With friends like us.... (UPDATED)

From the comments, B-Daddy advised Krauthammer to stick with the straight stuff and leave the shtick to Iowahawk. Yep...

Anyhoo, after receiving General McChrystal's request, I carefully reviewed and focus tested it with some of the top military strategist of DailyKos and HuffingtonPost. As an alternative, they suggested sending a special force of 200 diversity-trained surrender consultants. After several months of careful deliberation, polling, and strategic golfing, I told the General I would provide him a force of 30,000, which is fully 75% of a 110% commitment.

Now let's think about that. When you multiply it out, that's... let's see... that's almost an 83% total commitment to mission success! And son, back at Harvard Law that's what we called a "solid B." Not only that, I also pledged to provide you with all the healthy snacks and juice boxes you will need until the designated 5:30 pickup time. As an extra bonus to help you out, I secured a commitment of 10,000 additional special troops from our European allies. In fact, I think I see one of them in the back seat -- there in the blue bicycle helmet. What's your name son?

Pierre? That's... okay... okay, Pierre, please stop crying. Yes, I promised Mr. Sarkozy you'll be home soon.

(UPDATE #1): So how is the Taliban like George Washington? B-Daddy has the details, here.

Quickies

Jaw-dropping headline of the day (Huffington Post):

Actor Matthew Marsden Hides Right-Wing Political Views.

Bounce this against: Coming Out In Hollywood Not Always Easy… which, you may be shocked to find out, is not about right-wingers. Ah yes, how the liberal-Left really feels about tolerance and differing opinions.


Conserva-babe Michell Malkin catches NYT columnist Nicolas Kristoff peddling lies in and advocacy-journalism piece in support of Obamacare.


Deadspin breaks down some of the pros and cons of an 18-week NFL regular season schedule. Personally, we’re against it and think it’s a moot point anyway as the hurdles to make this happen are too high to overcome. By employing this logic, expect to see an 18-game schedule two CBAs from now.


More Ft. Hood good news. Andrew McCarthy, the man who prosecuted the Blind Sheikh and Zacarias Moussaoui has this:

Worse, last evening, Safi was apparently permitted to present a check (evidently on behalf of ISNA) to the families of the victims of last month's Fort Hood massacre. A military source told the blogger Barbarossa at the Jawa Report: "This is nothing short of blood money. This is criminal and the Ft. Hood base commander should be fired right now."

Hey, gang, believe it: Green really is the new Green. Bret Stephens follows the money trail and details just how much jack is being shelled out in the name of, uhh… climate change research.

We shall fight in the air, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields, we shall fight in the hills — for 18 months. Then we start packing for home.

Charles Krauthammer shares our concerns regarding a Commander-in-Chief who lacks a certain fire in the belly.


And finally, the L.A. Times has photo gallery here of their favorite Holiday beers. Remember, folks, stay away from the fruit.

College football open thread

As we polish off the Thanksgiving leftovers this weekend, visions of Turner Gill and Mike Rozier will be dancing in our head as we summon legends of Cornhusker past in our last chance for BCS Armageddon when #22 Nebraska takes on #3 Texas later this evening in the Big 12 championship game.

This is because, we will have the defacto BCS title game semifinal played earlier when #1 Florida locks up with #2 Alabama for the SEC crown.

Any chances of the little guy, represented in stellar fashion this year by #4 TCU, fouling the pristing big conference BCS waters rests with Nebraska.


Take Bama and the 5-1/2 pts. and #5 Cincy giving 2 to #15 Pittsburgh today in the Big East championship game.


We should be back later but if not please enjoy the rest of your blessed "holiday season" college football Saturday.

Great moments in the history of the 1st amendment

Apparently, the Federal Trade Commission is having a jobs summit of its own but is focusing on how to rescue the journalism industry and one of the keynote speakers this week was Henry Waxman (D-Mars) who trooped down from the Hill in order to make his case for a government bailout of the newsies.

"We cannot risk the loss of an informed public and all that that means" because of market failure, Waxman said. But he also said the government would need to tread carefully and he set up some ground rules for considering possible solutions that ranged from tax law changes and nonprofit status to antitrust law changes to a review of "cross-media laws that may constrain the commercial vitality of the industry." He said he had an open mind about all the proposals and thought they should all be discussed.

The author of cap and trade, legislation that will essentially dictate what forms of energy we all will be permitted to subsist upon and which as a result plays picking winners and losers with respect to entire industries and the people it employs is worried about the need for government to tread carefully? Beautiful.

First, he said, there should be consensus both inside and outside the media industry that the proposal is in the public interest. Second, it would need bipartisan support and "vigorous enforcement from both sides of the aisle." He said any public model would have to address the concern that "government control of journalism would lead to government control of content," as well as articulating the scope and dollars required, plus what the source of revenues would be.

Vigorous enforcement? Like what? Fines? Jailtime like Pelosi refused to rule out for non-compliance with Obamacare? And how exactly do you “address” concerns that the feds and its bureaucratic lackeys won’t be calling the content shots? You can’t because there is no explaining away the inevitable conclusion that federal money will have a corresponding effect on content control. And sources of revenue? Please.

And who was at the FTC journalism jobs fair?

The morning session also featured media policy activists, public broadcasters and proponents of nonprofit journalism making the case for government funding of the media.

That sounds like quite a diverse group who would be stellar defendants of the 1st amendment.

And what did some of these free speech advocates have to say for themselves:

"As a civil society, we don't trust the open market or the free market" to provide such valuable services, said Jon McTaggart, the senior vice president and chief operating officer of American Media Group, and neither should the media be allowed to suffer because of market forces.

Valuable services like putting food on the table, flying virtually anywhere in the world, performing open-heart surgery and providing automotive transportation. Uhh, put a partial scratch through that last one.

Eric Newton, vice president of the journalism program at the Knight Foundation, called the idea that government has never been involved in media a "mythology. "It's a bogus argument that just keeps us from doing the right thing," he said.

Newton’s exactly right. One of the finer examples of the government gettin' involved in the journalism business was back when President Lincoln didn't trust the free market to provide such a valuable service to society either and was shutting down newspapers left and right and throwing people in jail for what they were printing during the Civil War.

The fact that many of these people who are now lining up at the government trough cut their teeth in underground journalism and the free speech movement of the 60s or who are its direct cultural and ideological descendants and who'd rather swing from their love beads than be caught shilling for federal handouts is particularly galling and demonstrates just how intellectually bankrupt the statist nature of the New Left really was.

Way to stand on principle, guys

Unfortunately, That's not all, folks!

You knew it was coming. Like Thanksgiving leftovers, where it tastes just as good the second time around but without, perhaps, the same gargantuan proportions, your duly elected leaders are well on their way to bringing you Son of Porkulus aka Porky’s Revenge.

As we all know, the statist solution to its own failed statist policies is more statism and yesterday the jobs summit started tearing back into those tupperware containers of cranberry, green bean salad, stuffing and…. Pork!

The cost of a new jobs bill Democrats hope to move early next year runs to nearly $300 billion when major proposals under serious consideration are added up.

Lawmakers are calling for extending aid to the unemployed, infrastructure spending, a hiring tax credit and increased small business loans.

A number of the jobs proposals backed by Democrats make up a $230 billion package proposed by Mark Zandi of Moody's Economy.com, who made a presentation to Senate Democrats Wednesday. The provisions supported by Zandi along with new spending on infrastructure, a favored approach of top House Democrats, would cost between $291 billion and $299 billion, according to estimates by lawmakers and economists.

Shovel ready, baby - we’re partying like its February 2009!

The intellectual mediocrity and sheer incompetence of this legislative body never ceases to amaze.

Here’s our big idea for getting the economy back on track: Kill. Kill cap and trade. Kill Obamacare. Kill Porkulus the Elder and its bastard son.

The looming specter of the taxes and regulations contained in this raft of legislation which produces uncertainty in the private sector is a large part of what is ailing our economy.

The President himself has come out and said that small businesses are the key to economic recovery. Well, what small business is going to hire when they don’t know how healthcare reform or a massive reconfiguring of our energy policy is going to affect them?

The lack of a sense of irony on Capitol Hill would almost be humorous if it didn’t mean we would all pay so dearly for it.

On the President's West Point speech

Late news, perhaps, but a few words on President Obama’s speech at West Point two nights ago:

Whatever other problems we have with President Obama, we applaud his decision to grant General McCrystal most of the troops he had sought. Well, he was just fulfilling a campaign promise. Yeah, and we see how well that has been working.

But the downside: His heart isn’t in this fight and the tone and temperament, if we may use that term, of his speech showed it. It was technocratic to a fault. We understand the need to lay out policy in clear and precise terms (though, we did not need as much detail on timetables) and we understand the somberness of the decision but the speech lacked an emotional depth that suggested he was not personally vested, as Commander-in-Chief, in the lives and well-being of his charges.

David Frum counters that the pedestrian nature of his speech was precisely what the strategic situation in Afghanistan and the political situation here at home called for. In making this troop decision, Obama is alienating is lefty base and any “This is our finest hour”/Blood, sweat and tears grandeur would’ve sent them off the cliff like so many hippies in a VW mini-van at Big Sur. He made the call, now leave him be.

Perhaps, but in speaking to a roomful of America’s finest, some of whom will as shortly as a year or two from now be leading enlisted soldiers and non-coms in the field of battle, we would’ve hoped for a little more “victory” and little less ‘wonky”.

Again, the thought that he has committed troops but not committed his passion to victory troubles us. It troubles us deeply.

And we’ll finish off with some advice for conservatives like ourselves and uhh.. Frum by Frum himself:

Having urged the president to honor his commitment to the Afghan war, we Republicans must honor our commitment to support him as he fights it. Given the public unenthusiasm for the conflict, there will be political temptations to “go rogue” on the president, if not now, then in the summer of 2010. That will be our test, for us to pass as the president has passed his. I know many Republicans and conservatives will say: “Hey – the Democrats did not give President Bush support when he most needed it.” Correct. They didn’t. And the country suffered for it. The right way to react to that dereliction of duty is not by emulating it, but by repudiating it. “For it before I was against it” has deservedly become an epithet for shameful wavering. Let’s not inflict it upon ourselves.

May God grant wisdom to our leaders both in D.C. and our people calling the shots out in the field.


P.S. More Google search result shenanigans? We punched up "President Obama speech at West Point" hoping to get an image of, you know, President Obama speaking at West Point. Denied. No images of him at the lectern, no images of him pressing the flesh with the cadets. Nothing. Bizarre.

The latest from the "street"

The crowd may have applauded the cavalier way the new steward of American power referred to his predecessor, but in the privacy of their own language they doubtless wondered about his character and his fidelity. "My brother and I against my cousin, my cousin and I against the stranger," goes one of the Arab world's most honored maxims. The stranger who came into their midst and spoke badly of his own was destined to become an object of suspicion.

10+ months in and , yep, they still hate us.

The British solution to health care?

... don't get sick.

So as to alleviate ourselves from accusations of cherry-picking with respect to surmising how our healthcare system will look if we pass Obamacare – let’s broaden the lens a bit. Take Britain, please.

Poor nursing care, filthy wards and lack of leadership at Basildon and Thurrock University NHS Hospitals FoundationTrust led to the deaths of up to 400 patients a year.

Figures compiled by a health watchdog showed death rates at the Essex trust were a third higher than they should have been.

Among the worst failings discovered by the Care Quality Commission were a lack of basic nursing skills, curtains spattered with blood on wards, mould in vital equipment and patients being left in A&E for up to ten hours.

The report by the Care Quality Commission found “systemic failings” in the trusts management of Essex. For those of you in Placentia, California that means the whole doggone system was screwed up and which will produce copious amounts of cherrys.

And here’s the big response to blood, mould and being left to watch A&E:

Katherine Murphy, director of the Patients Association said: “Yet again patients are being neglected. Lack of monitoring, lack of help with feeding, lack of dignity, avoidable pressure sores. How many times do the public need to keep hearing about this before the Government is embarrassed enough to do something about it?

Bless your heart, Ms. Murphy, but the government “doing” has been the problem in the first place.

It speaks to the horrors of statism, though, that the sentence above is as it is and not more along the lines of “How many times do the public need to keep hearing about this before… they vote the bastards out… or burn the hospitals down… or run naked around the May Pole…. anything… anything at all that would represent actionable democracy.

Great Britain, our greatest ally in the battle for freedom and liberty is reduced to dependence on a hoped-for shamed government.

The failed jobs program that dare not speak its own name

Over ten months into his term, President Obama will address the nation’s unemployment problem which the Labor Department does not expect to improve when it rolls out the latest figures tomorrow.

The President will hold a jobs summit starting tomorrow that will include a lot of different people but a lot of other different people are worried about any jobs program sponsored by the federal government would contribute mightily to our already spiraling-out-of-control debt while still other people(D) are mostly concerned with saving their electoral bacon next November.

That’s essentially the tone of the article here that fails to address the fact that we’ve been down this road before. President Obama’s first legislative baby was the $787 billion monstrosity called porkulus signed into law back in February and which was not going to let unemployment go above 8%. We are at 10.2% right now and probably climbing and the President’s big idea? More government.

Not that anybody at this summit is going to be as impolite to address the point of why they are there to spend more tax dollars when porkulus is continuing to do it quite nicely, thank you, without any discernable results.

Mr. Obama invited academics, business and labor leaders to a White House seminar to hear their suggestions for what might spark them to begin hiring again.

(because academics and labor are always at the forefront of job creation ideas. Just ask the city of Chula Vista how they fared with labor leaders' job creation ideas during negotiations in developing that city’s waterfront)

That Obama “invited” labor leaders had an odd ring to it as a summons to the West Wing would not consist of anything more than a shout down the hallway to the nearly ubiquitous White House presence of Big Labor.

And more proof that an Ivy League affiliation is actually becoming a liability, here’s somebody named Alan Blinder of Princeton:

Princeton University economist Alan Blinder, a summit attendee and a former Federal Reserve vice chairman, supports public works programs for low-wage workers. But he warned in a recent article against providing tax credits to employers. It would be difficult, he said, to distinguish between new hiring tied to the economic rebound versus hires sparked by tax credits.

Whaaa? So, there are “good” jobs and “bad” jobs? Blinder doesn’t want the jobs situation to improve if it cannot be tied directly to the wondrous programs that will be generated by this jobs summit? Idiots like Blinder are leading indicators that this jobs summit will be every bit the Charlie-Foxtrot one would imagine it to be.

Good luck with that, Mr. President.

Tales from Bailout Nation Pt. XXII

How is it that you know any nascent recovery in the housing market may not be all that it’s cracked up to be? When the Feds threaten even more meddling and leaning-on than they already have, that’s how.

Looking to jumpstart its foreclosure prevention plan, the Obama administration announced new steps Monday to pressure loan servicers to help homeowners long term.

Responding to complaints that too many borrowers are stuck in trial adjustments, administration officials said they will now focus more heavily on getting borrowers into permanent modifications. Government swat teams will go to the institutions to see what the holdup is and banks will have to submit progress reports twice a day during December.

"Now it's up to the banks to do their part to covert borrowers to permanent modifications," said Michael Barr, an assistant Treasury secretary. "Servicers to date have not done a good enough job."

Because nothing says increased efficiency and effectiveness like government swat teams (swat teams!) and having to devote valuable resources to generate two “what I did on my coffee break” reports a day. It’s just insanity.

The article goes on to say that only a small percentage of troubled homeowners have received permanent modifications which is raising concerns about the effectiveness of the $75 billion Treasury effort. And the statist response to failed statist policies? More statism:

Top loan servicers will be required to report the status of each modification and their plan to reach a decision. Also, these servicers must say how they will communicate decisions to borrowers.

Those failing to meet their obligations could face so-far unspecified penalties and sanctions.

How they will communicate decisions to borrowers? How about, “No. You are a bad risk. You had no business owning this home in the first place. Please leave us and find a nice comfortable place in which to foreclose.”

But we know that will not be allowed to happen because as referred to above, this country seems to be skipping merrily down that road of governmental stong-arming in the housing sector that was largely responsible for getting us into the very mess we are now.

We welcome any encouraging news that will counter the double-dip recession behavior we see by the government all around us.

Quote of the day (UPDATED)

... with a "Person of the year" update.


“The hope that health-care reform would take care of our budget problem has evaporated.”


That from Isabel Sawhill (not pictured), a fiscal expert at the Brookings Institution of which no one will ever confuse with the Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute.

We will also use this as an opportunity to pimp our candidate for “Person of the Year” in Douglas Elmendorf, (pictured) the top dog at the Congressional Budget Office.

Back in August, when we made our initial push for Mr. Elmendorf we reasoned that the public tide-turning against health care began in earnest when the CBO was able to start “scoring” the various health care reform bills that were circulating around the Hill. Prior to that, because of the backroom nature of the legislation-fashioning, it was impossible for the public to grasp the scope of change these bills would wrought, thus the apprehension was more a fear of the unknown rather than the known.

Splashy graphics like the one below based on the CBO scorings, finally gave the electorate some understanding of what it was that was facing them and simultaneously exposed the accounting tricks and outright lies being peddled by health care reform proponents. Lies like Harry Reid saying the Senate version of health care would only cost $849 billion and would actually reduce the deficit in the first ten years.

(click to enlarge)


As one can see, Reid is counting the first four years as part of the ten - a period where we will be taxed for health care but will not see any of the “benefits” of that taxation. An honest assessment of the cost of health care reform should then shift four years to the right (2014-2023) where the taxation to fund health care and the outlays in health care are more concurrent and which results in the Senate bill actually costing $1.8 trillion over that same period of time.

We dug up this chart at B-Daddy’s behest who has his thought on the matter here and where we agree with his assessment that the Democrats have painted themselves into a corner on this issue.

Not passing healthcare reform would represent an epic failure of the Obama administration given the legislative advantages they possess. And conversely, passage of health care reform may well doom the Democrats in the next two election cycles and the President in ’12 as the electorate, already soured on the Senate bill, realize they will be making 4 years worth of down payments before they are able to move into the house Harry and Nancy built.

(UPDATE #1):It appears we may have been far too forgiving in tabulating the cost of the Senate bill for healthcare reform. Above we covered how the taxes start immediately but the spending doesn’t kick in until much later and progressively at that.

Another budget gimmick employed by the Senate bill is the requirement for individuals to purchase insurance. We’ll let Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute explain:

When the bills force somebody to pay $10,000 to the government, the Congressional Budget Office treats that as a tax. When the government then hands that $10,000 to private insurers, the CBO counts that as government spending. But when the bills achieve the exact same outcome by forcing somebody to pay $10,000 directly to a private insurance company, it appears nowhere in the official CBO cost estimates — neither as federal revenues nor federal spending.

This is an unfunded mandate that is not accounted for in estimating the cost of health care reform. Cannon estimates that when the spending is accounted for in the years 2014 – 2023 (the true lost decade) combined with that unfunded mandate in the same lost decade, the price tag for Obamacare checks in at, gulp…. $6.25 trillion dollars.

You may not want to believe that astronomical number but believe you must that even the whopping $1.8 trillion number estimated by the CBO is a low ball considering the fact they have not factored-in the unfunded mandate that will be borne by the private sector.

H/T: Hot Air