VDH Lists Lessons Learned After Obama

Victor Davis Hanson has a great article up listing ten lessons that the American electorate will have learned from having Barack Obama as our President for the past three years.   A sampling:

1. The type and nature of a presidential candidate’s prior experience will be examined as never before. Obama’s two years in the US Senate are now universally seen as insufficient preparation. The result will be more emphasis on executive experience and far longer tenure....  

2. For the time being, the media have lost any credibility as nonpartisan and disinterested investigators of presidential candidates. That many journalists now admit they were “saps” or accept that Obama was unqualified only confirms prior culpability.... 

3. Ivy League certification and prestigious awards will mean far less.... We are no longer impressed that Barack Obama and Eric Holder have Ivy League law degrees, or that President Obama and Steven Chu hold Nobel Prizes — not after Solyndra, Fast and Furious, and the present stagnation. Americans assume that Herman Cain learned far more of value turning around Godfather’s Pizza than Barack Obama learned as editor of Harvard Law Review....

5. We are reminded that populism and the high life don’t mix. Barack Obama’s efforts to play Huey Long were sidetracked by First Family detours to Martha’s Vineyard, Costa del Sol, and Vail. One cannot both beg from and demonize Wall Street, and still play community organizer....   

7. Barack Obama has essentially ended the smears against the Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols. Having himself smeared the prior administration relentlessly, he became de facto its greatest defender. One cannot insist past practices were immoral or illegal and then embrace or expand them all. “War criminal” will recede into the insanity of yesteryear, given that no logician could figure out how waterboarding three self-confessed mass murderers was a crime, while vaporizing two thousand suspected terrorists — including American citizens — by Hellfire missiles is not...  

Read the whole thing.  

Birthday Today - Thelonious Monk

Thelonious Monk, one of the most idiosyncratic (and greatest) jazz pianists, was born today in 1917.   Monk was one of the intellectual leaders of the Bebop moment in jazz in the post-war era, at a time when "serious" jazz music was almost mainstream -- Monk was one of only five jazz musicians ever to be on the cover of Time (Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck, and Wynton Marsalis are the others).   And his unique style -- highly percussive, dissonant, with melodies and unmelodic riffs angling back and forth in strange new combinations -- has been often imitated in the years since.   Here is Monk with one of his greatest compositions, one that the Regular Daughter at age 10 is trying to learn, "'Round Midnight" (in a slightly toned-down version):

  

The Incredible Shrinking President

This is actually not a funny portrait by Michael Goodwin in yesterday's New York Post:

The reports are not good, disturbing even. I have heard basically the same story four times in the last 10 days, and the people doing the talking are in New York and Washington and are spread across the political spectrum.

The gist is this: President Obama has become a lone wolf, a stranger to his own government. He talks mostly, and sometimes only, to friend and adviser Valerie Jarrett and to David Axelrod, his political strategist.

Everybody else, including members of his Cabinet, have little face time with him except for brief meetings that serve as photo ops. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner both have complained, according to people who have talked to them, that they are shut out of important decisions.

 

President Obama has become a lone wolf, a stranger to his own government.

 

The president’s workdays are said to end early, often at 4 p.m. He usually has dinner in the family residence with his wife and daughters, then retreats to a private office. One person said he takes a stack of briefing books. Others aren’t sure what he does.

If the reports are accurate, and I believe they are, they paint a picture of an isolated man trapped in a collapsing presidency.

I have seen reports like this only in what I would call "fringe" Internet sources -- mostly from the anonymous blogger "Ulsterman" and his anonymous "White House Insider."   I believed them, because they rang true psychologically to me.   This is what it would look like if a not-that-smart-but-incredibly-arrogant political novice got elected President on a wave of hopey-changey happy talk, and then had to confront an intractable reality ill-equipped by experience, talent, or temperament.   He would sink into a smaller and smaller sphere, afraid of being humiliated, afraid of being in a room with grownups who know the score.    But I had never seen this kind of spooky reporting in a mainstream outlet... the portrait of Obama here is scary, sad, "disturbing."  

Look for more of this.  

How's That Arab Spring Going?

One of the things you have to hand liberals is their capacity to believe things based upon what are essentially pop culture myths long after the facts have disproved them.   The average American liberal still believes, for instance, that their were no actual communist spies during the McCarthy Era; that Che Guevera was a romantic revolutionary and not a murderous thug; and that global warming is going to kill us all.  

Another myth that has taken hold is the myth of the "Arab Spring," which occurred only a few months ago, and yet which had already become hardened into a story of idealistic youths throwing off the shackles of repression to stride into the light of freedom.   It was never so -- the eruptions of popular opposition to repressive regimes in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere were largely led by radical Islamist elements such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, who don't want freedom, but instead want to impose sharia and anti-Western/anti-Americanism.   But the Left still believes it.

So when you hear someone say that the "Occupy Wall Street" idiots are an American version of the "Arab Spring," you might show them this story about how things are trending in Egypt:

The clashes Sunday night raged over a large section of downtown Cairo and drew in Christians, Muslims and security forces. They began when about 1,000 Christian protesters tried to stage a sit-in outside the state television building along the Nile in downtown Cairo. The protesters said they were attacked by "thugs" with sticks and the violence then spiraled out of control after a speeding military vehicle jumped up onto a sidewalk and rammed into some of the Christians.

Most of the 24 people killed were Coptic Christians, though officials said at least three soldiers were among the dead. Nearly 300 people were injured. Egypt's official news agency said dozens have been arrested.

The latest clashes Monday broke out outside the Coptic hospital where many of the Christian victims were taken the night before. The screams of grieving women rang out from inside the hospital and some of the hundreds of men gathered outside held wooden crosses. Empty coffins were lined up outside the hospital.

There were no word on casualties from Monday's clashes.

Christians, who make up about 10 percent of Egypt's 85 million people, blame the ruling military council for being too lenient on those behind a spate of anti-Christian attacks since Mubarak's ouster. The chaotic power transition has left a security vacuum, and the Coptic Christian minority is particularly worried about a show of force by ultraconservative Islamists, known as Salafis.

But, then again, given the rhetoric in this country about "radical" evangelical Christians -- frankly, I've never met one -- maybe it's not surprising that the Left in America wants to side with the people who murder Coptic Christians in Egypt.   

Girl of the Day - Dorothy Lamour

It's Dorothy Lamour's birthday today.    Born in 1914, Lamour is best-known for her star turn in the wartime "Road" movies opposite Bob Hope and Bing Crosby -- I remember her vaguely from those movies, which appeared usually on Saturday afternoon TV, wearing a sarong and singing somewhat forgettable songs.   But, man, were those movies funny, Hope in particular... we forget how great he was.   You can see why the troops in World War II loved him, and kept loving him for decades after.   Here's a clip from one of the best, The Road to Utopia, with Lamour singing "Personality":

Birthdays Today - Fletch and Bourne

Somewhat mediocre birthdays today.   Chevy Chase, amazingly, turns 68 today.   Chase is still best known for his Saturday Night Live stint in the 70s, and he had a decent run in some comedy classics for a few years after that, including in Caddyshack and Fletch, but he never quite had the career people predicted when he first came on the scene.   Here's a clip from SNL that captures him at his peak:




It's also Matt Damon's birthday -- he's 41.   Damon has had a big career so far, and I imagine it will keep getting bigger, particularly if he agrees to star in another one of the Bourne movies, which are among my favorite action movies ever:

Girl of the Day - More Natalie Wood, Please!

When I hit my 1000th post a couple of days ago, I looked back to the beginning of the Regular Guy Believes and recalled that my first post had been about Ronald Reagan.   Well, my first Girl of the Day was Natalie Wood, for the simple reason that she's probably my favorite Hollywood actress ever (at least in terms of beauty).   So I guess there's nothing wrong with looking back to her either:

It's the eyes that get you.  



Yep, it's the eyes.

Three for three.   It's the eyes.

Okay, maybe it's not just the eyes.   So sue me.  

Cardinals!

How sweet it is!   Cards 1, Phillies 0.

Chris Carpenter pitched the game of a lifetime, a three-hit shutout on the road with everything on the line against arguably the game's best pitcher, Roy Halladay.   What a great, great game.    Now, on to the Brewers.   I'll be wearing red around town next week, believe me.  

Girls of the Day - Nose Art Version

The men who flew B-17's over Europe in World War II suffered tremendous casualties... 46,500 killed or wounded out of 250,000 crew members.   So it seems particularly poignant how these young men dressed up their bombers' noses with portraits of young ladies -- they were expressing both what they were fighting for, and what some of them would never get to experience.   Here are some examples of B-17 nose art I've found, once again through the miracle of the Internet.   Some of them are racier than I would have expected (and I doubt would be allowed in today's military):

Here is the most famous, I suppose, due to the movie Memphis Belle:

Cool stuff.   It's one of the great boons of the current age that historical artifacts like these can be preserved and seen instantly by people around the world with a click of a button.  

Lest we forget.

Preference Cascade Update

The opposition -- and the intensity of opposition -- to President Obama is solidifying.   Before August 2011, Rasmussen's polling had Obama at an approval index rating of  negative 20 or worse (strong approval minus strong disapproval) only intermittently, with -20 daily ratings once in 2009 (a single day in December), only a few times per month in 2010 (with a high of five daily ratings of -20 or worse in September 2010, leading up to the mid-term elections), and only a few times per month throughout 2011 until August.   In August 2011 -- and I trace this to Obama going on vacation to Martha's Vineyard at a time when unemployment was still high and the debt crisis had metastasized -- Obama had ratings of -20 or worse on 21 out of 31 polling days, with a monthly average of -21.   In September 2011, Obama again had an average approval index rating of -21, with ratings below -20 on 22 out of 30 days.   In October so far, he's had approval index ratings below -20 every day, with his average dropping to -23 for the first week of the month.  

In other words, the people who strongly disapprove of Obama now seem to be fully convinced that he needs to go, and the people who strongly approve of him seem to be reduced to a stable, small contingent of true believers.   The consensus opinion on Obama now seems carved in stone:  incompetent loser.

Steve Jobs - The Businessman as Hero

It's somewhat ironic that the man who best symbolizes what we ought to be doing to create jobs in this country was named Jobs.   Steve Jobs, the brilliant entrepreneur who brought us Apple and a host of products that have transformed the world, died this week at age 56.   He will be sorely missed, not least because he symbolized something we ought to celebrate in this country more -- the Businessman as Hero.   Here is Kevin Williamson from NRO making the essential point:

I don’t know what Steve Jobs’s politics were, I don’t much care, and in any case they are beside the point. The late Mr. Jobs stood for something considerably better than politics. He stood for the model of the world that works.  Once you figure out why your cell phone gets better and cheaper every year but your public schools get more expensive and less effective, you can apply that model to answer a great many questions about public policy.

Jobs was sometimes criticized for not being a philanthropist along the lines of Bill Gates.  Mr. Jobs’s contribution to the world is Apple and its products, along with Pixar and his other enterprises, his 338 patented inventions — his work — not some Steve Jobs Memorial Foundation for Giving Stuff to Poor People in Exotic Lands and Making Me Feel Good About Myself. Because he already did that: He gave them better computers, better telephones, better music players, etc. In a lot of cases, he gave them better jobs, too. Did he do it because he was a nice guy, or because he was greedy, or because he was a maniacally single-minded competitor who got up every morning possessed by an unspeakable rage to strangle his rivals? The beauty of capitalism — the beauty of the iPhone world as opposed to the world of politics — is that that question does not matter one little bit. Whatever drove Jobs, it drove him to create superior products, better stuff at better prices. Profits are not deductions from the sum of the public good, but the real measure of the social value a firm creates. Those who talk about the horror of putting profits over people make no sense at all. The phrase is without intellectual content. Perhaps you do not think that Apple, or Goldman Sachs, or a professional sports enterprise, or an Internet pornographer actually creates much social value; but markets are very democratic — everybody gets to decide for himself what he values.

I've often meditated on the muddled thinking that characterizes much of our public discourse about what work is valuable.   When young people are in high school or college they are encouraged to do "service" projects, which invariably means volunteering to do something that seems good in a liberal sort of way, like serving food at a soup kitchen, or teaching poor children how to read.   They are rarely lauded for working at paying jobs, although, if they are being paid for doing something, that work is obviously by definition valuable to their employer.   Similarly, we have heard from Michelle Obama how young people should be encouraged to reject the world of paying jobs in the private sector to do public service.   But isn't doing work for someone who wants to hire you and pay you for doing a job doing something of value for society?

Jobs exemplified the notion that starting a business, providing a service or a product that customers want, fulfilling needs or desires of consumers, is a good thing to do, and makes people's lives better.   Making money in this view is not evil, rather it's a measure of how much value you are providing to society.   The idiocy of the current administration, and why businessmen appear to be standing on the sidelines waiting for the next one, is that Obama and his ilk appear to be telling businessmen that what they are doing in providing goods and services to paying customers is somehow a bad thing, an evil thing that they must be punished for.   It's an insane attitude that can only come from people with ideological blinders on -- they could simply open their eyes and look around themselves at the computers and cell phones and iPods and iPads and laptops and flat screens and cars and planes and abundant food and affordable clothing and all the other things that businessmen have given us, and reach the inevitable conclusion that we owe men like Jobs a debt of gratitude... they don't owe us anything, much less higher taxes.  

Treading Water

We're treading water on jobs according to the September data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics this morning.   Here are the key points:

• Unemployment rate was unchanged at 9.1 percent.  Since April, the rate has held in a narrow range from 9.0 to 9.2 percent.
• The economy added 103,000 non-farm jobs, but 45,000 represented Verizon employees returning to work after a strike.
• The number of unemployed persons, at 14.0 million, was essentially unchanged. 
• Unemployment rate for African-Americans was 16.0 percent, showing little change.  
• The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) was 6.2 million.  
• The civilian labor force participation rate, at 64.2 percent, and the employment-population ratio, at 58.3 percent, were little changed.
• The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) rose to 9.3 million in September. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job.
• In September, about 2.5 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, about the same as a year earlier. These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.

I've said this before, but it bears repeating.   We have a workforce of approximately 150 million Americans.   That workforce grows by 1-2% every year due to population growth, including immigration.   That means we need to create 1.5-3.0 million new jobs every year just in order to keep up with population growth.   And that means that 103,000 jobs, which translates into a little over 1.2 million new jobs annually, isn't even keeping up with population growth.   The only reason the unemployment rate isn't going up is because more and more people are falling out of the workforce, either becoming discouraged or else working in the underground economy.  

We desperately need to change our policies toward business, and that means we desperately need to get rid of Obama in 2012.   What worries me is whether we can wait that long.

Birthday Today - Johnny Cougar Version

John Mellencamp fka Johnny Cougar fka John Cougar Mellencamp turns sixty today.   It's an almost everyday occurrence on this blog that the Regular Guy is shocked that someone he remembers from his youth is suddenly at a fairly advanced age, but then again the Regular Guy himself is getting up there, and it's all happened so damn fast.   Anyway, Mellencamp's songwriting, while not on the level of a Springsteen, were very much a part of the background music for my early 20s, and if the measure of great music is that it lasts, well, then, his has lasted.   Here's one that I suspect the Regular Son will be playing in a garage band soon:

Sarah Palin Out

Sarah Palin, like Chris Christie, has decided not to run for President.   Looking back at my comments on Palin over the past eleven months, I seem to have vacillated between defending her from unfair attacks by the left-liberal media and arguing that she lacks the experience and gravitas to be President.   I also always thought that she would decide that not running for President allowed her to have more influence than running and losing, as she inevitably would; that it allowed her to maintain her family's privacy (at least a modicum of privacy... she's still a media figure, after all); and, most of all, maintain her ability to make a lot of money.   I only wish she had made the decision months ago; she's been a bit of distraction from the real candidates.   

The Regular Guy's 1000th Post

Coming up on a year on this blog at the end of October, and this is my 1000th post.   Not all of them have been great, and some were not even good, and the blog has too many "girls of the day" for the Regular Wife's taste, but it's still been fun.   The very first post I did was a "smile of the day" featuring this guy, who I sort of wish was still around to run in 2012:

Oh, and by the way, this is already the Regular Guy Believes' biggest day in terms of pageviews ever.   Thanks again to the hoaxers at ar15.com... I couldn't have done it without you dudes.   It doesn't feel half bad to have fallen for such a cleverly done joke. 

How to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

Apparently there are two sure fire ways -- or at least these are the only two the Regular Guy has been able to discover in the past 11 months I've been doing this blog.

First, you can post pictures of Kathy Ireland in a bathing suit.  

It worked before, it will work again.

Second, as I discovered today, you can get hoaxed by the dudes at ar15.com.   You got me, guys.   And thanks for stopping by.  

What the Left Wants Redux

I commented a couple of days ago here on the idiocy of the leftists who are part of the "Occupy Wall Street" protest movement.   This picture -- swiped from Ace of Spades -- pretty much tells the whole sad story:

I mean seriously, I can't understand why this guy can't find a good job.   He seems to have everything employers are looking for -- education, a cheerful attitude, personal responsibility, a marketable skill set.   What could be holding him back?   (Perhaps the glazed, don't-look-in-the-crawl-space-I-might-have-buried-something-there look?)

But I have a pretty decent idea why he can't find a date.... unemployed, living in his mom's basement, lots of hungry cats prowling about, and a mound of debt for taking Marxist-Leninist-Feminist-Transgender-Queer Theory classes at SUNY-Binghampton.   (Oh, and that look again.)   Not exactly what the girls would call a keeper.

Reality is hard.   It's not the job of the government or the job of your fellow citizens to shelter a grown man from reality.   As the gamblers in the old days used to say to rubes who wandered into the pool hall -- Get a job!

***

UPDATE:  I am informed by some semi-obnoxious readers (just happy to have readers at all) that the picture above is a hoax.   Well, maybe so.   But it's representative of a whole lot of the Occupy Wall Street crowd, whose similar handwritten messages are captured in photos that can be found here.   If this guy is a spoof, he's a dead-on spoof that caught me and the blogger at Ace of Spades.  Ah, well.   This whole Internet thang shore can be confusin'.  

The Stimulus - Reductio ad absurdum

We've seen how the federal government could waste $535 million on a failed green energy company, Solyndra.   But the real problem with the federal government and the Obama administration's stimulus plan is that it wastes money thousands of dollars at a time too, and although those wasted dollars add up, they are often too small for anyone too notice or care about.   Here's a story from today's Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that captures the absurdity of a government with too much of our money (or China's money for that matter), needing to spend it on anything, no matter how ill-conceived:

Eight new Dodge Grand Caravans, purchased 10 months ago with $186,192 in federal stimulus funds, are sitting unused in storage at a county park because Waukesha County has found no takers for its proposed workers' van pool program.

Public Works Director Allison Bussler said transit officials have been pitching the program to employers, whose workers could drive and ride the county vans to and from work for a fee.

So far, not a single minivan has been put into service.

Any reasonably intelligent adult could tell you what's wrong with this project.   First, people don't want to drive to work with their co-workers.   They want their private life to be separate from their work life, and the drive in to work is part of their private life -- they listen to the music they want, or the talk radio they want, or the sports talk radio they want; they stop when they want to get a doughnut or coffee; they drop off their kids at school; they run a quick errand; they get up early some days to get in a quick workout at the gym, etc.   

Second, picking up a number of people adds time to the process.   Most people already don't have enough time in the morning and are rushing to work.   They don't want to have to wait by the curb while Sue from Accounting pulls her stuff together or while Phil from Marketing goes back in to get his cell phone that he forgot.

Third, buying in to this kind of program requires a company to administer the program, to organize its workers into car pools.   Government doesn't understand the cost of administering things because it's paid for by taxpayers.   Companies do understand it.   (The article notes that: "The driver or van pool coordinator must keep daily and monthly reports and logs of use, passengers, mileage and maintenance."   Who wants to do that?)

Fourth, and most obviously, the cost of getting to work right now is paid for by the workers themselves; to the company it's free.   Why would a company now want to pay a fee for the privilege of having their employees drive in a crappy state-owned mini-van, and likely be later to work than they were before?    (The fee, incidentally, is $575 per month, or around $7,000 per year, not an insignificant sum for a business.   Why would they take on this extra cost?)

I've thought about this for five minutes and poked some significant holes in the concept.   Did anyone at the federal government handing out stimulus checks spend any time at all thinking about whether this was a good use of our money?

Finally, here's the part of the article that really drove me insane:

Even though the new vans are idle, County Executive Dan Vrakas praised the idea as an innovative way to provide mass transit.

"I want that program to be successful," he said. "I think it's an innovative way to run transit. We have too many empty buses running around and this is a way to have a small bus, a van, full of people, that pays for itself - except for the initial capital costs."

Vrakas acknowledged that county officials are frustrated the vans are not even on the road, much less full or paying for themselves. "We thought there would be more of a demand," he said.

If they already have empty buses around, why on earth would they think that their would be demand for more mass transit in Waukesha County, one of the most car-happy suburbs I've ever seen?   And, in terms of "paying for itself," something that is a capital purchase like a car that "pays for itself - except for the initial capital costs," really doesn't pay for itself at all, does it? 

Sheesh!  

Solyndra Update

There's not much new in this article about Solyndra other than fleshing out with evidence of internal emails how much the White House knew early on -- meaning before the President's appearance at the company in May 2010 to boast about how it was the type of company that would lead the nation into a green energy future -- about how screwed up the company was financially.  But the real news to me is the publisher, the New York Times.   If Obama starts losing the New York Times, he's a goner.  

This may sound paranoid, but I can't help thinking that there's starting to be a concerted effort among the liberal elites to give Obama a reason (sufficiently damning scandals) to step aside so that Hillary Clinton can ride in and save the Democratic Party from disaster.  

***

Oh, buried in the story there's this nugget:

Brad Jones, a founding partner of an investment fund that put money into Solyndra, in an e-mail exchange with Lawrence H. Summers, then a top economic adviser to President Obama, observed, “Every administration seems to feel like it knows better than the private markets how to allocate capital, and I’ve just never seen that to be true.’’

Like every conservative hasn't been saying that for years!

Girl of the Day - Boardwalk Empire Version

I've enjoyed the HBO show Boardwalk Empire, now starting it's second sesason, with Steve Buscemi and the great Michael Shannon, set in Atlantic City at the beginning of Prohibition.   Buscemi's character, Nucky Thompson, is the mobbed-up, corrupt City Treasurer who runs the Boardwalk and imports liquor to sell to the New York City crime syndicate run by Arnold Rothstein (Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Al Capone and other historical figures also appear); Shannon plays the G-man who's trying to take Thompson down.   The show also features the women behind the men, including, first, Aleksa Palladino as the wife of one young mobster, Jimmy Darmody:

Gretchen Mol as Darmody's very young looking, ex-stripper mother:

Kelly MacDonald as Nucky Thompson's girlfriend, a widow (whose violent husband Thompson had killed early in season one):

And Paz de la Huerta as an Atlantic City hooker, Lucy, who decidedly does not have a heart of gold:

All of them admittedly look better in civvies:

Birthday Today - Fly Like An Eagle Version

It's amazing to remember after 35 years or so how big a deal rocker Steve Miller was in the mid 1970s when the Regular Guy was in high school, and it's amazing to think that he turns 68 today.   Miller was born in Milwaukee, and his music to me sounds like the Midwest -- guileless, a little bit naive, bourgeois, friendly.   Here's probably his biggest hit:



Makes me want to drive to Dupo, Illinois for a beer with the boys at the Sports Page Bar.

Fast and Furious Metastasizes

The Obama administration gun-walking scandal known as "Fast and Furious" is about to metastasize.   Today the chairman of the House Judiciary committee, Lamar Smith, sent a letter to President Obama requesting the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate whether Attorney General Eric Holder lied to Congress when he said in May 2011 that he had only just learned of the Fast and Furious program.   Emails have recently come out suggesting that he was briefed on the program repeatedly beginning almost a year earlier.   

This is going to get interesting.   I'd expect Holder to resign within the next few weeks under normal circumstances.   But I have a feeling that Holder is the only thing holding a lid on other Obama scandals reaching back to his Chicago days, so getting him to fall on his sword won't be easy.

***

And, speaking of metastasizing, here's an ominous article about the decision just yesterday to postpone sentencing of Tony Rezco, the Chicago mobster who raised money to start Obama's political career.   The money quote comes from a tape of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich:

BLAGOJEVICH I thin-, you know, it's really, I get that I'm a big boy and I can handle that, but it's really f***ing galling, this guy is more Tony'd up than I am. And it's almost like they f***ing conspi-, made a concerted effort and they got the Chicago media to f***ing make me wear Rezko more. To f***ing dilute it from him.

Things may be about to get very interesting for the Obama administration.  

The Headline Tells the Story

... of how far we've fallen.

No Same-Sex Weddings at West Point's Catholic Chapel, Says Military Archdiocese

And why, pray tell, was this even an issue?  

Chris Christie Press Conference Today at 1:00 Eastern

In five minutes, Chris Christie will stride to a podium somewhere in New Jersey.... and eat it!

OK, just kidding.  Christie is set to announce finally, once-and-for-all, no-more-pussyfooting around, that he is not running for President.   Maybe he'll surprise and run, but I don't think so.

And, frankly, I hope not.   In my view, the Republican attack on Obama has to be focused on four main issues:

1.   His extraordinarily poor record on job creation.
2.   Repealing Obamacare.
3.   Reining in federal spending.
4.   His lack of executive experience/incompetence.

We already have a leading candidate (Romney) who, if nominated, would make us give up on one of these issues (Obamacare) because of his prior positions.   We don't need another candidate (Christie) who would make us give up on another issue (Obama's lack of executive experience).   Sure, Christie is competent as a governor, but it's only been less than two years.   He's just not ready.

We've tried "not ready" already.   Let's try "ready" for a change.   That means Romney or Perry in the current field, or else someone better put the thumbscrews on Mitch Daniels' wife and get him back in the race.

Girl of the Day - Claire Danes

The Regular Wife and I started watching Showtime's new show about the CIA and its hunt for a supposed al Qaeda mole -- a returning American POW/MIA played by Damian Lewis (of Band of Brothers).   The show is called Homeland and the central character is a CIA analyst played by Claire Danes who also (not sure where this will head in the course of the show) has a mood disorder and is taking anti-psychotic medicine, which might mean that her suspicions are paranoid.   Interesting show, and Danes and Lewis are both quite good.

Birthdays Today - Americana Edition

Great birthdays today.   First, Frederic Remington, perhaps the greatest and most American of America's artists, was born in 1861.  I suppose no one would compare him to Rodin or Michelangelo, and yet is there any more recognizable sculpture of the past 150 years:

It's also the birthday of Buster Keaton, born in 1895, perhaps the greatest and most creative of America's comics of the silent-movie era.   Here he is in one of his coolest moments, the train scene from The General: 

 

Finally, there is Charlton Heston, who, perhaps only exceeded by John Wayne, is the actor who best represents the American Character.  Heston was born in 1923 and, by the time of his death, had become probably the most beloved Hollywood figure among American conservatives.   Here is Heston doing his famous reading of Michael Crichton's screed on environmentalism from Jurassic Park, which Heston read on the Rush Limbaugh program:

Does Obama Want to Lose?

Does Obama want to lose in 2012?   I can see where he might.   Down in the polls, faced with intractable issues -- or at least issues that aren't susceptible to his brand of leftism -- and increasingly being branded as an incompetent, he might just think that being out of the presidency (like Bill Clinton) and raking in tens of millions of dollars a year in speaking fees and book contracts, all the while being in a position where you can be cheered by the still significant throngs of your supporters, looks pretty good.   How else can you explain his two recent statements, which for any other Presidential candidate would be viewed as "gaffes."

First, Obama said America was "going soft."   Many have commented on this statement, noting Obama's pathetic tendency to blame everyone else, including the American people, for his failures.   But think of it purely on a political level.   (You know the people around Obama think that way.)   Isn't this an almost suicidal meme to put out?   No politician who wanted to get elected President would be going around saying that the problem is that the American people have "gone soft."   Why is Obama doing it?

Now, over the weekend, he is shown with ABC News saying that America is not better off than they were four years ago.   Again, think of this on a purely political level.   This is the essential question that every President running for reelection has had to answer since Carter-Reagan in 1980.   And Obama is conceding the point?   On camera?   To a friendly interviewer?   Does he have a political death wish?  Maybe this is a grander grand strategy, in which Obama wants to be admit the line of attack that Republicans will undoubtedly use in order to defuse it.   Or maybe he wants to highlight how things are so bad because he wants to run on a theme that it's the Republicans fault.   But, seriously, this sort of thing is hard to understand for someone who really wants to get re-elected.

Dick Morris was quoted last week saying he thinks Obama will pull an LBJ and withdraw from the race.   I find that hard to believe, but we're living in very weird times when a President is speaking out loud the way Obama is right now.  

What the Left Wants

Leftists always accuse conservatives of wanting things that no one wants -- we supposedly want to go back to slavery, or segregated lunch counters, or segregated schools; we supposedly want to go back to the days of "back alley" abortions and a time when "women knew their place"; we supposedly want to "turn back the clock" on worker safety or the environment.   The invention of straw men goes on and on.

So it's interesting to note that leftists themselves actually do want a lot of things that most sane people realize would be horrible as policy.   For instance, here is a manifesto of the people who yesterday marched on Wall Street, with a list of demands that is, to put it charitably... freakin' insane:

Demand one: Restoration of the living wage. This demand can only be met by ending "Freetrade" by re-imposing trade tariffs on all imported goods entering the American market to level the playing field for domestic family farming and domestic manufacturing as most nations that are dumping cheap products onto the American market have radical wage and environmental regulation advantages. Another policy that must be instituted is raise the minimum wage to twenty dollars an hr.
Demand two: Institute a universal single payer healthcare system. To do this all private insurers must be banned from the healthcare market as their only effect on the health of patients is to take money away from doctors, nurses and hospitals preventing them from doing their jobs and hand that money to wall st. investors.
Demand three: Guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment.
Demand four: Free college education.
Demand five: Begin a fast track process to bring the fossil fuel economy to an end while at the same bringing the alternative energy economy up to energy demand.
Demand six: One trillion dollars in infrastructure (Water, Sewer, Rail, Roads and Bridges and Electrical Grid) spending now.
Demand seven: One trillion dollars in ecological restoration planting forests, reestablishing wetlands and the natural flow of river systems and decommissioning of all of America's nuclear power plants.
Demand eight: Racial and gender equal rights amendment.
Demand nine: Open borders migration. anyone can travel anywhere to work and live.
Demand ten: Bring American elections up to international standards of a paper ballot precinct counted and recounted in front of an independent and party observers system.
Demand eleven: Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all. Debt forgiveness of sovereign debt, commercial loans, home mortgages, home equity loans, credit card debt, student loans and personal loans now! All debt must be stricken from the "Books." World Bank Loans to all Nations, Bank to Bank Debt and all Bonds and Margin Call Debt in the stock market including all Derivatives or Credit Default Swaps, all 65 trillion dollars of them must also be stricken from the "Books." And I don't mean debt that is in default, I mean all debt on the entire planet period.
Demand twelve: Outlaw all credit reporting agencies.
Demand thirteen: Allow all workers to sign a ballot at any time during a union organizing campaign or at any time that represents their yeah or nay to having a union represent them in collective bargaining or to form a union.

So, to boil this down, the leftists want to be relieved of all of their debts (#11); to be able to incur new debt without fear of credit reporting agencies (#12); to get paid a "living wage" without having to work for it (#3); if they do work to have a $20 minimum wage (#1); to get a "free" college education paid for by taxpayers (#4); to have "free" health care paid for by taxpayers (#2); and meanwhile to have -- miraculously -- $2 trillion to spend on infrastructure and "ecological restoration."  I suppose they expect people who work for a living to pay for all of this wonderfulness, but meanwhile here's what they'd do to kill job-creation:  institute a Smoot-Hawley tariff that would immediately create a trade war that would destroy the export-import business (#1); destroy the health care industry (#2); destroy the oil industry (#5); destroy the nuclear power industry (#7); destroy the financial and banking industries (#11); and radically increase the power of unions (#13).   Oh, and meanwhile they're for unlimited immigration (#9).  

In short, what the left wants is to destroy America.   Now at least they're being open about it.  

Now, I know that the guy who wrote this manifesto is a loser and a nutjob.   But, really, how different is this manifesto from what the Obama administration has been doing for the past 34 months?

Girl of the Day - When Elizabeth Taylor Jumped the Shark

Fifty years ago this week, in October 1961, the cover of Life magazine featured a strange and somewhat jowly looking Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra.  

Taylor at this point was nearing 30, and coming off a string of four straight years when she had been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress, culminating in a win for 1960's Butterfield 8.   But Cleopatra would take three years to produce, and it bombed with critics when it came out in 1963, and Taylor's career was never quite the same.   It also seems to me that the image of her in the Cleopatra get-up was when she crossed over from serious young actress to pop culture phenomena, and although she won another Oscar for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf in 1966, she never quite crossed back to being thought of as an actress, not a celebrity.   She also, I'm sorry to say, got a little bit heavy -- we forget that she had three children in her 20s -- and very likely had lived a hard enough life (five husbands by the mid-60s, and an admitted addiction to painkillers and sleeping pills from her early 20s on), that, to my eye, she lost her looks.   Elizabeth Taylor at 35 by 1967 was a little bit scary looking; Elizabeth Taylor at 25 in 1957 was.... well, a picture tells the story:

Girl of the Day - Yuanyuan Gao

The Regular Wife and I saw another film at the Milwaukee Film Festival last night, this time a funny romantic comedy from Hong Kong called Don't Go Breaking My Heart.    The movie was really fun, although I can't help thinking that it would be silly if you simply transferred everything to New York and had the leads be American actors and actresses; it would lose all of the exotic charm that comes from recognizing that people around the world fall in love the same way we do.   But he girl at the center of the love triangle -- her two suitors are a suave investment banker and a romantic architect -- played by Yuanyuan Gao (as an idiot American I'm not sure which is the first and which is the last name) is very beautiful and appealing: