COTD: The Story O The Three Envelopes

clipped from pajamasmedia.com 99. Don51: The story of the three envelopes.

I had heard this one before but forgot how relevant it is to Obama.

The story:

When a newly hired exec bumps into his fired predecessor on the way out of the office, the individual is offered three envelopes. The predecessor advises that each consecutively number envelope is numbered and only to be opened in sequence when the proverbial crap hits the fan and nothing else is working. The new manager smiles, takes the envelopes but quickly puts them in a drawer and forgets them. That’s until months later things are still not running well and senior management is looking for scalps. Then the envelopes are remembered. The manager dutifully finds and opens envelope marked ‘1′. It contains a simple note saying – ‘Blame everything on me”. Not having any other real ideas, the manager does exactly that which buys him a reprieve from the powers to be. Things are still wonky, but the new manager barely keeps the office afloat. Many months later, things still haven’t significantly improved and senior management once again is looking to make someone walk the plank. The stressed manager remembers the envelopes and rips open the one marked ‘2′. It reads “Reorganize”. So a plan to reorganized is formulated and given to senior management. That buys our manager several more months to try to deal with the crisis at hand. Of course the problems being intrinsic to the organization, they only fester. Senior management now summons the manager to a meeting which anyone could understand may well be his last. So the manager digs to find envelope numbered ‘3′ to open, only to read the advice “Prepare three envelopes”.

Pleased To Be Both

clipped from network.nationalpost.com Scott Brown’s win was the real report card on Barack Obama’s one-year presidency. He may have given himself, in an interview with Dame Oprah of Afternoon Fluff, a B+. Voters of Massachusetts were more clear-eyed and rigorous. They went, let us say, with a “gentleman’s D.” How did this happen? Obama was a chandelier presence in a world of political moles. Obama is a parochial politician. He emerged from the small pool of the university environment and Chicago politics -- the former, I think, more significant than the latter. Take his jibes at Scott Brown’s pickup, which he delivered repeatedly in Boston two days before the vote. Only the thickest of tin ears could imagine that slurs and putdowns about driving a pickup have any appeal beyond arugula snobs trading nose-in-the-air witticisms about rednecks. With a persona that oscillates between professor and hipster, he patronizes -- he’s either smarter or cooler than anyone else in the room, and, worse, looks very pleased to be both.

The Gang That Couldn't Hire Straight

clipped from ace.mu.nu Three different White House officials gave out three different numbers for jobs "saved or created" on three different morning shows today. Fools: Valerie Jarrett had the most conservative count, saying “the Recovery Act saved thousands and thousands of jobs,” while David Axelrod gave the bill the most credit, saying it has “created more than – or saved more than 2 million jobs.” Press Secretary Robert Gibbs came in between them, saying the plan had “saved or created 1.5 million jobs.” Five dollars says that President Obama uses a fourth number in the State of the Union speech.

Great

clipped from pajamasmedia.com BRUCE SCHNEIER: U.S. Enables Chinese Hacking Of Google. “In order to comply with government search warrants on user data, Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts. This feature is what the Chinese hackers exploited to gain access. Google’s system isn’t unique. Democratic governments around the world — in Sweden, Canada and the UK, for example — are rushing to pass laws giving their police new powers of Internet surveillance, in many cases requiring communications system providers to redesign products and services they sell.” Great.

More Climate Corruption

clipped from www.telegraph.co.uk I can report a further dramatic twist to what has inevitably been dubbed "Glaciergate" – the international row surrounding the revelation that the latest report on global warming by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) contained a wildly alarmist, unfounded claim about the melting of Himalayan glaciers. What has now come to light, however, is that the scientist from whom this claim originated, Dr Syed Hasnain, has for the past two years been working as a senior employee of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), the Delhi-based company of which Dr Pachauri is director-general. Furthermore, the claim – now disowned by Dr Pachauri as chairman of the IPCC – has helped TERI to win a substantial share of a $500,000 grant from one of America's leading charities, along with a share in a three million euro research study funded by the EU.

Wind Wakes

clipped from www.popsci.com Turbine Contrails: Clouds form in the wake of the front row of wind turbines at the Horns Rev offshore wind farm near Denmark.  Aeolus Clouds stream in the wake of wind turbines arrayed at the Horns Rev offshore wind farm in this stunning photo. But David MacKay, a physicist at the University of Cambridge in the UK, sees the image as illustrating the common problem of back-row wind turbines losing power relative to the front row. Downstream wind turbines may lose 20 percent or even 30 percent of their power compared to their fellows in front, according to a study on wake effects at Horns Rev that MacKay highlights on his blog. The paper also emphasizes that different wind directions make it practically impossible to gauge an overall "steady state" for large wind farms, unless researchers can sample wind speeds and directions at multiple points throughout the array.

Without Comment

clipped from www.ncdc.noaa.gov

COTD: sOciopath

clipped from pajamasmedia.com 60. maineman: As a psychologist with almost 30 years of experience in psychodiagnosis, my read of the interview posted by zhombre is that this is the description of a sociopath. I know narcissism is a longstanding assumption, and I don’t disagree with that, the two syndromes being closely linked. The difference seems to me to be susceptibility to stress. The sociopath is narcissistic but is likely to be less vulnerable to destabilization than a pure narcissist when the approval or adulation ceases. Take Marilyn Monroe when she lost her looks as an example of a classic narcissist. Obama seems more arrogant to me than a garden variety political narcissist like Clinton, who was clearly able to regroup and make adjustments to keep the approval coming. There’s a megalomaniacal sense about this guy that makes me think he’s going to keep pushing with the expectation that he’ll prevail — not only has he always done so, but the stimulation derives from him beating the system and prevailing.

Shields Up

clipped from easyopinions.blogspot.com Robinson: You wrote in Forbes in Oct 2008, I know Obama through our association at the University of Chicago Law School and through mutual friends in the neighborhood. We have had one or two serious substantive discussions, and when I sent him e-mails from time to time in the early days of his Senate term, he always answered in a sensible and thoughtful fashion. And yet, for assessing the likely course of his presidency, I don't know him at all. How can you say such a thing? Read more ... Epstein: It's very easy. Obama has the world's most perfect human disposition. He can sit in a room with you, he can listen to you, and he can talk to you, and you really get the sense of a man who is in complete self control. But, that's the very feature that makes him so hard to read. He is so much in self control, that if he doesn't want you to know in a conversation what he is thinking, you can be there for 30 minutes and never be able to figure out what he believes.

The Day Obamacare Died

clipped from www.moonbattery.com

Open Letter

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com

Good Luck With That

clipped from hotair.com Message: I care, you bitter clingers! Since his party lost the special election to fill Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat, pundits have been proclaiming President Barack Obama in need of a new message. As this week drew to a close, he offered some samples of what it will sound like. Turning up the volume on the fiery populist rhetoric he’s been deploying against the Wall Street “fat cats” that have become a favorite target, Obama signaled that he intends to pursue new Wall Street regulations as well as health care reform, despite his party having lost its 60-seat supermajority in the Senate. Of course, Obama played the faux-populism card in the 2008 campaign, too. The reality was a bit different. Barack Obama’s first major step on the campaign trail — in December 2006 — was to Wall Street, where he snagged the backing of convicted inside trader George Soros and investment banker Robert Wolf, who became CEO of UBS Americas.

This is a concise RTWT about O's faux financial populism.

Being There

clipped from www.qando.net It is so obvious it frustrates me that others are too ideologically or politically blind to admit it.  The reason the Democrats are in the shape they’re in today has to do with the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and his obvious lack of leadership. Let me give you the latest example found in a Politico article today.  It is, in fact, all about why the legislative agenda is in trouble and Democrats are skittish. Congressional Democrats — stunned out of silence by Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts — say they’re done swallowing their anger with President Barack Obama and ready to go public with their gripes. If the sentiment isn’t quite heads-must-roll, it’s getting there. And they want the White House to step up — quickly — to help shape the party’s message and steer it through the wreckage of health care reform. Shorter version: “Where’s the leadership from the President?”

You Have To Repeat Yourself A Lot

clipped from www.qando.net Brutal.  And from the leftosphere to boot. TPM:

O Jack-sses And Dumbos

clipped from online.wsj.com If you were a normal human sitting at home having a beer and watching national politics peripherally, as normal people do until they focus on an election, chances are pretty good you came to see the two major parties not as the Dems versus the Reps, or the blue versus the red, but as the Nuts versus the Creeps. The Nuts were for high spending and taxing and the expansion of government no matter what. The Creeps were hypocrites who talked one thing and did another, who went along on the spending spree while lecturing on fiscal solvency. In 2008, the voters went for Mr. Obama thinking he was not a Nut but a cool and sober moderate of the center-left sort. In 2009 and 2010, they looked at his general governing attitudes as reflected in his preoccupations—health care, cap and trade—and their hidden, potential and obvious costs, and thought, "Uh-oh, he's a Nut!" Which meant they were left with the Creeps.

Limitless

clipped from www.investors.com But Wall Street didn't cause the collapse — government did . And this call for tougher rules is yet another attempt to escape blame. All Glass-Steagall did was let bank holding companies buy into investment banks. What undermined the financial system was a fanatical application of rules aimed at getting banks to lend as much money as possible to facilitate homeownership among minorities. It was the government, not Wall Street, that created the subprime market by compelling banks to make bad loans and urging Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to cash out the banks by putting more and more of the toxic mortgages on their balance sheets. hasn't given a thought to limiting, let alone blocking the proposed expansion of, the Community Reinvestment Act that started it all. Or to reining in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-created monsters that aided and abetted the meltdown. No, the Obama administration is back on its quest to take control of as much of the private economy as it can.

The Best Option

clipped from online.wsj.com More fundamentally, even if the logistics can be mastered, the President's plan would not have prevented the credit chaos of 2008. Bear Stearns was not a bank, could not borrow from the Fed's discount window and wasn't even all that big, yet the government still wouldn't let it fail. Under Mr. Obama's new rules, Goldman might simply decide to sell its bank—yet investors and its own traders would still assume it is too big to fail. That problem still needs to be addressed. Mr. Obama also keeps peddling the illusion that the entire crisis was caused by the bankers. But the root cause was a credit mania, courtesy of the Federal Reserve. The mania was concentrated in the housing market, courtesy of Congress and several Presidential Administrations. If we are going to have a Fed and a political class as reckless as we have, then we need a more comprehensive answer to financial risk. Bankruptcy for risk-takers who bet wrong is the best option.

Put Them Out Of Your Mind

clipped from ace.mu.nu But is Obama to blame? Of course not. You are, champ. Obama's like Reverse Jesus. You will, collectively, assume his sins so that he is cleansed and untainted.* * Yes, I know there's another word for "Reverse Jesus." I don't think that's really a good thing to say. When I was in college, some guy -- a transgressive sort of guy, a guy who liked causing reactions and doing shock value stuff to spook the "straights" -- was goofing around, claiming he was actually the Anti-Christ, to this guy who was Christian. The Christian guy was just shrugging along at how silly it was. Eventually the Transgressive Guy said, "How do you know I'm not the Anti-Christ?" The Christian guy smiled. "Easy. Satan wouldn't be so fat." So funny. Transgressive Guy, to his credit, busted a gut at that too. Anyway, if you had suspicions Obama was the Anti-Christ, put them out of your mind. Satan wouldn't be such a fuck-up.

There you have it.

Did I Forget To Mention That Hockey Stick? (Part 84,937)

clipped from www.americanthinker.com Smith also discovered that in California, only 4 stations remain – 1 in San Francisco and 3 in Southern LA near the beach, and rightly observed that: “It is certainly impossible to compare it with the past record that had thermometers in the snowy mountains. So we can have no idea if California is warming or cooling by looking at the USHCN data set or the GHCN data set.” That’s because the baseline temperatures to which current readings are compared were a true averaging of both warmer and cooler locations.  And comparing these historic true averages to contemporary false averages -- which have had the lower end of their numbers intentionally stripped out – will always yield a warming trend, even when temperatures have actually dropped.

And Who Would That Be?

clipped from justoneminute.typepad.com More pushback: But officials who have worked on the issue said Blair was wrong on almost every count. Abdulmutallab couldn't possibly have been questioned by the HIG because the unit doesn't exist yet. The task force had recommended it be created to handle the questioning of "high value"  Qaeda leaders who might be captured overseas—a criterion that clearly doesn't apply in Abdulmutallab's case. But the proposal is still being reviewed by the National Security Council, and the actual unit has not yet been created.  And we learned from FBI Director Mueller's questioning that responsibility for the decision to switch gears from intelligence collection to criminal processing lies with an unnamed high-ranking official at the Department of Justice. So who is the unnamed DoJ official?

Crony Capitalism Corruption Coincidences

clipped from drsanity.blogspot.com And Democrats wonder why the American people are upset?? BTW, instead of calling this "crony capitalism", I'd call it "creeping fascism."

Nothing to see here. Move along now...

Klaus On Uncriticizable Dogma

clipped from wattsupwiththat.com

Taxing Congress

clipped from business.theatlantic.com First, I was really surprised how adamantly opposed Buffett was to the bank tax. I wasn't shocked so much because it's such a great idea. Actually, I think it's a pretty ridiculous idea, for the same reason that Buffett does. He says about the tax: No, I don't understand that. If it's some kind of a guilt tax or something of that sort because banks were among the whole United States that were saved back in 2008, everybody was taken care of then. And the banks, basically, somebody like Wells, it's cost them a lot of money to be in the TARP and it was basically forced upon them. Or if you look at Fannie or Freddie. Are you going to go and tax the members of Congress who ran Freddie and Fannie?

O Avatars And Moonbats

clipped from www.moonbattery.com Tun Mahathir bin Mohamad, former Prime Minister of Malaysia, reveals what delusional dimwits Charlie Sheen and Rosie O'Donnell have surmised all along — the Muslim atrocities of September 11 may have been staged. Opines Mahathir: I am not sure now that Muslim terrorists carried out these attacks. There is evidence that the attacks were staged. How does he know? If they can make Avatar, they can make anything. Likewise, if an unhinged kook like James Cameron can get the whole planet to watch his dopey leftist propaganda, people can swallow anything. Mahathir is also miffed that Comrade Obama hasn't managed to rid the world of Israel. With even nuts like this turning on him, Dear Reader won't need his teleprompter to tell him that his days of coasting on hype are over.

Decline

clipped from www.americanthinker.com

Dark Future

clipped from www.moonbattery.com Sweet Land of Liberty, this was once called; and it will be again — provided our current government is run out of Washington. Under Comrade Obama, America is dropping like a stone on the Index of Economic Freedom. This year, of the world's 20 largest economies, the U.S. suffered the largest drop in overall economic freedom. … Scores declined in seven of the 10 categories of economic freedom. Losses were particularly significant in the areas of financial and monetary freedom and property rights. Driving it all were the federal government's interventionist responses to the financial and economic crises of the last two years, which have included politically influenced regulatory changes, protectionist trade restrictions, massive stimulus spending and bailouts of financial and automotive firms deemed "too big to fail." North Korea shows us our dark future if we don't reverse course.

Excuse Me With Whipped Cream On Top?

clipped from ace.mu.nu Earlier today Denis Blair, Director of National Intelligence testified at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing into the Christmas Day Bomb plot that the bomber should have been placed in the administration's interrogation program for high-value suspects but wasn't. "That unit was created exactly for this purpose," Blair told the Senate Homeland Security Committee. “We did not invoke the HIG in this case. We should have. Tonight via Keep America Safe we find out that the DNI Blair has changed his story. My remarks today before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs have been misconstrued. The FBI interrogated Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab when they took him into custody. They received important intelligence at that time, drawing on the FBI's expertise in interrogation that will be available in the HIG once it is fully operational. Excuse me? We don't currently have an operational program to interrogate individuals deemed to be of high value?

BJ II Department

clipped from washingtontimes.com The White House National Security Council recently directed U.S. spy agencies to lower the priority placed on intelligence collection for China, amid opposition to the policy change from senior intelligence leaders who feared it would hamper efforts to obtain secrets about Beijing's military and its cyber-attacks. The downgrading of intelligence gathering on China was challenged by Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair and CIA Director Leon E. Panetta after it was first proposed in interagency memorandums in October, current and former intelligence officials said.

Hillary IS the SecState after all. She couldn't be doing nothing even though it looks like it.

In His Truck

clipped from gatewaypundit.firstthings.com Dear GOP— PLEASE Let Scott Brown Give the response next week to Obama’s State of the Union Address… …In his truck.

For You

clipped from gatewaypundit.firstthings.com Senator Teddy Kennedy’s car is dragged by a wrecker out of Poucha Pond in the morning on July 19, 1969. (Ytedk) Radio host Rush Limbaugh commented on Scott Brown’s win tonight. Radio Equalizer reported: This one’s for you, Mary Jo.

The Tallest Midget

clipped from www.thedailybeast.com My sources at these firms tell me they’re all aware of the obvious: The news clips, the stories, the TV segments about the hearings all focused on Blankfein’s absurd AIG defense or his explanation of how it’s OK to screw your customers because they’re “professional investors.” How about Dimon’s reasonable suggestion that banks should be able to fail, as long as they don’t flush the entire system down with them, or Mack’s mea culpa that Wall Street risk-taking was at the heart of the financial crisis? Those statements were drowned out by Blankfein’s defense of the indefensible. Goldman may have been the best of a bad lot, as Blankfein said, but that’s like saying it’s great to be the tallest midget in the room.

The Bystander

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com As I understand the Democratic narrative of today's election, as explained by Robert Gibbs and others, Scott Brown's victory is the result of voter anger. That anger, in turn, is the understandable result of President Bush's policies. Thus, George W. Bush is responsible for the election of Scott Brown. President Obama is just a bystander.

Message Sent

clipped from homepage.mac.com

Not that it will be received of course...

Social "Justice" And Ghost Towns

clipped from www.moonbattery.com The American Left looks at the authoritarian government of Communist China with a mix of wonder and envy. New York Times columnist Thomas Freidman, Professional Teleprompter Reader Barack Obama, and even the America-hating trolls who infest the comments of this weblog openly admire the way Chinese autocrats crush the little people under the treads of progress --- often literally. And they wish the American government could do the same --- abolish property rights, wipe out entire towns, push dissidents into re-education camps --- at least when "progressives" are in power. Building a city in the middle of nowhere that no one wants to live in is pretty insane, but is it more insane than progressives in the USA borrowing billions from China to bailout the banks after they forced the banks to extend billions in bad mortgage loans to people who couldn't repay them in the name of "social justice?" You tell me.

Is Friedman just not smart enough to know that he's pining for Las Vegas and Florida?

But It Ain't Going To Happen

clipped from www.forbes.com Returning to the gloomy job and wage predictions, when those who expect the worst talk about jobs and pay, what they're really talking about is investment. Their funereal views of our economic future are rooted in the notion that stateside investment will dry up such that wages and job opportunities will become less bountiful. If so, what looks unfortunate is easy to fix. There are no jobs without investment, so the easy answer is to reduce the cost of same through reduced capital gains taxes, and most important, the issuance of a stable dollar the value of which will be a magnet for capital around the world. Jobs are the easy part--if only the Obama administration actually focuses on what's presently driving down investment.

"Science" Update

clipped from www.qando.net This gets worse and worse – or better and better, depending on which side of the man-made global warming scenario you come down on.  This time it is the Himalayan glaciers: 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. 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. Yet it found its way into a science journal, and later was included in the IPCC’s 2007 report as an alleged scientific finding? How many scientists signed that report? That’s science? That’s what we should base life-changing political policies on?

Not Too Far Off?

clipped from www.latimes.com The movement has continued to pick up speed since then. This month, a diplomat at an Iranian embassy in Europe openly told me that the time of "justice and freedom" is coming. His time scale was "the next few months." This would have been an extraordinary statement for a loyal servant of the Islamic Republic to make anywhere, much less in an embassy reception hall, which is probably bugged. "The disillusionment within the regime is sometimes stronger than the disillusionment of the ordinary people, because these are people who had traveled outside Iran, to Europe, and knew a different level of life," There was nothing random about my friend's electronic glasnost. When I wrote back asking what he had done while I was in jail, I got back a one-line plea to allow him "an opportunity" in the future to explain. Perhaps this opportunity is now not too far off.

Even If Enough Chicago Dead Vote To Beat Brown This Is Pretty Amazing

clipped from pajamasmedia.com A REPORT FROM THE SCOTT BROWN RALLY AT WORCESTER: “It’s an absolute mob scene. The police have closed off the streets. It’s mind blowing. The hall is already full, and it holds 3,000 people. There may be another 1,000 people outside.” Meanwhile, reader Sean Fitzpatrick writes: “Pictures don’t do justice. Nothing like this in Mass since JFK. Worcester rally starts in thirty minutes and the streets are already packed.” Here’s a pic. UPDATE: Fitzpatrick sends another picture from inside the hall, and comments: “If the Brown campaign were worried that they wouldn’t fill the hall then they needn’t have. It is standing room only and the hall management is concerned about OVERcrowding.” ANOTHER UPDATE: Meanwhile, reportedly, Coakley can’t fill a hall. “Martha Coakley and Barack Obama held a rally today in Boston. They couldn’t fill the hall. . . . It holds 3,000 and frankly only 2,000 to 2,500 showed up.”