Maybe the country is just not that into you...

by Smitty (h/t Insty)

ABC reports that the: "The Energy and Commerce Markup of H.R. 3200 – America’s Affordable Health Choices Act"--AKA, that pile of AAHCA--"for 7-22-09 has been CANCELLED."
ABC also noted:

In the last nine days the president has spoken publicly about health care reform nine times. Tomorrow night, in a prime time press conference, will make it 10 times in 10 days.

This blog would like to suggest some consolation headware for the POTUS, suitable for that next trip to the pitchers mound. As you fetish the camera and the bully pulpit all the more, and watch your approval ratings dive for the sewer, you can know that, for all we strive to maintain decorum towards you as a person, we really have no love for you in your role as POTUS. No, I'm not going to watch your ratchet-head emit another series of empty clichés at the presser. Fear, guilt, and straw man arguments do not an impressive leader make.
No, the real questions are the level of debris your Carter-esque (should we be so fortunate) administration will leave in its wake, and whether this country I love will awaken to what a wrong-headed scam all of the Progressive crap has been these last 80 years, and kick that crap to the curb at the ballot box. One hopes that the history of the third century of the American experiment marks your administration as the climax of an attempt to overthow "We the People", replacing it with a watered-down aristocracy.
FINEX RAMBLE-EX

Update:
Pundette approves of this message, with additional analysis. Bless you, lady!

The Mother of All IG-Gate Updates

On the Internet, stuff gets scattered around so that you never see it all in one place. Today's IG-Gate Update at the Hot Air Green Room pushes the story forward:

Behind closed doors on Capitol Hill last week, I asked a Republican source about the investigative efforts of Democratic staffers for the House Oversight Committee.
"Honestly?" the source said. "They're useless."
More than three weeks have passed since Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) joined the committee's ranking Republican, California Rep. Darrell Issa, to launch an investigation into the case of former Amtrak inspector general Fred Wiederhold Jr. . . .
Despite the "grave concerns" expressed by Towns and Issa three weeks ago, however, Republican sources on Capitol Hill have complained that Democratic staffers on the Oversight Committee have not shown much zeal for the investigation. Sources say Democratic staffers have skipped meetings and conference calls to which they were invited by GOP investigators, who are attempting to work with Grassley's staff in order to prevent unnecessary duplication of efforts. Sharing documents and scheduling interviews with witnesses, allowing Republican and Democratic investigators from both chambers an opportunity to question these witnesses, is a demanding logistical task. And GOP staffers complain that this task seems to be lacking in terms of bipartisanship. . . .

Read the whole thing, because toward the end, I make this point:

This is a huge story, involving multiple investigations, and 1,200 words here don’t even begin to summarize the 1,400 words there [at The American Spectator on Monday], to say nothing of the 400 words I did last night about the SIGTARP report.

Like I said, read the whole thing, and follow the links, because this is one big sprawling mother of a story. The best I can do in any single chunk is to bring in new facts, new quotes, new angles, and link to as much other the other stuff as possible. (That Green Room article includes more than 25 links, including the link to the Spectator article, which has more than a dozen links.)

If you'll go to Bob Belvedere's WWU-AM and scroll down, he's got a huge IG-Gate link dump with my reporting, Byron York's reporting, columns by Michelle Malkin, reports from ABC News, the Washington Post, etc. There's a lot of stuff out there, in other words, and you need to see it all if you want to try to understand this thing.

"Try," I say, because I don't even claim to understand it all yet. My sources talk about things and sometimes I can tell they're trying to drop me a hint of something they want me to write about, e.g., "Who Is Eleanor Acheson?" It's important to ask the right questions, as one of my sources said.

On the one hand, there is the temptation to focus on one aspect of the story -- the Washington Times keeps calling this "WalpinGate," which is too narrow -- but on the other hand, you've got to be careful not to waste time playing "connect-the-dots" with things that might not really be connected. Yes, there's a pattern, but that doesn't mean there's a conspiracy.

Still, as I predicted on June 18 -- right after Michelle Malkin's first column on the Walpin case slapped me upside the head -- this story isn't going away anytime soon. June 18 was the same day IG Fred Wiederhold delivered his report to the Amtrak board and suddenly retired, and also the same day Chuck Grassley made public his letter about the International Trade Commission IG, Judith Gwynne.

So barely a week after Walpin got his June 10 quit-or-be-fired ultimatum from White House lawyer Norm Eisen, there were two other IG cases. Then we have the case of the watchdog who's still hanging tough, SIGTARP, Neil Barofsky. The bailout watchdog showed yesterday how much trouble he can cause, and it's therefore no mystery why Treasury's giving Barofsky a hard time. (My money's still on Barofsky as the IG most likely to get a Cabinet secretary sent to federal prison.)

IG-Gate is a big mother, you see. Because I'm on deadline for a print magazine article, there's no time for me to do a complete aggregation now, but here are the major IG-Gate articles I've done so far:

• July 21: IG-Gate UPDATE: Behind the Scenes of the Investigations
• July 20: Behind Closed Doors
• July 14: The Little Scandal That Could
• July 9: Democrats Question AmeriCorps Officials Stonewall on IG Case
• June 28: Media & IG-Gate: Question the Timing?
• June 28: NTC Special Report: Obama vs. the Watchdogs
• June 25: Grassley: Amtrak 'Systematically Violated' IG Law
• June 25: Obama Plays Hardball With Watchdogs
• July 19: The 'Domino Theory' in the IG Scandal

Each of those items is chock-full of links to other items. As you can see, just six weeks into this story, there's a lot of stuff out there -- and, no doubt, a lot more to come. Just keep hitting the tip jar.

One of these days, I plan to hit the American Spectator with the mother of all expense reimbursement requests -- "$800 for fireworks?" "Promotional activity. Perfectly legitimate, Al." -- but in the meantime, Daddy needs a new pair of shoes.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Just in case you're wondering why Professor Reynolds loves this story so much, I once again remind you to read the whole thing. The professor's drooling at the prospect of The Mother of All Chris Dodd Updates.

Meanwhile, be sure to check out the IG-Gate Rule 3 memo, which offers more tasty watchdog morsels.

Have we 34 governors with a clue?

by Smitty

Stephen Green on Trifecta mentions the growing gubernatorial consciousness of the 10th Amendment.

It's actually got me in a cheerful mood, to consider the possibility of an Article 5 gathering:

on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress

They could start with an outburst of common sense along the lines of the Federalism Amendment. Sure, it's never been done. Then again, we seem to be in a shock and awe decade on so many, many levels.

The thought of 546 (Congress, SCOTUS, Frick and Frack) Federal eff-wits facing a come-to-Beavis moment... Easily the most satisfying thought of this administration.

Get your 12 September plans made. Let's stuff the Mall and communicate a solid, Constitutional message, ye patriots. Keep building the momentum. Republican governors in Virginia and New Jersey this November. 2010, 2012.

All isn't lost yet. Think of it. Future American generations not faced with inevitable debt-slavery. Potentially, we're close enough to the brink to trigger a course alteration.

Update:
Protein Wisdom has related goodness.

Sexy For Sale!

Rule 5(c): Sex Sells.

So I was logging into my e-mail account -- at some point I must get that inbox cleared out enough that I can see my incoming messages -- and there was an ad showing a woman's belly as she reclined in a bikini. The headline on the ad: "How to Get a Sexy Summer Stomach." Below that, another ad, this one for "Single? Over 40?"

Maybe Donald Douglas has some thoughts about this. Every day, advertisers are using sex to sell stuff and, in the Internet Age, every time a blogger mentions that he is a successful older professional, the algorithm automatically throws up a spot for Established Men.

That's a no-go, a scratched mission, because (a) I'm a successful older professional journalist, which is about three paygrades below being a successful janitor, and (b) despite the constant influx of e-mails from desperate women trying to entice me -- some of them are, coincidentally enough, relatives of the former Oil Minister of Nigeria -- the fact is Mrs. Other McCain has got more sexy than even I can cope with.

My point (and I do have one) is that the problem with a hypersexualized culture is not so much in the supply, but in the demand. If everybody wasn't trying to look hot in their sexy summer bikini so they could go looking for some SugarDaddie.com, those advertisers wouldn't be selling that stuff.

A hypersexualized culture has political consequences, "The Sex Vote," as James Poulos calls it.

Just throwing these thoughts out there, because I'm on deadline for a 2,000-word print article about IG-Gate and want to give the commenters something interesting to discuss for the next several hours. Oh, and the way to get that super-sexy summer stomach? It involves a healthy colon.

NTTAWWT.

Also, there's a Salon article about Republicans, "C Street" and "its links to three political sex scandals." Sex! Scandals! And, four decades later, Mary Jo Kopechne still could not be reached for comment.

Is Hot Air offline? Or is it just me?UPDATED: Back online; 'human error'

(BUMPED 12:03 P.M.; SEE UPDATES BELOW) Of course, it's 3:30 a.m., so they may just be doing downtime for service or something. The site seemed to go down while I was working on an "IG-Gate Update" report in the Green Room. Figured it was just a glitch, so I finished writing the post in Word format, but when I went back -- two hours later -- I still couldn't get the site to come up.

Perhaps it's all part of the conspiracy against me. Byron York is probably in on it, too.

Bloggernoia, anyone?

UPDATE: In the comments, Gerard Van der Leun confirms that both Hot Air and Michelle Malkin's site are now down. So, down for maintenance, targeted by denial-of-service attack, or did somebody just forget to pay the ISP bill this month?

UPDATE II: At 9:45 a.m. Ed Morrissey posted: "This was human error . . ." For which somebody undoubtedly got a double-earful of grief.

If any of you actually know Michelle Malkin, she is not a woman you would ever want to make angry. Some of you may think of her as just another pundit, but it's more appropriate to think of her as an independent businesswoman. The syndicated column, the books, the speaking engagements, the TV appearances, her blog, Hot Air -- she's a one-woman industry, a name brand, and she didn't build her media empire by slacking around doing sloppy work, see?

A few years ago, when I was at The Washington Times, we got Michelle to come to the office for an interview. When the interview was over, I wanted to introduce her to some people on the second floor. This took a little longer than anticipated. Michelle had another appointment -- she was on a schedule -- and she began to become noticeably irritated at the delay of her departure, which was my fault. It was scary.

'Human Error'?
Fast-forward to earlier this year, when Michelle asked me to read a few draft chapters of Culture of Corruption and suggest changes.

Oh. My. God. Yeah, heckuva an honor to be asked, but on the other hand, a task fraught with danger. A book is not a blog post or a newspaper article. It is not a transient phenomenon, here today and forgotten tomorrow. Regnery is going to sell tens of thousands of copy of that book, every liberal critic on the planet will go over it with a fine-toothed comb looking for a comma splice or a typo, and . . . Oh. My. God.

Think of "human error" in hardback! If I were responsible for a screw-up, I'd be forever banished, exiled to The Land Of Perpetual Non-Linkage, persona non grata in the blogosphere.

Well, as Michelle would say, you gotta have balls to take on that kind of job. I've edited some excellent journalists over the years, and every writer loves his first draft. Sometimes in the newsroom, I'd find myself in furious arguments with reporters (I don't want to name names, Stephen Dinan) who were prepared to fight for every preposition and participle.

Don't Change a Word!
As an editor, you hate that attitude -- you're not being paid the big medium bucks just to read stuff and send it along -- but Dinan is a meticulous writer, and there was at least one occasion where an editor, thinking to "improve" Dinan's copy, accidentally introduced an error into his story. Hey, it's the reporter's byline, and his protective instinct, his pride of authorship, was not a thing to be taken lightly.

Which I, of all people, should understand. I was both an editor and a reporter, and when it was my byline on a story, I was obsessive, even fanatical, about protecting my articles as they flowed through the editorial process. My motto then became, "Don't Change a Word of My Deathless Prose!"

All this background was in my mind when I was asked to read Michelle's manuscript. It's her book, her research, her hours of writing and re-writing, her name on the cover. If there's an error in the book, she's going to be the one who takes the heat, and God forbid I should be in the vicinity of such an error.

So please buy a copy Culture of Corruption -- better yet, buy two copies and give one to a liberal you know, just to annoy 'em. And please pray for me, and for the other people involved in the editorial process on Michelle's blockbuster expose of Team Obama.

"Human error" . . . Oh. My. God. I'd be a dead man. Or at least, I'd wish I was dead.

Nice campaign committe yougot there, Senator Cornyn . . .

Sure would be a shame if anything were to happen to it:

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) raised $6.2 million in June, outraising the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) by nearly $3 million.

But don't worry, Senator. Just as soon as Charlie Crist catches fire, you' be right back on top. If only you had a few more red cents . . .

Bankruptcy doesn't stop GM fromdoing what it does best: Lobbying

They're laying off factory workers by the thousands, but GM's doing just fine down on K Street:

General Motors reduced its lobbying spending in the second quarter by only 1.4% compared to the first quarter, even though the second quarter saw the company go bankrupt, be taken over by the government, and announce it was cancelling its outside lobbying contracts.
In April, May, and June, GM spent $2,760,000 on lobbying according to its Q2 lobbying filing, compared to $2,800,000 in the first quarter.

But isn't this a case now of one branch of the government lobbying another branch? Does that incestuous relationship have anything to do with ChevroGay?

Exit question: Are these GM lobbyists among those "jobs saved or created" that Obama keeps telling us about?

UPDATE: Interesting thought:

Can we expect General Motors to thrive based upon the record of the Federal Government’s handling of the Post Office and Amtrak? Already, Congress and the UAW are trying to micromanage this auto manufacturer by dictating which plants can be closed, where cars will be built, as well as preventing the dropping of unprofitable dealerships. American taxpayers will be paying for the losses of this corporation for many years to come.

Speaking of the Post Office, people who think profit, greed and capitalism are the root of all evil need to explain why "going postal" is a synonym for homicidal rage.

A little note on NASA

by Smitty (h/t Insty)

Insty links the Foresight Institute, emphasis mine:

With space travel, there’s a pretty straightforward answer: the Apollo project was a political stunt, albeit a grand and uplifting one; there was no compelling reason to go to the moon given the cost of doing so. The nature of political stunts is such that it does you no good to repeat one, even if you can do the same thing better or cheaper or whatever.

His next post quotes Megan McArdle:

What happened to the dream? Government mismanagement, yes, but something more than that, too, some failure of imagination and will.

Your attention is drawn to the Cold War. Anyone failing to grasp that the whole warheads-on-foreheads concern, and the need for supporting navigation/missile systems, was among the chief drivers for everything NASA was doing in the 60s and 70s is urged to take a more cynical read of the subtext of the Outer Space Treaty. Think Curtis LeMay, not Tom Swift.

My question is, If Sarah Palin makes funding NASA a national priority, funding exploration through a re-vitalized, de-centralized capitalist economy, will the loony Left
a) blame Bush for not having done all that sooner, or
b) blame Palin for marring the Martian ecosystem with human presence?

Thankfully, it wasn't macaca

by Smitty (h/t Instapundit)

An unfortunate word has been uttered.
Maloney's got a problem bigger than a chigger on a grave digger. If she can figger how to placate this gigger before the media can jigger the healines to make her a racist pigger, then she'll prove a fine media rigger, and it won't trigger a career shift to wigger.
My chief joy is that she didn't say macaca, or this post would have been blown to Pennsylvania.

Anger on its own does little

by Smitty

Diana West had a provocative editorial in the Washington Examiner: "Anger ahead when the fog clears on Obama's power grabs" (the print title was shorter). In a shockingly traditional move, I had picked up this dead-tree format paper from the driveway while my wife was dragging me to the store to shop some groceries. Formatted as per the print edition for clarity.

As much as anything else this week, what cast me into this particular abyss of speculation was the stunning news that after Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., declared the Obama administration's stimulus spending plan ineffective and urged a halt to further stimulus spending, the White House dispatched four Cabinet secretaries -- Transportation's Ray LaHood, Agriculture's Tom Vilsack, Housing and Urban Development's Shaun Donovan, Interior's Ken Salazar -- to write letters to Republican Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer enumerating every dime of federal monies that would no longer flow to her state if Sen. Kyl had his way.

As LaHood snarkily put it to Gov. Brewer, "If you prefer to forfeit the money we are making available to your state, as Senator Kyl suggests, please let me know."

What did the White House expect the governor to do next? Make Sen. Kyl an offer he couldn't refuse? Or, as Mark Steyn, detecting the whiff of extortion in the air, asked: "Why not just break his (Kyl's) legs in the Senate parking lot?"

It's understandable that the Federal government, which prints the money, would assume the role of manna generator. It's also natural, from a Tytler viewpoint, that politicians would latch onto largess to ensure re-election. This is the nature of moral hazard and the Iron Law.

What is needed, then, are some dispassionate ideas about how to put the throat that makes the decision just a little bit closer to the hand that has to work to fund it. Assuming he stays in character, by the time Barack Obama dies, hopefully more than twice his current age, he'll be paraphrasing Westmoreland: ""The United States in the end abandoned Socialism."

It doesn't take anger. It takes commitment to Federalism, avoidance of shortcuts, and insistence from "We the People" that social programs are not funded using Rock Star Economics: "We'll just tour some more and release another live album to fund the drug habit."

What Obama Says When OnlyLiberals Are On the Conference Call

Dan Riehl caught this notebook account:

Doing nothing is defending the indefensible
Opponents are offering up nothing and admit that they are just trying to stop it. He mentioned Jim DeMint and Bill Kristol as examples of obstructionism.
Liberal Bloggers have done an excellent job of debunking right wing myths...
Bloggers have played and will play a critical role in passing legislation.

John Amato of Crooks and Liars was the JournoLister stupid enough to transcribe Obama's marching orders to the troops, even going so far as to provide audio.

Note once more Obama's habit of debating straw men who favor doing "nothing," as if "nothing" were the only possible alternative to the Democratic plan of shoveling another trillion or two of borrowed money out the door to pay for a Rube Goldberg contraption of innovation-strangling bureaucracy.

Exit question: Does anybody think Democrats will support "transparency" on ObamaCare any more than they support "transparency" on the TARP bailout?

No, but you might be a Progressive

by Smitty

Jesse Hathaway has published an attack on Ron Paul's policies, RePaulicanism is not the answer. Hathaway offers some history on the John Birch Society and then says:

Ron Paul is a relic, a holdover from a time when the Birchers held sway, and when "conservatism" meant economic and political isolationism, xenophobia, homophobia... all those things that so-called "little 'r' republicans" and "non-partisans" believe in. They like to bloviate about "empire-building" and how "socialist" and "totalitarian" the government is. They are often either disinterested in foreign policy, as in Ron Paul's case, or have liberal-esque foreign policies as Pat Buchanan does.

Further on:

Libertarianism is not the same as Buckleyist Conservatism, and it annoys me when liberals use Libertarians like Paul as a bludgeon against Republicans. He is a Republican In Name Only, and I wish he'd at least be honest with people and identify as Libertarian.

As is so often the case, a clarification post follows. I Must Be A Communist:

When I say "fetishizing the Constitution," I was refering to the Repaulican maneuver of holding it up and opposing anything that isn't expressly spelled out in the Constitution. For example, there is no literal right to privacy in the Constituion. There is nothing in the Constitution about a federal highway system, or publicly funded schools. Birchers would point to these things as examples of creeping fascism, examples of how we live in a totalitarian state.

I submit that a bit more historical detail may help.

• "We the People" have been running a 233 year experiment.
• The Declaration of Independence was revolutionary on a variety of levels.
• The Articles of Confederation (AoC), by comparison, make the European Union look relatively strong. The federal government was notional.
• The 1787 Constitution, while awesome, was not flawless, talking its way around the topic of slavery as it did. It was relatively stronger than the AoC, and there was a federal government with some teeth.
• 74 years later, that flaw shattered the nation. In restoring the country and abolishing slavery, the federal government took on increased strength.
• The Progressive movement came in the late 1800s. Ideas such as the Federal Reserve Act and the Sixteenth Amendment marked 1913 as a turning point in American History.
• The Federal Government, especially since FDR, has increased its power, at the expense of the 50 States. Vastly expensive bureaucracies employ armies of point-headed little bureaucrats, and pile up debt on a scale that literally escapes comprehension.

You might have thought that the Information Age would have allowed for decentralization of power. Quite the opposite. The country is being emptied of value by our "political class", the very existence of which is antithetical to what "We the People" areshould be about.

Seen from the standpoint where the US is a tub, power is water, and Washington, DC is the drain, Ron Paul is quite valuable as a rubber ducky for tracking the drainage. Sure, I think his neo-isolationist approach to foreign policy amounts to wishful thinking. No, I'm unconvinced that his gold standard solution actually buys much. However, the fact that we have any breath of intellectual fresh air in Pelosi's House of Horrors is crucial.

Is Ron Paul a RINO? Arguably, from a libertarian standpoint. RINOs like Stacy's cousin, in my mind, are Progressive squishes who've failed systematically to uphold the three-branch/three-level Consitution that I hold rather close. Am I a Constitution fetisher? Guilty as charged. Watching the presidential debate, and hearing Senator McCain talk about having the Treasury work directly with lenders to "solve" the mortgage crisis, I was thoroughly pissed to hear such a non-grasp of the chain of command coming from a retired Navy Captain. WTF, Senator? Where is the analysis that says the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 was a giant, steaming, and expensive load of fertilizer? Oh, that's right: we're talking about a Progressive RINO here.

Is Jesse Hathaway a Progressive? Here is a litmus test. Do you think that the Federalism Amendment makes sense? Nothing is perfect, but I submit that this is an idea that any actual, no-kidding, ant-RINO conservative should consider supporting substantially.

What Did I Tell You? Research Confirms DC Drivers Most Dangerous in U.S.!

Via James Joyner at Outside the Beltway:

Riskiest Driving Cities
1. Washington, D.C.
2. Baltimore, MD
3. Glendale, CA
4. Hartford, CT
5. Newark, NJ
6. Philadelphia, PA
7. Elizabeth, NJ
8. Providence, RI
9. San Francisco, CA
10. Los Angeles, CA

More at Fox News. For years I've insisted to friends that D.C. drivers are the world's worst. It is impossible to calculate drive times in the D.C. area simply because of the utter randomness of these brain-damaged motorists. A large proportion of them obviously can't read English well enough to understands street signs, and there is a constant influx of newcomers who don't know where they're going.

If Obama wanted to re-deploy the CIA effectively to save American lives, some of these thick-skulled morons would be snatched off the streets and flown by black helicopter to an undisclosed location.

INTERROGATOR: (Holds up sign.) OK, Omar, what does this say?
SUBJECT: (Trembling.) Uh . . . please, no. I not know dees word. Please, not da shock thing . . .
ZZZZZAAAAPPPP!
SUBJECT: AAAEEEIIII!
INTERROGATOR: OK, Omar. I'll make it easy for you. This sign says, "Left Lane Closed 1/2 Mile Ahead. Merge Right."
SUBJECT: OK.
INTERROGATOR: Not, "OK," Omar. Say it.
SUBJECT: Left Lane . . . uh . . . Left . . .
INTERROGATOR: Left Lane Closed . . .
SUBJECT: Left Lane Closed . . .
INTERROGATOR: 1/2 Mile Ahead . . .
SUBJECT: 1/2 Mile Ahead . . .
INTERROGATOR: Merge Right.
SUBJECT: Merge Right.
INTERROGATOR: Now, which way is your left, Omar?
SUBJECT: Dees way.
INTERROGATOR: Very good, Omar. You're learning. Remember, just yesterday, you didn't know the difference.
SUBJECT: (Smiling, eager.) Yes. Yes. Dees one left. Dees one right.
INTERROGATOR: Good, Omar. Very good. Now, one more question. What does 'merge' mean?
SUBJECT: Merge.
INTERROGATOR: Merge. Yes, Omar. What does it mean?
SUBJECT: What? I no understand dees question.
INTERROGATOR: When the sign says the left lane is closed, what does it mean by "merge right"?
SUBJECT: Oh! Oh! I know dees!
INTERROGATOR: OK, let's hear it, Omar.
SUBJECT: Well, da left lane, eet weel clear out, see? So den, I drive up to last orange cone and den put on da right turn signal . . ..
ZZZZZAAAAPPPP!
SUBJECT: AAAEEEIIII!
ZZZZZAAAAPPPP!
SUBJECT: AAAEEEIIII! . . .

Excuse the "Omar," which should not be interpreted as evidence of anti-Omarism. But ask anybody in D.C. about the hazards caused by morons behind the wheel of cars with "Diplomat" tags. What a "Diplomat" tags usually means:

"This car is driven by the 19-nephew of a vicious Third World kleptocrat. The driver of this vehicle just arrived in the U.S. last week from a country where they drive on the left side of the road, at least if the goat path is wide enough to have two sides. He can't speak a word of English, doesn't even understand the concept of 'no left turn' and if he dies in a fiery crash that kills you, he will be eternally revered as a martyr in his homeland."

And you think I'm joking. But the vehicular terrorist/diplomat from Berserkistan is a mild annoyance, compared to such other D.C. driving hazards as the Disoriented Intern Late For Her Meeting, the Tourist Who Didn't Want to Ride the Subway, and the Post-Traumatic Homicidal SUV Rage Syndrome Sufferer.

Do me a favor: If you are thinking about moving to the D.C. area, or just making a quick visit to gape at the marble buildings that local commuters drive past every day, LEAVE YOUR CAR HOME. Out-of-towners should book their flights into Reagan National, call a cab (say hello to Omar!) and go directly to their hotels.

If Marion Barry were aiming to make a comeback campaign as D.C. mayor, I might actually support him, if he would promise to outlaw car rentals for tourists.

It's New! It's Improved! It's . . .

. . . Jimmie Bise's Sundries Shack!

A few weeks ago, Jimmie and I were talking about page design. He asked me what I thought, and so I made a couple of suggestions -- larger font, etc., etc. -- and then last week, he said, "I've decided it's time to just do it!"

And so he did. I like it. Let Jimmie know what you think.

Jimmie's also now writing regularly for the American Issues Project, so check him out there, too.

IG-Gate: Behind Closed Doors

From my latest report at The American Spectator:

Those familiar with the investigations caution against "playing connect-the-dots" with these three distinct cases. However, some informed Republican sources are beginning to call attention to other evidence of a concerted effort to blindfold, muzzle or neuter watchdogs -- especially those who dare to growl at Democrats.
Why, for instance, did Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.) rush through the House a bill that would give President Obama power to hire or dismiss five inspectors general -- including the IG for the Securities and Exchange Commission -- who under existing law report to the agency heads?
The IGs themselves have protested against the Larson bill, which has yet to be debated in the Senate, and it has not escaped notice on Capitol Hill that Larson is a prominent "Friend of Chris." That would be Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. Dodd is under intense scrutiny for a number of shady-looking activities -- "Chris Dodd Update" has become a regular feature at Professor Glenn Reynolds' popular Instapundit blog -- and Dodd is also facing a tough re-election bid next year.
No one on the Hill has yet directly suggested that the Larson bill -- which could effectively muzzle watchdogs at five federal financial agencies -- was specifically intended as assistance to the embattled chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. But as liberal bloggers used to say about the Bush administration's activities, some Republicans have begun to "question the timing." . . .

There's lots more juicy goodness where that came from -- today's article is more than 1,400 words -- so please read the whole thing.

I'm very grateful to those loyal readers who have helped fund my trips to Capitol Hill by hitting the tip jar. There are some things that can be accomplished only by the skilled application of shoe leather, such as accidently walking into the wrong office -- but there are no accidents.

By the way, something I omitted from the "citizen-journalist" account of my Friday trip. After I missed my lunch appointment because of the Tourist Drivers Damned to the Fiery Pit of Hell, I found myself with time to kill because the next person I was supposed to meet was (of course) caught in tourist-infested traffic. Noticing the grody condition of my shoes, and observing the nearby location of a shoeshine stand, I decided to indulge myself: $7 for a shoeshine while I read the newspaper and tried to relax.

The cheerful gentleman did such a thoroughly professional job that when he was done, I handed him $10 and said, "Keep the change." A foolish indulgence. Little did I suspect, however, that a few minutes earlier, a homeschooling mom had hit my tip jar with . . . $10.

Coincidence? Right. Somebody ask The Anchoress who she was linking Sept. 24, and why.

PREVIOUSLY AT THE SPECTATOR:

• July 17: Amtrak IG: Important Background
• July 14: IG-Gate: Sincere Doubts
• July 14: The Little Scandal That Could
• July 9: Democrats Question AmeriCorps Official's Stonewall on IG Case
• July 1: Malkin on IG-Gate: Does the Endangered Species Act IncludeWatchdogs?
• June 26: Grassley: Amtrak 'Systematically Violated' IG Law
• June 25: Eleanor Acheson: Lobbyist
• June 25: Obama Plays Hardball With Watchdogs
• June 23: Amtrak IG Probe: Who Is Eleanor Acheson?
• June 19: IG-Gate: Domino Theory
• June 18: AmeriCorps Scandal Won't Go Away Soon

SIGTARP Strikes: IG Barofsky Report SaysTreasury Not Tracking Bailout Cash

The watchdog bites Tim Geithner:

The top watchdog over the financial bailout package said the Treasury Department is rejecting "common sense" by not requiring banks receiving billions of dollars in government money to say how they are using the money.
In a report to be released on Monday, Neil Barofsky said banks that have received money from the $700 billion bailout package passed last year are able to indicate how they are using taxpayer money and that Treasury should require banks to be more transparent. . . .
Barofsky is the Special Inspector General over the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP) that was passed by Congress in October. . . .

Read the whole thing. This SIGTARP report is a perfect example of why the Obama adminstration hates IGs. The Democrats just want to shovel money out the door and don't care who gets it, except to be sure their well-connected friends get their share.

According to the liberal neo-Keynesian economic gospel, as long as the federal government does X-billion dollars of deficit spending, that will produce X-plus-Y amount of stimulus value (where Y = Magic Government Spending Multiplier Effect) without regard to whether the money ends up feeding orphans or supplying the mistresses of Goldman Sachs executives with bustiers and garter belts

Unfortunately for liberals, the stupid taxpayers can never seem to comprehend the nuances of neo-Keynesian theory the way Nobel Prize-winning genius Paul Krugman does.

No matter how many times they're lectured about this "stimulus"/bailout brilliance, the idiots who pay the taxes get a little miffed to discover that their great-grandchildren's future has been hocked to pay for new wallpaper and wainscoting in the executive lavatory of a giant banking conglomerate which -- as every expert in Washington explained last fall -- was so frantically in need of cash that the branch managers were sending tellers to sell plasma to the blood bank, merely to prevent a complete catastrophic meltdown in the global finance system.

Those stupid taxpayers are like that. They have a habit of remembering irrelevant minor details like those 90-point headlines on the front pages of all the newspapers:

CRISIS LOOMS: WORLD ECONOMY TEETERS ON BRINK OF FINAL APOCALYPSE; CONGRESS DESPERATELY FIGHTS TO AVERT ECONOMIC DOOMSDAY; PLAGUES OF LOCUSTS, FROGS FEARED

Damned idiot taxpayers. What do they know about economics and budgets and stuff that only people with Ivy League Ph.Ds can ever hope to understand?

(H/T: Memeorandum.)

World leaders on 'Fakebook'

by Smitty

Via my sister-in-law, a German magazine poking some world leaders by envisioning them on Facebook, writing mildly goofy stuff to each other. Lots of fun little details, like the shirtless Vladimir Putin pic. POTUS and Mahmud are the best. Angela and Silvio are also well done, but rely on healthy knowledge of Old Europe. Angela's group at the end of her page is "Powerful Women of the World".

• POTUS
• Silvio Burlusconi
• Mahmud Ahmadinejad
• Angela Merkel

VIDEO: Extended-Release Stimulusol(TM)

From The Nose On Your Face:

Just give me the Rohypnol and maybe something for the next-day discomfort after being forcibly gang-sodomized by SEIU, IRS, EPA, UAW, NEA, NARAL, ACORN, PPFA, AFSCME . . .

Almost as creepy as Joe Biden

Some freak took nude video of ESPN reporter Erin Andrews -- through a peephole, undressing in a hotel room -- and put it on the Internet.

Ick. Just . . . Ick. Like Dan Riehl and Don Surber, I had no clue who Erin Andrews is before this incident. I feel wrong even blogging about, and I'm notoriously shameless when it comes to traffic enhancement.

My good friend Stogie at Saberpoint blames me for Donald Douglas' aggregation on this story. I have no interest in watching the video and just now saw Dr. Douglas's post.

Criminal voyeurism isn't sexy. Nevertheless, crime is news, and the fact that so many people felt the need to comment on it just goes to show why the most famous headline in history was the New York Post's "HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR." Or, as Hunter S. Thompson observed in Hell's Angels, "Every editor loves a good rape."

Maybe this is another example of how New Media helps demystify what Old Media has been doing for years. Dr. Douglas shows you the strings in the puppet show -- "Look, I'm shamefully exploiting prurient interest!" -- and you say, "That's disgusting!"

OK, so next time Greta Van Sustern flies off to a tropical island to search for the missing blonde teenager . . .

Mark Levin vs. Weekly StandardBozo Who Needs to STFU

(Note to self: Never argue with this guy.)

In the first sentence of his review [Bozo] asserts "Moderation ... is an essential political virtue and a quintessentially conservative virtue." This is the way forward for conservatism, he insists. At no time does he define "moderation" or any governing principles, other than to misapply moderation as prudence, when prudence is, in fact, about judgment. . . .
For the neo-Statist (or neo-Conservative), the problem is particularly acute when applied to international relations for he usually promotes a hawkish and interventionist foreign policy. If prudence is moderation per se, then how does [Bozo] square this circle? Is bombing Iran's nuclear sites, even as a last resort, a moderate or an immoderate act? Obviously, the question makes no sense. The test is whether it is prudent.
Thus, those, like [Bozo], who promote moderation (not prudence) as a principle, are actually promoting a tactic or process without any core.

Read the whole thing. Try not to slip on Bozo's entrails that Levin leaves scattered on the floor.

Note that Levin distinguishes himself from the neo-conservatives. One of the idiotic misfortunes of the Bush era was that the Left picked up the term "neocon" as shorthand for "Jewish hawk," with conspiratorial overtones of "stooge for the Zionist lobby." This was both unfair and inaccurate.

As my old friends know, I tend to roll more toward the paleo side of the neo/paleo divide, with a wide streak of libertarianism ("From My Cold Dead Hands!") and am also a hillbilly Bible-thumping Calvinist, if not a theocrat.

My position on the Iraq war was nuanced, as the liberals would say. Unlike Kerry, I was against the war before I was for it. Basically, from 2002 until the war started, I was very skeptical toward arguments for the invasion and conquest of Mesopotamia. However, the time for arguing ended when the first shot was fired. My attititude about war is, "If you're in it, win it."

No nation ever benefitted from losing a war. Military defeat tends to demoralize a nation and, if repeated, can result in absolute decadence. (Cf. France.)

A Peace Through Strength approach to foreign affairs doesn't make you a warmonger, an imperialist, or a "neocon." I could write a book about this, but I'm on deadline for the Spectator, so just read Mark Levin's article -- and remind me never to pick a fight with him.