I Blame Tom Delay

 

And, to a lesser degree, Newt Gingrich.  And W.  And Trent f’n Lott.  Damn them, it is their fault that we are about to flip socialist. 

Why these guys?  It all started with this, Delay’s “K Street Strategy”.  This is where the fiscal irresponsibilty, corruption and appearances of corruption began.  The K Street Strategy, in a nutshell, consisted of Delay twisting the arms of the K Street lobbying firms to send the vast majority of their money to Republicans and to even remove Left-leaning lobbyists from their positions and replace them with more Right-leaning types.  In return, the lobbyists and their clients got what they wanted.  It was vote-buying in it’s most bald-faced form; a scorched-earth strategy and the earth has been fucking scorched to shit right now.

This strategy led to a surfeit of money in Republican coffers and then to assholes like Ted f’n Stevens and his goddamned Bridge to Nowhere.  And it was this effect that so thoroughly discredited them as fiscal conservatives to the point that we elected a Socialist and allowed the even more Socialist Pelosi, Waxman, Markey and so on to take the reins of government.

The article linked above appeared in the Washington Post, co-written by David Maraniss and Michael Weisskopf in 1995.  They were never more prophetic than when they wrote this, emphasis added:

“Yet money is also the source of increasing tension among House Republicans that could ultimately weaken them, if not tear them apart. The conflict, in essence, is between ideology and populist reform. One wing wants to collect as much corporate money as possible to sustain and expand the revolution. Another wing fears that this will disillusion voters who brought the Republicans to power to change the traditional ways of doing business in Washington. Gingrich stands in the middle aware, people around him say, that his tenure could depend in part on his ability to resolve the conflict.”

Newt, Newt, Newt.  You blew it.  If you saw the tension here and let it go unimpeded, you laid the groundwork for yours and America’s demise.  All those Lefty nutbags back then hated you because they thought that you would ruin the country, and they were right for the wrong reason.  The country is about to take a road that it cannot return from.  The nutbags wouldn’t be orgasming today over Obama had you simply put your foot down on this activity and set the tone then that Republicans should hew to the principles of fiscal conservatism that is so important to conservative voters.  And then along came W with an allergy to the veto pen and here we are.

Folks, it’s gonna be a long, slow descent into European-style malaise.  We get to watch China, Asia and Brazil take center stage on the world now. 

Watch now, once this crap passes on Sunday, as hiring by private companies goes nowhere.  Companies have been waiting to see what would happen with this and other bills and the only conclusion they can come to now is that their costs are going to permanently and unalterably increase.  No CEO in his right mind would take on added costs in this environment.  Get ready for permanent 10 to 12% unemployment.  We won’t have jobs, but we’ll have health care.

I wonder if I can get my congressman to put provisions for nutrient ingestion in the bill?

What Happened on August 28, 2008…

…that might have had something to do with our financial collapse?  Barack Obama accepted the Democrat nomination, that’s what.  That is also when the stock market took a dive and also when unemployment really kicked in to high gear.  Look, I am no statistician or pollster or financial analyst, but when you look at the following charts I have assembled, it gives you pause.  I thought at the time that at least part of the reason that things cratered when they did is that it became clear to Wall Street and businesses in general that we were about to elect an anti-business President and perhaps a Democrat majority in Congress.  And, since businesses can’t afford to wait and see if they are right in these matters, they acted almost immediately in the face of the higher cost of doing business that was coming their way.

From the BBC, here is the timeline of the 2008 election:



I used Rasmussen in the above shot because according to this analysis from Costas Panagopoulos of Fordham University, Rasmussen was the most accurate poll of the 2008 election. Sorry, I know that Rasmussen is evil and all, but he is also mostly correct.

Less than a month later on September 18, Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke were asking Congress for carte blanche to deal with the imminent collapse of the whole damn global financial system and it was on like Donkey Kong.  Here is a very nifty timeline of events back then, from Dipity:

Economic Collapse Timeline on Dipity.

You can probably see it better if you click through to Dipity.  Also, scroll a bit to the left to see the beginning of the events.  Dipity starts with September of 2008.  Things really accelerate after August 28, don't they?

Next, from MSN Money is the Dow Jones, S&P and NASDAQ averages from February 2007 through February 2010.  Note the highlighted points; the market cratered beginning at the end of August 2008.



Clearly, the market was already trending down by August, but right after the nomination everything fell off the cliff.  

Finally, here is the unemployment trend from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:



Again, unemployment was trending upwards from about December 2007 on, but it accelerated dramatically after August 2008, increasing a full 1.3 percentage points from August to December of 2008.  For the math-impaired, that was a 21 percent increase over that period of time, compared to an 8.6 percent increase over the same period in 2007.

I posit that the election of Barack Obama pushed the economy over the edge into panic mode.  Investors wanted out of markets, companies knew they had to cut overhead and they all knew that they had to act quickly, before Obama and the Dems took office and imposed higher costs in the form of higher taxes, health care reform, cap and trade and because of the simple fact that modern Democrats in general and Obama in particular are essentially socialist in philosophy. Couple this with the deteriorating business conditions in general and the collapse was inevitable.

No, Obama’s nomination did not cause the financial deterioration of the economy.  That was already underway.  But it damn sure sped things up and made things worse.  With his nomination and subsequent election, all hopes of a soft landing evaporated.  Elections really do have consequences.

Fall Far, Fall Fast

Look at this snip from tonight’s home page of the Huffington Post:

 

The Alexander McQueen story posted today about three hours ago.  The John Edwards story posted two days ago.  Dude is toast.  Rielle must be holy hell in the sack.

And Herein Lies the Problem

 

When members of his own party begin to make statements like this, I don’t see how anybody should expect Republicans or leaders of other countries can be expected to do business with Obama:

 

 

Link to story and video is here.  (Real Clear Politics doesn’t allow embedding, apparently.)

Maybe Obama is doing some kind of amazingly brilliant counter-intuitive strategy.  Maybe he is doing the old “reverse psychology” trick that works so well on 4 year olds.  But we’re not 4 year olds, though he apparently thinks that we are all a bunch of rabble to be led into the wake of his magnificence. 

And when the New York Times begins to question his credibility and integrity, he is on the downward slide to Cartericity or maybe Nixonism.  Either way, this is a problem for all of us, conservative or liberal.  The US needs a strong, trustworthy, effective President and right now Barry is lacking in all of those things.

Woooo---Check out the Katie Cougar!!!

 

The coug on the loose!  Looking upscale, while CBS is thinking about cutting staff or wages or both.  Way to rally the troops, Katie!  But you’re lookin’ mighty fine:

 

Obama on Afghanistan

 

Obama has clearly learned that actually being the man charged with making a decision is hard. It's damned easy to run around the country in a campaign and read teleprompters that tell you to call for the end of the war and another thing entirely to suddenly realize that he can't just vote "Present" any longer.

True to form, he straddled the whole thing. McChrystal asked for 40,000 troops; Obama sends him 30,000 and no doubt congratulates himself for his Solomon-like (in his mind) decision for halving the infant. It's a half-measure, calibrated to calm critics on both sides of the aisle. Eighteen months isn't enough time and he knows it, but that coincides nicely with the next Presidential election, so he tosses that number out. These are not decisions made to win the war; they are intended to buy time and relieve pressure on himself.

What a cynical, no-balls move from the President. Not that he deserved it, but the nobel committee should rescind their peace prize* award.

 

*never capitalized here ever again.

Something Doesn’t Make Sense Here

 

Have a look at this photo of Tiger Woods’ car, after his crash:

 

Photo courtesy of TMZ.com, via the Washington Post.

Tiger’s wife, Elin, supposedly bashed out the rear window with a golf club so that she could get him out.  OK, why?  Look at the driver’s side door.  No damage.  Why wouldn’t she simply open the door and pull him out?  Because she was whalin’ away on the car, that’s why!  And the story that they have told is an attempt to explain how the back window got shattered when not even the windshield in this frontal impact was damaged.  And check out the gangster dubs being sported by the billionaire.  Sorry Tiger, the photographic evidence does not support the weak story.

Jumping the Shark, Obama-style

He did it; he just dealt his own Presidency a severe blow.

Ours is a celebrity-obsessed culture and right now, there are no bigger celebrities in the US than Barack and Michelle Obama and Oprah.  And they just failed and in so doing embarrass themselves, their city and their country.  Without question, Obama's involvement in this effort was test of his popularity on the world stage and he lost big.  Which means we lost big.  I care not one whit for the loss that Chicago has sustained, in terms of money.  I care greatly for the loss of prestige for that great city, for the loss of prestige of the Office of the President and for the loss of prestige for our country.

More to the point for Obama, this diminishes his celebrity-hood.  And it was that celebritiness that got him elected in the first place.  When the 52 percent begins to come to the realization that he ain't all that (and that is happening as I write this), his popularity will drop to Bushian levels.  At least Bush has the comfort of knowing that he held to his own moral compass.  Obama can only reflect that he has failed more often than not, especially in the international arena.  Just embarrassing for us all.

I cannot for the life of me fathom what he was doing.  He is a trained lawyer, fer cryin' out loud!  First rule of being a lawyer is never ask a question you don't know the answer to.  First rule of being President is never risk loss of face in foreign matters without already having the deal done.

We have a naive, unworldly, suit-wearing, smooth-talking, shark jumper for a President.

SPPPLLBBBT!

That's how you spell it when you have just read something that causes you to spit your coffee out.

Michael Brenner of the Center for Transatlantic Relations, (whom I am not familiar with) has published a column at the Huffington Post (!) pointing out Obama's failure at diplomacy in the Middle East. It seems the 52 percenters are just now figuring out that The One is all show, no go. Brenner's piece is a withering, dead-on assessment of Obama's posturing about the neverending Israeli/Palestinian conflict. I am gobsmacked that this appeared in HuffPo. Read the article here and then read the comments and you will see, as it happens in real time, what it's like to witness the public coming to the realization that they made a huge mistake in electing Obama. Speechless, I'm speechless I tell you!

UPDATE: Gore Vidal joins the fail parade: "How’s Obama doing? “Dreadfully. I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we’ve had in that position for a long time. But he’s inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters...."

UPDATE 2: Kathleen Parker, a putative conservative though previously an Obama admirer, bails out on Him, too.