Filed under: Fun!, Politics — dave @ 10:46 pm 2010/02/25
Vice President Joe Biden had some notable things to say about his Executive Branch position today…
Just moments before the afternoon session (of the today’s health care summit at the Blair House) got underway, C-SPAN’s cameras picked up audio of Biden chatting casually with participants.
“It’s easy being vice president — you don’t have to do anything.”
Whomever Biden was chatting with said, “It’s like being the grandpa and not the parent.”
“Yeah, that’s it!” replied Biden.
Good grief, what a buffoon. And to think that the people who voted to put this guy a heartbeat from the Presidency were worried about Sarah Palin… After all of his gaffes last year I’m surprised he’s still allowed out in public.
Here’s a good read by Dan Kennedy on the Business & Media Institute website. An excerpt:
Mrs. Obama… reportedly has a staff of 22 assistants. Yes, I said twenty-two. (Previous First Ladies’ dedicated staffs were in the single digits). Michelle’s little army includes a Chief of Staff costing $172,000 a year; a Deputy Chief of Staff at $90,000; a Director of Policy and Projects at $140,000; a Director of Communications at $102,000; a Deputy Director of Scheduling at $62,000; two Social Secretaries – mysteriously, one at $65,000, one at $64,000; an Associate Director of Correspondence at $45,000, an Assistant to the Social Secretary at $36,000, and more, in total consuming $6.3-million annually thus $25-million during her 4-year term. Not to mention a make-up artist and hair stylist.
Kennedy took the occasion of the scolding tone of President Obama to bring this up; when he said that a trip to Vegas wasn’t the wisest move “when you’re trying to save for college. You prioritize. You make tough choices. It’s time your government did the same.”
She has been using Air Force aircraft and personnel to jet back and forth between Washington, D.C. and her home in San Francisco, plus has made several overseas junkets (for who knows what)… But traveling alone isn’t much fun, so she has her usual entourage tagging along, plus any number of her family members, plus whatever Congressional delegation needs to come along, plus their own entourages, plus security…
And when asked about the extravagant use of taxpayer funds for travel, Pelosi’s defense is along the lines of, it’s all necessary for the person third in line to the Presidency. Can she justify all of the travel and expenses? Has she reimbursed the DOD for any of those expenses? If Denny Hastert had pulled the same stunts, would there be the near deafening silence from the mainstream media about it? I think not, on all three counts.
Not my words, but the words of highly respected economist, Dr. Arthur Laffer from an interview published on Human Events.
“Obama is a fine, very impressive person. He really is. Unfortunately, everything that he is doing in economics is exactly wrong. He is a crappy president,” Laffer said.
Dr. Laffer had a lot more to say in that interview about the state of the country’s economy and how the Obama Administration’s economic policy is affecting it. Although Laffer didn’t have much nice to say about the current policy, his is not your run-of-the-mill partisan mudslinging. He’s also written some scathing reviews of Bush Administration spending decisions, especially the bailouts in 2008. He may not be a totally unbiased source of info, but he is consistent in calling bad economic policy as he sees it. And he has some solid credentials backing up what he says.
President Obama told Diane Sawyer in an interview recently, “I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president.” I would so love for him to be a really good president, but if he continues on his present course, I forsee him being more of a crappy one-term president.
Here’s a fun way to make President Obama’s State Of The Union address, coming up on January 27, fun for the whole family, and perk things up a bit;
… it would be fun and also a good exercise for those of us who are going to listen to Mr. Obama’s State of The Union Address on January 27th to print off this list and keep count of how many times he says the following phrases, which I lifted from Mark Alexander’s essay, State of Disunion:
“let me be clear”
“make no mistake”
“back from the brink”
“signs of recovery”
“restored our reputation”
“fiscal restraint”
“greed on Wall Street”
“affordable health care”
“relief for working families”
“job creation”
“inherited” as in “I inherited this mess”
And some I’d be interested hearing him say:
“Constitution”
“Founding Fathers”
“Individual liberty”
I might have to come up with a set of Bingo cards that would follow the same theme, kinda like the Buzzword Bingo made famous by Wally & Dilbert. Would it not be hilarious if in the middle of his speech someone in the gallery (a Senator?) shouted out, “BINGO!”?
Actually, I won’t need to have the speech ‘perked up’; my challenge, if I listen to it, will be keeping my blood pressure down, as Obama will surely say plenty that will get under my skin.
Edit: Just a quick search reveals that I’m definitely not the first one to come up with State Of The Union Bingo. Lots of options are already out there, like this multipage pdf that you can print out and share with your friends, an online version that will allow you to generate a different version with the click of a button, or this interactive online version that you can play in your web browser (no printing required!) And in case anyone sees this as an unfair slam on our illustrious President, let me point out that the Democrats did it first.
“That I do think is a mistake of mine — I think the assumption was if I just focus on policy, if I just focus on this provision or that law or if we’re making a good rational decision here, then people will get it.”
— Barack Obama on his proposed health care takeover.
Got that, folks? Even when he’s admitting a “mistake of mine,” he’s throwing the blame onto others. His failures are your fault because you just don’t get it. That’s called pathological narcissism.
Next week’s State of the Union address ought to be interesting… Interesting to see how often the blame for the country’s problems will be cast on Bush, the Republican obstructionists, the populace who just doesn’t get it, the Tea Partyers, etc… But I doubt he’ll blame the true culprit; his teleprompter.
The Massachusetts Senate seat vacated with the death of Senator Ted Kennedy should have been a slam dunk for the Democrats; it was theirs to lose. And lose it they did. But now, if DNC leaders are to be believed, it’s all Martha Coakley’s fault. Poor Martha isn’t taking this blame game sitting down though; days before the election she was pointing right back, saying she didn’t get the national support she needed to beat Scott Brown in yesterday’s election. While she also acknowledges that the mood of the voters played a part as well, her diagnosis of that anger is a bit off; she said that the people are, “… frustrated, concerned… They are angry about healthcare issues, and they are angry about our two wars, our inability to properly care for those who return home after fighting… “
True enough that people were angry about healthcare, but my take is that the anger is directed more at the designs of President Obama and the Democrat-controlled Congress concerning our healthcare system. Yesterday’s vote was less a commentary on how each candidate ran their election, and more a referendum on how the President and Congress are doing. This election was nothing short of an angry middle finger thrust out at them. Obama ran on the mantra of “Hope and Change”, but the kind of change people had in mind seems to be a far cry from the fundamental changes he and the leftists running Congress are trying to implement, and yesterday’s vote in Mass. was just a sampling of how people across the country feel about that. And if blue-as-blue-can-be Massachusetts, on the tails of a decades-long Kennedy dynasty, can send a Republican to the Senate with a five-point margin, Just watch for what will happen in November.
Obama, Pelosi & Reid all promised that things would be done in the most open and transparent and ethical manner possible, but the last year has shown us nothing of the sort; if anything they’ve stepped up their shenanigans with all the back room deals and pork payoffs. But public anger doesn’t seem to faze these politicians; they are right (just ask them) and will do what they think is right in spite of the will of the people. As columnist Cal Thomas said in this morning’s radio commentary, “The voters don’t like arrogance from either party and this election again proved it.”
The DNC took Massachusetts for granted, assuming an easy win and a continuation of their 60-vote majority. Now the Republicans can at least put the brakes on, maybe putting truth to the Democrats’ lies about Republicans holding things up in Congress. Whether they’ll learn anything from yesterday’s defeat is anybody’s guess. My take? They are too arrogant to understand where things went wrong, and they’ll continue digging their own political graves.
Edit: Had to add the editorial cartoon above; just too good to omit. One good line that I wish I had come up with…
“Voters in the often wayward Cradle of Liberty looked danger in the eye, stood up, and said, ‘Enough.’ Tuesday’s takeaway is this: if Obama & Co. can’t sell their agenda there, it’s an epic fail everywhere.”
— columnistTom Blumer
And finally, one gem found at the site of a trainwreck of a blog, this interpretation of how Adolf Hitler would’ve reacted to the news of Brown’s win in Massachusetts… Simply, hilarious!
I’ve known for a long time that voting Democrat is a bad idea for the country, but didn’t realize that doing so would have a negative impact on health, but now there’s a study to prove it: Voting Democrat Causes Cancer. In this first map, red indicates an area with high cancer rates and blue indicates low ones.
The distribution on that map looks a bit familiar, kinda like… This one that shows counties that voted Democrat in blue and Republican in red in the 2008 election.
Very similar distribution. There’s got to be some causality there. Right?
No, the correlation displayed here and in the linked article shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Nor should other obviously biased studies that attempt to make ridiculous connections. Unfortunately, people believe them anyway.
I was listening to the radio just a little while ago (Beyond the Beltway was on) and the host, Bruce DuMont, was commenting on some stories in the news today. He read through part of an article in today’s New York Times…
On the afternoon he held the eighth meeting of his Afghanistan review, President Obama arrived in the White House Situation Room ruminating about war. He had come from Arlington National Cemetery, where he had wandered among the chalky white tombstones of those who had fallen in the rugged mountains of Central Asia.
How much their sacrifice weighed on him that Veterans Day last month, he did not say. But his advisers say he was haunted by the human toll as he wrestled with what to do about the eight-year-old war. Just a month earlier, he had mentioned to them his visits to wounded soldiers at the Army hospital in Washington. “I don’t want to be going to Walter Reed for another eight years,” he said then.
I got a good laugh out of that. I seriously don’t think that’s something he’ll need to worry about.
Of course, once he’s out of office in three years & change (that’s change I can believe in!) he’s free to visit Walter Reed as a private citizen, but realistically, how often will that happen? How often did it happen prior to him being elected to the Presidency?
And one more thing to note in my never-ending quest to find fault in everything President Barack Hussein Obamma (mmm, mmm, MMM!) does, his speech last week not only managed to severely tick off his leftist base, he also preempted the broadcast of A Charlie Brown Christmas. Way to wreck Christmas, dude.
