I think the purpose of life is
to be useful,
to be responsible,
to be honorable,
to be compassionate.
It is, after all, to matter:
to count,
to stand for something,
to have made some difference that you lived at all.
Leo C. Rosten
Quote of the Day for Barack Obama
I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.
Thomas Jefferson
The Guillemette Political Principles: Part 2
(Original Quotes) Part 1
- A government bureaucrat's appetite always exceeds whatever is on his plate.
- The greatest enemy of a government bureaucrat is never a reformer, but another bureaucrat.
- Fiat currency is always backed by fool's gold.
- A politician is necessarily obscure, so that he can always declare victory.
- A politician who is truthful and candid will always be quoted by his opponent.
- The one sure way to reduce the number of criminals is to repeal a law.
- The successful government bureaucrat knows to ask for more than he wants.
- The wise politician distrusts any popular bill.
- The heroic politician always dies by friendly fire.
Asked about Gov. Chris Christie's recent remarks that the president doesn’t have the courage to lead and that he is a “bystander” in the Oval Office and a “divider," President Obama fired back that the GOP is the divisive force. “I don’t think the American people would dispute that at every step of the way I have done everything I can to try to get the Republican Party to work with me on the biggest crisis of our lifetime, and each time all we’ve gotten from them is no."Pathetic, deceitful, spineless, defensive. The dictionary defines loser as "a person who fails frequently or is generally unsuccessful in life." YES, the American people ARE DISPUTING that he has done everything he can to pull the country together: what part of a sub-45% job approval rating, an historic turnover in last year's mid-term elections, a Congressional approval rating below 20%, and over half the country thinking the country is going in the wrong direction is he not getting?
How disingenuous does one have to be to blame a vastly outnumbered opposition and a predecessor no longer in office for the fact of the current economic malaise? He has been busy spending over $10T over 3 years, adding over $4T on the backs of his future grandchildren, and he's been busy demonizing businesses and the economically successfully, adding thousands of pages of new regulations and costs to businesses. When is he going to be man enough to stop blaming other people for the fact he doesn't have a clue on what to do, how to set priorities, how to exercise leadership, and how to deal with the opposition, knowing that shoving partisan legislation down the throats of the opposition instead of seeking legitimate bipartisanship, that playing political hardball, like elections, has consequences and a day of reckoning?
Obama believes that he is smarter than everyone else; any truly intelligent person recognizes his own limitations. Obama, do you think everyone believes because you make a brief appearance one day at a Republican retreat, this constitutes "bipartisanship"? Or being seen playing a round of golf with Speaker Boehner? Or hold a gimmick bipartisan health care summit where you spend half the time interrupting and "correcting" invited Republican legislators and then proceed to ram an unpopular corrupt partisan Senate health care bill down the Republicans' throats AFTER the Scott Brown victory in Massachusetts, where he ran as senator #41 for any reconciled House/Senate bill? Or invite a token Republican or two to a White House Super Bowl party?
Obama, do you think we're all children, entranced by the gift wrap and pretty bow on the package, whom won't notice the box is empty? Do you think we mistake political spin for substantive policy? Do you think we wouldn't notice how you failed to back up your own bipartisan deficit reduction committee's findings, where all but one senator agreed on a balanced framework--knowing the US Senate is usually the bottleneck for legislation? ANY INTELLIGENT PERSON, other than an unrepentant hyper-political empty-suit party hack would have embraced that and run with it. Every Republican senator on that commission signed onto that. So STOP LYING, MR. "PRESIDENT" (in name only)! Just because you repeat a PROVABLY FALSE LIE, doesn't make it any more true! It simply reflects YOUR LACK OF INTEGRITY as a man and as a person.
Tell me, Mr. "President": WHAT SPECIFIC STEPS HAVE YOU TAKEN TO LIVE WITHIN $2.2T OF FEDERAL REVENUES? Even minor steps, like a real (not just nominal) cut of 3% across the board? How do you think everyday people live when someone loses his or her job? They have to cut back; why is the government an exception? Everything out of your mouth is about raising taxes and increasing spending! What did you do during the 111th Congress about a looming crisis with some $50T of unfunded liabilities to accommodating the largest generation, the Baby Boomers, the first wave hitting 65 just over the past couple of years? What did you do--you signed a bill that INCREASED ELIGIBILITY in Medicaid, which requires huge matching federal and state outlays; you paid for a new health care entitlement using FUTURE phantom cost-cutting of already below-market federal (Medicare/Medicaid) reimbursements (ignoring the reality of conceptually related doc fixes) for provider services?
COMPROMISE MEANS HAVING TO MAKE CONCESSIONS. The only real concession I've seen Obama make through 4 years as a senator and as President is TEMPORARILY giving up his cherished class warfare tax hike--mostly because the GOP told him he couldn't pick and choose among which Bush tax cuts he wanted to keep, including the three-quarters going to the middle class. But to avoid an anti-growth tax hike, the GOP had to give up spending--more than the $70B/year in tax hikes Obama reluctantly surrendered. Of course, when you run up $1.6T deficits, anyone who seriously believes that Obama wanted the tax hikes for anything other than pure ideology is deluding himself.
Obama's idea of compromise is to co-opt GOP proposals with barely recognizable, watered-down variations. I've mentioned before about how Obama's idea of offshore oil and gas exploration arbitrarily excluding the solid-blue West Coast or upper East Coast. By some industry estimates, Obama's proposal opened up only about 5% of target areas. Obama then attempted to take credit for increasing US production, but a lot of that had to do with the industry employing newer advanced techniques to extract more resources from existing wells and/or two energy-friendly states, Texas and North Dakota; these things occurred DESPITE Obama, not BECAUSE OF Obama. None of that had anything to do with Obama's energy policies. What part of the fact that significant portions of our imports come from unfriendly nations, which worsens our trade deficit and contributes to a lower standard of living does Obama not get?
Entertainment Potpourri
My Picks For the New TV Season
- "New Girl", FOX-TV, T 9-9:30PM EDT. I've only seen 3 episodes, but this is one of the best new sitcoms I've seen in years. I'm not aware of series' lead Zooey Deschandel's prior work, but her Jess character is adorably quirky and funny (even without the plot and dialogue). Earlier episodes are available online via the above link. Zooey plays a single elementary school teacher, whom broke things off with her cheating boyfriend, and subsequently moves into an apartment with 3 bachelors (sort of an updated, inverted 'Three's Company'). Jake Johnson plays Nick, a slightly neurotic guy whom suddenly pines after the breakup for his former girlfriend; Max Greenfield plays Schmidt, a fairly transparent, immature womanizer whom convinced the other guys to take in Jess (since her best friends are seriously gorgeous models); Lamorne Morris plays Winston, the jock of the group whom seems utterly clueless in his dealings with women. (My favorite scene is in the pilot; Jess is crying in one scene and "Coach" Winston decides to handle the problem, goes up to her, shakes his finger in her face and sternly demands her to stop the crying!) The scriptwriting sparkles (so far), and Zooey comes across to me as this generation's Lucille Ball.
- "A Gifted Man", CBS, F 8-9PM, EDT. This continues a series of CBS fantasy series, in the past serving up the wonderful "Joan of Arcadia" and then the "Ghost Whisperer". Patrick Wilson plays Michael Holt, a brilliant brain surgeon, whom suddenly finds himself haunted by his late ex-wife, Kate (played by Rachel Lefevre), whom, unknown to Holt, returned from Alaska to the same city as Holt to run a free clinic. (I'm sure most divorced men finding themselves literally haunted by their ex-wives would consider it hell on earth.) Holt initially thinks his ex is alive and starts rediscovering what made him fall in love with Kate. He tries to reach her at the clinic and discovers that she had recently passed away. Like any other confirmed empiricist, he naturally starts trying to diagnose the source of his "mental illness" because, of course, there's no such thing as a ghost. The plot line is somewhat predictable: Kate can't leave this world because she has unfinished business with her clinic. Holt is used to dealing with well-financed insurance plans paying invoices, not free clinics, but the writing is on the wall: slowly but surely he's being sucked into the affairs of the free clinic. I could deal without not-too-subtle moralizing about the separate class health care system. I'm not sure that taking a highly-skilled, in-demand surgeon and putting him, say, in a family practice somewhere makes a lot of sense (but maybe the plot line is not as predictable as I thought...)
"Actually, President Obama did take Michelle out to a lovely dinner on Saturday. It was a little awkward, though. When the bill came, Obama just put it on the tab of the Chinese couple sitting next to them." - Jimmy Fallon
[Unfortunately, the waiter was a registered Republican, and the President couldn't get him to pass the bill...]
"Obama says he will be reforming No Child Left Behind. That’s not to be confused with Michelle Obama’s childhood obesity campaign, 'No Child Left With a Big Behind.'" - Jay Leno
[After talking to Michelle, Obama decided that the only to ensure no child got left behind was to give the fat kids a 15-second head start.]
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
Fleetwood Mac, "Silver Springs". Another Nicks classic about her relationship with Lindsey Buckingham, a timeless ballad, with a simple, haunting melody with the typical group genius for pop music craftsmanship. According to interviews, she came upon the song title and verse while riding near the northwestern 495/Beltway (near College Park, MD, where I used to work; in fact, I once interviewed for a DBA job in Silver Spring). "Time cast a spell on you, but you won't forget me": has she become just another girlfriend whom didn't work out? He'll forget the good times, when they initially fell in love, because people tend to remember the more recent, negative stuff and can't rationalize how they could ever have fallen in love with such a person in the first place--he was duped; she must have been devious. But there was something special, very real about their relationship, and no matter how futilely he tries to suppress the memories of their relationship, she will always be a part of him. "But tell myself you never loved me": she knows in her heart he loved her, but she can't deal with how someone who loved her would leave her that way: it's just easier to pretend he never loved her. She tries to put her best foot forward, but she has little patience with his trying to convince her that he's moved on: Lindsey, you're fooling no one but yourself!
This is my last interpretation of a Nicks' song in this blog (unless I cover her solo material). As someone who wrote a few poems in late high school and early college, I can only imagine falling in love with a poetess. Since I am more of an acquired taste, I have no doubt that I would have inspired some epic material. [I published in limited edition anthologies: Ruth Fierros was my inspiring teacher and mentor: I'll never forget those summer English IV classes, the smell of wood furniture, the Shakespeare LP's, writing poetry for the first time: it was magical. For some reason, I had decided at the last minute to switch my summer registration to English IV instead of English III, in pursuing early graduation, and I never regretted that decision. There are 4 teachers whom have particularly inspired me, all women.]
