Charlie's Chatter

Since I almost never watch political speeches, I did not watch Obama’s speech last night on his “First 100 Days”. I did, however, read about it this morning. According to this article, Obama said he wanted “to disabuse people of this notion that somehow we enjoy, you know, meddling in the private sector. If you could tell me right now that when I walked into this office that the banks were humming, that autos were selling, and that all you had to worry about was Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea, getting health care passed, figuring out how to deal with energy independence, deal with Iran, and a pandemic flu, I would take that deal“.
    Good gosh, did Obama actually use that semi-literate, mid-sentence expression “you know”? I thought his rhetoric was better than that! Well anyway, it is nice to know that Obama and his administration do not enjoy “meddling” in the private sector. The word “meddling” implies taking action in some area where you do not belong, action that is usually not good, if not actually harmful. But I am sure that Obama and his administration are instead providing effective control in the private sector, and that is quite another matter. After all, to many people, the government should provide a lot of control in the private sector. That is what “Social Democrats” and “Progressives” want. But Obama and his administration are very intelligent and knowledgeable, so relax. Their control in the private sector will improve things for almost everybody!
    I was a little put off by the strong implication that if we were not in an economic and financial crisis, that Obama would still do something in the private sector. Given his words, apparently he would still get heavily involved in “health care” and energy (energy independence). I’m not too sure of Obama’s competence in these areas. I know that he himself and no one in his administration are going to become physicians or nurses or medical technicians. And they certainly are not going to mop the floors in hospitals. Gosh, what can they do about our “health care”? Well, at least Obama apparently did not get Hugo Chavez mad when he met him several days ago, so at least for a while Venezuela will still sell us some of their crude oil. I do note that in Obama’s words which I mentioned above that he did not mention education. Perhaps that is because most of our “education” is not in the private sector, but is instead in the public sector, at both the local political levels and the state and federal levels. To be sure, the increasing amounts of taxpayer money that has been spent on education over the past few decades has not seemed to improve the quality of the education. But Obama and his administration, being very intelligent and knowledgeable, will now start spending our taxpayer money wisely on education, so that it does improve. So relax!

Again president Obama uses his mouth in an attempt to show Americans just how fiscally responsible he is. Well, this is just another rhetorical equivalent of a sleight of hand trick, and I know that it is bullcrap. I find it absolutely amazing, and terribly irresponsible, that the President of the United States would behave in such a manner. He must think that most voters are stupid, or at least somewhat dull. (I’m beginning to think that many are.)
    In his latest weekly radio address, Obama started out fairly quickly by again talking about how it is necessary for “us” to “build a new foundation” for the 21st century – a foundation based on lowering health care costs, investing in quality education, and developing new sources of energy. But he does not spend much time talking about that. Instead he continues on with “clever” rhetoric about fiscal responsibility. For example, he announced a plan for federal workers to propose ways to improve their agencies’ and departments’ budgets. Obama said that employees’ ideas would be key as his Cabinet officials try to cut millions from the budget and trim the deficit. Well, I have already commented on Obama’s previous call to his Cabinet members that they come up with budget cuts totalling 100 million dollars. That latter amount is less than 0.003 percent of the nearly 3.6 trillion dollar budget that Obama has proposed – an extremely, extremely small percentage cut. But of course, now that we know that all federal employees have been asked by the president to help in this endeavor, heck, the total budget cuts might even amount to more than 100 million dollars! Why they might even amount to 106 million dollars, which would bring the percentage reduction of the huge, huge budget to exactly 0.003 percent instead of something slightly less ! In fact, Obama even mentioned that he would identify some of those individuals who came up with very good ideas and that he would publicly thank these individuals. See ?   In fact, according to my first referenced article, Obama said additional things which showed us how fiscally responsible he is. For example, he is reported to have said, “So much of our government was built to deal with different challenges from a different era. Too often, the result is wasteful spending, bloated programs and inefficient results“. Obama again noted that he took office facing a $1.3 billion budget deficit. (Yep, there’s that darn Bush again; Bush caused many of our problems.) Obama also said in today’s address, “Already we’ve identified substantial savings“. See? He has already saved us some money! My only concern is with this part of his speech:

We’ll create new incentives to reduce wasteful spending and to invest in what works. We don’t want agencies to protect bloated budgets – we want them to promote effective programs. So the idea is simple: agencies that identify savings will get to keep a portion of those savings to invest in programs that work. The result will be a smaller budget, and a more effective government.

That does concern me a bit because I thought that kind of activity has often been done in the past by many administrations. That is, an agency which is budgeted, say, 45 billion dollars, finds out near the end of the fiscal year that they still have 4 billion dollars left. That is, they have apparently “saved” 4 billion dollars. But that usually means that if they do not spend that 4 billion dollars before the fiscal year is complete, then they will not only lose it, but also stand a chance of having their budget slightly reduced for the coming year. But Obama is saying, in effect, that such an agency will be allowed to spend that money, or at least much of it, as long as it is “invested” in programs that work. To me that sounds pretty much like the same old ball game. The only difference is Obama’s slightly better (clever?) use of language, such as using that word “invest” again. The next time I hear him say that word “invest” I think I will puke.
    Obama is either foolish, terribly uninformed, or else he is a politician with his own agenda who takes us for fools. (For the most part, I suspect the latter.) I note how he is pandering to many ordinary working people when he said in his address, “After all, Americans across the country know that the best ideas often come from workers, not just management“. Now if that is not pandering, then I do not know what is. In any case, Obama is acting like an accomplished bullshitter. Sorry for the strong language, but we are talking about very, very huge amounts of taxpayer money here, not to mention all our existing problems, and the brewing troubles on the horizon for our country, not just domestic but foreign.

There is no need for me to give detailed comments on one of the latest examples of decadence in the United States. That’s because another commentator does a much better job than I could do in her blog post. Essentially, what happened was that a contestant in the Miss USA pageant, a Miss Carrie Prejean, was asked a question by an openly homosexual judge about whether or not she approved gay marriage. She did not. Because of that Miss Prejean probably lost the title. But then came the rest of the story – this gay man Perez Hilton then attacked this female contestant on the Internet, (and on other venues), using foul language and even four-letter words. And some people even supported him and his atrocious behavior. This is an example of decadence at one of its worst.
      To continue with the decadence, according to the above referenced blog post, instead of apologizing for pageant judge Perez Hilton’s vile behavior, the pageant director of the Miss California contest, Keith Lewis, sent a note to Hilton throwing Prejean under the bus: “I am personally saddened and hurt that Miss CA USA 2009 believes marriage rights belong only to a man and a woman…Religious beliefs have no place in politics in the Miss CA family.”
      Religious beliefs ? The reader should know that I myself am not a religious person. Despite that, I am not at all in favor of legalizing “gay marriage”. For one thing, legalizing gay marriage diminishes the social utility of families, and strong families are built on marriage between a man and a woman. They are seldom built on “marriage” between two gay people. Let’s keep religion out of it. Religious people are making a mistake when they say that they oppose gay marriage because it is “against their religion”. Religion does not need to be used to defend an opposition to legalizing gay marriage. By the way, Miss Prejean, when she said she opposed legalizing gay marriage, did not mention religion in any way. Only that despicable pageant director Keith Lewis mentioned religion, automatically equating opposition to legalizing gay marriage with religious beliefs.
      It would be correct to say that I am a “secular” person and not at all religious. However, I must say that the so-called secular intelligentsia are making many mistakes. One of these latter is their failure to give good reasons why legalizing gay marriage would be a mistake. I gave one reason in two short sentences above. In fact, I suspect that many so-called secular people are in favor of legalizing gay marriage. And that is not good. But please keep religion out of it. There are too many different religions throughout the world, even in the United States. And controversy among different religions and religious sects, even in the United States, seldom helps any particular social issue that any religion supports, (unless they preach to the choir).

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, president Obama vows to cut waste from government spending programs. Just now I read a brief news article which says that Obama vows to cut $100,000,000 from his proposed $3,550,000,000,000 budget. Wow! That amounts to a percentage reduction of just under 0.003 percent! Now that is a large percentage reduction! It’s as though you had a monthly home mortgage payment of $3,000 and now it has been reduced to the point where you only need pay $2,999.91 a month!   Ain’t that great?
(For those of you who are mathematically-challenged, it is like reducing a monthly payment of $3,550.00 to $3,549.90 – 10 cents less.)
      On a TV news program, a short film clip of Obama speaking had him saying, “I’m asking for all of them to identify at least $100 million in additional cuts to their administrative budgets”. Note the word “additonal” in that sentence, (my emphasis), a word which clearly implies that, apart from this $100,000,009 “cut”, Obama has already asked for budget cuts. Of course he had not, so this is, of course, absolute bullcrap, and is just another example of Obama’s clever use of language in order to delude people. This man is a dangerous politician, one who is good at using language to shade meanings and tell half-truths.
      Another thing that I find disgusting about this is that Obama may very well use this “reduction” to show just how financially responsible he is. What bullcrap.

What is it with these politicians? One of their enduring pronouncements when it comes to government spending is that they will “cut waste”. How many times have I (and you) heard that before? Now Obama himself does the same damn thing, announcing publicly during his “weekly” radio address that he will eliminate dozens of wasteful or ineffective government programs as part of a broad effort to restore fiscal accountability to the federal budget. He said he would use his first full Cabinet meeting on Monday to ask department and agency heads for specific proposals for trimming their budgets.
According to the referenced article, some of the things he said are:

« As surely as our future depends on building a new energy economy, controlling healthcare costs and ensuring that our kids are once again the best educated in the world, it also depends on restoring a sense of responsibility and accountability to our federal budget. Without significant change to steer away from ever-expanding deficits and debt, we are on an unsustainable course. If we’re to going to rebuild our economy on a solid foundation, we need to change the way we do business in Washington. We need to restore the American people’s confidence in their government — that it is on their side, spending their money wisely, to meet their families’ needs. ».

Well, Mister Obama, what about the huge amount of new spending that you propose just “to ensure that our kids are once again the best educated in the world”? By now almost everyone should know that our governments, including the federal government, have been spending more and more money on education for many years, with results that have been poor at best, near disastrous at worst. And Obama asks for more such spending! Is that not waste? Of course it is, and he will not cut so much as a dime from what he wants spent to “improve” education. At most he will “cut” a few pennies, which of course will have the net effect of no cut at all since the net spending will increase, most probably by a very large amount. Oh, and never mind all the increased government (taxpayer) spending that he wants for “green” energy and “universal” health care. What a jerk this guy is. Does he take us for fools? Frankly, I suspect that he does take much of the electorate for fools; and Obama himself, with an ideology that tends strongly to much more government involvement in our economy, will himself add huge amounts of waste. But of course he will not call it “waste”, but instead “responsible” spending. What bullcrap.
    Again note the rhetorical “sleight of hand” that Obama often uses – from one side of his mouth he says one thing, but then he does and/or says things which contradict himself. In this case he puts emphasis on the need for fiscal responsibility, and yet his actions and proposed actions are fiscally irresponsible, and to a large degree. This man is dangerous to the welfare of our country.