Same old, same old

So now that the Obama cabinet appointments are beginning to put meat on the bones of his “change” mantra, let’s see what we have so far.   A somewhat extended quote from Jim Geraghty’s blog puts it in perspective this way:

So How Do You Define ‘The Same Washington Players’?

Barack Obama, December 27, 2007: “The real gamble in this election is playing the same Washington game with the same Washington players and expecting a different result.”

Vice President Biden: First elected to Washington office in 1972.

Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel: Worked on his first congressional campaign in 1980; first presidential campaign in 1984; moved to Washington in 1993. Worked as Clinton staffer for five years; went to the board of Freddie Mac; elected to Congress in 2002.

Expected Secretary of State nominee Hillary Clinton: First came to Washington in 1993. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 2000.

Secretary of Homeland Security nominee Janet Napolitano: Anita Hill’s attorney during the 1991 hearings; Clinton appointee to be U.S. Attorney in Arizona in 1993.

Secretary of Health and Human Services nominee Tom Daschle: First elected to Washington office in 1978.

Attorney General nominee Eric Holder: first began working at the Department of Justice in Washington in 1976.

Boy, good thing this administration isn’t full of the “same Washington players.”

UPDATE: Two more:

Greg Craig, the incoming White House counsel, began his career at a Washington law firm and started his career inside the Beltway as an aide to Ted Kennedy in 1984.

Peter Orszag, the incoming head of the Office of Management and Budget, worked on Bill Clinton’s National Economic Council starting in 1997 and went on to work at the Brookings Institution and the Congressional Budget Office. He is the “fresh face” among the named staffers so far in the sense that he has only been in Washington for about 11 years.

Oh yes, sounds like “change”, doesn’t it?  Not!!

Quotes

From Jonah Goldberg’s blog…

Quote of the Day, from a reader on Obama’s victory:

“It’s kind of like being diagnosed with testicular cancer.  You hope to live through the treatment, but you don’t look forward to what you’re about to lose.”

From Peter Kirsanow:

It’s all well and good for Republicans to congratulate Obama today, and on Inauguration Day. The GOP shouldn’t oppose merely for the sake of opposition. But if they were paying any attention to what Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Rangel, Schumer, etc, have been saying over the last year, they should realize that on the major issues of the day, liberals are determined to take the nation down a hard left path that will, in the words of Obama, “fundamentally transform” America.

Republicans and conservatives will be taking a needed hard look at ourselves. Losers usually do. We must reassess, recalibrate and argue.

But in the meantime, we still have principles to defend and we must defend them vigorously. Particularly in the first 100 days when many of the most objectionable bills will likely be brought up.

For those inclined to make nice, which of the following Democratic agenda items are you prepared to sign on to so that you’ll get invited to the right parties?

* Employee Free Choice Act
* Fairness Doctrine
* Freedom of Choice Act
* Nationalization of health care
* Estate tax increases
* “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” (driver’s licenses for illegals)
* Capital gains tax increases
* Defense cuts
* Liberal judicial appointments
* Racial and ethnic preferences
* Income tax increases
* Bans on oil drilling
* Global poverty tax/Kyoto

These are but a few. Perhaps the most worrisome agenda items are those that will betray a fecklessness in foreign policy that could lead to a nuclear Iran, a vulnerable Israel, an imperial Russia, and an imploding Pakistan…

No comment necessary

Speaks for itself

The latest column by Thomas Sowell says this far better than I can:

Representative government exists, in the first place, because we the voters cannot possibly have all the information necessary to make rational decisions on all the things that the government does. We cannot rule through polls or referendums. We must trust someone to represent us, especially as President of the United States.

Once we recognize this basic fact of representative government, then the question of how trustworthy a candidate is becomes a more urgent question than any of the so-called “real issues.”

A candidate who spends two decades promoting polarization and then runs as a healer and uniter, rather than a divider, forfeits all trust by that fact alone.

If Ronald Reagan had attempted to run for president of the United States as a liberal, the media would have been all over him. His support for Barry Goldwater would have been in the headlines and in editorial denunciations across the country.

No way would he have been able to get away with using soothing words to suggest that he and Barry Goldwater were like ships that passed in the night.

If Barack Obama had run as what he has always been, rather than as what he has never been, then we could simply cast our votes based on whether or not we agree with what he has always stood for.

Some people take solace from the fact that Senator Obama has verbally shifted position on some issues, like drilling for oil or gun control, since this is supposed to show that he is “pragmatic” rather than ideological.

But political zig-zags show no such moderation as some seem to assume. Lenin zig-zagged and so did Hitler. Zig-zags may show no more than that someone is playing the public for fools.

Some people who see the fraud in what Obama is saying are amazed that others do not. But Obama knows what con men have long known, that their job is not to convince skeptics but to enable the gullible to continue to believe what they want to believe. He does that very well.

I will let those words speak for themselves!

Makes the point

Taxes, taxes and more taxes

Haven’t posted in a while… been too caught up in watching the Olympics!

Anyway, here’s the latest of the Messiah’s “economic plan”:

Obama has proposed increases in every major federal tax. He has proposed to increase individual income taxes, with the top rate to rise to almost 40 percent. He has proposed to increase the top capital-gains tax rate by 33 percent. He has proposed the same for the top tax rate on dividends. He has proposed to increase payroll taxes, with a rate increase of 16 percent to 32 percent for workers earning over $250,000 a year. He has proposed to reinstate the death tax (estate tax), now phasing out under current law, with a top rate of 45 percent. He has proposed several increases in corporate taxes, including a so-called windfall-profits tax on oil.

And he has the stones to criticize McCain’s plan as “more of the same old Washington games”?? What is more characteristic of Washington in the last 30 years than tax and spend (repeat ad infinitum)?

The likely results?

Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Mundell has written that if such tax increases are adopted, the U.S. economy will suffer “a deep recession, a nosedive,” and the dollar will decline further. Amity Shlaes, author of The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, claims Obama has proposed the exact same policy mix that led to the depression of the 1930s. (See full article here )

Yes, that’s the kind of economic “growth” we need! Back to the Future… the 1930s???  Keep this in mind when trying to cut through the smoke and mirrors at the Dem convention next week.

Drill now! Nuke the caribou!

How’s that for a provocative quote! It is from Michael Barone’s article on how $4 gas finally got people’s attention and caused us to step back from what he calls “enviro-lunacy” which he rightly attributes to the enviromentalists and their lobbyists:

…[L]obbyists and litigators for environmental restriction groups have produced energy policies that I suspect future generations will regard as lunatic. We haven’t built a new nuclear plant for some 30 years, since a Jane Fonda movie exaggerated their dangers. We have allowed states to ban oil drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), prompted by the failure of 40- or 50-year-old technology in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1969, though current technology is much better, as shown by the lack of oil spills in the waters off Louisiana and Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina.

We have banned oil drilling on a very small portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) that is godforsaken tundra (I have been to the North Slope oil fields — similar terrain; I know) for fear of disturbing a herd of caribou — a species of hoofed animals that is in no way endangered or scarce….

Now all that is in danger, because the pain of paying $50 or $60 for a tank of gas has convinced most Americans to worry less about the caribou or a recurrence of an oil spill that happened 39 years ago.

It’s sad that its taken this much pain to wake people up, but at least more are finally starting to pay attention.  I don’t really have anything against the caribou, but I am convinced that more [safe] drilling is a major part of the eventual solution to this mess!