourne
4. Shanna Moakler
5. The cast of Little People, Big World
6. “Dog” Chapman
7. The Real World
8. Tori Spelling
9. The Real Housewives of [anyplace]
10. The entire cast of Flipping Out.
11. Tyra Banks

Thanks for your cooperation.

That is all.

Saint Paul is looking to bring…

…Cray Supercomputer to downtown Saint Paul?

The St. Paul Housing and Redevelopment Authority will vote Wednesday on whether to approve a $400,000 forgivable loan for Cray Inc. to move into a downtown building.

Cray, a global supercomputer company based in Seattle, is considering moving about 200 employees from its Mendota Heights operation to 48,000 square feet of space in Galtier Plaza, 380 Jackson St.

On the one hand I, who used to be a contractor at Cray, am just a little surprised that Cray still exists (and that it’s based in Seattle), and that it still employs 20, much less 200 people.  I know there’s still a market for “supercomputers” in doing fluid dynamics and other really large-scale number-crunching applications, but I’d sort of thought that massively-parallel Unix and Linux distributed networks had eaten up the whole market.

Well, most of it; when I worked at Cray, it occupied an entire complex out on Lone Oak Road (it’s now an R&D facility for Ecolab) and was overflowing even that.   Then Silicon Graphics bought the place, and we know how that turned out, judging by how many Silicon Graphics computers you see out there anymore.

Crayons are a pretty tightly-knit clicque  Ex-Crayons have had their own website ever since Cray started shredding jobs in the mid-nineties. And while I was the lowliest contractor in the whole building (a tech writer doing a business plan for the Software Division), I still have some sentiment for the place; it was there, having been a tech writer for a year and already bored out of my mind with the field, that I first encountered Usability and User-Centered Design; it took four years of reading and self-study, but it was the first step in getting to my current career.

Anyway – glad to see ’em coming downtown. Hope they avoid the fate of every other entity that has ever taken up shop at Galtier…

Obama is going to keep the military tribunals. The ones he campaigned against.  The ones the hard-left took out second loans on the Volvo to try to bring pressure against.

Obama administration officials — and Mr. Obama himself — have said in the past that they were not ruling out prosecutions in the military commission system. But senior officials have emphasized that they prefer to prosecute terrorism suspects in existing American courts. When President Obama suspended Guantánamo cases after his inauguration on Jan. 20, many participants said the military commission system appeared dead.But in recent days a variety of officials involved in the deliberations say that after administration lawyers examined many of the cases, the mood shifted toward using military commissions to prosecute some detainees, perhaps including those charged with coordinating the Sept. 11 attacks.

“The more they look at it,” said one official, “the more commissions don’t look as bad as they did on Jan. 20.”

And we have a “Most Transparent Administration Ever!” alert:

Several officials insisted on anonymity because the administration has directed that no one publicly discuss the deliberations.

Prediction: when lefties say they’ll discontinue military tribunals, it means that halfway into their term they’ll have Citizens Committees carrying out drumhead trials and executions on the street.

Speaking of Red Dawn, from yesterday’s discussion; once I heard that Hollywood – as in Big Hollywood, not John Milius, the author and director of the original – was going to remake the movie, I wondered: in today’s PC environment, just who would be air-dropping into our plucky Colorado town?

I figured the most likely suspects would be:

• Fundamentalist white Christians
• Jewish settlers
• Catholic Priests
• Wall Street Hedge-Fund Managers

So I was almost relieved – and only briefly so – to see the breakdown, from a leaked version of the script:

The bad guys/invaders will now be the Red Chinese, who knocks off America in the first 20 pages, and gets help from those stinkin’ Russians later in the movie. The cause of the invasion? Oil, of course.

I did say briefly, didn’t I?

There are hints that America is kinda to blame, too. In today’s PC environment, that’s not too much of a surprise.

– Our heroes: Jed is now a former Marine back from Iraq and Matt his high school star quarterback brother; Erica is now an Asian-American cheerleader; and Danny is the African-American star running back
. Basically, all the original characters will return (including keeping the same names) but as different archetypes.

I dunno.  I don’t see quite the same angst about the Chinese.

(Yet).

Moe Lane notes that Rasmussen shows the Democrats’ Trust-On-Issues numbers are dropping faster than President Obama before Saudi royalty:

I’ll break down the declines; see the article for the original numbers:

• Economy – Down 12%
• Govt Ethics – Up 1% (who are these people?)
• National Sec. – Down 10%
• Education – Down 6%
• Healthcare – Down 2%
• Taxes –  Down 11%
• Iraq – Down 7%
• Social Security – Down 3%
• Abortion – Down 9%
• Immigration – Down 1%

Lane:

As you can see, back in October it was fairly clear that Democrats were enjoying consistent leads over Republicans when it came to how much the public trusted them on various issues. It’s also fairly clear that in most cases, those leads have been savaged.

Part ot it is the inevitable attrition that comes from being in power and having to implement you campaign promises.

Part of it is that their campaign promises and other ideas are just so wrong.

S/He who forgets history is condemned to repeat it.

S/He who forgets economics is condemned to repeat history while broke.

Thomas Sowell field-strips the Financial Crisis. Like so many crises, it’s an unintended consequence of the response to a non-existent crisis – the”Affordable Housing” crisis (remember that one? If you voted for Obama, I bet not) a few years back.

When the political crusade for affordable housing took off and built up steam during the 1990s, the share of their incomes that Americans were spending on housing in 1998 was 17 percent, compared to 30 percent in the early 1980s. Even during the housing boom of 2005, the median home took just 22 percent of the median American income.

What created the illusion of a nationwide problem was that, in particular localities around the country, housing prices had skyrocketed to the point where people had to pay half their income to buy a modest-sized home and often resorted to very risky ways of financing the purchase. In Tucson, for example, “roughly 60% of first-time home buyers make no down payment and instead now use 100% financing to get into the market,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Almost invariably, these locally extreme housing prices have been a result of local political crusades in the name of locally attractive slogans about the environment, open space, “smart growth,” or whatever other phrases had political resonance at the particular time and place.

Pick a housing market with high prices and terrible rents.  You’ll find government intervention in some form or another – New York’s rent controls, Portland’s “smart growth” – behind most of ’em.

Where housing markets have been more or less left alone — in places like Houston or Dallas, for example — housing did not take even half as big a share of family incomes as did comparable housing in places like the San Francisco Bay Area, where heavily hyped political crusades had led to severe restrictions on building. It was in precisely these extremely high housing-cost enclaves that the kind of people for whom the national housing crusade expressed much concern — minorities, low-income people and families with children — were forced out disproportionately.

Few things blind human beings to the actual consequences of what they are doing like a heady feeling of self-righteousness during a crusade to smite the wicked and rescue the downtrodden.

And that’s where the real problems – the real crisis – began.

Even where loudly proclaimed concern for the poor and minorities gave impetus to the drive for over-riding traditional mortgage lending standards, this is not to say that the poor and minorities were the sole beneficiaries or even the main beneficiaries. When you open the floodgates, you cannot tell the water where to go. Housing speculators — “flippers” — found the new and looser home mortgage rules a bonanza. So did many others. It is by no means clear that the poor or minorities came out ahead at all, after the housing boom turned to bust and many were left with mortgage payments they couldn’t meet on homes they couldn’t afford.

With rich rewards available — politically, ideologically, and financially — from the “affordable housing” crusade, there were ample incentives to keep this crusade going for years. Meanwhile, various special interests found ways to benefit themselves from all this, whether as home builders, real-estate investors, or others, and therefore added their voices in support of the open-ended goal of more home ownership through various ways of achieving, or seeming to achieve, affordable housing.

So how do we dig out of this government-created crisis?

Well, not through more government action:

While some congressional Democrats have proposed a moratorium on mortgage foreclosures or allowing judges to change the terms of mortgage contracts, Senate Republicans have proposed “providing government-backed, 4% fixed mortgages to any credit-worthy borrower.” What these proposals from politicians of both parties all have in common is an utter absence of any serious consideration of the repercussions in multiple directions of arbitrary government fiats.

Read the whole thing.

Better yet, find your Congressperson, and make them read it before you go all Jack Bauer on them.

Presenting symptoms:

1. Yesterday morning: I woke up and came downstairs.  Before I started blogging, I made myself my usual “quick” “breakfast”; a slice of whole grain bread with margarine and honey.  I grabbed a tub, sank the knife in, dabbed a schmear of margarine onto the bread (observing as I did so that the flourescent lights made the margarine seem washed out) and poured on a brief drizzle of honey.  I ate the slice as I walked to my computer room.  As I sat and started typing, I noticed that, while the flavor of the honey normally overpowers the margarine, it tasted a little bland today.  It took me a few seconds to notice that no, it wasn’t bland honey; it was aggressive butter.  It took a few more minutes of typing, chewing and swallowing to notice that it was aggressive, indeed – but not butter at all.  It was sour cream.  I’d left a tub – the same sized tub as the margarine – sitting out the night before.  While I did notice the “margarine” seemed washed out in the light, I didn’t actually make the connection until two whole minutes after I ate the stuff.
2. So I grabbed my bike and went to the coffee shop on the corner.  I ordered a large light roast.  I walked to the credenza and poured in some half ‘n half.  Then I grabbed two Splenda and ripped them open.  And poured the Splenda into the trash.  And stopped myself barely on the brink of throwing the wrappers into my coffee.

I made sure I had coffee made before I started blogging this morning…

As noted in the previous article, I hate crap.

Unless it’s good crap.

Or, if it’s bad crap, at least let it be bad crap that does something good.

Let’s be clear; Red Dawn is a crap movie.  It’s so crappy, only Quentin Tarantino should direct the remake.

And yet I love it.

It had everything a teenage guy (or in my case, a twenty year old, which in college is just about the same thing) could want.

It had all your best buds, out on a really serious adventure!

It had blatant cold-war emotional manipulation!

It had you…er, Patrick Swayze and all your buds kicking righteous ass!

It had Ferris Buehler’s sister and that Caroline In The City chick whose name eludes me, with guns!

Jennifer Gray and Lea Thompson!  I didn’t even have to look it up!

I noted long ago that I’ve only walked out of two movies in my life; Tom Hanks’ wretched The Burbs, in 1988, and Little Nicky in 2000.  Red Dawn was nearly the first; during the scene where the student council president (who later betrays the group) calls for the vote on going back to town after the invasion?  I started getting my things together to get up and go – but since it was a cold night and only homework at college awaited me, I stayed put. 

And there were more justifications for getting up and going; any scenery that Lea Thompson doesn’t shoot or blow up, she chews; you can see Powers Boothe silently cursing his agent in every scene; the ending is mawkish and awful.

But it’s a John Milius movie.  And Milius has a way of making “marinading in testosterone” fun, and even thrilling.  Dirty Harry was only a few steps above Tarantino-level dreck – but there’s not a person in the film-going world that doesn’t love it; there are people in Sri Lanka whose only English is “Go Ahead, Make My Day”, and they all get it.

And as bad as the movie is, Milius is in fine form, pushing all the same buttons that get otherwise-sophisticated Americans to get a little verklempt at “God Bless the USA”, or sing along “we’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way!” with Toby Keith. 

It’s manipulation.  It’s crap.  It’s glorious. 

It’s almost a rite of passage, these days.  I watch it with my kids, partly to point out the crap, and partly to pass on the great two-generations-from-white-trash folklore of the whole thing. 

Wolverines!  F**k Yeah!

Now, I’m going to go listen to “This American Life” to rebalance my chi.

Take two patties of crap.

Mold them around a piece of pungent, sharp swiss cheese to form a “Juicy Lucy” patty.  Grill the patties to perfection, and put them on a fresh, just-crusty-enough Kaiser bun, with Jamaica onions, tomatoes, a little smear of garlic paste, dijon mustard and ketchup.  Plate it with some impeccable steak fries with pepper-catchup and ranch dipping sauce. 

You’ll have a real work of culinary art and craft on your hands, a testimony to the skill of the cook and the quality of the ingredients…

…or you would, if it weren’t for the fact at the center of it all it’s still just a crap sandwich. 

Film buffs tell me I’m supposed to looooove Quentin Tarantino.

I can’t stand him.

Oh,  Pulp Fiction is all right; it’s entertaining, but terribly overrated.  But a little of it goes a looooong way.

Which is better than I can say for the rest of his filmography.  Reservoir Dogs is like Diner for people who were raised by bad dog trainers.  The Kill Bills  were like the sandwich above; crap sandwiches, albeit well-crafted with with the occasional “ooh, cool!” piled between the patties of crap and the bun.  I never saw Grindhouse, but I’ll take a guess and wager “crappiest” was the adjective I’m looking for.

But here’s my big beef (as it were); what would we say if, say, a music producer came to the fore whose entire oeuvre was recapturing the magic of Tommy Roe or Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods?  We – people who care about actual music – would shake our heads, mutter etro Uber Alles people have gone too far”, and go about our business.

If a chef opened a high end restaurant featuring Tang, Space Food Sticks and Cap’n Crunch, what’d the culinary crowd say?

Well, we know what some of them – the crowd that flocks to Chino Latino to get abused by the surly hipster waitstaff, the ones that get their yuks at just how tacky people used to be by wallowing in faux irony.

And that’d explain Tarantino.  He’s a one trick pony; his only trick is endless, pointless homage to the kitschiest, ugliest, shabbiest things American moviemaking has ever done.

Wheee.

Tracy Eberly at Anti-Strib once said that my dislike of Tarantino was a musician thing:

Mitch Berg has highlighted the massive chasm that exists between movie people and music people.

He actually admits to hating Quentin Taratino’s movies!

No.  It’s a “I dislike, and refuse to celebrate, crap” thing.  Accepting Tarentino as a good example, much less as the sine qua non of American filmmaking is like going to Manny’s and ordering a cow flop steak with all the trimmings.

Look – just for future references:  Doesn’t matter if it’s crap music, crap literature, crap dance or crap movies.  And it really doesn’t matter if it’s just a well-crafted, lovingly-obsessive, irony-drenched homage to crap, or the first-generation variety. Crap is Crap. 

Tarantino: he may not be crap.  He’s just built a career out of repackaging crap for those who idealize crap or, worse, think that paying homage to crap ennobles it. 

Go ahead, Quentin.  Pull.

The good news?  Roxana Saberi, Fargo native, former Miss NoDak and NPR reporter, held for three months in an Iranian prison on apparently-bogus espionage charges, will be released soon:

Saberi, a 31-year-old who was born in the United States and who has reported for the BBC, National Public Radio and other media, was detained in the Islamic state more than a month ago.

The perhaps not so good news?  She may have been released because the Obama Administration gave the Iranians what they wanted (emphasis added):

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton demanded that Tehran immediately release the journalist during a news conference on Thursday at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels.

She earlier said the United States planned to invite Tehran to a conference on Afghanistan, in a first overture to Iran.

The United States is reviewing its isolation policy on the Islamic Republic, including whether to open up a low-level diplomatic office there.

On the one hand, good thing that Saberi’s been released.

On other other; if indeed the release was accompanied by big concessions from the US, that’s probably not a great precedent.

UPDATE:  My NARN cohost Ed Morrissey at Hot Air (thanks for the link!) notes:

The Bush administration also made overtures towards Iran on Afghanistan on a similar basis; the holdup wasn’t a lack of US invitation, but Iranian recalcitrance on accepting a more public connection with the US on the issue.  The Bush administration had conducted talks with Iranian representatives on Iraqi security on several occasions over the last few years, so this isn’t exactly a new concept, and wouldn’t have triggered Saberi’s release.

There may still be a stinking concession at the heart of this, but the Afghanistan conference won’t be it.

I could have written more clearly. 

The US and Iran have been talking – on some low, diplomatic level or another – for years.  Every administration has had some sort of dealing with Teheran.  And Ed notes correctly that we have worked with Iran on things like Afghanistan in the recent past, and that the Afganistan meetings aren’t a quid pro quo for releasing Saberi.

My biggest concern – let me write it clearly this time – is this: given that Tehran’s mullas have always acted (as any government normally will) in Iran’s government’s interest, and that the Iranians have just gotten away with kidnapping an American (ten days after Obama’s inauguration, in fact), is the old ’70s-’80s tactic of grabbing Americans back on the table as a means of exacting concessions from a weak, inexperienced president?  Just like 30 years ago?

Time will tell.  But I don’t think this is a good start.

I run into this over and over again; Democrats in debates or discussions who accept as a matter of faith that “republicans are the party of the rich, and the tics are the party of the working people”.

I ask them why, then, that the Plains states and the West – which are, demographically, very disproportionally “working people” – vote so reliably Republican.  They usually respond by calling me a racist and a sexist and asking why I hate children.

But I digress.

The claim, of course, beggars all the evidence.  My favorite factoid; in the 2002 Senate campaign, the average Coleman contribution was about a fifth that of the average Wellstone donation – but they raised about the same total.

Of course, plutocrats like Warren Buffet, George Soros and Bill Gates, to say nothing of a uniform cross-section of Hollywood’s super-wealthy, have long supported the Democrats; for the fantastically wealthy, a regulated society is a predictable (and, for currency speculators like Soros, exploitable) one.

And in the last election, Wall Street contributors backed Obama over Mac.

There might be a bit of morning-after remorse from that last, though:

Wealthy Wall Street financiers and other business figures provided crucial support for Mr Obama during the election, backing him over the Republican candidate John McCain as the right leader to rescue the collapsing US economy.But it is now dawning on many among them that Mr Obama was serious about his campaign trail promises to bring root and branch reform to corporate America – and that they were more than just election rhetoric.

A top Obama fundraiser and hedge fund manager said: “I’m appalled at the anti-Wall Street rhetoric. It was OK on the campaign but now it’s the real world. I’m surprised that Obama is turning out to be so left-wing. He’s a real class warrior.”

The bad news is that people on Wall Street seem to be very stupid.

The good news?  Michelle Obama’s campaign claim that our best and brightest go into hedge funds rather than teaching and nursing would seem to be wrong.

“These big companies are based in New York Boston, Seattle and Silicon Valley, where Democrats dominate,” [Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute] said. “Obama’s tax plan is already cleaving him from his big corporate supporters,” he said.Mr Obama made no secret of his plans to raise taxes on the “working rich” (individuals earning more than $200,000) by imposing a top income tax rate of almost 40 per cent, and there is little surprise that those plans remain on track, even during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Note to self and world; next time, let the whole gabbling bunch of Brooks-Brothers-clad cretins go bankrupt.

After running a campaign that harped on “vision”, Obama’s administration desperately lacks it:

President Barack Obama is about as visionary as the guy who invented Dippin’ Dots, Ice Cream of the Future. Far from sketching out a truly forward-looking set of policies for the 21st century, as his supporters had hoped, Obama is instead serving up cryogenically tasteless and headache-inducing morsels from years gone by.On issue after issue, Obama has made it clear that instead of blasting past “the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long,” (as he promised in his inaugural address), he’s moving full speed ahead toward policy prescriptions that already had less fizz than a case of Billy Beer back when Jimmy Carter was urging us all to wear sweaters and turn down our thermostats. Instead of thinking outside the box, Obama is nailing it shut from the inside.

My theory – and I’ll stand by it – is that much of Obama’s electorate is too young or too complacent about politics to know that “different from Bush” isn’t really “different” in the great scheme of things.

Obama’s big schtick so far seems to be counting on populist Macguffins  both vague (“hope and change”) and specific (“green jobs”, “raising taxes on the wealthy”, “high speed trains”) for his actual policy substance:

Consider the president’s recent “major” speech about transportation, yet another Castro-like exhortation in which Obama boldly rejected the failed policies of the past in favor of the failed policies of the future.

“Our highways are clogged with traffic,” he noted, before unveiling his big fix: Shiny new trains that go almost twice as fast as cars. Forget that, as urban historian Joel Garreau has long documented, our country has been decentralizing its living and working patterns for decades now, migrating from virtually all urban centers (except maybe for booming Washington, D.C.) to relatively low-density suburbs. In a big, spread-out country where individualized service at the coffee stand, on cable TV, and in your computer is the new normal, our chief visionary officer is talking about a one-size-fits-all solution that will surely bomb even bigger than NBC’s Supertrain.

It’s an axiom of economics that “making someone pay more or less for a good or service than they would on their own causes grievous unexpected consequences”.  I suspect that the same holds true for trying to chivvy, shame or coerce people into living where they ordinarily won’t would work about the same.

Remember for the past eight years?  When “Rendition” – grabbing a terror suspect and sending them quasi-legally to a country with more casual laws about coercion and suspects rights, was the subject of boundless ire?  And even a Meryl Streep JDAM of a movie?

No?

Either does The One’s Attorney General:

Cautioning Holder that any potential investigation into the Bush administration’s torture program could result in Democrats being roped in, “Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Richard Shelby of Alabama pressed Holder on the CIA’s ‘rendition’ program that moved terrorism suspects from one country to another,” reported Domenico Montanaro with MSNBC.“Didn’t that happen during the Clinton administration?

“Yes, Holder said.

“‘How many did you approve?’ they asked.

“Holder said he’d check the record.”

Despite frequent condemnation of the practice around the world, rendition — the secret capture, transportation and detention of suspected terrorists to foreign prisons in countries that cooperate with the U.S. — remains in the CIA’s playbook, thanks to a Jan. 22 executive order issued by President Obama.

Given The One’s reversals on Guantanamo, coercive interrogation and tribunals, expect to see…:

1. A media/administration campaign showing that terrorists are bad people who don’t deserve due process, and
2. Hollywood movies that show terrorists killing Americans, possibly (although this is unlikely) without the aid of secret vatican orders or groups of rural fundamentalist Christians.

Count on it.

Porn star Stormy Daniels claims to be running for Senate, in a move I fear will upset the gravitas and integrity…:

Miss Daniels, 30, born in Louisiana, insists she’s serious and is spending her own money on a “listening tour” to hear what people have to say as she considers a possible run, and said she isn’t just starting a publicity stunt to promote her work or embarrass Mr Vitter.

However, she said she hasn’t lived in Louisiana for seven years – she currently resides in Florida – and would need to re-establish residency to run.

…of the pornography industry.

Americans that lived through The Great Recession of “Ought Nine” will not soon forget the lessons learned and in fact US savings rates are up; consumer debt has fallen like a rock.

In the end, history will point an impeaching finger at liberals whose “high-mindedness” led to the most catastrophic and costly financial crisis in American history.

And yet…

Grants of as much as [$16,000] to first-time buyers and the lowest interest rates in 49 years have emboldened more than 40,000 young [home buyers] to take out home loans since October, stoking demand for properties that cost less than [$385,000].

These buyers may be vulnerable when interest rates begin rising, potentially triggering a jump in foreclosures that will drive down property prices, cut profits at banks and damp household spending, which accounts for half the economy. A surge in defaults in America was a key trigger for the financial crisis that pushed the global economy into its worst recession since World War II.

History repeats itself indeed, only this is in Australia, where the toilet swirls the other way and lessons are apparently learned the hard way.

“We’re mirroring what happened to the U.S. three years ago, when people who shouldn’t have been in the market bought houses,” said Martin North, managing director of Fujitsu Australia, a Sydney-based property-consulting company. “It’s a strategy set for an unfortunate outcome.”

G’Luck, mate!

Pawlenty vetoes the DFL’s tax bill on before going fishing.

And – wonder of wonders – although the DFL’s Recovery Confiscation bill passed in both houses, the GOP closed ranks and stood its ground against the DFL’s rapacious assault in both chambers.

Bob Collins at NewsCut:

Under the Legislature’s plan, taxes would rise on alcohol, credit card companies that charge high interest rates and couples earning more than $250,000.

Send your local GOP rep a note of thanks; phone calls are best.  Also to the two Dems in the Senate (Sparks and Tomassoni) and the sole DFLer of principle in the House (Pelowski).  All of them can expect immense pressure from the Tics and their hordes of kept groups to override the veto.

The House can — and will, probably — try to override the veto and most of the media experts focus on the need to get three Republicans to defect to their side, presuming that all the DFLers vote for the override. But will they?

Well, we lost six last year. Hopefully the caucuses learned their lesson last year.

It’s a good day!

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism from 11AM-5PM. 

• Volume I “The First Team” –  Brian and John kick off from 11-1.
• Volume II “The Headliner” – Ed and I are up next, from 1-3.
• Volume III, “The Final Word” – King is on next, dishing his own personal brand of conservative hurt from 3-5.  Check it out.
• And don’t forget, our long-time colleagues David Strom and Margaret Martin lead things off on the David Strom Show from 9-11AM!

(All times Central)
So tune in to all six hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of sanity. You have so many options:

• AM1280 in the Metro
• streaming at AM1280’s Website,
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• UStream video and chat (at HotAir.com or at UStream)
• Podcast at Townhall (usually uploaded by Monday morning).
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488!

Join us!

Non-survival of the dumbest for example.

Drivers and front-seat passengers in Florida may be cited for not wearing seat belts when a new law takes effect on June 30. Known as a “primary” seat belt law, the law allows enforcement officers to pull vehicles over solely for a belt violation

Sounds reasonable enough, right?

Signed into law by Gov. Charlie Crist earlier this week, the legislation makes Florida eligible for up to $35 million in federal grant money created in 2005 as an incentive for states to establish seat belt laws.

Thanks for holding firm to the principals of conservatism there Chuck. It’s my pleasure to pay federal income taxes and see them spent in Florida to incent some dufus to wear his seat belt.

100 Plus days in and America’s first half-African American President is proving to be everything and more of what conservatives warned he’d be…and has reneged on so many campaign promises to his liberal supporters that one loses count.

the handwriting is on the wall regarding our new leader’s game plan for America.  Spend other people’s money like a Madoff on steroids.  Let every enemy on the planet know there’s a wimp in the White House. Let every ally know the wimp in the White House will do nothing to help them when push comes to shove. Let the 50 states know there’s a power coup in play that strips them of constitutionally guaranteed liberties.  Let every company know that neither they nor their non-union employees are safe from Chicago-Way thugs and their mouthpieces in the media. Let the 300 million American citizens know that the rule of law, applied equally to all, is about to be replaced by special favoritism in the form of “empathy.”

If asked for a word to describe an Obama voter, there is only one that any sentient person could offer: SUCKER.

They’re the kind of voters that every crooked politician has drooling dreams about every night of the year.

I’ve never been much of a video game player. 

Part of it was that even as a kid, I was never much wired to stand around the arcade feeding quarters into game machines.  Part of it was that I was an incredible cheapskate as a kid; I found myself wracked with guilt one day my junior year of high school when I wasted four quarters playing Asteroids (which is still the best vid of all time) in one orgy of dissipation. 

But later – as in, in my mid-twenties – as I hung around one or another of the bars I worked at, I found the urge to while away the odd hour here or there playing videogames.  And then, finally, I succumbed to addiction.  I burned up countless after-work hours and quarters playing Tetris, the Russian-themed geometry speed game whose theme music I can hum note for note to this day.

And I suspect that I could surround myself in a miasma of post-video-traumatic stress disorder by sinking a buck or two into Tetris Furniture.

Dream?  Nightmare? 

Discuss.