Obama, the Perfect Commentary

This says it all...

Dowd on Obama

I always enjoy Maureen Dowd. She usually has a good analysis but then spices it up with verbal fireworks to make it doubly delicious. Here's Dowd's NY Times op-ed with her take on Obama's deflating "leadership"...

Like Reagan, Obama is a detached loner with a strong, savvy wife. But unlike Reagan, he doesn’t have the acting skills to project concern about what’s happening to people.

Obama showed a flair for the theatrical during his campaign, and a talent for narrative in his memoir, but he has yet to translate those skills to governing.

As with the debates, he seems resistant to the idea that perception, as well as substance, matters. Obama so values pragmatism, and is so immersed in the thorny details of legislative compromises, that he may be undervaluing the connective bonds of simpler truths.

Americans who are hurting get angry when they learn that Timothy Geithner, as head of the New York Fed before becoming Treasury secretary, caved to the insistence of Goldman Sachs and other A.I.G. trading partners that they get 100 cents on the dollar when he could have struck a far better bargain for taxpayers.

If we could see a Reduced Shakespeare summary of Obama’s presidency so far, it would read:

Dither, dither, speech. Foreign trip, bow, reassure. Seminar, summit. Shoot a jump shot with the guys, throw out the first pitch in mom jeans. Compromise, concede, close the deal. Dither, dither, water down, news conference.

It’s time for the president to reinvent this formula and convey a more three-dimensional person.

Palin can be stupefyingly simplistic, but she seems dynamic. Obama is impressively complex but he seems static.

The American people deserve something better. Obama should resign, Biden step aside, Nancy Pelosi give up he Speaker of the House, and thereby force another election where somebody willing to act and lead and save the nation steps forward. (On second thought, that might not work. Too many voters have been lobotimized and will pull the levers to support gasbags and right wing extremists.) I guess all I can do is what the mess simmer and stew. What a tragedy.

The Failings of American Health Care

I get a chuckle out of the idiotic positions that US lawmakers get into over health care. The ranting about the "public option" drives me crazy. These lawmakers refuse to open their eyes and see just how broken the US health care system is. This graphic makes the point. The US spends far more money per capita on health care but has shorter lifetimes and higher infant mortality. It is as if the US is purposefully designing a health care delivery system that kills people off and American are proud of it. They should be ashamed! The debate should focus on how money is wasted. Instead, the lawmakers act as if everything would be tickety-boo if only there is no "public option"...

Click to enlarge

The reason why the rest of the world gets better bang for its health care buck is that they all have public health care systems. The only "public" health care in the US are the remnants of the 19th century when public health authorities were put in place to monitor plagues and act in extreme situations to protect the population. Otherwise Americans are in love with the idea of public misery and private excesses. Nutty!

Human Potential

I never cease to be amazed at the strange gifts and obsessions of individual humans. Here's an example of dexterity that boggles my mind. The video is nicely done...



Now for a different slant on human arts and potential...

I'm a bibliophile, so I treat books as if they were precious objects. (I just moved so I spent 3 weeks at back breaking labour boxing my 7,000 books. I've 'paid my dues' to my books to keep them close to my heart.)

The following video is beautiful form of art, but I cringe as I think about the sacrilege of creating this kind of art from books. But in the spirit of celebrating human potential, I'm willing to enjoy it:



That is very definitely a different way to celebrate the art & stories that books bring to one's life. Nicely done!

A Little Light Entertainment

Nothing like science to give you a source of good humour...



And if you like your humour to be factual, try this:

A small college in the Midwest wanted to put up a wind turbine on their campus. The school, being on top of a hill in the middle of the prairie, had enough wind to produce upwards of 3/4 of their needed electricity, so the project made good sense. But when it came time to talk to the people living nearby, the school ran into some opposition. In particular, from a farmer who thought the noise and appearance of the wind turbine would lower property values.

The punchline: He was a pig farmer.

Pessimism

This bit from a Paul Krugman op-ed in the NY Times sums up my feelings about how things have gone off the rails:

A funny thing happened on the way to a new New Deal. A year ago, the only thing we had to fear was fear itself; today, the reigning doctrine in Washington appears to be “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”

What happened? To be sure, “centrists” in the Senate have hobbled efforts to rescue the economy. But the evidence suggests that in addition to facing political opposition, President Obama and his inner circle have been intimidated by scare stories from Wall Street.

...

In December 2008 Lawrence Summers, soon to become the administration’s highest-ranking economist, called for decisive action. “Many experts,” he warned, “believe that unemployment could reach 10 percent by the end of next year.” In the face of that prospect, he continued, “doing too little poses a greater threat than doing too much.”

Ten months later unemployment reached 10.2 percent, suggesting that despite his warning the administration hadn’t done enough to create jobs. You might have expected, then, a determination to do more.

But in a recent interview with Fox News, the president sounded diffident and nervous about his economic policy. He spoke vaguely about possible tax incentives for job creation. But “it is important though to recognize,” he went on, “that if we keep on adding to the debt, even in the midst of this recovery, that at some point, people could lose confidence in the U.S. economy in a way that could actually lead to a double-dip recession.”

What? Huh?

This is a tragedy on many levels. The failings of Obama mean that millions will live lives of quiet despair for many years, tens of thousands will take decades to recover, and for some, the rest of their lives will be lived as a tragedy (just like the Great Depression created a silent army of hobos who never did find a job in the mainstream working world). All this would have been unnecessary if Obama had taken bold action.

At another level, it shows how money & power on Wall Street has subverted democracy and rational policy making.

Climate Fraud

The hacking of the Hadley centre's CRU (Climate Research Unit) has uncovered massive fraud by global warming fanatics to push their radical agenda on governments and advance their perverted "science".

Here's a bit on this event on Wikipedia.

Here is an interview with Tim Ball, a retired geography professor at the University of Winnipeg and a global warming sceptic, that discusses the level of fraud that has been uncovered by hacking into the CRU's e-mails:



It will be interesting to see how this fraud is dealt with. The fanatics have wormed their way into control of most major climate research insitutitions and they are playing "hardball" to ensure that their political views prevail and as the e-mails show, they are willing to distort data and the science in order to sell their global warming agenda. How long will it take to root them out? It may take as long as it took to get the deviant Lysenkoism out of Soviet science.