Suitably Flip

God of Czarnage, Revisited

The Fine Print Czar might be the most ironic of the bunch, as the appropriations for his or her office will undoubtedly be set within the thousands of pages of an emergency spending bill that no one will read before voting on it.

Previously: God of Czarnage

BILLY MAYS HERE FOR PRESIDENT OBAMA'S ECONOMIC STIMULUS PLAN!

Good stuff from the late great pitchman.

Governor Rudy

Via Ed Morrissey, America's mayor confessed this morning to weighing a bid to become America's governor in 2010.

Liveblogging the Bernie Madoff Sentencing

Reuters is tweeting it live from the courthouse (victims' statements, pictures, et al) where the superlative Ponzi schemer is about to get up to 150 years.

Update:  Boom!  All 150.  Crime doesn't pay, kids.

Strategy Room 3:00-4:00

I'll be on Strategy Room at FoxNews.com today from 3-4 pm.

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As always, you can email the show here and you can stream it live here.

Update:  An excerpt, wherein the National Enquirer reporter talks and I sit by, looking pretty.

"Maria Belen Shapur Photo" Blowin' Up

Hot Air Headlines notes that searching for pictures of Governor Sanford's Argentine beauty is suddenly the most popular thing to do with your Google (with an official Hotness rating of "Volcanic").

A cynic might assume that HA so notes in a naked ploy to cash in on some of that exploding search traffic.

Hmm... interesting idea.

Update:  Also via HA, there's the pic, according to News Bizarre.

Chris Quinn's Hysterical Hyperbole

New York City Council speaker Christine Quinn is dismayed about the legislative gridlock in Albany, noting that it has prevented the State Senate from imposing her and Bloomberg's nearly billion-dollar tax hike "revenue package" on New York City residents.

It's well known that New York is a dangerously undertaxed city, but I'm not sure Quinn's insistence that this is "close to life or death stuff" isn't just a touch overblown.

So He Chose Freedom. Running Around, Trying Everything New. But Nothing Impressed Him At All.

He never expected it to.

S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford arrived in the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport this morning, having wrapped up a seven-day visit to Buenos Aires, Argentina, he said. Sanford said he had not been hiking along the Appalachian Trail, as his staff said in a Tuesday statement to the media.

Sanford's whereabouts had been unknown since Thursday, and the mystery surrounding his absence fueled speculation about where he had been and who's in charge in his absence. His emergence Wednesday ended the mystery.

Sanford, in an exclusive interview with The State, said he decided at the last minute to go to the South American country to recharge after a difficult legislative session in which he battled with lawmakers over how to spend federal stimulus money.
...
Sanford said he was alone on the trip. He declined to give any additional details about what he did other than to say he drove along the coastline.

Update:  Zoinks.

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, his eyes red, admitted to having an extramarital affair Wednesday with an Argentine woman.

"I've been unfaithful to be my wife," Sanford said at a state capitol news conference.  

It began very innocently," he explained, saying that developed into an adulterous relationship in the past year.

He said he seen his unidentified mistress three times since they began the affair or, as he put it, "since the whole sparking thing."

Sanford said he was resigning his post as Chairman of the Republican Governor's Association.

Now This Is a Coup

What the NYS Senate Republicans did was a power play.  A legal and successful one.

This, however, is something else entirely.

Previously:
Legislating At Gunpoint: Paterson Threatens NYS Senate With Forcible Session
NYS Senate Dems Failing To Adjust Gracefully To Minority Status
Holy $#!&: Twin Democrat Defections Hand NYS Senate Back to GOP

Death Goes Green

Just because your heart has stopped beating, that doesn't mean it has to stop bleeding for mother earth.

Obama Defies Logic In His Identification Of Logic Defiance

In his meandering press conference today, "the only President of the United States" insists that opponents of socialized medicine who claim the "public option" will render private insurers unable to compete "defy logic" with their argument.  The dwindling of private insurance in competition with federally subsidized insurance, Obama maintains, must instead give the lie to the premise that insurance companies are even attempting to provide service at competitive prices.

It seems self-evident, but apparently it demands note, that the inevitability of the market dominance of a subsidized alternative is wholly logical and not at all at odds with the presumption that robust competition already exists in the private marketplace.

Hard Chairs and Near-Fights: The Torturous Life Of a Suspended NYC Public School Teacher

Weep for the fully salaried sexual offenders and other miscreants.

Hundreds of New York City public school teachers accused of offenses ranging from insubordination to sexual misconduct are being paid their full salaries to sit around all day playing Scrabble, surfing the Internet or just staring at the wall, if that's what they want to do.

Because their union contract makes it extremely difficult to fire them, the teachers have been banished by the school system to its "rubber rooms" — off-campus office space where they wait months, even years, for their disciplinary hearings.

The 700 or so teachers can practice yoga, work on their novels, paint portraits of their colleagues — pretty much anything but school work. They have summer vacation just like their classroom colleagues and enjoy weekends and holidays through the school year.

"You just basically sit there for eight hours," said Orlando Ramos, who spent seven months in a rubber room, officially known as a temporary reassignment center, in 2004-05. "I saw several near-fights. `This is my seat.' `I've been sitting here for six months.' That sort of thing."
....
Mimi Shapiro, who is now retired, said she was assigned to sit in what Philadelphia calls a "cluster office." "They just sit you in a room in a hard chair," she said, "and you just sit."

Teacher advocates say New York's rubber rooms are more extensive than anything that exists elsewhere.

The End of Blogging

Of this one, anyway, should this come to pass.

I do ordinarily enjoy being hassled by the federal government, but a massive payola blogola crackdown sounds like a bit more of a nuisance than I generally prefer.

Legislating At Gunpoint: Paterson Threatens NYS Senate With Forcible Session

Too bad SNL's not in season.

Americans Want Higher Taxes

Yes, it's "true"!

A majority (*cough* of Obama supporters) favor hiking taxes to pay for socializing health care.

From the Washington Examiner:

Obamacare advocates can only hope their friends in the mainstream media do a better job of carrying their water for them in the weeks ahead than The New York Times and CBS with their latest poll. Using a sample with exactly twice as many Obama voters as McCain voters, the Times/CBS pollsters got a result in which 57 percent of their respondents said they would pay higher taxes “so that all Americans have health insurance that they can’t lose no matter what.”

Sotomayor Is a Fast Learner

Her membership in an elite no-boys-allowed club isn't problematic from an ethical perspective, but...

...she said she didn't want questions about it to "distract anyone from my qualifications and record."

America Loses Its Religion: Messiah President Forsaken

Blasphemy.

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Sunday shows that 32% of the nation's voters now Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Thirty-four percent (34%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -2. That’s the President’s lowest rating to date and the first time the Presidential Approval Index has fallen below zero for Obama (see trends).

Milton Friedman On Curing American Healthcare

Even from the grave, the man's still on point.

3,200th Post

I meant to put up this celebratory post a couple months ago when we clipped past 3,000, but it blew right by while I was happily preoccupied with general non-blog-related life.

Anyway, happy belated trimillennial post to us.

For those keeping score at home, this 3,200th post represents almost exactly 4 years' worth of squirting out roughly 800 posts per year.

That's approximately 10 full-length books (or one hard-backed tome every 4-5 months), so quitcherbitchin and set to partying down.

The "Screaming Joke"

Seriously.  At some point, we do need to grow up.

And when man-child Greg Gutfeld is the voice of reason, you know we're a few yards past said point.

"You're Gonna Laff"

... at the simultaneous tweets of a pro-Mousavi Iranian student amid the gunfire versus those of a toadyish, Obamaphilic CNN correspondent feverishly documenting the ice cream and custard preferences of Barry and the girls.

Strategy Room: 3:00-4:00

I'll be on Strategy Room at FoxNews.com today from 3-4 pm.

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As always, you can email the show here and you can stream it live here.

Lee Fisher For U.S. Senate (Shoulder Hair Party - OH)

Submitted without comment.

Surprise: Americans Even Cooler On Socialized Medicine Now Than In 1993

And it's disproportionately Dems and independents who account for the lesser support for a "complete rebuild" of the health care system.

A narrow majority of 55% was on board when Hillary was donning her lab coat, a number that's dwindled to a mere 41% with Dr. Obama on call.

Have the trillions in incremental spending and the accelerating creep toward a centrally planned economy somehow convinced the populace that the federal government isn't the best choice for your primary care physician?

Video: White House Spokesman Says It All

Where in the world has single-payer healthcare worked?

Nowhere in particular.

Obama's "New Foundation" In a (Big) Nutshell

WSJ's Washington Wire blog maps out the President's proposed overhaul of the financial system in 56 easy bullet points.

The unabridged version runs 89 pages and prescribes throwing a helluva lot of spaghetti at a helluva lot of walls.  Some of it's bound to stick, no?  And it's not like there's a downside risk to over-regulation.

President Loses Hope

Denny's will do that.

Content warning for blue language.

The ObamaCare Panacea: 30 Million Left Uninsured For the Bargain Price of $1 Trillion

Befuddling.  It's almost as if government running a major sector of the American economy is a bad thing.

Yo Ho, Yo Ho

A terror detainee's life for me.

Muchausen By Stimulus

The economy was sick, stricken with a more virulent strain of an illness that it suffers every 7 or 8 years.  Its newly elected caretakers prescribed a peculiar medication that has been demonstrated time and again to be poisonous, assuring naysayers that upping the dosage to elephant-grade levels was the surest path to recovery.  And when the economy's pulse weakened further, and its condition deteriorated beyond the prognosis absent the poison, the head nurse shrugged off accusations of malpractice, insisting that the patient simply must've been sicker than we thought.

"No one realized how bad the economy was. The projections, in fact, turned out to be worse. But we took the mainstream model as to what we thought -- and everyone else thought -- the unemployment rate would be."

"Everyone guessed wrong at the time the estimate was made about what the state of the economy was at the moment this was passed."

Biden's grapple with cognitive dissonance must be exhausting.  His boss's plan doesn't work and the only explanation he can fathom is one that absolves their historically demonstrably harmful remedy, instead pinning the blame on "everyone" having been wrong about the diagnosis three months ago.

Once you adopt the "create or save" mindset, you can truly do no wrong.  Everything good is to your credit; everything rotten is, well, better than it would've been if you hadn't been on the job.

You're welcome, still-employed 91.6% of the labor force.  And just think, before long, the federal government will be your literal healthcare providers too.  Early projections suggest Drs. Obama and Biden will create or save hundreds of millions of lives.  And you might be one of those lucky Americans who don't promptly die!

Previously:  For the Love of God, Please Stop Creating or Saving Jobs

Update:  Innocent Bystanders catalogs the not-quite-everyone who thought stimulus was the best medicine a few month ago:

• Obama reminds GOP in stimulus meeting: “I won” (Hot Air): 1/23/09
• House passes stimulus plan, but with no Republican votes (McClatchy): 1/28/09
• Pence Opposes Democrat Stimulus Bill: “It Won’t Work”: 1/28/09
• Economists say stimulus won’t work (St. Louis Post-Dispatch): 1/29/09
• Analysis: Stimulus Won’t Jump-start Economy (AP): 2/13/2009
• Sen. Cornyn: Stimulus Won’t Work (Fox): 2/13/09
• Republican Governors Step Up Attacks on Obama Economic Policies (Bloomberg): 2/23/09

Breathe, Barney

Dude, seriously?

Yes, we want to lose you.

God of Czarnage

Does anyone have an updated count of all the czars, special masters, and other unaccountable, non-confirmable policymakers the Obama administration has crowned?

The latest is Kenneth Feinberg, who will serve as pay czar, charged - presumably - with ensuring our financial institutions get back on track by sourcing the best talent that arbitrarily limited sums of money can buy.

Two months ago, Foreign Policy magazine put the czar count at 19 (one more than boasted by the 300-year Romanov Dynasty) and acknowledged the tally was conservative, in part because they pettily refused to acknowledge John Holdren as science czar, since doing so would be tantamount to agreeing with Michelle Malkin's characterization and "as a matter of principle [the author] won't count anything that horrifying woman does."

FP also noted its omission of the car czar, the economic czar, the cyber security czar, the AIDS czar, and the green jobs czar.

I guess that means we're arguably up to at least 26 czarhoods by now, many of which have been dreamt up since January.

And, as that horrifying woman notes, we may shortly witness the coronation of #27.

News Corp Bows To Race Hustlers

I thought one of the perks of living in post-racial America was not having to suffer this brand of fatuity anymore.

NYS Senate Dems Failing To Adjust Gracefully To Minority Status

Blame an evil billionaire outsider, question the residency of your defectors, and when all else fails, lock the chamber doors, shut your eyes, stick your fingers in your ears, and scream, "Malcolm Smith is still majority leader!"

It's a helluva playbook.

A Glaring Omission

Where do I petition for a recount?

Americans Tiring of Stimulation

That's all we can stands, we can't stands no more.

Forty-five percent (45%) of Americans say the rest of the new government spending authorized in the $787-billion economic stimulus plan should now be canceled. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that just 36% disagree and 20% are not sure.

According to news reports, only $36 billion of the stimulus plan had been spent as of late May.

Since the impact of the stimulus to date has been roughly, well, the opposite of what its architects pledged, maybe it's not too late to put the check book away and quit constraining the economic recovery.

(HT: Hot Air)

Second Sign of the NY Apocalypse

Here's another head scratcher you probably didn't see coming: despite a 60% approval rating, most New Yorkers want to oust Bloomberg as mayor in November.

55-40 in favor of a "new person."

I rather doubt Mike is sweating the numbers.  His bottomless war chest and Presidential-class campaign operation have been known to move mountains.

Holy $#!&: Twin Democrat Defections Hand NYS Senate Back to GOP

I'm speechless.

The State Senate has fallen silent after Republicans introduced a resolution electing Pedro Espada Jr. as temporary president of the Senate and Dean Skelos as majority leader.

Hiram Monserrate and Espada, both Democrats, apparently will vote with Republicans on the motion, and are doing so now in the midst of a procedural fight.

UPDATE: At 3:47 p.m., Espada was sworn in as president pro tem, and Skelos as majority leader. They called for an immediate meeting of the Rules Committee. All the Democrats but Monserrate, Espada, Ruben Diaz Sr. and Carl Kruger (the original, nominally Democratic "gang of four") are gone from the chamber.
...
UPDATE: Espada just told reporters that he decided to cross over the aisle and support the Republicans because of the "quagmire" that had occurred since Malcolm Smith and the Democrats took over. He said it has been "chaos" and that he and Monserrate will form a caucus of "reform Democrats."

It's too bad that half of the Gang of 2 is so clutzy, but I ain't complaining.

The State Senate had been in Republican hands for more than 40 years, until the Democrats eked out a majority last November.  With all pillars of state government belonging to a single party (and with gerrymandering redistricting on the horizon), this sudden reversal is likely welcome news for millions of New York taxpayers.

To what do we owe the defections?  Did Monserrate and Espada catch sight of today's Rasmussen poll?

Update:  All class, all the time.

During the coup, Democrats fled the chamber, turned out the lights, and cut off the Internet feed of chamber proceedings, leaving Republicans and their two Democratic friends to take the vote in the dark.

For the record, CBS News (et al), it wasn't a coup, strictly speaking.  It was a leadership change effected through well-established, legal, democratic means, notwithstanding what erstwhile majority leader Malcolm Smith would have you believe.

Smith didn't see it that way. He said the coup was illegal and he was still the majority leader, although he only has about two dozen Democrats with him not the 32 he claims to have.

"Let's just be real clear. The Senate Democrats are still in the majority. Senator Malcolm Smith is still the majority leader," Smith said.

It is real clear, 3rd-person-self-referring Senator Smith.  You're out.  Skelos is in.

Obamacare Posterpalooza

Prompted by Ah, Shoot, Michelle Malkin is compiling a fine repository of WWII-style propaganda posters in "support" of the looming socialization nationalization Post Officization of your healthcare system.

Embracing the spirit (if defying the genre), I made a humble contribution.

See the others.

For the Love of God, Please Stop Creating or Saving Jobs

The flagrant waste of trillions of "stimulus" dollars was supposed to "create or save" some 3.5 million jobs.  In the months since the bill's passage, the economy has disappeared a whopping 1.6 million payrolls, but we are assured all is going according to plan.

With that in mind, this news that another 600,000 jobs will be created or saved over the summer is daunting indeed.

President Barack Obama promised Monday to deliver more than 600,000 jobs through his $787 billion stimulus plan this summer, with federal agencies pumping billions into public works projects, schools and summer youth programs.

Obama is ramping up his stimulus program this week even as his advisers are ramping down expectations about when the spending plan will affect a continuing rise in the nation's unemployment.

(HT: JWF)

Update:  Drew at AoSHQ points out this illuminating comparison of actual unemployment data versus Obama's own predictions about life with and without the stimulus.

Is it too late to go back to without?

Also, is his entire economic team now fired for such comically abysmal forecasting?

Thus far, the mathematical rationale behind "created or saved" has consisted primarily of a smiling shrug, so let's give them a hand.  Taking the President's sales team at their word, unemployment should've risen to 8.6% by May if we'd done nothing.  With the actual May unemployment rate at 9.4%, the missing 80 basis points translate to 1.2 million jobs (0.8% * labor force of 155 million) neither created, nor saved, but lost because of the stimulus.

In other words, based on Obama's own pre-stimulus projections (and in the absence of any other substantiation of his magical mathematics), 75% of the 1.6 million total jobs we've shed since being stimulated were destroyed at the hands of Messrs. Obama and Keynes.

Strategy Room: 10:00-11:00

I'll be on Strategy Room at FoxNews.com today from 10-11 am.

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As always, you can email the show here and you can stream it live here.

Strategy Room Rewind

A segment of our panel discussion on GM and the state of the American auto industry on Tuesday afternoon has been enshrined in the Best of Strategy Room archive.

This guy's the one on the left.

Please to enjoy.

Update From the Word Police: You Are Now Permitted To Use the President's Middle Name

He is, after all, the leader of "one of the largest Muslim countries in the world."

Norwegian Plaudits Go Only So Far

I've said it before; I'll say it again.  When you predict a recession every year, you're going to be right occasionally.  On average, every 7-8 years.  And if you play those odds, rather than endure the inglorious years-long process of developing actual predictive capacities, you'll ultimately be hailed as a rarefied genius.

Oddly enough, if a lazy meteorologist were to predict a freak storm every day and get lucky every several years, we wouldn't likely laud him with lofty global praise once that storm eventually, inevitably makes landfall.

Sadly, in the messy world of economic prognostication, the impulse is to do precisely that for the perennial doomsayer once his gloomily stopped clock occasionally coincides with the actual time.

Worse, the natural impulse of an answer-thirsty populace is to blindly suckle at that occasionally on-point teat of accidental accuracy thereafter, without much thought given to the patently abysmal predictive records that so often silently sully such ostensible econo-prophets.

Longtime readers surely will have already guessed that I'm speaking of New York Times "Conscientious Liberal" and Nobel laureate (stop giggling, it's rude) Paul Krugman.

Krugman has recently aimed his considerable acumen in the direction of SCOTUS nominee Sonia Sotomayor, assuring this wary republic that this woman - who presumably wields enviable stores of empathy - was merely attempting to be "entertaining" when she maintained that Latina women are judicially more capable than boorish white males.

"This was a speech," New York Times columnist Paul Krugman pointed out Sunday on ABC's "This Week." "The famous line comes from a speech where she was trying to be entertaining...Have I somewhere along the line said, I’d like to think that bright Jewish kids make the best economists. I probably have somewhere along the line. It doesn’t mean anything. …The judicial record shows nothing of this."

[Pause for laughter]

If there's one thing that's been missing from the Supreme Court in recent decades, it's been the ability to laugh.

Far be it from me to differ with the esteemed Dr. Krugman.  Instead, read Sotomayor's speech and decide for yourself if her comments about the superior jurisprudence of Latina over Whitey elicit the heartiness of guffaw for which Krugman must be aiming.

As a refresher and for posterity, if you can't be bothered to click the link:

Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.

The Seven Year Ditch

According to science, the half life of friendship is seven years.

I think I must be more fickle than the average compadre.  Exactly seven years ago, I graduated from business school.  Even limiting the pool of circa 2002 friends to those with whom I wound up in the same metropolitan area, I don't think I'm in regular contact with more than two in seven.

Any out-of-touch friends from the relevant era reading this, drop me a line.  Help me get back above 3.5.

(HT: Hot Air Headlines)

Strategy Room: 4:00-5:00

I'll be on Strategy Room at FoxNews.com today from 4-5 pm to discuss the GM bankruptcy.

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As always, you can email the show here and you can stream it live here.

Look Kids, Someone Who Isn't Guessing

Mitt Romney, a Michigander who knows a thing or two about salvaging and reorganizing failing enterprises, seems to suggest that the Presidents of the United Auto Workers and United States aren't necessarily the best stewards for General Motors.

Blasphemy.

Obama will take to the podium at noon to discuss his acqusition and, presumably, to publicly smite the insolent Romney.