Roman Around

combating liberalism and other childish notions

Archive for February, 2010

PICTURE OF THE DAY FOR FEBRUARY 6, 2010

Posted by Andrew Roman on February 6, 2010

irony?

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THE “P” IS SILENT

Posted by Andrew Roman on February 5, 2010

The English language can be flummoxing.

Some of its letters in certain situations can present significant challenges.

For instance, many of us are familiar with “silent e” (as in cape, vane and globe),  but there are others that can be more perplexing, more troublesome.

One such example is the harrowing and sinister “silent p.”

They’re very tricky.

If your psychic has pneumonia, you know what I’m talking about.

I learned early in life how problematic they were watching everyone’s favorite Cuban band leader, Ricky Ricardo, stumble over the word “psychiatrist.”

I never forgot that. 

Of course, the dreaded “silent p” is even more of a nuisance when it appears in the middle of a word.

Just ask the President of the United States.

The Harvard Law School alum, world-renowned orator, community organizer and civil rights attorney, must have been in the canteen the day they went over the “silent p” portion of his Language Arts workbook.

During yesterday’s National Prayer Breakfast, the President was lauding the efforts of relief workers in Haiti, and offered specific high praise for a Navy Corpsman. The silent “p” proved too much for the magne cum laude as he twice pronounced the word corpsman with the “p”.

As in “corpse, man.”

Messiahs are capable of many things, but to expect grammatical perfection is probably a bit much.

It’s that anti-Capitalist, anti-free market, pro-Marixst streak in him that is probably behind this gaffe. The word “corpsman” looks a lot like “corporation.”

We know he knows how to pronounce that word.  Besides, teleprompters can’t whisper back.

Putting all in context, it’s not like he mispronounced the word “nuclear” or anything.

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PICTURE OF THE DAY FOR FEBRUARY 5, 2010

Posted by Andrew Roman on February 5, 2010

I am not one of those anti-smoking zealots, but this struck me as funny.

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JUST SHUT UP, OKAY? YOU’RE NOT NEEDED HERE

Posted by Andrew Roman on February 4, 2010

It was embarrassing enough for Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood to uninvitedly get up in front of the nation and tell owners of recalled Toyota vehicles to stop driving their cars, only to come back later and recant. Indeed, it was beyond moronic for him to advise the owners of eight recalled Toyota models to take their cars off the road until their accelerator pedals could be looked at, only to reappear hours later and explain that he really didn’t mean what he said. LaHood’s big mouth did nothing more than throw a monkey wrench into an already troubling situation.

But that’s okay. He’s from the government, and he was only here to help.

Of course, opening his mouth and letting out a whole lot of jackass is not the real issue here.

The issue – as always – is the demonstrable inability of Obama-style, big government to stay out of the way of its citizenry.

This Toyota recall is a private sector issue being handled by the company itself – as it ought to be. The company will adhere to the rules of the free market system by making its corrections, withstanding any financially losses that will inevitably come (if they can), and winning the trust of the public by coming back with a better product. It’s how free enterprise works.

This is not a government problem.

Besides, who in hell is Ray LaHood to open up his pie hole about a situation he clearly knows nothing about and confuse the hell out of everybody?

Because he’s the Transportation Secretary?

So what? Who gives a raccoon’s nipple?

All Mr. LaHood did was create a serious uproar and send a whole bunch of Toyota owners into a state of befuddlement and frustration before realizing that the taste of feet on his tongue is rather unpleasant.

Was it necessary for the Secretary of the Transportation Department – which serves “the United States by ensuring a fast, safe, efficient, accessible and convenient transportation system that meets our vital national interests and enhances the quality of life of the American people, today and into the future” – to come out publicly and tell drivers what to do with their own cars? Is there a “grease monkey” clause in the DOT mission satement I missed? Without LaHood, would American Toyota drivers have neglected following up on their recall notices? Would they not have known to be careful but for the grace of the federal government telling them to?

This nanny-state mentality does no one any good.

It is a perfect illustration of how government intervention into private sector matters causes more problems than it solves.

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Posted in Big Government, Nanny State | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

WHAT DID BAMMY REALLY INHERIT?

Posted by Andrew Roman on February 4, 2010

"It's yours." "No, it's yours."

It’s fairly common.

Talk radio hosts will field phone calls from liberal callers who, when asked to offer their take on President Obama’s skyrocketing deficit numbers, will inevitably, unfailingly, reflexively bring up George W. Bush. (I think it’s a law now). After all, as is made evident on a daily basis by this administration, there wasn’t anything in all of recorded human existence impervious to W’s gross mismanagement and downright destructiveness, particularly during the dark wilderness that defined America’s “BB” days (Before Barack). The inexpungible mark President Bush left on this nation was (and is) so ubiquitous, even eight disastrous years (God forbid) of Barack Obama can (and will) be overlooked by rational people, because no man – not even a Messiah – could ever hope to salvage anything from the splintered wreckage left by W.

Barack Obama’s budget, even by conservative estimates, will catapult America’s deficit to levels never seen before – and yet somehow, astoundingly, Democrats are talking about fiscal responsibility. It’s like a Weight Watchers class going out for chili dogs and cheeseburgers after the meeting.

And while this administration continues to count on the stupidity of the American public to buy into their “let’s spend our way out of debt” approach, they have no problem continuing to cite the deficits they inherited from George W. Bush when confronted with challenges to their own spend-and-more-spend agenda.

“Look at the hole Bush dug us into before we got here,” they say.

“You best look at what Bush did before you start pointing fingers this way,” they’ll exclaim.

But as political analysts Dick Morris and Eileen McGann write at Townhall.com, Obamacrats are not telling the whole truth.

President Obama was disingenuous when he said that the budget deficit he faced “when I walked in the door” of the White House was $1.3 trillion. He went on to say that he only increased it to $1.4 trillion in 2009 and was raising it to $1.6 trillion in 2010.

As Joe Wilson said, “You lie.”

Here are the facts:

In 2008, George W. Bush ran a deficit of $485 billion. By the time the fiscal year started on Oct.1, 2008, it had gone up by another $100 billion due to increased recession-related spending and depressed revenues. So it was $600 billion. That was the real Bush deficit.

But when the fiscal crisis hit, Bush had to pass TARP in the final months of his presidency, which cost $700 billion. Under the federal budget rules, a loan and a grant are treated the same. So the $700 billion pushed the deficit — officially — up to $1.3 trillion. But not really. The $700 billion was a short-term loan, and $500 billion of it has already been repaid.

So what was the real deficit Obama inherited? The $600 billion deficit Bush was running plus the $200 billion of TARP money that probably won’t be repaid (mainly AIG and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). That totals $800 billion. That was the real deficit Obama inherited.

So what, pray tell, happened once The One set up shop in the White House?

Then … he added $300 billion in his stimulus package, bringing the deficit to $1.1 trillion. And falling revenues and other increased welfare spending pushed it up to $1.4 trillion.

So, effectively, Obama came close to doubling the deficit.

It’s interesting to note that while the President continues to claim he inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit, he takes full credit for rescuing America’s financial institutions.

I admit to being quite impressed.

Being able to speak so well out of both sides of the mouth is no menial task.

It is the TARP money – $700 billion – that is credited with saving the banks, which is more than half of the deficit Obama says he inherited from Bush. To date, as Morris and McGann point out, $500 billion of that has been paid back.

It takes real talent to do what Obama does. He blames Bush for the deficit created by TARP, but takes credit for the results.

Too clever.

The fact is, President Obama is the proprietor and general manager of the largest deficit and largest budget on record – and no matter how many pins lefties keep sticking their little “W” dolls, it won’t change the fact that Obama owns it now.

It is all his.

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PICTURE OF THE DAY FOR FEBRUARY 4, 2010

Posted by Andrew Roman on February 4, 2010

Whos’ got the number to the fire department?

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IT’S THE NEWS CYCLES’ FAULT – OLBERMANN IS A TENT-POLE

Posted by Andrew Roman on February 3, 2010

Scott Brown was not elected to the Senate because of health care. It was, as Howard Dean put it, a message being sent to Democrats that they were not being leftist enough on the issue.

You probably didn’t know that.

Collapsing poll numbers and recent Democrat election losses are no indication whatsoever that Americans are rejecting modern liberalism. Rather, it’s simply a matter of intolerant, obstructionist right-wingers spoiling the messianic transformation with their assorted variety of “isms” and “phobes.”

Were you aware of that?

You were probably also unaware that the steadily decreasing viewership of Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC Countdown program has nothing to do with his intellectually putrid, angry-middle-aged, over-the-top, lying-sack-of-crap approach to political commentary.

It’s true.

His disappearing ratings are completely unrelated to his tired, ill-informed, painully tedious, hard-left daily tantrums.

It is not because he hosts a very bad television program that people don’t want to watch.

Instead, it can be blamed on the new cycle.

The boss at MSNBC says so.

Jeff Bercovici at the Daily Finance writes:

Ratings for Olbermann’s Countdown have been soft recently, and the 8 p.m. shows on CNN and HLN have narrowed the gap. In the important demographic of adults 25 to 54 — the group advertisers are looking to reach — Countdown was down 44% year-over-year in January. It averaged 268,000 viewers in that demo, only 3,000 more than Nancy Grace’s show on HLN, and 12,000 more than CNN’s Campbell Brown. Fox News’s O’Reilly Factor dominated the hour with 964,000 viewers age 25 to 54, and was the only cable news show in the time period to increase its audience, by 55%.

(Network President Phil) Griffin, not surprisingly, says he doesn’t believe Olbermann’s recent hiccups are part of any larger trend. “Keith has been our tentpole,” he says. “I watch the show every night. It’s a great show. It’s as smart and clever and fun as any out there, and I’m pleased with where we are.”

He attributes Olbermann’s January ratings slip to a news cycle in which international news, rather than domestic politics, was the No. 1 story. “On big, breaking international news, CNN tends to do better than us. They did a great job in Haiti, and I tip my hat to them,” he says. “We’re the place for politics, and there are times when politics does great, and there are times when it doesn’t.” With primaries in the midterm elections already looming, he says, “I think we’ll get our momentum back.”

Keith is a pole, all right …

What a disingenuous assessment. If MSNBC is the place for politics, as Mr. Griffin suggets, that network’s numbers should have gone through the roof in recent times. What news story has engaged America more than health care reform talk? Like it or not, it is still the defining story of Obama’s stumbling presidency. At the same time, the entire month of January was one non-stop “Obama – One Year Later” newsfest. Isn’t that the kind of stuff that MSNBC lives for? What was a bigger political story in January than Scott Brown’s election in Massachusetts? What about all the “terror trial” news in recent days? If that’s not a political issue, what is? And didn’t President Obama give a State of the Union address last month?

What in the name of Mrs. Columbo is Griffin talking about?

MSNBC should be making out like bandits in the rating race – using his criterion.

So, it was breaking international news every night at 8PM that caused Olbermann’s numbers to take a dive. Why didn’t I think of that?

Of course, both CNN and MSNBC lag far behind Fox News.

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Posted in Keith Olbermann, leftism, Liberalism, Media, Television | Tagged: , , , , , | 2 Comments »

SAY IT ENOUGH TIMES … POOF! IT’S TRUE!

Posted by Andrew Roman on February 3, 2010

Rosie O’Donnell is America’s favorite pinup girl. Al Sharpton really does care about justice for all. Nancy Pelosi is the nation’s most trusted politician. Barack Obama doesn’t believe in big government.

How many times would you have to read those lines before you started believing they were true? Most of you would sooner shove a serrated ice pick into your retina.

Still, there comes a point – for some – when sheer repetition trumps reality. There is a time when repeating something over and over becomes so familiar to those within earshot that it is simply accepted or believed.

Take our President, for example.

Whatever land he is living in must currently be cracking down, because the rational are being detained at the border.

Once again, Bammy is talking up the success of his stimulus bill, going on about how many jobs have been “saved” or “created.” Once again, the President is repeating something that is, at the very least, impossible to substantiate, and at most, a catastrophic fraud.

In his case, reality has already been trumped.

Jake Tapper from ABC News writes:

President Obama veered off script – and away from the facts – when he spoke about the stimulus bill today in Nashua, NH.

“Now, if you hear some of the critics, they’ll say, well, the Recovery Act, I don’t know if that’s really worked, because we still have high unemployment,” the president said. “But what they fail to understand is that every economist, from the left and the right, has said, because of the Recovery Act, what we’ve started to see is at least a couple of million jobs that have either been created or would have been lost. The problem is, 7 million jobs were lost during the course of this recession.”

Um, it’s not true that “every economist” has said the Recovery Act has saved or created two million jobs.

What have some of them said?

The chair of his Council of Economic Advisers Christina Romer wrote last month that “The CEA estimates that as of the fourth quarter of 2009, the ARRA has raised employment relative to what it otherwise would have been by 1½ to 2 million.”

In her blog she wrote “approximately 2 million people are employed who otherwise would not be, because of the Act.”

At the end of November, Congressional Budget office Director Douglas Elmendorf wrote that because of the stimulus bill “in the third quarter of calendar year 2009, an additional 600,000 to 1.6 million people were employed in the United States..”

But clearly other economists are much more skeptical, including Dan Mitchell at the libertarian Cato Institute, and J.D. Foster at The Heritage Foundation.

Some economists say the whole notion of counting “saved or created” jobs is impossible. Harvard University labor economist Lawrence Katz told ProPublica that trying to count how many jobs have been saved or created is “a silly exercise.”

And in fact, in December the Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag issued a directive scrapping the whole “saved or created” construct.

So, there are no economists anywhere who have not bought into this hogwash?

None?

Just like there are no scientists who refute the perils of man-made global warming?

The same thinking that has me wondering why anyone would trust the government to handle health care reform when they couldn’t handle already existing government programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, also has me asking why anyone in their right mind would trust anything the administration is saying about jobs being “saved” when they had such a perplexing time making sure that the districts receiving stimulus cash actually existed.

The entire stimulus recovery angle is a myth – much like the “climate change” hoax, or the “most transparent administration in history” garbage.

There are endless stories out there on how the “saved” and “created” criteria were painfully flawed.

Recall that entire zip codes didn’t exist, yet jobs were miraculously created or saved there.

Also keep in mind that the vast majority of these “saved jobs” were government jobs, so the entire premise, even if true, is misleading.

And yet, the President and his chums will keep saying “two million jobs” over and over again until it morphs into conventional wisdom. With bed fellows like the mainstream media, it’s only a matter of time before two million becomes two-and-a-half million. Then, it’ll be rounded up to three million. Before July 4th, the President will have saved or created twenty-eight million new jobs. The only reason there will be any unemployed at that point will be the fault of George W. Bush.

It’ll be repeated so often, it will become “true.”

Well, not here.

It’s all a crock of boiling excrement.

Period.

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PUBLIC-SECTOR JOBS … IT’S GETTING BETTER ALL THE TIME!

Posted by Andrew Roman on February 2, 2010

Hypothetically speaking … 

As a small business owner, if the federal government was offering me “stimulus money” for the purpose of keeping an employee or hiring someone new, I’d have no choice – economically or morally – but to give it back.  There is simply no way on God’s green earth that I, or any other small business owner, would (or could) actually use so-called stimulus cash to put someone to work or keep someone on the payroll.

It doesn’t even make sense, does it?

I run a business out here in the private sector – or as I refer to it, Obama’s toilet. How am I  – or anyone else in the trenches – supposed to benefit from such a moronic, ill-conceived handout program?

To me, the idea of expanding government by hiring people is bad enough. But the thought of having my neighbors relinquish more of their hard-earned money so that I could temporarily “save” an employee’s job in my private sector business, assuming such a dumb thing would ever work, is inconceivable to me. 

And if, in some alternate universe, I could retain an employee based on a government handout, how in the world would that be a good thing? 

How does taking from the earners make for a healthy economy? 

Honestly, listening to liberals speak is sometimes like having someone run a  cheese grater along the back of your leg. 

It hurts. 

Assuming the economy is limping along – which it would have to be to warrant a stimulus money infusion – how does paying someone with other people’s money to keep someone else employed help my business? How does it generate capital? How does it keep me a viable competitor in the market place? In other words, if I am not seeing any real-world increase in business – if the only boost in income is artificial – what happens when the handout dries up? Do I then fire the person whose job I was supposedly “saving?” Do I keep that person on and raise prices during an economic downturn? 

Do liberals ever think ahead? 

Of course, the vast majority of jobs supposedly “saved” or “created” by President Obama’s stimulus bill were government jobs. 

Thus, what President Obama really accomplished was sucking money out of the economy – always a bad move during tough economic times – and redistributing it in the form of paychecks. 

Sounds like a winning plan, doesn’t it? 

Well, brace yourselves. The future looks very bright ahead … for high-paying, non-private sector jobs, that is. 

Susan Adams from Forbes.com, writing for ABC News

While companies large and small continue to shrink their workforces, the federal government remains on a steady hiring course across the country. 

Uncle Sam will hire 600,000 people over the next four years, a 50% increase over the previous four, reports Max Stier of the Washington-based Partnership for Public Service, a group that promotes government jobs. 

Six-hundred thousand over four years? 

Despite popular notions to the contrary, an increase in the number of public-sector jobs is not something to be tripping the light fantastic over. It is no indicator of recovery. I’m not sure why this concept eludes leftists. It’s unclear to those who tend toward rational thought why such monumental wastes of taxpayer dollars, like the construction of light rail systems where they aren’t needed, are seen as positive, productive endeavors.

In what universe? How exactly?

(Those leftists love their light rail systems, don’t they?)

Next to President Obama’s policies, I don’t know that there is anything quite as empty as the cars in Seattle’s never-used, taxpayer raping trains.

There’s nothing like confiscating money from private citizens to pay the salaries of people who hold jobs that would never exist in the private sector.

Please don’t misunderstand me.

I’m not talking about jobs that almost everyone agrees are best handled by government – military, police, fire protection, etc. Yes, there are legitimate functions of government.

Rather, I’m talking about useless government expansion for the purpose of “putting people to work.” 

When the government outpaces the private sector in both job growth and pay – which it has been, and will continue to do under President Obama – the word unsustainable comes to mind. 

And with projected record deficits of well over a trillion dollars ahead – that’s just the deficit, not the total debt – it won’t be long before those making over $150,000 … then a $100,000 … then $75,000 … will all become America’s wealthy class –  and subject accordingly to Obamacrat tax increases. 

Congratulations! 

Under President Obama, we’ve made it

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Posted in Big Government, Economy, stimulus bill | Tagged: , , , , , | 1 Comment »

PICTURE OF THE DAY FOR FEBRUARY 2, 2010

Posted by Andrew Roman on February 2, 2010

Very cool.

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BOW, BOW, BOW YOUR HEAD

Posted by Andrew Roman on February 1, 2010

I mean … I don’t really want to make a big deal out of this. On the whole, I’d much rather delve into more substantive issues. This is just too easy.

But isn’t this getting a little ridiculous already? Isn’t this propensity to bow when meeting someone gone a little overboard already? Hasn’t this entire new-age, metrosexual, compassionate, in-touch-with-his-feminie-side, bend-over-and-look-like-a-weakling thing run its course?

What is with all the bowing?

I honestly don’t get it.

Is it hard-wired in him? Did he get into the habit by bowing to his nightstand picture of Karl Marx every time he got up to pee when he was in college? Did he wake up in a daze and think he was overseas meeting some head of state? What on earth is going on?

First, the Saudi king gets a close-up of President Obama’s scalp. Then, it’s the emperor of Japan who gets a peak. But now, the mayor of Tampa, Florida?

I mean, come on … what is this already?

Why in hell would the mayor of Tampa, Florida – second-term Democrat, Pam Iorio – require a bow from the President of the United States?

My Lord … If the mayor of Tampa gets a full-fledged bow, I wonder what Michelle Obama gets when they wake up in the morning. A toe-licking? Armpit smooches? An ear-wax tongue cleansing?

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Huge H/T to Weasel Zippers.wordpress statistics

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AGENDA-DRIVEN CLIMATE SCIENCE – AMAZON RAIN FOREST DANGER IS A PHONY

Posted by Andrew Roman on February 1, 2010

All of that “hockey stick” talk turned out to be a load of balderdash, but it hasn’t been enough. The inability of scientists to explain why the world isn’t warming anymore doesn’t seem to matter. The fact that not a single computer model managed to predict the current cooling patterns hasn’t seemed to curb anyone’s hysteria. The reality that global temperatures are trending down is explained away as being “part of the larger climate change problem.” The fact that no one can seem to tell us what the correct temperature should be hasn’t stopped the climate fascists from pushing their agenda. The idea that the world’s leading authorities on global warming were caught in a disgraceful data manipulation scandal has not kept the zealots at bay.

To be clear, the polar bear population is not decreasing, the Arctic will not lose all of its ice inside of five years, coastal cities are not in danger of being submerged beneath ice-cap melting floods, and using multiple squares of toilet paper will not make Sheryl Crowe’s music sound any better.

But it doesn’t matter.

The science is settled. We’re just waiting on the data to catch up.

A couple of weeks ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had to retract a claim that “climate change” would likely melt the Himalayan glaciers by the year 2035. The “warning” was not based on peer-reviewed science, mind you, but on anecdotal observations from a magazine.

Brilliant, no?

The fact is, even with climatic conditions at their ice-melting worst, it would likely take hundreds of years for all of that ice to turn to water.

But wait, it gets better.

This time, the anecdotally-based “science” concerns the Amazon rain forests.

Jonathan Leake at the Times Online writes:

A STARTLING report by the United Nations climate watchdog that global warming might wipe out 40% of the Amazon rainforest was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in its 2007 benchmark report that even a slight change in rainfall could see swathes of the rainforest rapidly replaced by savanna grassland.

The source for its claim was a report from WWF, an environmental pressure group, which was authored by two green activists. They had based their “research” on a study published in Nature, the science journal, which did not assess rainfall but in fact looked at the impact on the forest of human activity such as logging and burning. This weekend WWF said it was launching an internal inquiry into the study.

So, they heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend who heard it from another …

The latest controversy originates in a report called A Global Review of Forest Fires, which WWF published in 2000. It was commissioned from Andrew Rowell, a freelance journalist and green campaigner who has worked for Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and anti-smoking organisations. The second author was Peter Moore, a campaigner and policy analyst with WWF.

In their report they suggested that “up to 40% of Brazilian rainforest was extremely sensitive to small reductions in the amount of rainfall” but made clear that this was because drier forests were more likely to catch fire.

The IPCC report picked up this reference but expanded it to cover the whole Amazon. It also suggested that a slight reduction in rainfall would kill many trees directly, not just by contributing to more fires.

And where, pray tell, is the media on this one? Where are all the young, fraud-hungry Woodward and Bernsteins out there? How is it that this little masterpiece isn’t making the rounds?

And when will we finally be able to say goodbye to those God-forsaken squiggly light bulbs?

And can I get a great big “hip-hip-hooray” for those engine idling, incandescent bulb burning, over flatulating, anti-environment types?

It’s damn cold here in New York.

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Posted in global climate change, Global Warming, Junk Science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

PICTURE OF THE DAY FOR FEBRUARY 1, 2010

Posted by Andrew Roman on February 1, 2010

 

I couldn’t resist.

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