Now andThen

Bensblurb #524

Now and Then...

“New Va gov McDonnell talks common sense for 10 minutes and gets whacked for stating truisms. President Obama lectures for 70 minutes, insults a co-equal branch, the Supreme Court, with an erroneous charge, and essentially buries a health reform measure he had previously touted for months on end, and, oh yes, says nary a word about his first blunder: Gitmo. The comparisons are indeed striking.”----

Well, that was my take in a recent HuffPo posting, but it needs updating. President Obama did very well indeed with his followup session with GOP Reps in Baltimore. The TV coverage showed him to be greatly conversant and forceful in his Qs and As....I'd say it was his best performance to date. Now, to my other published stuff this week:

Thinking about then and now

2009? To me, that was so...last year. Instead, as a service in helping you get with what is real-time now, or simply to be “with it,” as we sophisticates say in today’s world, here are a few things that are definitely out, followed by a list of truly in-things for 2010.

OUT: Jobs, Stafford’s BPOL tax, the county’s conservation overlay district, Ukrops, liberals, Washington’s stimulus programs, ACORN, global warming, transparency, Conan O’Brien, Wizards, Redskins and Cowboys.

IN: County supervisors, Virginia’s governor, county SPCA shelter, soup kitchens, real estate reassessments, airport strip-search X-rays, Census, Tea Parties, Capitals, Palin, Gitmo, Haiti, higher gas prices, Wake-up call: Scott Brown, voter anger.

Even so, there remains less clarity now in clarifying and quantifying another phenomenon: The further debasement of language in today’s America.
Here’s an indication of the growing problem:

President Obama---"We dodged a bullet, but just barely. ... While there will be a tendency for finger-pointing, I will not tolerate it." ..."I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat-cat bankers...”
　
Such slang from the president, plus general references to “connecting the dots,” reflect our common adoption of business jargon.
Such as (from a recent satire in Forbes magazine)--”[We] touch base, circle the wagons and get people working on the same page [while ignoring] the low-hanging fruit....limiting everyone’s bandwidth, when the troops really just want to drink from a high-level fire hose while the cement is still wet and the competition is still in the weeds...”

Or, as a recent critique in the Wall Street Journal inelegantly put it, “We have 16 separate intelligence agencies. No wonder people aren’t connecting the dots.”

By the way, speaking of the work in intelligence, here’s a quip by Daniel Patrick Moynihan on the subject: “Intelligence is not to be confused with intelligence.”

The lack of effective, organized intelligence was exemplified recently when “security screeners at a Bozeman-area airport failed to spot a gun in a passenger’s luggage last month, but the man turned himself in when he realized his error.” DHS Secretary Janet undoubtedly again claimed, “The system worked.”

That was small comfort concerning the past year in general. President Obama took his lumps, too. “He's so sure of himself and his actions that he fails to see that he misses the moment to be president -- to be the strong father who protects the home from invaders, who reassures and instructs the public at traumatic moments. He's more like the aloof father who's turned the Situation Room into a Seminar Room." --New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

By the way, please pardon me for going on so aimlessly, since I do try in each column to be, well, pithy--just as you have come to expect. But having done them for 14 years on these pages, it gets more problematic to stay fresh as a daisy and provocative as a big barking dog. Especially in the dead of winter, I’d add, plus when our country is waist deep in worries (or bliss) about that new senator, Scott Brown (D-Mass).

So please have mercy and await brighter prose, surely forthcoming any day now--if the creek don‘t rise.


Ben Blankenship is an Aquia Harbour resident and career journalist. Reach him at info@staffordcountysun.com".

　

All Hat No Cattle

Bensblurb #522 1/27/10

All Hat, No Cattle

That was my first reaction to Obama’s State of the Union address last night. In Texas we used to say that about people who talked too much without substance.

“Drugstore cowboy” also came to mind. In other words his most seminal words, in my opinion, were “I don’t quit.”

That was disheartening to hear, especially coming near the end of his lengthy address, which was more like a lecture, and all about himself. How many references to first-person singular? They must have set a record.

His points strayed little from what he had said a year ago, merely defending old positions that few in Congress sitting there would agree to support enough to pass into law. And he figuratively buried the health reform legislation, in his speech, before Congress could pre-empt him.

He acknowledged there are still “deep and corrosive doubts about how Washington works that have been growing for years.” He might have added, “especially since fall,” and the upset senatorial election victory by the GOP in Mass.

He did give lip service to the ideas of nuclear energy, offshore oil drilling and clean coal, which garnered hardly polite applause. Those measures, of course, would doubtless be pursued by the White House as soon as his cap and trade energy bill to fight climate change was passed.

Oh yes, and he took a unique and frontal swipe at the Constitution's federal separation of powers, directly dissing Supreme Court justices sitting there for their freeing up of election speech.

Entertainment was provided by Congress, those attentive performing seals in attendance, and the Veep, who gave every sign of being perpetually enthralled by his boss.

Our new Virginia governor gave the response to Obama’s speech. Yes, the setting was a little hokey, but his message was clearly a contrast: Free enterprise vs. Huge gov’t.

Back to Obama, it seems every time he’s on TV his impact decreases further; he talks so much to so little effect.

Oh well, three more years...

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Obama Lashing, Trashing

Bensblurb #521 1/22/10

Obama is lashing, trashing...Oh my.

If you own stock today, our president has cut your net worth in his angry reaction to the Democrats’ stunning loss of the Kennedy senatorial seat in Mass. The Supreme Court’s ruling on freeing political donations to candidates has only made things worse for the White House.

I don’t know how to read it any other way. I’m peeved certainly in a financial sense, but more worried about Obama’s personal stability, let alone his competence to manage even his own people. Rumors are that he's dumping Bernanke. I hope I’m wrong, but I fear we’re in real trouble.

Speaking of retaliatory anger, Obama’s fresh tirade against banks (to help change the subject from the health care debacle perhaps?) totally spooks the stock market. The Dow lost over 400 points this week. Today’s Wall Street Journal: “Obama deposits a bombshell on Wall Street.” Permit a personal “ouch.”

SUPREME COURT DISSED:

“Obama called the [Supreme Court] decision a victory for Wall Street, Big Oil and other special interests hated by the Left, and he promised to work with Congress on a ‘forceful response.’ That's nothing but hypocrisy coming from the first major-party presidential candidate to reject public funds, opting instead to run solely on money from special interests.”--The Patriot blog


THINGS ARE COMING UNGLUED:

Here’s Mort Zuckerman, in US News and World Rpt:

“...[W]hile Obama gets the approval of 76 percent of non-whites, his approval among whites is down to 41 percent, according to Gallup. This is a huge change that literally puts the Democratic control of Congress at risk. The Republicans have hardly been stellar either, but there is now a renewed openness in the country to hear what they have to say. Obama's political realignment of America is over. We no longer believe that he will ‘change the world’ and ‘transform the country.’...

“There is still time for Obama to change and turn things around. But the first year is the critical year, one in which the public defines the president, and it has to be said that broad swaths of the country are deeply disappointed.

STICKING IT TO HIM

Scott Brown’s acceptance speech this week, after winning the special US senate election in Mass., included this zinger:

“In dealing with terrorists, our tax dollars should pay for weapons to stop them, not lawyers to defend them.”

This new guy could go far. He will certainly divert many Sarah Palin fans. In any event, could Republicans have picked any two more attractive individuals to lionize? Of course, the Democrats still have Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank.

By the way, Obama gives yet another speech next week: The State of the Union.

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A Long Winter's Night

Bensblurb #520 1/20/10

A Long Winter’s Night

Here I was about to dread the rest of this cold winter. I had forgotten we live in exciting times. For instance....
　
Critical Mass:

“Poor Obama! It's the eve of the anniversary of his inauguration. The State of the Union was supposed to be very grand. And now what? He has been repudiated! He made this election a referendum on the Democrats agenda, and the people of Massachusetts, the most liberal state, gave him a resounding no.”--Ann Althouse

In awe, I listened last night to Scott Brown’s acceptance speech, carried in total on Fox News but nowhere else on commercial TV. He is definitely an up and comer. His expressed political sympathies are Barry Goldwaterish, without the growl. Step aside, Sarah Palin. A star is born.

Mass for the departed:

MSNBC's Ed Schultz believes a victory by Scott Brown (R-Mass.) in Tuesday's special senatorial election in Massachusetts would signal "the end of change as we know it."
"I think it`s just an unbelievable scenario that`s playing out and don`t kid yourselves, folks, this could derail the rest of the Obama agenda for 2010 and beyond," Schultz told his "Ed Show" audience.
"The way the political winds are turning right now is absolutely amazing," he continued.
"If the tea party-endorsed candidate nabs Ted Kennedy`s seat in Massachusetts it`s the end of change as we know it"
--Amen
　
　
　
Politically Correct Army?
　
　
Here’s one of my heroes, Bill Bennett, sounding off on the new report, "Protecting the Force: Lessons from Fort Hood."
It’s “gutless.“ “It mentions the words ‘Islam’ and ‘Muslim’ not once. Not once. It refers to Hasan as a ‘gunman.’ As Ralph Peters put it, the report is ‘not about what happened at Fort Hood.’ And ‘It avoids entirely the issue of why it happened.’“You can read that ‘low self-esteem, depression, and anger are tied to many different types of violence’ in the report. You can read about ‘workplace violence’ and ‘disgruntled employees’ in the report. You can read about ‘Motivations for domestic terrorism’ such as ‘animal rights, white supremacy, and religious intolerance’ thrown in on equal par among other factors that simply were not in play here in the report. And you can read the grand conclusion that ‘Religious fundamentalism alone is not a risk factor; most fundamentalist groups are not violent, and religious-based violence is not confined to members of fundamentalist groups.’“But you would be reading a complete and total whitewash. You'd be reading a lie of a report. But that is what the Pentagon has produced.”
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Northrop coming?

Bensblurb #519

In the “light-skin” news, via columnist Star Parker...
“Americans are sick of political hypocrisy. Perhaps worst of all, Republicans insult blacks to think that they do not see the obvious. That alleged Republican outrage about Reid’s remarks is simply a political game. Or that blacks do not appreciate the transparent hypocrisy when a black RNC chairman, who is in his job because of his race, expresses outrage that a white Democrat expresses the truth that we are not in post-racial America – yet.”

True. Just as Trent Lott simply was buttering up a 100-year old on his birthday, so was Harry Reid simply expressing a truism. Should have been no big deals. But race is still a thicket. And by the way, are Haitians Afro-Americans? No way, but what do you call white Haitians if there are any? Are Canada’s blacks Canadian African-Americans?
Long ago, an affectionate term in the South was Darkies. Don’t hear that anymore. Or Negroes or Coloreds. Today there’s “inner-city youths.” And the appropriate post-racial term to use in the future? Who knows.
　
More BIG business coming soon to Bureaucrat land?
So a pro-business Republican ticket sweeps state elections in Virginia. So a pro-business Republican majority sweeps Stafford County’s supervisor elections.
So now we hear that Northrop Grumman Corp. has decided to move its headquarters from Los Angeles to the Washington area.
Was there a connection? If this giant global defense contractor moves to Virginia instead of Maryland or D.C., I’d say yes, since big industries love friendly political environs.
Further, if by wild chance it chooses Stafford County over those richer Beltway counties, I’d say...uh, oh.
But consider: Northrop’s big-shots could fly in and out of Stafford via our convenient, underused airport without being patted down by any of those pesky TSA bureaucrats that haunt all the major airports...yet.
You can never tell, though, the over-reaction inherent in a stung bureaucracy. When one wretched terrorist (who by the way doesn’t look like one, but rather like an inner-city gang member) can greatly encumber millions of air travelers already hassled to the max at airports, then we--not to mention Janet Napolitano--are in really big trouble.

Pardon me for the divergence, but here, transparency leaps to mind. Not the kind we were promised and then denied by Obama, most recently in the horrible health care “reforms” being secretly bulldozed through Congress, but the literal kind that involve electronically stripping you buck naked by X-ray to reveal your true self. Some folks actually still treasure such privacy, despite Hollywood’s movie trends toward full-frontal disclosure.

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Bensblurb #518 01/10/10

Ah, January.....

While freezing in this global warming era, please note some other notable concerns facing us today. Airport security, for instance, and a monster health care reform bill full of everything it seems except tort reform and availability of insurance across state lines.

The question of airport security reminds me of something. Two Janets: One named Reno directed the massacre of a commune in Waco, Texas. And one named Napolitano has directed the de facto strip-searching of airline passengers in the War on Terror...Why? We have some 60,000 TSA workers, security forces and tons of money invested in protecting our airlines and us. Since 9/11/01 you must admit they have succeeded by and large. The terrorist’s slayings at Fort Hood were the major exception.

We certainly would have saved many more American travelers more effectively, for example, by diverting a few of those big bucks to waging total domestic war against drunk drivers. In some ways, they are a much greater threat than those nutty jihadists.

Item: In 2008 nearly 12,000 Americans died in drunk driving-related crashes, according to Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Which proves nothing, just like the nonsense over the administration’s prioritizing health care “reform” over fixing the economy. Meantime, the jobless can just go hang. Or get killed on the highway by a drunk driver.
　
The question of “transparency” aside (making Obama look absurd now over his earlier C-span comments), consider these comments on the health fiasco by Sen. Tom Coburn (Okla.)---

“This process was not compromise. This process was corruption. This bill passed because votes were bought and sold using the issue of abortion as a bargaining chip. The abortion provision alone makes this bill the most arrogant piece of legislation I have seen in Congress. Only the most condescending politician can believe it is appropriate to force Americans to pay for other people's abortions and to coerce medical professional to take the lives of unborn children.”
　
Megan McArdle (in the Atlantic) piles on:
“Congressional Democrats started out with a CBO score they wanted, and worked backward to the bill. They’ve been pretty explicit about the fact that no one wants this actual bill; rather, the plan is to pass basically anything, and then go and totally rewrite it when the budget spotlight is off. I’m not aware of any other piece of legislation that was passed this way. Essentially, the Democrats have finished the process of gaming the CBO scores. They’re now meaningless. You don’t pass a piece of legislation that bears any resemblance to what you intend to end up with; you pass a piece of legislation that gets a good CBO score, and then go and alter it piece by piece. . .”
　
Victor Davis Hanson (in Pajamas Media) puts it all in context:....
“...A clear majority of Americans is opposed to almost everything Obama has to offer; congressional representatives know they are acting against the will of the people, but know too that they are offered all sorts of borrowed money for their districts to compensate for their unpopular actions. And a charismatic commander in chief believes that he can charm even the angriest of critics, and that anything he promises (Iran’s deadlines, closing of Guantanamo, new transparency, no more lobbyists, etc) means zilch and can be contextualized by another “let me be perfectly clear” speech spiced with a couple of the usual “it would have been impossible for someone as unlikely as me to have become President just (fill in the blanks) years ago”

Finally, here’s one last look-back at the past year’s most unfortunate comment, on the Fort Hood massacre:

Gen. George Casey, Army Chief of Staff, said that the murders were a tragedy, but worried that it "could potentially heighten backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers." He then warned, "As horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that's worse."

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Baby it's cold outside

Bensblurb #517
Brrrrr...

Drudge Report headline for 01/03/10:
“Temps plunge to record as cold snap freezes North, East states...”
　
Where is Al Gore?

“[Cold] of a variety not seen in over 25 years in a large scale is about to engulf the major energy consuming areas of the northern Hemisphere. The first 15 days of [January] will be the coldest...in over 25 years.” --Joe Bastardi, AccuWeather forecaster
　
Even so, the climate skeptics (according to noted meteorologist Neil Frank) concur with the believers that...
“[T]he Earth has been warming since the end of a Little Ice Age around 1850. The cause of this warming is the question. Believers think the warming is man-made, while the skeptics believe the warming is natural and contributions from man are minimal...
“Second, skeptics argue that CO2 is not a pollutant but vital for plant life. Numerous field experiments have confirmed that higher levels of CO2 are positive for agricultural productivity. Furthermore, carbon dioxide is a very minor greenhouse gas. More than 90 percent of the warming from greenhouse gases is caused by water vapor...
‘Third, and most important, skeptics believe that climate models are grossly over-predicting future warming from rising concentrations of carbon dioxide. We are being told that numerical models that cannot make accurate 5- to 10-day forecasts can be simplified and run forward for 100 years with results so reliable you can impose an economic disaster on the U.S. and the world....
‘The revelation of Climate­gate occurs at a time when the accuracy of the climate models is being seriously questioned. Over the last decade Earth's temperature has not warmed, yet every model (there are many) predicted a significant increase in global temperatures for that time period. If the climate models cannot get it right for the past 10 years, why should we trust them for the next century?”--excerpted from the Houston Chronicle.

So we can just cool it, at least for the new decade we’ve entered. Speaking of which, another writer claims we’ve got real problems, plus imagined ones aplenty on the horizon.

Nick Gillespie: There is a looming showdown in American society between public-sector employees and the rest of us, in terms of job security and, especially, unsustainable gold-plated retirement and health benefits that are working hard to bankrupt whole states such as California, New York, and New Jersey. As with some parts of the private sector (domestically owned auto companies, for instance), basic compensation packages were hammered into place in a very different America, and conferred massive future benefits when politicians were either too stupid or too cowardly to confront basic questions of fiscal responsibility. Do you want to spend your life (and have your kids spend their lives) to pay ever-increasing taxes for teacher, cop, and bureaurat retirements at early ages? Especially while you're expected to fully fund your own? This is a social contract that needs to be redrawn ASAP“--Gillespie is editor of Reason magazine.

In a piece in the Wall Street Journal, he lightens up about the 2010 decade.:
“...it’s unimaginable that we‘ll go 10 full years without a White House Conference on the Coarsening of Culture, that some form of deadly yet cuddly mammal will be identified as near extinction even as its population is increasing, that we will suddenly realize that our core common culture is threatened by the failure to teach “The Brady Bunch” in the K-12 curriculum, and that viruses are either multiplying or disappearing altogether at an alarming rate.”

Finally, here’s a thought :“Reading the Climategate archive is a bit like discovering that Professional Wrestling is rigged.”.--The Register

Happy New Year anyway.