The Wednesday Wail

If you engage in public speaking with any frequency, there has almost certainly been at least one time when you, at the last minute before going on stage, scribbled a few notes on the palm of one of your hands to use as a reminder to make some key points that you had not included in your original slides or script.  I do this almost every time I give a presentation or speech. Once, while waiting to give testimony before a legislative committee, I realized that the witness just before me was making pretty much all of the points I had intended to make, and, lacking any paper, ended up scribbling an entire set of new notes on both palms in the few moments before I had to take the witness table.  Ironically, it ended up being probably the most effective testimony I've ever offered.

And so we get to the leftist media's latest obsession with Sarah Palin.  It seems that, when offering her speech to the Tea Party convention in Nashville on Saturday, the former Alaska Governor had scribbled a few notes on the palm of her left hand, and this showed up on the cameras.  Immediatly, the neo-fascist goon squads that make up the regular contributors to the Huffington Post, Daily Kos and other far-left nut site went berserk, spending all day Sunday making the wholely illogical analogy between President Obama's inability to speak to a class of 6th graders without his Teleprompter crutch, and Ms. Palin scribbling a few reference notes on the palm of one hand.

Here I sit on Wednesday morning, for some reason watching Morning Joe on MSNBC, and the liberal pea brains who host this program are still obsessing about this, four days after Ms. Palin delivered her speech.  The context has changed a bit, with much of the focus now on the pathetic White House spokesman, Robert "I'm almost as utterly incompetent in this job as Scott McClellan" Gibbs, who mocked Ms. Palin at Tuesday's press briefing by showing the assembled reporters notes he had scribble on his own fatty palm.

The lefties in the media all thought that was very cute, but the reality is that it amounts to just one more clear indicator that this President and his staff simply have no understanding of how ordinary Americans actually function in life.  Every time they and their unflinching allies in the press manufacture some new fake excuse to mock Ms. Palin, they make her a more sympathetic character to millions of Americans, and show themselves for the arrogant pinheads they truly are.

Of course, the best news of this week is that the repeated record snowstorms in the DC area have forced the House of Representatives and much of the federal government to shut down for the entire week.  If we could get another six months of this, the budget deficit would be cut in half.

But there's no shutting down Barack Obama's mouth, or the smarmy mouth of Robert Gibbs.

A couple of other things:  John Murtha, one of the very worst, most unethical people to ever serve in the U.S. congress, died on Monday.  He is, in my opinion, a truly tragic figure:  A real, genuine American hero in his early life, who became a real, genuine, unabashed scumbag in his later life.  One of the most mixed legacies I've ever seen.

Finally, the U.S. Senate should be applauded:  the effort to invoke cloture on the nomination of communist Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board failed on a vote of 52-33. Becker was hand-picked by Obama's benefactors in the SEIU, which funneled tens of millions in illegal contributions into the Obama campaign, to fill the post.

That made Tuesday a great day for America.  Let's see what we can do about Wednesday.

The Monday Morning Mass Hysteria

All you need to know about Barack Obama, part 6,593:  When speaking to a military audience, he does not know how to pronounce the word "corpsman". Either that, or he thinks everyone in the navy is a zombie (for all you humorless liberals, that would be a walking corpse).

After spending an entire year killing any chance of passing a healthcare nationalization bill by holding all negotiations in secret and shutting Republicans out of the process completely, the White House has decided to actually hold a public meeting on the subject - right out in the open, with TV cameras in the room!  - and even invite some evil Rs to attend.  I'm sure it'll be a fabulous success.

Yeesh.

Some guy who writes for the Nashville Post is whining that Sarah Palin has somehow "hijacked" the Tea Party.  What a terrible way for a writer to waste his one shot at national exposure.  Somebody give this clown a Kleenex.

If you hate your local TV weather guy, just be glad you don't live in Baltimore.  I think this may be the same guy who wrote the silly piece about Palin and the Tea Party.  He has a long commute.

Our favorite liberal bed-wetting columnist, E.J. Dionne, has written something completely senseless about about how passing a healthcare bill is like renovating a kitchen. Or something like that.

Finally, just in case you live under a rock and missed it, WHO DAT????

Sarah Palin: Doing Everything Right

Sarah Palin is doing everything right. What do I mean by that? Well, let’s go back to a conversation I had last November with a group of Washington insiders. By “insiders”, I mean that this group of four men and one woman make their livings working in the political process in the nation’s capital: Three are lobbyists, one a pollster, and one an executive at a trade association. While I live in Houston and visit DC on work assignments 12 to 14 times a year, all of the others spend their entire lives living and working inside the Washington echo chamber.


It was a fascinating conversation – at least to me – and I was at the time the odd man out. You’ll see what I mean by ‘at the time’ in a moment.

We were having a wide-ranging political conversation over dinner, and one of the lobbyists posed this question: “Sarah Palin: is she a viable future candidate for national office, or is she done?” I sat silently as, one by one, the five political pros at the table knee-jerked to the “she’s done” posture.

The reasons thrown out for their dismissive posture towards Gov. Palin were predictable: “Too ditzy”, “doesn’t speak well”, “inexperienced”, “knows nothing about foreign policy”, “shouldn’t have resigned her job as governor”, and perhaps most fascinating of all, “doesn’t fit in around here”. This came from the lone female at the table, a lovely woman who grew up in New York state, educated in private schools and Yale, and who worked her entire life in one government job or another before becoming a lobbyist a few years back. Despite that background, she still possesses some modicum of common sense, although she displays all the lack of understanding of middle America you’d expect from a person of her background.

Keith Olberman Agonisties

Poor Keith Olberman.  Ok, wait, let me back up.  Keith Olberman can kiss my burnt orange Texas a**.  He epitomizes everything that is bad about the political left in America:  hopelessly ignorant yet cocksure; consistently wrong yet condescending; unable to make the simplest argument based on logic or facts yet smarmy and dismissive when engaging anyone who disagrees; completely unaccomplished in any real-world endeavor yet self-justified in lecturing others.

For exhibiting such a horrid set of personal behaviors, he is of course awarded an hour-long, prime time show on cable television's most biased "news" channel, just as similar oafs like Janeane Garafalo and Al Franken were initially given their own radio talk shows on the now-bankrupt and deceased Air America.  The American left always awards the dimmest bulbs among them - that's how Al Gore became Pope of the Church of Global Warming, after all.

And as always happens when the American left puts one of its most pathological dimwits on full display to the public in the media, the ratings go to hell.  It happened with Air America, it happened with Chris Matthews, who currently hosts the single lowest-rated prime time show on any cable "news" network, it has happened with every leftist radio talk show host who has ever been given a national stage, and it is now happening to Keith Olberman, Rachel Maddow and the rest of the uniformly left-wing prime time contingent at MSNBC. 

It has been obvious for years now that MSNBC cannot hope to compete in any meaningful way with Fox News - Fox now out-draws MSNBC consistently by about a 4 to 1 margin in both total audience and the 18-49 demographic that is so critical to advertisers - so obvious in fact that no one even really bothers to list Fox among MSNBC's ratings rivals anymore, choosing to focus instead on the race for a very distant second place between MSNBC, CNN and even CNN Headline News.  It has been widely reported this week that MSNBC's uniformly leftist prime time lineup has now fallen behind a more balanced CNNHN, an incredible feat of incompetent management rivaled in modern times only by CNN's dramatic fall from grace, and Toyota's quality control process.

The Friday Morning Fright Fest

Let's dig right in with one of my favorite pet peeves, the worthless, feckless, wimped-out, pretend-to-be-conservative Democrat "Blue Dog" Caucus in the House of Representatives.  These 42 or so members of the House constitute the most over-hyped and under-accomplished caucus in the history of American government.

Take a look at this story. Yesterday, the Democrats raised the U.S. debt ceiling by a whopping $1.9 trillion, the largest such hike in U.S. history, by far.  The story really plays up the role the Blue Dogs played in ensuring the bill also invoked "pay as you go" budgeting rules in the house for 2010, making them seem to be these intrepid protectors of taxpayer dollars.  Well, bullshit, as we like to say down here in Texas.

First of all, these "pay as  you go" rules have been in effect for the vast majority of the last 12 years, as the federal debt has literally exploded.  This Blue Dog caucus has been in existence since the mid-1990s, as the federal debt has literally exploded.  Am I repeating myself here?  Well, sorry, I'm a little pissed.

The Blue Dog caucus has been in existence since around 1995, and has yet to take a single vote as a group against any huge spending bill proposed by their Party's leadership.  They caved on the fake stimulus bill last year, most of them caved on a cap and trade bill that would have added yet another $2 trillion to the national debt, and most of them have been feverishly negotiating special deals for their districts in exchange for their votes on the healthcare nationalization bill.

The only way this worthless collection of fake fiscal conservatives could ever make themselves a truly relevant caucus would be to oppose some huge spending bill - any huge spending bill - favored by their leadership as a bloc.  But because they are fake fiscal conservatives who only assume that posture as a means of getting elected in what are otherwise Republican districts, they never do that.  These are the very worst people in the U.S. House of Representatives, because they give the Democrat Party a patina of ideological diversity it does not in fact possess.   A pox on all their Blue dog houses.

Ok, let me take a deep breath here before moving on...

The Thursday Morning Thrill Ride

Wow.  You miss a couple of days blogging and all hell has broken loose.  Where to begin...

How about here.  Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln, after having spent the last year desperately attempting to set herself up as the 60th vote for the Obama healthcare nationalization plan, suddenly finds herself down by 23 points to a Republican opponent in her bid for re-election.  So now she gets religion, and asks the President when he's going to start fighting back against those evil liberals in his own Party.  This would be comical if it weren't so damned pathetic.

Back in December, I wrote in my newspaper column that it was very clear to me at that time that, unless the President radically shifted his legislative and regulatory agenda back from the far left to the center of the political spectrum, both houses of congress would clearly be in play and subject to a GOP takeover this November.  I also admitted I was out on a limb with that projection, and that the national punditry would take a little while to reach a similar conclusion.  That realization among the pundit class has now begun in earnest, with this piece from an AP writer being the latest evidence of this transitional thought process.  If the AP, which has been firmly in the Obama tank for the last 2 years, has writers coming very reluctantly to this conclusion, you now the polling data is very, very compelling.

This is important news - Democrat Collin Peterson, Chairman of the House Ag Committee, has now introduced a bill that would deny EPA the ability to move to regulate "greenhouse" gases under its entirely fraudulent "endangerment finding" published in late 2009.  Rep. Peterson is extremely influential among farm state Democrats, who make up about 40 votes in the House, enough to get a bill passed with solid Republican support.  We continue to see rising support in the Senate for similar legislation among "moderate" Democrats who, like Sen. Lincoln, see their polling numbers fading rapidly under the steady leftwards assault on the economy and our freedoms by the Obama Administration.


This one actually surprises me a little bit.  The President actually had a pretty good day last Thursday when he went to a GOP caucus retreat and had a semi-free flowing Q and A session with members of the loyal opposition.  And he did well - I mean, the man is not competent at much, but he can debate when he's been properly schooled beforehand.  So when I saw early yesterday that a group of pundits and bloggers from across the political spectrum had sent a petition to the White House to make these kinds of sessions a regular periodic event, I half expected the Administration to at least give lip service to wanting to explore the possibility.  But these guys are clearly the most inept and clueless bunch we've had ensconced at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue since at least the Carter Administration, so I suppose it should not surprise me that they are choosing to forego an opportunity to make their guy look good on TV 2 or 3 times a year.

I know you will all be shocked to hear this, but the Obama Commerce Department has been dummying up fake unemployment numbers in an obvious effort to prevent the published rate of unemployment from rising above 10%.  As we mentioned on Monday, the Administration has already demonstrate its willingness to fake these economic indicators by having to revise its third quarter GDP estimate downwards twice, ultimately taking it all the way down to 2.2% from an initial estimate of 4.6%.  I'm laying odds that the 5.7% 4th quarter GDP estimate published last week will ultimately be revised downwards to somewhere south of 3.5%.

And then I came across this. This does not bode well for any of us.  Maybe we all ought to consider taking up golf. 

Have a great Thursday.

The Monday Morning Mind Meld

Are you sitting down?  If not,  you might want to before reading the next sentence...

The Barack (the Hussien is silent) Obama Administration will release its 5 year budget plan today.  It projects a budget deficit of $5.08 trillion during that time period, which is 35% higher than the administration's previous projection.  The Politico story I've linked you to makes a fetid effort to blame it all on higher than anticipated war spending, but that is just a very small portion of the increase in spending.  You should also understand that this budget anticipates something over $600 billion in revenues related to the mind-boggling stupid cap and trade plan that everyone in Washington knows is not going to be passed into law.

The most dishonest, least transparent administration in American history continues its deceitful ways.

The folks over at Weazelzippers.net show us that this President will surrender his dignity to pretty much anyone.  The Mayor of Tampa?  Seriously?

If you still wonder why Newsweek continues to teeter on the brink of bankruptcy, all you need to do is read this insipid piece by the terminally irrelevant Anna Quindlen. This nitwit is still making the "we won, so just get in line" argument that Obama himself quit making along about March of 2009.  Unreal.

That's all I can stand for today - y'all have a great week.