Okay, I admit it: I didn’t watch the state of the union address. I haven’t seen one in years. I can’t stand to watch presidents stand up there and announce all the good things Washington will do for us in the next year by spending more of our tax dollars. If a president ever walks to the podium and says, “I’ve reviewed the Constitution and the writings of The Founders and I’ve concluded that the best thing I can do for America is to repeal 90 percent of our laws, cut the federal government in half, then get the hell out of the way,” I’ll start watching again.
But I did check the news stories. Here are some quotes in italics, with my comments.
President Obama called on Congress Wednesday to pass a new jobs-creation bill, saying the economy will be his “number one” priority in 2010.
Lovely. Congress can’t create jobs. It can only transfer them from one sector of the economy to another, or from one generation to another. Every job “created” by government is a job that wasn’t actually needed — or it would’ve already existed — that comes at the expense of a job that will no longer exist, since the employer who would have created it no longer has the money to pay for it.
After having campaigned for the White House by promising to expand government help for struggling segments of the population, Obama reversed course Wednesday night. He called for a total freeze for three years, beginning in 2011, on all government spending other than national security and public insurance programs that are mandated by law - Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
Okay, I get it … we’re going to freeze government spending while creating all those new jobs. That’ll be a neat trick.
Obama was calling for Americans to wage a battle on “a deficit of trust” in U.S. society that has crippled the government’s ability to address its deficit of dollars.
Let’s review: The Federal Reserve produces a crash by monkeying with the money supply and interest rates, Congress voids contracts with investors so the unions can take over G.M., then spends nearly a trillion in bailouts for big banks and big insurance companies, then spends another trillion in “stimulus” money that just happens to go largely to groups that support the Democrats in elections. Add it all up and the answer is: the real problem is a lack of trust. I’d say lack of trust is the sign of a functioning brain.
The president defended his performance against opinion surveys showing popular dismay with the country’s economic picture. He stood by his economic stimulus plan, which he said had made progress without raising taxes.
Well, that’s sort of true. He spent an extra trillion dollars and didn’t raise taxes. That means my kids will pay the taxes, and so will their kids.
But he acknowledged that progress had been slow and said it would require the collective will of the American people to bring about true change. “We do not give up. We do not quit. We do not allow fear or division to break our spirit” he said. “In this new decade, it’s time the American people get a government that matches their decency, that embodies their strength.”
Actually, Mr. President, I wish you would quit. Americans are perfectly capable of reviving the economy and bringing about true change, but we don’t need government to do it. America’s had plenty of deep recessions in the past. Most of them lasted a few years or less. But the really big one, the one that lasted more than a decade and ended up with the name The Great Depression, was the one government tried to fix. The first year of the recession of 1920-1921 was worse than the first year of The Great Depression. All the federal government did was cut taxes and reduce spending. It was all over in 18 months.
Decrying outsize corporate influence on elections, Obama called on Congress to pass legislation to blunt the Supreme Court’s ruling last week allowing corporations to spend directly on campaigns, saying, “I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, and worse, by foreign entities.”
Pretty interesting idea coming from a guy who received a gazillion dollars in Internet credit-card contributions from overseas, and whose party took illegal contributions from the Chinese. And by the way, the problem isn’t too much money in politics; it’s too much power in politics. Take away the power, and the money will go away too. No corporation offers a bribe to a politician who can’t jigger the rules in the corporation’s favor.
Defending his approach to the economic crisis, Obama on Wednesday said his administration acted “immediately and aggressively” to stave off a “second depression,” but said the “devastation” remains.
FDR acted immediately and aggressively too. That’s why the Great Depression lasted another 10 years.
“One year later, the worst of the storm has passed. But the devastation remains. One in 10 Americans still cannot find work. Many businesses have shuttered. Home values have declined,” Obama said.
Let me see if I understand here: the wild inflation in home prices was a good thing? People spending 50 percent of their incomes on mortgage payments was a good thing? The decline in home prices isn’t “devastation”; it’s a return to reality. That’s good news for people planning to buy a home.
Obama also proposed a major increase in federal spending on education, by as much as $4 billion, in an effort to revamp the No Child Left Behind law enacted under President George W. Bush.
Ah yes, because that’s the real problem in education: not enough federal spending. We spend more per student than any country in the world, but it’s clearly not doing the job. Perhaps we should just offer schoolkids a $10,000 reward for each A on the report card. It would probably be cheaper. And didn’t I just read something about a freeze in federal spending a few paragraphs ago?
And he called on Congress to repeal the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy prohibiting gays from serving openly in the military. “It’s the right thing to do,” Obama said.
Okay, I agree with him for once. If you can do the job — cop, firefighter, pilot, surgeon, soldier, sailor, whatever — I don’t really care about your gender or gender preference. Besides, anyone willing to tell a bunch of fellow marines he’s gay is probably one tough son of a bitch.
Busy week, so this will be a short post. I spent some time online recently debating a global-warming true-believer. The Reader’s Digest version of his argument (actually, it’s the central argument in a book he likes) went something like this: Most of us aren’t qualified to evaluate all these back-and-forth arguments by the alarmists and the skeptics, so we must rely on the most credible experts.
So far, so good. But then he wrote that he considers government documents near the top of the credibility scale. I read that sentence twice to make sure he wasn’t joking. He wasn’t. My, it must be comforting to have such child-like faith in the purity of governments. I of course put government documents near the bottom of my credibility scale. I’m pretty sure history supports my evaluation.
If you’ve seen my film Fat Head, for example, you know that the CDC intentionally jacked up the figures on deaths due to obesity. If you were fat and died in an auto accident, they decided you died from being overweight. (Perhaps your belly pushed the steering wheel in the wrong direction.)
In the 1980s, the Surgeon General’s office set out to prove that fat and cholesterol cause heart disease by conducting an analysis of all the relevant studies … but when the data didn’t support the theory, they shelved the project rather than publish the results. That was after wasting 11 years and more than 100 million dollars. So no, I don’t trust government officials to tell the truth.
My debate opponent puts scientists at the very tippy-top of his credibility list — as long as there’s consensus among the scientists. Once again, it must be nice to have such child-like faith. The “consensus” that cholesterol causes heart disease was manufactured. Dissenting research was ignored. Scientists who published dissenting research were sometimes bullied … they lost their tenure, their grants, and their reputations. The same thing happens to scientists today who dare suggest maybe we don’t actually know what causes climate change.
So I wasn’t exactly surprised to learn this week that a governing body and some scientists — those great pillars of credibility — misled the public about global warming … and I’m not even talking about the Climategate emails. Here’s the headline and some choice quotes from the online article:
World misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown
A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.
In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report.
It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.
Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was “speculation” and was not supported by any formal research. If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research. The IPCC was set up precisely to ensure that world leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate change.
Ah, yes, ensuring that world leaders receive the best possible scientific advice on climate change. That would explain this behavior:
… it was a campaigning report rather than an academic paper so it was not subjected to any formal scientific review. Despite this it rapidly became a key source for the IPCC when Lal and his colleagues came to write the section on the Himalayas. When finally published, the IPCC report did give its source as the WWF study but went further, suggesting the likelihood of the glaciers melting was “very high”. The IPCC defines this as having a probability of greater than 90%.
Some scientists have questioned how the IPCC could have allowed such a mistake into print. Perhaps the most likely reason was lack of expertise. Lal himself admits he knows little about glaciers. “I am not an expert on glaciers and I have not visited the region so I have to rely on credible published research. The comments in the WWF report were made by a respected Indian scientist and it was reasonable to assume he knew what he was talking about,” he said.
Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, has previously dismissed criticism of the Himalayas claim as “voodoo science.”
Hmmm, let’s see … The IPCC grabs a story, doesn’t check the reliability of the source, makes no effort to disprove it (standard procedure in good science), exaggerates it, hands it over to a guy with no expertise in glaciers to use as the basis of a report on glaciers, then dismisses criticism offered by real scientists as “voodoo.” Gee, that sounds like maybe the IPCC has an agenda. I’m starting to think they aren’t actually interested in providing the best scientific information to world leaders.
So pardon me if I don’t put government officials anywhere near the top of my credibility list.
Looks like Lil’ Harry Reid is off the hook. Obama forgave him and everything. Boy, there’s a shock. I thought Obama would call Reid into the Oval Office and say something like, “Harry, I know you come from a state where you’ll probably be replaced by a Republican who would cost us a filibuster-proof majority in the senate. But to heck with all the socialist programs we’re trying to pass. I’m offended and I think you should step down.”
In case you haven’t heard, a forthcoming book reveals that Harry Reid predicted Barack Obama would do well in the 2008 president race because he’s “light-skinned” and had “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”
The quick forgiveness by Obama, Al Sharpton, the press, and the directors of Offended Incorporated was entirely predictable, for one simple reason: Harry Reid is a liberal. In modern America, being a liberal means owning a permanent get-of-jail-free card that can be used whenever you happen to say something that spikes the needle on the Great Offend-O-Meter. You just have to say you’re really, really sorry, make some obligatory phone calls to prominent members of the offended group, and all is well.
Anyone with half a brain knows if the exact same observation about Obama had come from the mouth of a Republican senator, Al Sharpton would still be protesting outside the senator’s office, angry demands for the senator’s resignation would be the lead story in most media outlets, and the senator would in fact end up resigning by the end of the week — even after making all the same obligatory phone calls to prominent African-Americans.
But thanks to his liberal credentials, Harry Reid would still be a senator even if he’d applied his creative observations to other ethnic candidates:
He’s a light-skinned Mexican who speaks understandable English, and he doesn’t even use a leaf-blower, unless he wants to.
He’s Jewish, but he’s been generous on a number of occasions and doesn’t whine very often, unless he wants to.
He’s a sober Irishman, and has never once started a bar brawl that I know of.
Sure, he’s Japanese-American, but his math skills are average enough that I think he’ll actually believe our health-care bill won’t add to the national deficit.
The double-standard is nothing new, of course. A few years ago, Mel Gibson was pulled over by police for drunk driving. During the arrest, he offered his opinion that Jews have started all the wars in the world. It was an idiotic thing to say, and of course Gibson ended up apologizing to every prominent Jew he could think of and volunteering for therapy … all for a drunken remark never intended for public consumption, made in relative private to a police officer.
Around the same time, I heard a perfectly sober Bill Maher say — on national TV — that 80 percent of all reborn Christians are hypocrites. Let’s set aside the fact that Bill Maher probably doesn’t even know the minimum number of reborn Christians required to make such a precise calculation (five, if you’re wondering). It was a stupid and bigoted thing to say either way. And yet there was no outrage, and he never had to apologize to Pat Robertson in order to salvage his career. Maher is a liberal (despite his completely illogical claims of being a libertarian), most of his fans are liberals, his HBO bosses are liberals, so he has the get-out-of-jail free card.
While the double-standard annoys me, I don’t believe Reid’s remarks warranted such a stir in the first place. Okay, so he observed that Obama has light skin and doesn’t speak with a “Negro” dialect unless he wants to. So what? Image matters in politics — if it didn’t, JFK never would’ve been president. Is it racist to observe that in a country with a white majority, Obama is smart enough to adjust to the audience? That’s just good salesmanship.
In high school, I worked at a clothing store where the star salesman was also a “light-skinned” African-American. When a white customer walked into his department, he’d approach with something like, “Good afternoon, sir. May I help you?” When a black customer walked in, he’d change his tune to something more like, “Hey, Brother, what’s happening?” We all noticed. We also thought it was a smart move. We weren’t racists for making the observation.
I’ve adjusted my own dialect at times to fit in. When I lived in Chicago and performed in the local standup clubs, I spoke like a Chicagoan. I could sneak a soft “n” into words where it doesn’t belong, like “White Sahncks.” But trust me, I immediately reverted to my southern-Illinois voice when I stepped onto a stage in the south or west. I also dressed differently.
At least Obama’s dialect sounds genuine. As you may recall, Hillary Clinton tried adopting a dialect when she spoke at an African-American church. It sounded like a bad impression of Uncle Remus. (That incident, along with her “Sopranos” parody campaign ad, proved she might be the world’s worst actress.)
So I’m not suggesting Reid should’ve been forced to resign. I’d just like to see liberals and conservatives judged by the same Offend-O-Meter once in awhile. And while we’re at it, let’s recalibrate the Offend-O-Meter so it only spikes when actual racists make intentionally malicious remarks.
It’s been usually cold here in Tennessee. It’s been unusually cold in much of the country (see the video below), and in Europe as well. Naturally, the global-warming fanatics can’t bring themselves to admit that we’re seeing a cooling trend. Riiiight … three years in a row of record-breaking cold is just an anomaly, and never mind that Al Gore’s beloved computer models didn’t predict any of this. Frankly, I’m pretty sure nothing could convince them to give up their quasi-religion. Temperatures could drop for the next 20 years, and they’d still be insisting the planet has a fever and calling for more cap-and-tax schemes — especially Gore, since he’s set himself up to make millions from carbon credits.
After a decade in Los Angeles, I’m enjoying experiencing a winter that feels like winter. We’re even supposed to get up to three inches of snow tonight. My daughters are so excited, they had a difficult time going to sleep. Alana, my four-year-old, has already announced that she plans to build a snowman, have a snowball fight, build a snow fort and go ice skating, all in one day.
I think it would be more amusing just to drive around (carefully, of course) and see how the other drivers handle the snow. It probably wouldn’t be as much fun as in previous decades; too many people have moved here from other parts of the country, including the snow states. When my friend Bob moved here 25 years, he called me the first time it snowed — a wee little bit — to tell me he saw people abandon their cars and walk home. They couldn’t handle the pressure.
Some people can’t even handle the pressure of riding in the snow. About 15 years ago, I drove across North Dakota and Minnesota on a comedy tour, sharing my car with a young comedian from Seattle. Snow was a foreign substance to him. We had to drive through snow several times, usually on two-lane roads that hadn’t been plowed, and every time the wheels lost traction for a nanosecond or so, he gasped and grabbed the dashboard with both hands.
When it was no longer amusing, I finally said, “Lonnie, I’ve been driving in this stuff for 20 years. I’m not going to spin out. And look out the window, for chrissakes … there’s nothing for us to hit.” Then, since he seemed far too young for a heart attack, I jerked the wheel and fishtailed a bit on purpose, just for fun.
Not that winters have always been fun for me. Perhaps it was karma getting back at me for scaring Lonnie when, two winters later, my normally-reliable Toyota Camry started to die on me one night as I was heading to a gig in Green Bay, with the temperate on its way to -45 degrees. Yes, you read that correctly … 45 degrees below zero. I’d like to say the weather surprised me, but it didn’t — I had checked the forecast before driving up from Chicago. In fact, I called the club owner and urged him to cancel. He said, “Don’t worry about it. People up here are used to cold weather. They’ll still come out.” Stupidly ignoring my better judgment, I made the trip.
About 10 miles from the hotel, my interior lights started to dim. I began pleading with the car, calling it pet names, promising it all the oil and gas it could drink if it would just get me to the hotel. The lights continued growing dimmer, both inside and outside. I could barely see where I was driving. It occurred to me that people die in these circumstances. This was before cell phones, and there wouldn’t be much chance of flagging down a passing motorist — only idiots and comedians drive in -45 degree weather.
The car began to shudder and shake and finally quit on me four blocks from the hotel. I zipped my parka all the way up to my nose to form a peephole, grabbed my suitcase, and began running. By the time I reached the hotel doors, my shivers had degenerated into near-convulsions. I had to blink several times per second to keep my contacts from freezing.
I called the club owner and told him I needed a ride. He sent an employee to pick me up. When the show began, there were nine people in the club, playing pool in the bar. None of them had a ticket for the show, but the club owner said they could stick around and watch for free. Four of them wisely declined, saying they wanted to leave before their engine blocks froze. So I performed for five people.
On the local TV news that night, a reporter showed that he could toss a glass of water into the air and it would land as chunks of ice. The hotel had the heat all the way up, so it was several degrees above freezing in my room. I slept in my clothes, with both a sweater and a sweatshirt. I still woke up shivering.
The next day I called to have my car towed to a local garage. The mechanic told me it would be at least Tuesday before he could even look at it — there were dozens of dead cars ahead of mine. Lovely. The club would only cover the hotel for the two nights I was performing, so I would be paying for two or three nights from my own pocket. Meanwhile, it warmed up a few degrees, so we had nearly a dozen people attend the Saturday-night show.
My car wasn’t brought back to life until Wednesday. The damage was about $350, wiping out most of my paycheck from the club. The extra hotel bill wiped out the rest. I spent three days shivering in my room, watching TV and reading books. At mealtimes, I ran back and forth to a diner a few blocks away. The food was mediocre. I didn’t care.
A couple of weeks after I returned to Chicago, I received a notice from my bank — the club’s check had bounced. I tried to call the club, but the number wasn’t in service. They were out of business. Between the car repair, the hotel bill, gas, and the days away from my hourly-wage job, I figured it cost me about $1,000 to perform two shows for fewer than 20 people.
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