I’ve been following the whole healthcare debate taking place in Washington from a distance, and deliberately so. First of all, because I can’t keep track of all the plans being put forth - what’s in, what’s out, how much it will cost, etc. Second of all, because I’ve thought all along that if what Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and/or Barack Obama were proposing was so good for the Democrats and the American people it would have passed by now. Thirdly, I find the whole Pelosi / Reid / Obama trio so brain-numbing whenever I see them or hear them on TV that I immediately change the channel to something more relevant.

“Thanks, Alex, I’ll take the letter ‘C’….”

After all, regardless of the spin you get from these clowns, there are - well, until Scott Brown came along - there were enough Democrats in both houses to get the job done. They didn’t need the Republicans. But between the fact that they couldn’t even craft decent legislation (well, legislation that at the very least didn’t require threats, or gimmicks, or graft to get people in their own party (of their own party, no less!) to convince them to support it), and the total abdication of leadership on Barack Obama’s part (leaving Reid and Pelosi to their own radical, left-wing, big government/anti-free market devices sole responsibility to draft their own legislation at the White House’s urging), they now find themselves 16 months down the line, no single bill that anyone can up or down a vote on, and, now, another artificial deadline imposted by the White House to “save healthcare reform”

All this time and effort when the President should have been focusing solely on jobs, getting the economy moving again, and, of course, Iran, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Not that, compared to that 60-lb. gorilla in the room called “healthcare reform” any of these matter, of course….

Talk about screwing up your first year in office and setting your entire Presidency up for failure!

I just find it hard to take any of this seriously. I mean, it’s not as if I think, were the Republicans solely in charge like the Dems are, they could come up with something majestic that would “fix” health care and be acceptable to everyone. (I do have sufficient faith in the Republican approach to government that anything they came up with would probably be better than the hog slop Obamacare currently looks like - if only because it wouldn’t involve new government programs and a slew of regulatory commissions that would choke the marketplace.) But I just think our country has bigger fish to fry right now then healthcare reform.

Some might say, ‘well Great White Shank, that’s because you have health insurance; easy for you to say’. But the fact is, life isn’t fair. And while this country has enough wealth to be able to take care of every person’s every need, no matter how big or small it might be, that doesn’t mean we have to, or even ought to. No matter how hard anyone tries, you can’t level the playing field for everyone. It’s not practical, it’s not possible, it’s not even advisable. That’s life. That’s the way life is.

Look, this nation ahs already spent far too many years and wasted far too much money encouraging people to look to Washington as the answer to all their needs, as opposed to looking for work, encouraging families to hang together and look to themselves and their communities (both civic and religious) for helping each other out. Washington, in the end, cannot take care of us. We have to take care of ourselves.

And to think that the answer lies with the likes of Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, or any host of politicians that every ill that ails us can be assuaged, that every boo-boo can be kissed away with billions upon billions of taxpayer money, and that something as complex as healthcare reform can be fixed with a single, sweeping piece of comprehensive legislation is to believe that tooth fairies wear monkey boots while eating Big Macs with their toaster ovens.

And it’s time America and its political class grows up and understands this.

This seems pretty unnecessary to me. Why Hollywood constantly feels the need to remake things that don’t require remaking is beyond me. The original series was a ’70s classic - ought to be good enough in this day and age. But it’s all about the $.

Others may not think so, but I’m betting Tiger comes out for The Masters in April.

…after all, he wouldn’t want to miss what defending champion Miguel Cabrera has planned for the traditional pre-tournament Champions Dinner:

On a conference call Tuesday, Cabrera was asked if he had given any thought to his menu at the Masters.

“There’s not a lot to think about,” he replied through a translator. “A good Argentine ‘asado.’ Some good beef.”

Epps said asado is a popular Argentine barbecue, and the menu will feature a five-meat course, including filets, short ribs and sausages, including one known as “morcilla.”

“There won’t be a lot of carbohydrates at this dinner,” said Epps, who grew up in Argentina.

There will be salad and bread to dip in a sauce that Cabrera will make himself, along with plenty of Argentine wine and music.

Wish I could be there for that!

I won’t hold my breath waiting for the mainstream dino-media to launch an investigation into how often this kind of thing occurs.

Tomorrow night, baseball’s back in New England. Sure it’s only a game involving a college team, but after the kind of winter those folks have had, I think they deserve it.

I say let them try. I mean, for gawdsakes, why it has taken the Dems this long to pass Obamacare bewilders me. They can complain all they want about the Republicans not wanting to play ball, but dudes, not sure you know this, but you have the White House, and you’re the majority party in both the House and Senate. So stop making excuses and just go for it already, will ya? The end of your elected terms in Washington await. (Hat tip: Drudge)

Hmmm…it’s alreday March 3, I’ve seen robin red breasts all over the place here in Tupelo, Mississippi, and not a peep from the powers-that-be about this year’s 20th Goodboys Invitational weekend. I guess it’s not that big a deal after all….but it is only a little over four months away. Time’s wasting, fellas…

All you really need to know about what came out of todays’ so-called “healthcare summit” is that the President had no response to this…

America, pay attention before your elected leaders lead you over the cliff into total financial insolvency in the name of a Ponzi scheme designed to make you feel as if they care a rat’s behind about own personal situation and needs.

Because they don’t. It’s all about taking care of the unions and the special interests.

Today in the mail I received yet another mailing from the Republican National Committee, expressing their concern that they haven’t received any financial support from me for quite a while. Coincidentally, on the very same day I received this mailing, the alternate media is ablaze with this news breaking across the political landscape (Hat tip: Hot Air):

Republican National Chairman Michael Steele is spending twice as much as his recent predecessors on private planes and paying more for limousines, catering and flowers – expenses that are infuriating the party’s major donors who say Republicans need every penny they can get for the fight to win back Congress.

Most recently, donors grumbled when Steele hired renowned chef Wolfgang Puck’s local crew to cater the RNC’s Christmas party inside the trendy Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue, and then moved its annual winter meeting from Washington to Hawaii.

…

“Michael Steele is an imperial chairman,” said one longtime Republican fundraiser. “He flies in private aircraft. He drives in private cars. He has private consultants that are paid ridiculous retainers. He fancies himself a presidential candidate and wants all of the trappings and gets them by using other people’s money.”

Louis M. Pope, who chairs the RNC’s Budget Committee, defends Steele’s expenses, arguing that a bump in costs is unavoidable for a party that lacks control of any of the levers of government. “Michael Steele does travel more, but he’s in far more demand. He’s a huge part of the fundraising apparatus,” said Pope. “Nobody is living it up at the RNC. There are a number of upscale events, but those are all profitable.”

I can’t tell you how much this sickens me to no end, but I’m hardly surprised. The whole idea of political parties cozying up to contributors and the special interests is so 20th century. The polls show Americans are sick and tired of business as usual in Washington, and Glenn Beck was absolutely right when he said there’s not a dime’s bit of difference between the parties in the toxic cesspool that is now Washington.

Question to Michael Steele: if the RNC and its own chairman doesn’t show restraint and austerity, why should anyone think the party they represent would be any better than the party currently in power? I mean, how stupid can you be? All this kind of thing does is enrage the very people you should be crafting an alternative message to. The fact you can’t see that makes you as politically tone-deaf as Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, and incapable of presenting yourself and our party as a viable, desirable alternative.

So that’s it. Today, I sent the following e-mail (Subject: Please remove me from your mailing list) to the RNC; in the words of my good friend and fellow Goodboy Ben “The Funny Guy” Andrusaitis, I’m “going mustang”, politically:

Dear Sirs;
Please stop sending me further mailings and requests for money. The report out of today’s Politico blog is sufficient evidence to me that, by pissing away the contributions of loyal and hard-working registered Republicans while millions of people are out of work and/or struggling to make ends meet in this troubled economy, the RNC is no better than the Democrats in power. It seems the only thing you and your fellow fat cats in Washington know how to do is shamelessly and recklessly spend other people’s money as if it were your own. It makes me sick and disgusted to call myself a Republican.

I am hereby requesting my name be removed from every and all mailing and call list you might have. Don’t bother to send me another mailing, it will just end up in some lonely Nevada landfill (next to Harry Reid’s political future). I assure you, you’ll never get another dollar or dime from me ever again.

It would appear the RNC will have to learn the same hard lesson the Democrats will most assuredly learn come this November: that people out here on “Main Street” are tired of all you bow-tied, bum-kissing Beltway bureaucrats putting your needs ahead of the country’s. You, and those like you, need not to just be retired, but obliterated from the political landscape.

Like that great Rolling Stones song from 1966, you’re out of time. And I’m out of patience with the likes of you.
Sincerely,
Doug Richard

The revolution is coming, and it’s time for the powers that be in Washington, Republican and Democrat, to be swept away like grains of sand in a strong breeze. And I am making a personal commitment in terms of time and talent that I will do all in my power to ensure that happens to the GOP, from within.

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For a great remake of that great Stones’ song, check out this great version from none other than the Ramones. Fantastic.

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Pool temp: 54 degrees

Crazy work week doing forecasts and budgets, glad to have a night away from the laptop. Bunch of stuff happening out there:

Look, I don’t know how well - or even if - President Obama’s stimulus package that went into law last year on this date has made that much of a difference. I doubt not even his economic team does. So the Prez does himself an incredible disservice when, as he did today, he uses ridiculous platitudes like, “There has never been a program of this scale, moved at this speed, that has been enacted as effectively and as transparently as the recovery act.” The fact he can say such things with a straight face diminshes both and his Presidency. Look, people know the difference between the usual political hyperbole and flat-out bullshit. And when it comes to the latter, he’s off the charts.

So Tiger Woods is going to come out of hiding this Friday, huh? To read a statement without taking questions. I don’t know, I don’t see what would be wrong with inviting a few carefully-chosen golf writers to ask him tough questions in a respectful forum on, say, the Golf Channel or ESPN, where he has a chance to speak honestly and at length. Doing something like the wonderful “Studio 42 With Bob Costas” on the MLB Network, I think, would do him a world of good. By avoiding questions, all that’s going to do is delay the zoo for another day. And that day will come, believe me…

Can we all agree now that the whole man-made global warming thing was nothing more than a hoax of monumental proportions propagated by a bunch of self-serving zealots interested not in science, but in pushing their own anti-capitalist, anti-free market agenda, knowing it would be swallowed wholeheartedly by the tax-and-spend liberal elites of the world. Mark my words: today it’s just a trickle of corporations and financiers and states backing away from their prior commitments; soon it will be a tidal wave, leaving only the most in-denial zealots who simply can’t bring themselves to believe their lives and their cause was nothing more than a flimsy house of cards built on rank dishonesty, corruption, and lies. Science, indeed.

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Pool temp: 56 degrees

This promises to be quite the election season. Lots on the line, accusations flyng back and forth, lots of talking heads with inflated egos on the cable networks with nary a clue as to what they’re talking about.

But that’s the fun of it, right?

Lots of yakking out there about this wild and crazy web ad by former Hewlitt-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, who is running in the Republican primary for the right to oppose Babs “call me Senator” Boxer for her Senate seat. People simply don’t know what to make of it. Is it genius? Is it beyond ridiculous? You be the judge.

Then you have this Republican National Committee ad against Alexi Giannoulias, the Illinois state treasurer who won last night’s Democratic primary for the Senate seat once occupied by Barack Obama (now kept warm by Roland Burris). Giannoulias will hook up against moderate Republican Mark Kirk in the fall.

What do these ads tell us?

First of all, even the most traditionally left-leaning prognosticators tell us that, unless some miraculous economic recovery takes place between now and November, this promises to be a gruesome year - perhaps historically so - for Democrats in Washington. Anti-incumbency fever is growing among Independents and conservatives, and Barack Obama nevertheless seems intent on leading his party over the cliff.

Second all, because of the above - especially with Scott Brown’s incredible upset in the Massachusetts Senate race for Ted Kennedy’s old seat - no Democrat seat appears safely locked down this year, so Republicans across the land are making commitments to fiercely contest seats that otherwise might be conceded to incumbent Democrats.

Taken together, all of this means more contested races, more money, and more political ads than ever before. So, how to cut through all the noise and get your message heard? It’s simple. Ads just like the above, ads that are creative and humorous, the kind that will generate a lot of “buzz” and get a lot of play on the internet. Heck, I almost expect at least one candidate for elected office to concoct a stunner based on the wildly-shared “Hitler finds out” videos I mentioned the other day.

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Want further evidence that you don’t necessarily need any common sense or intelligence to be a talking head on the cable networks? Discussing the above-mentioned RNC ad linking Illinois’ state treasurer with loans made to some pretty unsavory characters, one of MSNBC’s daytime anchors, Dylan Ratigan, commented as follows:

Dirty politics reared its ugly head in Illinois. Hours after the state treasurer, Alexei Giannoullias, won the Democratic Senate primary, that is an Italian name, “Giannoullias,” excuse me. Republicans are comparing Giannoullias, an Italian name, to a character from “The Sopranos.”

Now I’m no genius, but even I could tell you Giannoullias is no Italian name. But like NRO’s Jim Geraghty notes, “all those swarthy Mediterranean types look the same from the MSNBC anchor desk”. Heh.

It’s gonna be a long, long election year….

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Pool temp: 54 degrees

Wonder how the good folks in Las Vegas who work long, hard hours to make a living, put food on their tables, pay their bills, and send their kids to college feel about a President who makes reckless and careless comments like this:

President Barack Obama took another dig at Las Vegas at his New Hampshire town hall Tuesday after similar remarks got him into hot water last year.

Obama said that people should not “blow a bunch of cash in Vegas” during a tough recession. Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman called for Obama to apologize after he made comparable comments last February.

“When times are tough, you tighten your belts,” he said at the forum.” You don’t go buying a boat when you can barely pay your mortgage. You don’t blow a bunch of cash in Vegas when you’re trying to save for college.”

Now, people who read this blog know I’m no fan - by any stretch of the imagination - of President Obama. I don’t like him personally, and frankly the sound of his voice continually lecturing me about who’s good in America (i.e., the government) and who’s bad (the banks, the insurance companies, energy producers, Wall Street, Republicans and conservatives, etc. etc.) irritates the hell out of me.

It’s not that I want to feel that way. I respect the office of President of the United States and truly want to like and respect this one. I never liked Jimmy Carter (after voting for him!), but I respected him. I even liked and respected (at least until you-know-what) Bill Clinton. And while I disagreed with George W. Bush on Iraq and found his Katrina response sorely wanting, at no point over the course of these men’s presidencies that I felt they wanted anything but the best for America and its people.

I don’t fell that way about Barack Obama; in fact, it’s just the opposite.

At times I do wonder if he has the interests of this country and its people at heart. I’m sure deep down he has his own ideas as to what America should be, but I’m increasingly doubtful that the majority of people in this country outside of the East/West coast elites, Beltway intellectuals, and radical socialists he has associated himself with all his life) share those ideas or ideals.

After all, at a time when the economy is struggling mightily (something he personally has had a major hand in, BTW), you would think the President would, rather than dissing cottage industries like corporate business or pleasure travel to economically hard-hit places like Las Vegas, actually talk up these industries and vacation destinations to get people to spread their money around if they have it in their power to do so. But it just goes to show how out of touch he is with average Americans - you know, the same ones who put him into office on his fraudulent “hope and change” mantra.

What I come away with when someone like Barack Obama says such stupid and reckless things is this: 1) he hasn’t a clue as to how average people live and work in the private sector, far away from the clutches of government/union employment, 2) he doesn’t fully understand yet that there’s a vast difference between off-hand comments you might make as some silver-spooned U.S. Senator and as President of the United States, where you need to be really careful about what you say because words have meaning, and 3) he just can’t help himself from lecturing people about how they should live their lives, as if we were all just a bunch of $#@% stupid peasants.

One final note: this President talks about what “belt tightening” ought to mean to us common folk; methinks he ought to take a lesson from his own words when it comes to his bloated, irresponsible 2010 budget. A proposal that, if enacted to the letter (which it won’t be), would be devastating to this country’s ecomonic future.

But that’s what I believe this President, given his radical socialist upbringing has his heart set on doing. The President’s comments today are not only stupid, but show a cluelessness and recklessness that reveals someone not just in way over his head, but someone not worthy of the office he has been elected to.

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Pool temp: 54 degrees

I don’t get to watch FOX News’s Glenn Beck much - he’s on too early here in Arizona and I’m usually up to my eyeballs in work crises at that time. But the times I’ve watched him I always get a kick out of his irreverent approach to questioning Washington’s “conventional wisdom” (a misnomer if there ever was one) and the liberal state-run media.

This video shows exactly why Beck is so popular. In response to this pathetic screed by Time Magazine’s uber-liberal Joe Klein, Beck uses humor, sarcasm, and not a little bit of those things both liberals and progressives seem to hate the most - i.e., facts and the truth - to rip Klein’s elitist views and arguments to shreds. I thought it was a gas, perhaps you will too.

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Pool temp: 51 degrees

Watched the President’s speech tonight and came away feeling sad as much as anything. Despite my personal dislike of the President and distaste for his politics and policies, I was hoping that a more pragmatic and conciliatory (I dared not to expect humble!) President would present himself tonight, especially given the recent losses of his party in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, and recent polls that indicate the dire straits both he and his party is in at this point in the 2010 election season.

So what did we get? Unfortunately, more of the same in the way of high-falutin’ empty rhetoric and promises that, if history is to be judged, he has little or no interest in keeping. To me, that’s OK - after all, that’s what State of the Union speeches are for. By their very nature they’re long, self-serving and congratulating, partisan, and generally pretty boring affairs, so I get that, and, like I say, that’s OK.

What made me sad and truly fearful of this man’s presidency, was the general angry, petty, and condescending tone of his overall speech. The Obama of the 2008 campaign trail had that “hope and change” mantra going, and he could turn a phrase and offer up a self-deprecating jibe at himself and the powers that be in Washington in a way that made him both likeable and approachable (even if that weren’t true).

One year into his presidency, Obama’s SOTU speech was an uninspiring and critical affair where everyone from George W. Bush, Democrats and Republicans, the voters, talk radio, and, yes, even the members of the Supreme Court (sitting directly in front of him) were subject to his barbs and criticism. In fact, the only one who he didn’t blame for the state this country is in at the present was numero uno. This wasn’t a nice speech; it wasn’t gracious, it wasn’t hopeful, it certainly wasn’t classy, and more than that, it wasn’t presidential.

I think National Review Online’s Yuval Levin put it best:

…But on the whole, this was really an incredibly graceless, self-righteous, and grouchy performance. It had a lot of what’s bad about Obama’s speeches (he said “I” almost a hundred times, repeatedly referred to his campaign as though it were a great American story we all love, continued to blame Bush for everything under the sun even as he said he was “not interested in re-litigating the past,” and piled clichés sky high) but none of what’s good about his speeches—the simple theme simply pursued. It was a very Clintonian speech without Clinton’s human charm.

I truly believe tonight’s speech marks the beginning of the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, and that makes me sad. Not for the person, since I truly believe Barack Obama’s true goal has always been to destroy capitalism and the socio-economic fabric of the United States, and he and the hoodlums and cronies he has surrounded himself with get what they deserve, but for all those people who truly believed the hype and aura candidate Obama’s team created around him. Obama was different. Obama would make everything right, Obama would usher in a new “era of good feeling”.

Sure, he might still be able to turn a phrase when read off a TelePrompTer, but how sad it is that in just a little over two years Mr. “Hopenchange” has revealed himself to be a thin-skinned, bitter, unprepared, detached, aloof, and arrogant politician unwilling to admit his own mistakes and lacking in any kind of graciousness and class typically associated with the office of the President of the United States.

I’m not saying there isn’t room in an individual elected President for those kinds of negative qualities - hell, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter had them in spades. But the difference is how you present yourself in public. Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign presented himself as a uniter and someone who by his very nature could transcend the partisan bitterness left over from the George W. Bush years. Tonight, when a little self-deprecating humor and sense of humilty would have gone a long way, he showed himself to be someone lacking in those most basic qualities that people seek in a leader. Leaders don’t play the blame game, leaders lead by example.

Most people, I think, in the end - no matter what the state of things are in the country at a given point in time - want to feel good about their President and their country, want to believe that things are going to get better, and will therefore give the President some leeway in the hope and desire of seeing him succeed. Barack Obama’s angry, bitter, and condescending performance tonight will only serve to polarize the electorate further and make the task of those who earnestly want both him and his presidency to succeed all the more tougher.

Let me first state for the record that I detest most politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike. Oh, I’m sure there are exceptions on both sides of the political aisle, and to be honest, my only exposure to aactual political figure and campaign was back in the early ’70s when I didn’t know any better and John Kerry of all people was running for Congress on an anti-Vietnam War platform.

But in my mind the only thing most politicians are interested in are feathering their own pockets at the expense of hard-working taxpayers who don’t have, say, the luxury of taking their spouses and well-connected friends on junkets to Denmark to watch a bunch of limp-wristed Europeans and third-world despots attempt to fleece the pockets of the industrialized nations for the sake of some totally contrived idea that the fate of the world hangs in our ability to counteract human-induced climate change.

What a bunch of idiots. What a bunch of bullshit.

This is very cool, though….

But I digress.

Now where was I? Oh yeah. I look and listen to these clowns, this Barack Obama, this Harry Reid, this Nancy Pelosi, this Barney Frank, and ask myself: who on earth would ever vote for these imbeciles to an office higher than your average town clerk job? I mean, who do these people think they are? Talk about being drunk with power! And how many actual living, breathing people have these clowns ever represented in their districts? 20K?, 40K? And now they’re all of a sudden so smart that they can decide how 1/4 (banking/finance) and 1/6 of our economy (health care) should operate?

I think not.

My whole point is this: I despise the so-called “gentlemen” and “gentlewomen” who we have put in charge of this country. You listen to them give speeches in their various houses or blather on the cable talking-head shows, and you just shake your head as they spout their own party’s talking points. You look at them and wonder if they’ve ever so much as run a business, treated a patient, worn a decent suit, held a real job, or received a paycheck that wasn’t courtesy of the taxpayers of their state or district.

We need new blood, new leadership, desperately, because I’m thoroughly convinced that Barack Obama is nothing more than an egomaniacal, socialist ideologue who would need instructions as to how to run a capitalist lemonade stand; that his wife is nothing but an angry, bitter powermonger whose grandiose ideas of her own so-called class, culture, and intellect are the result of the syncophants she and her husband have surrounded themselves with. That if Harry Reid wasn’t a U.S. senator that he’d have a damned hard time holding a job shining shoes at Las Vegas’s McCarron Airport; that Nancy Pelosi is a frustrated, power-hungry witch who could care less about what anyone outside of her corrupt circle of well-connected hacks thinks. That Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, and John McCain all ought to think about finding new pastures to graze upon.

And to top it all off, my pool temperature is heading south as quickly as Barack Obama’s fortunes. I’ll see this about “The Messiah”: he makes Bill Clinton look like Abraham Lincoln.

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Pool temp: 50 degrees