But given the attacks on Michelle Malkin by Keith Olbermann and commenter Kevin, I think it is important to note.

Now, Ms. Malkin (a sexy Filipina not that it matters) is definitely to the right of me.  And she is quick to document the corruptness and hypocrisy so rampant among the left these days.  I am a semi-regular reader of her blog and I have never seen her resort to personal attacks on individuals.  She points with glee to their failings to be sure, but never engages in name calling.

I am anxiously awaiting Mr. Olbermann’s calling out Chris Matthews for wishing Rush Limbaugh dead. 

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Keith Olbermann decries alleged hate speech by Michelle Malkin thusly:

“She received death threats and hate-filled voice mails all thanks to the total mindless, morally bankrupt, knee-jerk, fascistic hatred, without which Michelle Malkin would just be a big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it.”

Thanks for the lesson in hypocrisy Keith!

I’ve got a great idea for a deficit reduction program.  It would work similarly to the “cash for clunkers” program.  Except this time instead of the government paying for your clunker vehicle, taxpayers could pay to have clunker politicians removed from office.  If given this opportunity I am quite confident we would have entirely new leadership and a budget surplus in next to no time.

A classic win-win, don’t ya think?

The idea came to me after reading this article in the WSJ:

Remember “cash for clunkers,” the program that subsidized Americans to the tune of nearly $3 billion to buy a new car and destroy an old one? Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood declared in August that, “This is the one stimulus program that seems to be working better than just about any other program.”

If that’s true, heaven help the other programs.

Cash for clunkers had two objectives: help the environment by increasing fuel efficiency, and boost car sales to help Detroit and the economy. It achieved neither. According to Hudson Institute economist Irwin Stelzer, at best “the reduction in gasoline consumption will cut our oil consumption by 0.2 percent per year, or less than a single day’s gasoline use.” Burton Abrams and George Parsons of the University of Delaware added up the total benefits from reduced gas consumption, environmental improvements and the benefit to car buyers and companies, minus the overall cost of cash for clunkers, and found a net cost of roughly $2,000 per vehicle. Rather than stimulating the economy, the program made the nation as a whole $1.4 billion poorer.

The basic fallacy of cash for clunkers is that you can somehow create wealth by destroying existing assets that are still productive, in this case cars that still work. Under the program, auto dealers were required to destroy the car engines of trade-ins with a sodium silicate solution, then smash them and send them to the junk yard. As the journalist Henry Hazlitt wrote in his classic, “Economics in One Lesson,” you can’t raise living standards by breaking windows so some people can get jobs repairing them.

The joke’s on us folks…

And lame.

Ok, so The One told us without the stimulus pork recovery plan unemployment would exceed 9%.  So, we spend billions on worthless projects and now have unemployment at 9.7%.  A truly scary number is that when you count folks who have taken part time work and those who have just given up, the rate is at 17%.   Well, Barry did promise us CHANGE, and we sure are getting it.  Let’s HOPE he doesn’t have any other tricks up his sleeve.

Er, well.  Then there’s this:

GM’s sales are down 45% from last September (when sales were already bad enough to drive the company into banrkuptcy). Chrysler is down 42%. Ford is only down 5%. Car buyers are clearly punishing the two bailout recipients brutally. Robert Farago of Truth About Cars–who has been right before–predicts that GM and Chrysler will both “go down by the end of next year” without a second, new federal bailout. The only question, he says, is whether the two manufacturers will need the cash before the 2010 midterm elections.

I’m really not all that surprised.  I for one would never purchase a vehicle from GM (government motors) and although I have been a near lifelong customer of Chrysler (Dodge trucks and Jeeps) I don’t think I could bring myself to buy a Fiat (whatever the name on the car).

Sad to say, but the country might be a helleva lot better off if little Barry would confine himself to Olympic bids.  At least there his failures only impact one city at a time.

God help us.

It’s always fascinating to me to read the viewpoints and observations of folks outside the USA on the sorry state of our nation and the apparent incompetence of our President.  Such is the case in an article entitled “Lament for a nation” by David Warren in The Ottawa Citizen.  Mr. Warren compares Obama to Gorbachev in presiding over the decline of the USA and the breakup of the Soviet Union.  I think that comparison is a bit strained, but I think it is hard to argue with this:

There is a corollary of this largely unspoken assumption: that no matter what you do to one part of a machine, the rest of the machine will continue to function normally.

A variant of this is the frequently expressed denial of the law of unintended consequences: the belief that, if the effect you intend is good, the actual effect must be similarly happy.

Very small children, the mad, and certain extinct primitive tribes, have shared in this belief system, but only the fully college-educated liberal has the vocabulary to make it sound plausible.

With an incredible rapidity, America’s status as the world’s pre-eminent superpower is now passing away. This is a function both of the nearly systematic abandonment of U.S. interests and allies overseas, with metastasizing debt and bureaucracy on the home front.

And while I think the U.S. has the structural fortitude to survive the Obama presidency, it will be a much-diminished country that emerges from the “new physics” of hope and change.

Speaking of Canadians, lately this Neil Young song has been ringing in my ears:

Its awful hard to find a job
On one side the government, the other the mob
Hey, hey ain’t that right
The workin’ man’s in for a hell of a fight.

Oh, this country sure looks good to me
But these fences are comin’ apart at every nail.

Our progressive neighbors to the north (Canada, not the DPRK) are light years ahead of the USA in the health care arena.  But The One is single-mindedly driving us to catch up quick.  So, let’s dispense with all the political bickering and hear from a genuine Canadian on what we have to look forward to one day soon:

When the pain in Christina Woodkey’s legs became so severe that she could no long hike or cross-country ski, she went to her local health clinic. The Calgary, Canada, resident was told she’d need to see a hip specialist. Because the problem was not life-threatening, however, she’d have to wait about a year.

So wait she did.

In January, the hip doctor told her that a narrowing of the spine was compressing her nerves and causing the pain. She needed a back specialist. The appointment was set for Sept. 30. “When I was given that date, I asked when could I expect to have surgery,” said Woodkey, 72. “They said it would be a year and a half after I had seen this doctor.”

So this month, she drove across the border into Montana and got the $50,000 surgery done in two days.

“I don’t have insurance. We’re not allowed to have private health insurance in Canada,” Woodkey said. “It’s not going to be easy to come up with the money. But I’m happy to say the pain is almost all gone.”

Alrighty then.  Sign me up.  Besides, there’s always Mexico.

Lefty Howard Fineman in the leftist newsrag Newsweek has this to say about The One:

If ubiquity were the measure of a presidency, Barack Obama would already be grinning at us from Mount Rushmore. But of course it is not. Despite his many words and television appearances, our elegant and eloquent president remains more an emblem of change than an agent of it. He’s a man with an endless, worthy to-do list—health care, climate change, bank reform, global capital regulation, AfPak, the Middle East, you name it—but, as yet, no boxes checked “done.” This is a problem that style will not fix. Unless Obama learns to rely less on charm, rhetoric, and good intentions and more on picking his spots and winning in political combat, he’s not going to be reelected, let alone enshrined in South Dakota.

The president’s problem isn’t that he is too visible; it’s the lack of content in what he says when he keeps showing up on the tube. Obama can seem a mite too impressed with his own aura, as if his presence on the stage is the Answer. There is, at times, a self-referential (even self-reverential) tone in his big speeches. They are heavily salted with the words “I” and “my.” (He used the former 11 times in the first few paragraphs of his address to the U.N. last week.) Obama is a historic figure, but that is the beginning, not the end, of the story.

There is only so much political mileage that can still be had by his reminding the world that he is not George W. Bush. It was the winning theme of the 2008 campaign, but that race ended nearly a year ago. The ex-president is now more ex than ever, yet the current president, who vowed to look forward, is still reaching back to Bush as bogeyman.

He did it again in that U.N. speech. The delegates wanted to know what the president was going to do about Israel and the Palestinian territories. He answered by telling them what his predecessor had failed to do. This was effective for his first month or two. Now it is starting to sound more like an excuse than an explanation.

Members of Obama’s own party know who Obama is not; they still sometimes wonder who he really is. In Washington, the appearance of uncertainty is taken as weakness—especially on Capitol Hill, where a president is only as revered as he is feared. Being the cool, convivial late-night-guest in chief won’t cut it with Congress, an institution impervious to charm (especially the charm of a president with wavering poll numbers). Members of both parties are taking Obama’s measure with their defiant and sometimes hostile response to his desires on health care. Never much of a legislator (and not long a senator), Obama underestimated the complexity of enacting a major “reform” bill. Letting Congress try to write it on its own was an awful idea. As a balkanized land of microfiefdoms, each loyal to its own lobbyists and consultants, Congress is incapable of being led by its “leadership.” It’s not like Chicago, where you call a guy who calls a guy who calls Daley, who makes the call. The president himself must make his wishes clear—along with the consequences for those who fail to grant them.

Will someone stick a fork in this guy?  Once he loses the press, what’s he got left of the left?

And the walls come tumblin’ down…

Well, we have all seen the positive response of “respected” world leaders in Libya, Venezuela and Cuba to the new guy in the White House.  Meanwhile, across the pond the Brits aren’t feeling the love.  From The Guardian:

The juxtaposition on our front page this morning is striking. We carry a photograph of Acting Sgt Michael Lockett – who was killed in Helmand on Monday – receiving the Military Cross from the Queen in June, 2008.  He was the 217th British soldier to die in the Afghan conflict. Alongside the picture, we read that the Prime Minister was forced to dash through the kitchens of the UN in New York to secure a few minutes “face time” with President Obama after five requests for a sit-down meeting were rejected by the White House.

What are we to make of this? This country has proved, through the bravery of men like Acting Sgt Lockett, America’s staunchest ally in Afghanistan. In return, the American President treats the British Prime Minister with casual contempt. The President’s graceless behaviour is unforgivable. As most members of the Cabinet would confirm, it’s not a barrel of laughs having to sit down for a chat with Gordon Brown. But that’s not the point. Mr Obama owes this country a great deal for its unflinching commitment to the American-led war in Afghanistan but seems incapable of acknowledging the fact. You might have thought that after the shambles of Mr Brown’s first visit to the Obama White House – when there was no joint press conference and the President’s  “gift” to the Prime Minister was  a boxed DVD set – lessons would have been learned. Apparently not. Admittedly, part of the problem was Downing Street’s over-anxiety to secure a face-to-face meeting for domestic political  purposes but the White House should still have been more obliging.  Mr Obama’s churlishness is fresh evidence that the US/UK special relationship is a one-way street.

Hope and Change.

So, Obama made a fool of himself at the UN this week.  Or as Rich Lowry puts it, he came across as a “gullible sap”.  Same, same.

Has an American president ever expressed such implicit hostility toward his own nation’s pre-eminence in world affairs? Or so relished in recalling its failings, or so readily elevated himself and his own virtues over those of his country?

Between America and the world, Obama adopts a happy medium. It is in this sense only that he is a centrist.

“For those who question the character and cause of my nation,” Obama said, “I ask you to look at the concrete actions we have taken in just nine months.” In other words, he’s the redeemer of a nation sunk in war crimes (we condoned torture), high-handedness (we ignored the United Nations) and hypocrisy (we promoted democracy selectively) prior to the ascension of his blessed administration.

Read the whole thing.

Well, if Jimmy Carter is to be believed, the majority of Americans (those of us opposing Obamacare) are definitely blinded by racism.  Why else would we be opposed to an unprecedented intrusion of government into our freedom to choose medical care?

Here’s a handy chart to help you discover whether you are a latent racist:

Hat Tip: Powerline

You know, this Camille Paglia may be my favorite liberal.  She calls ’em like she sees ’em, and I can’t help but respect that.  Sure, she rags on the Repubs which is to be expected and frankly in some cases it is more than a little deserved.  While I disagree with her on Afghanistan, she seems to get it right more than she doesn’t.  Here’s a sampling:

By foolishly trying to reduce all objections to healthcare reform to the malevolence of obstructionist Republicans, Democrats have managed to destroy the national coalition that elected Obama and that is unlikely to be repaired. If Obama fails to win reelection, let the blame be first laid at the door of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who at a pivotal point threw gasoline on the flames by comparing angry American citizens to Nazis. It is theoretically possible that Obama could turn the situation around with a strong speech on healthcare to Congress this week, but after a summer of grisly hemorrhaging, too much damage has been done. At this point, Democrats’ main hope for the 2012 presidential election is that Republicans nominate another hopelessly feeble candidate. Given the GOP’s facility for shooting itself in the foot, that may well happen. 

Why did it take so long for Democrats to realize that this year’s tea party and town hall uprisings were a genuine barometer of widespread public discontent and not simply a staged scenario by kooks and conspirators? First of all, too many political analysts still think that network and cable TV chat shows are the central forums of national debate. But the truly transformative political energy is coming from talk radio and the Web — both of which Democrat-sponsored proposals have threatened to stifle, in defiance of freedom of speech guarantees in the Bill of Rights. I rarely watch TV anymore except for cooking shows, history and science documentaries, old movies and football. Hence I was blissfully free from the retching overkill that followed the deaths of Michael Jackson and Ted Kennedy — I never saw a single minute of any of it. It was on talk radio, which I have resumed monitoring around the clock because of the healthcare fiasco, that I heard the passionate voices of callers coming directly from the town hall meetings. Hence I was alerted to the depth and intensity of national sentiment long before others who were simply watching staged, manipulated TV shows. 

But this is the part that really resonated with me.  See, I still think I’m a liberal.  It’s just that the left left me. 

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism. 

How has “liberty” become the inspirational code word of conservatives rather than liberals? (A prominent example is radio host Mark Levin’s book “Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto,” which was No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly three months without receiving major reviews, including in the Times.) I always thought that the Democratic Party is the freedom party — but I must be living in the nostalgic past. Remember Bob Dylan’s 1964 song “Chimes of Freedom,” made famous by the Byrds? And here’s Richie Havens electrifying the audience at Woodstock with “Freedom! Freedom!” Even Linda Ronstadt, in the 1967 song “A Different Drum,” with the Stone Ponys, provided a soaring motto for that decade: “All I’m saying is I’m not ready/ For any person, place or thing/ To try and pull the reins in on me.” 

But affluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it’s invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote “critical thinking,” which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms (“racism, sexism, homophobia”) when confronted with any social issue. The Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those clichés that it’s positively pickled. 

Yeah, you go girl!  Tell it like it is.  Sock it to ’em. 

Interesting post at Althouse this morning.  It seems when Bush I gave a speech to students similar to Obama’s (which I concede was innocuous) the Democratic controlled Congress had a conniption.

The controversy over President Obama’s speech to the nation’s schoolchildren will likely be over shortly after Obama speaks today at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. But when President George H.W. Bush delivered a similar speech on October 1, 1991, from Alice Deal Junior High School in Washington DC, the controversy was just beginning. Democrats, then the majority party in Congress, not only denounced Bush’s speech — they also ordered the General Accounting Office to investigate its production and later summoned top Bush administration officials to Capitol Hill for an extensive hearing on the issue.

Unlike the Obama speech, in 1991 most of the controversy came after, not before, the president’s school appearance. The day after Bush spoke, the Washington Post published a front-page story suggesting the speech was carefully staged for the president’s political benefit. “The White House turned a Northwest Washington junior high classroom into a television studio and its students into props,” the Post reported.

With the Post article in hand, Democrats pounced. “The Department of Education should not be producing paid political advertising for the president, it should be helping us to produce smarter students,” said Richard Gephardt, then the House Majority Leader. “And the president should be doing more about education than saying, ‘Lights, camera, action.'”

Democrats did not stop with words. Rep. William Ford, then chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, ordered the General Accounting Office to investigate the cost and legality of Bush’s appearance. On October 17, 1991, Ford summoned then-Education Secretary Lamar Alexander and other top Bush administration officials to testify at a hearing devoted to the speech. “The hearing this morning is to really examine the expenditure of $26,750 of the Department of Education funds to produce and televise an appearance by President Bush at Alice Deal Junior High School in Washington, DC,” Ford began. “As the chairman of the committee charged with the authorization and implementation of education programs, I am very much interested in the justification, rationale for giving the White House scarce education funds to produce a media event.”

That didn’t stop Democratic allies from taking their own shots at Bush. The National Education Association denounced the speech, saying it “cannot endorse a president who spends $26,000 of taxpayers’ money on a staged media event at Alice Deal Junior High School in Washington, D.C. — while cutting school lunch funds for our neediest youngsters.”

My main point in this controversy was the double standard.  Obama gets a free pass where a Republican would not.

It’s not often that I find myself in agreement with uber lefty Jane Hamsher.  But I found it hard to argue with her defense of recently deposed czar Van Jones.  Ms. Hamsher notes, as aptly put by Tom Maguire , “he wasn’t any crazier than the rest of us”:

 Ms. Hamsher further ruefully notes that in the face of conservative attacks “no coherent liberal critique was offered…”.

Indeed.  Lord knows we have all been waiting for something coherent from our friends on the left for oh so many moons.

You know, watching what’s going on in America from 7000 miles away is something of a blessing.  What with all the Obama worship and indoctrination of school kids and all, I just wouldn’t be a happy camper.

Still, it’s been in my mind that there is something strangely familiar about the personality cult surrounding The One.  Then I came across a video and it all made sense.  But of course, how could I have missed the similarity to the “Dear Leader” only 30 miles north of my front door?  Duh!

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“This is my Congressional Office…”

Um, no it isn’t.  It belongs to the people.  You are merely an office holder.  Hopefully, not for much longer.

I pledge allegiance to the Hope and Change

Of the United States of Obama

And to the socialist Republic for which He stands

One nation, under Obama

With lack of liberty and healthcare for all.

So help me God Obama.

I guess it’s official now.  Obamaism is the new religion.

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 UPDATE:  Apparently, it was all just a big misunderstanding:

As one of the preparatory materials for teachers provided by the Department of Education, students had been asked to, “Write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president. “

Today, after Republicans accused the White House of trying to indoctrinate school children with liberal propaganda the White House and the Department of Education changed the section to now read, “Write letters to themselves about how they can achieve their short‐term and long‐term education goals.”

“We changed it to clarify the language so the intent is clear,” said White House Spokesman Tommy Vietor…

Two thoughts on Obama’s planned piped-in propoganda speech to America’s schoolchildren:

1.  If I had school age kids, Tuesday would be a home school day.

2.  If the former president had tried this tactic the left would have gone nuts.

Hope and change.

I guess I have a third thought:  I wonder if the kids will be given an email address to report their parents should they fail to heed the message.