Hope! Change! Hypocrisy! (Vol. 232,872,912,019)

Why is it I am not surprised that the "Task Force" designed to save the Ossified Car Makers isn't too hot on driving the cars they are supposed to save?

At least two task force members don't own a car, and there are still two open slots on the 10-member panel that will be filled by the secretaries of labor and commerce, who have not yet been appointed.

The co-chairs of the task force -- Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and White House National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers -- both own foreign automobiles.

Geithner owns a 2008 Acura TSX, registered in New York. He once owned a 1999 Honda Accord and a 2002 Acura MDX, according to public records.

Geithner is the president's designee for purposes of enforcing loan agreements with GM and Chrysler and must approve or reject any proposed transactions by either company that would cost $100 million or more.

His maternal grandfather, Charles Moore, was a vice president at Ford Motor Co. from 1952-63, according to Peter Geithner, the secretary's father. But Geithner wasn't very interested in cars growing up -- in part because he graduated from high school in Asia, his father said.

Summers owns a 1995 Mazda Protege that's registered in Massachusetts. He previously owned a 1996 Ford Taurus GL.

What other task force members drive:

• Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag owns a 2008 Honda Odyssey and a 2004 Volvo S60. He previously owned a 1997 Jeep Grand Cherokee and 1982 Datsun.

• Carol Browner, the White House climate czar, said earlier this month at the Washington Auto Show that she doesn't own an automobile. Public records show she once owned a 1999 Saab 9-5 SE.

• Energy Secretary Steven Chu doesn't own a car, his wife, Jean Fetter, said in a telephone interview on Sunday. Cabinet officials are typically transported to and from work by security officials in government vehicles.

• Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson owns a 2008 Toyota Prius and a Honda Odyssey minivan, she said Sunday. "It's great," she said of her Prius.

• Vehicle information was not available for Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood or Christine Romer, head of the Council of Economic Advisers.

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Hope! Change! Being A Deadbeat!

You mean the Magic Unicorns couldn't pay off his party debts?

Here is where I recycle my old "if the Republicans had sone this..." line.

Stacie Paxton, a spokeswoman for the Obama-controlled DNC, explained the reimbursement delay by saying, "We are still looking at various costs and bills.'' She would not say whether parts of the bill are disputed.

The city spent $1 million on police protection for the rally. The Office of Emergency Management and Communications racked up more than $120,000 in expenses, including $19,500 paid to police official Neil Sullivan to quarterback election night logistics.

In late October, Mayor Daley assured that the cash-flush Obama campaign would reimburse the city for every penny spent on the rally. "We have a financial crisis," he said at the time. "The City of Chicago could not afford $2 million on this because we're gonna be laying off people, cutting back. That [cost] would really be unfortunate. . . . It's a huge cost to the City of Chicago.

"This is not a presidential visit. . . . This is a political event, and they've agreed to pay for all those services -- all the expenses of that. ... It's costly, but they raised quite a bit of money. There's no [shortage] of money in that campaign."

The day after the Nov. 4 election, Daley was asked again whether the Obama campaign would pay up.

"Yeah. I don't know why you're so negative. ... What is this? He just won for president, and you say, 'He's not gonna pay his bills,' " the mayor said then.

On Dec. 9, the day the Sun-Times disclosed the $1.74 million tab, Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt referred questions to the DNC.

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Fuck Obama

Some fun stuff that is definitely "Obama's fault."

(h/t: One of my all-time favorite blogs: Cold Fury)

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Shocka! Team Obama May Have Another Tax Avoiding Cabinet Guy Issue Brewing

Thanks to Mr. "Dead! Dead! Dead!"

Consider: Emanuel served on the Freddie Mac board of directors during the time that the government-backed lender lied about its earnings, a leading contributor to the current economic meltdown.

The Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight Agency later singled out the Freddie Mac board as contributing to the fraud in 2000 and 2001 for "failing in its duty to follow up on matters brought to its attention." In other words, board members ignored the red flags waving in their faces.

The SEC later fined Freddie $50 million for its deliberate fraud in 2000, 2001 and 2002.

Meanwhile, Emanuel was paid more than $260,000 for his Freddie "service." Plus, after he resigned from the board to run for Congress in 2002, the troubled agency's PAC gave his campaign $25,000 - its largest single gift to a House candidate.

That's what friends are for, isn't it?

Caution: Yeah, it's a Dick Morris column. But, if this is true......

Posted by: eddiebear at 01:42 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Ruh-roh

We've all been focused on how Obama is leading us down the road to domestic ruin with the Spendulus bill, but, surely, his foreign policy team is keeping us safe with new and different Hopeychangey ideas:

In a slap at her predecessors, Clinton made it clear she believes that the Bush administration's decision to walk away from an agreement negotiated during her husband's administration -- the 1994 Agreed Framework -- helped create the current crisis over North Korea's stash of nuclear weapons.

"The Agreed Framework was torn up on the basis of the concerns about the highly-enriched-uranium program," Clinton said. "There is no debate that, once the Agreed Framework was torn up, the North Koreans began to reprocess plutonium with a vengeance because all bets were off. The result is they now have nuclear weapons, which they did not have before."

And there was no debate whatsoever over the fact that "The Agreed Framework" was based on a thin tissue of lies that your husband wanted to hear in order to believe that he'd found a solution to an international problem rather than placing a Band-Aid on it?  Right?

The Funniest End of Civilization EVAR is going to be a lot funnier from somewhere far from the West Coast, right?  Okay, then, I'll be moving to Nebraska.

Posted by: Sean M. at 03:37 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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A Thought On The Stock Market Crash Today

Remember back whenever the stock market would dip while President Bush spoke, the Deciders would gleefully post a spilit screen of the two events?

How much you want to bet this conveniently doesn't happen now?

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You're going to want to vomit

Oh. My. Fucking. God. We are witnessing something America has never seen before...

“I dreamed I was an Obama girl. I had a chance to be in the same room with him for the first time. There were dark velvet chairs and he was standing there with all this dark and mist around him. His lips so purple and sensuous as if to be otherworldly,” she wrote to me. “I moved gently toward him and then I said the wrong thing. Obama tamped it down like some vapor that didn’t register. He wasn’t even flattered.”

Why should he be flattered? He's The One. He's gonna...well...Uh...

Posted by: Sean M. at 05:37 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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Waking up

I guess Charles Krauthammer hasn't received his unicorn yet:

After Obama's miraculous 2008 presidential campaign, it was clear that at some point the magical mystery tour would have to end. The nation would rub its eyes and begin to emerge from its reverie. The hallucinatory Obama would give way to the mere mortal. The great ethical transformations promised would be seen as a fairy tale that all presidents tell -- and that this president told better than anyone.

I thought the awakening would take six months. It took two and a half weeks.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be anything in the Constitution about "do-overs."  Damnit.

Posted by: Sean M. at 05:19 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Not Even Obama Can Stop The Rat Problem In Washington

Kinda symbolic, no?

Sylvia Keys, a calligrapher who’s lived in a condo there for 18 years, recently posted to the U Street Listserv that she finally scored an alley parking spot and, guess what? There are rats in the alley. And guess what else? They are “living, eating and partying on our motors. And leaving ‘debris’ behind,” Keys writes.

And that’s not all: “My taillight went out and the dealer said that rats had been chewing away the wires, thus costing me $200. And yes, the dealership did find a dead rat baby around my motor.”

 There’s no way she’s giving up her spot in “a very nice, newly bricked, alleyway” to battle the masses on 15th Street again. So she turned to the Listserv for help. The Listserv directed her to D.C. vermin czar Gerard Brown, who has a lot on his to-do list, including, as our almost-old cover story points out, bedbugs.

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Your tax dollars at work

(h/t)

Posted by: It's Vintage, Duh at 02:53 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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What's In YOUR Wallet?

When I came home from work last night, I flipped on the news and saw this live confirmation of Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary. The way the audience reacted you would have thought Geithner just gave the State of the Union address. It made me ill.

However, I was stunned when I began reading the vote in the Senate. Cornyn (R-TX)? Corker (R-TN)? Shelby (R-AL)? YES!??? I cannot believe that Geithner's tax cheating was dismissed as no big deal. It is insulting to every taxpayer in this country. Outrage doesn't begin to describe my reaction. Confirming him is the equivalent of confirming Ray Nagin as the head of FEMA. What were they thinking?

So I've been sulking all day about this, letting the reality of this sink in and then I read this. (I must be a glutton for punishment.)

In an age of bailouts, Geithner is the original Bailout Czar. It was Geithner, after all, who was the instrumental figure in arranging JP Morgan’s takeover of Bear Stearns, a deal in which $29 billion of taxpayer money was pledged as a backstop against illiquid and toxic assets.

It wasn’t Hank Paulson, but rather Tim Geithner who put together the plan to have the government rescue AIG, to the tune of $85 billion and growing.

It has been widely noted Geithner was in favor of stepping in with taxpayer dollars to save Lehman Brothers. I guess it’s pretty easy to spend taxpayer dollars when you aren’t even paying your own taxes.

Do you hear that sound? It's the sound of what is left of your money being ripped from your wallets to pay for a nationalized banking system courtesy of the same man that certain Republicans thought just made a simple mistake on his taxes.

So perhaps a new movement is in order. Instead of sending bricks or bags of tea to Congress as a sign of revolt, perhaps we should start mailing them empty wallets that have an enclosed note that says "THIS is what's in my wallet, you thief!"

Meanwhile, I'm thinking of just ordering a bunch of these name tags to wear every day for the next four years.  What do you think? Appropriate?

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If Obesity Can Be Caught As If It Were The Flu, What Can We Do To Stop It?

Personally, I think this is a bit silly. But since SCIENTISTS have claimed it to be so, it must be.

As many as one in three obese people may have become overweight after falling victim to the highly infectious cold-like virus, known as AD-36.

It is known to cause coughs, sore throats, diarrhoea and conjunctivitis but has now also been found to make fat cells multiply, leading to weight gain.

The shocking discovery will add to evidence that Britain’s obesity epidemic is not simply down to an unhealthy diet or lack of exercise.

Research suggests a third of UK adults will be grossly overweight within three years, with Britain even predicted to overtake the US as the most obese nation in the world.

The problem already causes 9,000 premature deaths in the UK a year and costs the NHS £1billion.

Many experts already believe that genes can make some people more susceptible to weight gain and now it seems that infections could also hold the key.

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The proverbial elephant in the room

This has been kicking around my skull for a while, and I just had to get it out there...

If He was born Brian Harrison O'Grady, a guy with a white mother from Kansas and, well, a white father from Kansas (or a white father from anywhere else, for that matter), and He had pretty much the same resume, He never would have made it to the Senate, much less anywhere near the Oval Office, right?

Discuss.

(And, yes, I'm fully aware that I'm a RACIST!!!!11!!one!1!! for even thinking this, much less committing it to teh internets.)

Posted by: Sean M. at 12:22 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Obama's Fault: Keyboard to Chair Interface Problem

The only way to secure a computer is to turn it off and unplug it. - Old IT Saying

It seems the public fister just can't live without his fucking Blackberry.  Of course, their going to let him keep it even though there is an amazingly good reason they shouldn't:

Still, hackers can plant malicious software on a BlackBerry from afar. One existing piece of software, for example, can transform the device into a mini-radio receiver, allowing eavesdroppers to hear any conversations near it.

Others can detect the phone's location by way of signals it sends to nearby cellular towers, turning it into a homing device.

In fact, according to a database maintained by the Department of Homeland Security, at least 16 potential chinks in the BlackBerry's security armor have come to light since 2004. "Of course, the president's location is usually fairly publicly known#8212;he's within the White House or a building," said John Pescatore, vice president for Internet security at research firm Gartner Inc., who worked on communications security for the Secret Service in the early 1980s. "However, somebody could have the ability to figure out he's on this floor or that floor," he said.

Ultimately, the biggest concern may not be someone hacking into Obama's BlackBerry but targeting the devices of people he's communicating with, said Johannes Ullrich, chief research officer for the SANS Technology Institute in Bethesda, Md., which trains network security and system administrators.

Obama probably would not lose his BlackBerry, with dozens of Secret Service agents around to keep an eye on it. But if one of his e-mail correspondents lost his or her device, agents would not be there to scoop it up.

Security concerns are not the only consideration for Obama. Work-related communications of executive branch employees could become public records after the president's term is through.

What the fuck is he thinking?  Once again, his behavior forces me to believe he is just not a serious person.  He doesn't, in any way, understand the gravity of the position he now holds. 

But wait, it gets worse:

The newspaper said the Obama team, which ran a technology-savvy campaign, has been faced with a morass of security regulations, which bar private e-mail accounts and instant messaging.

Fuck.  Me.  With.  A.  Lubed.  Hammer.

Are they fucking serious?  Did it ever occur to them that the reason the previous administration didn't allow private e-mail and instant messaging is because those technologies are fundamentally and inherently unsecure.* 

The previous administration didn't allow them because being able to share pictures of kittens in bowls of yarn and super fucking important virus alert information was just slightly less important than... I don't know... securing the communications and informational integrity of the world's most powerful nation.  A nation, I might add, that is at war and has more enemies than any other entity in the history of Earth.

This is just sad.  And stupid.  And will lead inevitably to a major security breach or legal trouble for Obama or both. 

Verdict:  Dumb

Other things that are Obama's fault:

• Not only closing Guantanamo but closing all overseas "secret holding facilities" and eliminating any interrogation techniques that aren't in the Army Field Manual.  Verdict:  Evil
• Eleventy Billion Dollars to "stimulate" our debt shaft and massage our "economic prostate."  Verdict:  Dumb
• Got sworn in again, making him the third president to take the oath twice.  Verdict:  Smart.

Running total -

• Smart Things Obama Has Done:  1
• Dumb Things Obama Has Done:  3
• Evil Things Obama Has Done: 1

* - I don't mean insecure, I mean unsecure.  Insecure is how you feel when you think your nose is too big.  The use of private e-mail and instant messaging is the exact opposite of secure.  Shitty hackers can violate the pathetic safeguards on AIM.  World-class hackers will face-rape Yahoo's smiley face.

 

Posted by: Moron Pundit at 09:25 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
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Some sort of response is required

to the Googlebomb.

Terrorist sympathizer?

Murderer of tiny foreign fetuses?

Socialist in sheep's clothing?

Further suggestions are appreciated.

Posted by: Alice H at 08:14 PM | Comments (23) | Add Comment
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Maybe This Is Why My Dad Wouldn't Let Me Drive His Car

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Obama's Fault: It begins...

Hope and Change is sweeping through Guantanamo Bay:

In one of its first actions, the Obama administration instructed military prosecutors late Tuesday to seek a 120-day suspension of legal proceedings involving detainees at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- a clear break with the approach of the outgoing Bush administration.

Army Col. Patrick Parrish promptly put one of the cases on hold Wednesday morning, and the disposition of several others is expected to become clear later in the day. Parrish is overseeing the trial of Omar Khadr, a Canadian accused of killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan when he was 15. Khadr's trial was about to begin, but the defense did not object to a delay until May 20 and Parrish issued the necessary order.

I have a great idea.  Why don't we have all the Guantanamo murdering terrorist scum detainees shipped to D.C. and let them live at the White House?  Surely being surrounded by such innocent, upstanding members of the human race could only serve to enhance the One's glory.

Time to keep a running total -

• Smart Things Obama Has Done:  0
• Dumb Things Obama Has Done:  1
• Evil Things Obama Has Done: 0

Fellow Bloggers, feel free to update these totals in any blog posts you may make.

Posted by: Moron Pundit at 09:45 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Obama's Fault: Inaugural Edition

Obama's fault today?  I'm struck with an overwhelming melancholy after it became official.  I think there are several reasons for this but the most striking is the feeling that a truly important and amazing era of my life and United States history is over and that the next era will bring with it much more terror and desperation than we have seen in half a century.

Our enemies are emboldened, our allies content with our self-castration and our fellow citizens apparently eager to bankrupt the treasury in exchange for a little Hope and Change.

It is imperative that we hound this man on policy and culture and in every other way that will lead to his defeat in 2012.  While he cannot destroy a country in four years it is evident that by the next election he will have laid the groundwork for America's permanent removal from the pantheon of great and powerful nations.  By then he will have had time to devestate our military, abandon any overseas commitments that may have racist overtones, start at least half a dozen pointless "humanitarian" conflicts in places no American should ever step foot and borrow our economy into a state of permanent recession. 

What enemy wouldn't take a shot at the title after that? 

I felt relief after the election.  It was finally over.  But now I realize that was the most false sense of contentment I could have experienced.  This borderlng-on-open Marxist will use every dirty trick in the book to remain in power including turning the Government into a 24/7 campaign commercial until election day 2012.  We will need all of our resolve, creativity and resources to compete with this. 

I'm glad Obama's Ace HQ was able to have fun today because I fear we have a very grim four years to look forward in which the balance of a nation hangs.  

Let's nail these motherfuckers to the wall.

P.S.: You cocksucking five-year-olds that taunted the President on his departure can throat-wrap the barbed cock of Satan and gargle his demon lava.  I find it unbelievable that modern partisans could use lessons in decorum and class from the fucking hippies at Woodstock.  

[Rage has removed ability to form sentences properly.]

Posted by: Moron Pundit at 04:27 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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The Obama Presidency, 10 Minutes In

Dammit! I am still fat and bald, my car still needs gas, and that unicorn hasn't arrived yet. What gives?

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The Deciders have Decided, And We Must All Feel Pain

Shockingly, that whole "sacrifice", "pain", and "spread the wealth" thing seems to be getting a lot of love from The Deciders, who have all but declared themselves cheerleaders for Obama. Not only that, but, ironically, they are claiming we can no longer afford dissent, and the "need to rise above politics" meme, what with The Arrival of The Messiah less than 24 hours away.

Well, I think more than anytime than I can remember in all the years I've been doing this, the country is paying attention. The phrase I've been using, "The nerve endings of the country are exposed." And now, after the election and given the magnitude of the problems that we're facing, even Republicans are cheering him on. They want this to work and they're willing to set aside, you know, a lot of what we've been through for the last eight years and beyond that in terms of the ideological food fights. And they're saying, "Look, we've got to get through this together." There is going to be some pain. The economic conditions, the objective reality is they're very, very difficult. And you can't even find a model that fits, in our lifetime, for what we're facing now. And what we've learned in the last four months, just when we think we've gotten to higher ground we go off the cliff again. And I think that has meant for the country not just a crisis of confidence, but sheer terror on the lot of a lot of people, and with good reason.

And Chuck Todd is pushing the angle that we all need s torturous visit to the doctor for our own good

this speech for the stimulus package last week, I thought it was one of his surprisingly weaker performances. It was very dry, it didn't ask for any sacrifice from the, the country, it was all about government. And it was an odd thing, because it was supposed to be a speech that was to the American people, getting them – to buy in on this, and he didn't ask for any buy-in. Now, maybe they were waiting till the inaugural address to do that, but I think that that is the number one thing a lot of Obama's supporters on the intellectual side of this are all wondering; "OK, Bush didn't do this after 9/11. We're counting on you to do this. How are you going to do it and how are you going to make that real?"

 

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