Instead of “I acted like a punk,” I think you were thinking of a different word that also begins with P.

How desperate do you have to be for a Senate seat, and how sure you won’t get one any other way, to accept an appointment from a blowhard mob type who’s been arrested on federal charges and been warned from every possible quarter that his appointment to the seat will not be, um, seated? What a nest of idiots.

And why do these appointments lie with governors anyway? Who thought it was a good idea to give them that power?

Or, How Politicians Lie to Themselves so That They May Lie to Me About My Own Positions

In response to my emailed form asking him to vote NO on the auto bailout:

Dear Ms. Anwyn, If That Is In Fact Your Real Name:

Thank you for contacting me regarding your opposition to government loans for the auto industry. I appreciate knowing your thoughts on this issue.

Well, that’s a relief; I’ve been under the impression members of Congress do not want to know my thoughts on this issue. Oh, right–they don’t:

I understand your concerns with the federal government providing assistance to the auto industry, and I share your anger with the automakers’ business plans’ that focused on production of large SUVs and high-profit luxury vehicles instead of the fuel-efficient vehicles consumers demanded. However, in this economy, when over 1 million have already been lost this year, I believe Congress has a responsibility to protect the 3.3 million jobs GM, Chrysler, and Ford provide for American workers. In Oregon, more than 37,000 jobs are directly liked to the “Big Three” automakers.

Whew! So THAT’S the problem–huge businesses deciding, for kicks, to make a boatload of product that nobody will buy while paying their workers artificially high wages! No, wait–that’s not what they were doing, that’s what Congress actually wants them to do–make bicycle-shaped cars that run on hamster wheels. Should make them solvent in no time flat, yes?

Our nation is facing serious economic turmoil that has been characterized by a sharp downturn in auto sales. While I am deeply concerned about the business decisions that contributed to the automakers inability to respond to our nation’s current economic crisis, I believe we should help the auto industry weather the current economic crisis. That being said, I believe any assistance should be tied with conditions, and the federal government must have broad accountability and oversight powers. These conditions should be based on the automakers overhauling their business foundations for long-term viability.

I voted for the auto industry rescue (H.R. 7321, the Auto Industry Financing and Restructuring Act) when it was considered by the House of Representatives on December 10, 2008. The rescue would have provided up to $15 billion in short-term bridge loans to the automakers. In addition, H.R. 7321 would have created a “Car Czar” to hold the car companies accountable for developing and implementing viable long-term restructuring plans. The bill also would have prohibited participating automakers from providing excessive compensation packages to their executives, including so-called “golden parachutes.”

Well, thank God, as long as somebody’s making concessions.

H.R. 7321 was passed by the House by a vote of 237 to 170. The bill, however, stalled in the Senate, and it now appears unlikely that Congress will enact a rescue package for the automakers before the end of the year.

Hoo-rah-ray and a tiger.

Congress will likely re-consider a revised auto industry rescue when the 111th Congress convenes in January. Although we disagree on this particular issue, I will keep your concerns in mind as Congress debates further auto industry rescue proposals.

No, you won’t. You refused to even acknowledge my concerns, which centered on the UAW’s unreasonable contracts and refusal to make concessions. Because then you might have had to comment on them in this letter.

Thank you again for sharing your views on this issue. If you have further questions or concerns, please contact me at 503-326-2901 or 800-422-4003.

With warm regards,

David Wu
Member of Congress

Please do not respond to this message. This mailbox is unattended. If you wish to contact me, please use my website, www.house.gov/wu. Thank you.

I wonder if ol’ Wu has a staffer who gets off on sitting around, answering emails from constituents by re-stating their position in the way most disconnected from reality, or if he just wrote that one-size-fits-all piece of garbage and they mail it out to everyone who complains, no matter what’s in their email? Your Congress at work! You missed an apostrophe and a few other typos, guys. In the midst of your giggling over your cleverness (“Also, this one’s ticked about pork! Let’s put in ‘we’re just as angry about public money being spent on defense rather than on the homeless as you are’!”) you think you could put down the bong and do some proofreading?

Stupid stunts as the politics of finance.

Of the very thin specifics of Ford’s plan in the linked article, they are all salary cuts or freezes for management. When it comes to what the UAW will sacrifice, there is a vague sentence about “cost cutting.”

No bailout. Email your senators. The Great Depression was caused in part by an administration that pressured industry to keep wages unaffordably high until mass layoffs resulted. The UAW will do the same if given half a chance–except they will milk the government trough for all it’s worth for as long as they can possibly avoid the layoffs. Taxpayers will be paying the artificially high wages of uncompetitive workers. This is not economically sound.

The U.S. auto industry is not competitive with overseas makers. They can either become competitive through realistic cost cuts, including wages, or die.

Reading this makes me uneasily rethink my disagreement with something like this.

And condescend to you over the knowledge needed to know you must register to vote. Because what are you doing right now … ? Watching TV, our product? Watching a movie, again our product? Watching this video online, still our product? Wow. You’re doing that instead of registering to vote? You know you gotta register, right? Ya know that, right?

Cuz remember, if you spend your time watching what we do, you must be dumber than dirt.

What a bunch of wackoffs. Honestly, the only one I was sorry to see in there, though, was Amy Adams.

A post on the Beatles. I don’t know what this blog is coming to. I blame SarahK, whose ongoing saga “We Can Wiirk It Out” has got the Beatles stuck in my head today, much to my distress.

I dislike the Beatles. I like individual songs here and there (“I Will” leading that category by several lenths), but in general I find them (the group) overblown and overrated. On the “overrated” charge, I am willing to concede that, being far too young to have been around for the furor they caused when they were coming up, I probably cannot appreciate by how far they were the first of their kind. And I certainly have not missed the fact that a lot of my favorite musicians cite them as influences. So I don’t want to be ungrateful. But sometimes their sheer pompousness really gets to me. Have you ever really listened to the words of “We Can Work It Out?”

Try to see it my way,
Do I have to keep on talking till I can’t go on?
While you see it your way,
Run the risk of knowing that our love may soon be gone.
We can work it out,
We can work it out.

Think of what you’re saying.
You can get it wrong and still you think that it’s all right.
Think of what I’m saying,
We can work it out and get it straight, or say good night.
We can work it out,
We can work it out.

Life is very short, and there’s no time
For fussing and fighting, my friend.
I have always thought that it’s a crime,
So I will ask you once again.

Try to see it my way,
Only time will tell if I am right or I am wrong.
While you see it your way
There’s a chance that we may fall apart before too long.
We can work it out,
We can work it out.

Wow. We can work it out, as long as “work it out” means you immediately drop your POV and position and embrace mine. Otherwise we’re through.

“You can get it wrong and still you think that it’s all right” is undoubtedly said between many a couple during arguments. If one person didn’t think the other was unutterably wrong, there probably wouldn’t be the fight to begin with. But it’s not a basis for “working it out.” It’s the basis for the ultimatum being given here: Drop it or I’ll drop you. Seems like they’re past the point of presenting arguments with evidence and logic behind them to try to sway the other person or at least get a compromise. So what is there to work out?

The bridge is possibly the worst of all. “Fighting sucks, so stop doing it. Obviously I’m not the one fighting; it’s just you being so very, very wrong.” If you go to war, needlessly, for I did not desire it, then men will be slain. Saruman sez: I didn’t desire the war, I just decided to overrun your lands and lay waste your forests and plunder your people and you were supposed to do nothing. Because you didn’t do nothing … war! See what you did?

This song is the same thing in microcosm. It is horrible, and not worthy of McCartney, the man who wrote “I Will.” Looks like there may have been some personal overtones to it, but once you put a song out there like that it becomes a general recipe, and this is one of the worst I’ve ever heard.

Not that I needed any more.

… do you pass a “comprehensive energy policy that can bring down gas prices” that does not already included drilling in the United States, offshore or otherwise?

“My interest is in making sure we’ve got the kind of comprehensive energy policy that can bring down gas prices,” Obama said in an interview with The Palm Beach Post.

“If, in order to get that passed, we have to compromise in terms of a careful, well thought-out drilling strategy that was carefully circumscribed to avoid significant environmental damage — I don’t want to be so rigid that we can’t get something done.”

So to pass some magical plan that’s going to bring down gas prices through Barry Dust and Hope, he’ll throw a bone to “compromise” that will do the thing that actually will bring down gas prices.

It’s not so much that I think Obama’s stupid, it’s that I think he’s deeply invested in the belief that we–both his opposition and his potential base, mind–are utterly stupid. Nobody could say these things if he didn’t believe he was talking to dolts.

Granted, the kinds of people who heckle speeches probably could use some doltspeak, but I have to admit to a little bit of flabbergast even there, at the patronizing, kindergarten-teacher way he speaks to these–black, lest we forget–shouter-downs:

Obama eventually stopped speaking, turned around, and said, “Excuse me, young men. This is going to be a question-and-answer session, so you can ask a question later. Let me make my statement. Why don’t you all sit down? Then you can ask your question. That’s why we’re having a town hall meeting. Sit down. You’ll have a chance to answer your question. But you don’t want to disrupt the whole meeting. Just be courteous. That’s all. All you got to do is be courteous. That’s all. Just be courteous and you’ll have a chance to make your statement.”

The men eventually sat down and their sign was taken away by those sitting nearby, and eventually a campaign staffer took it away.

*** UPDATE *** Per NBC’s Lauren Appelbaum, Obama eventually took a question from one of these protestors. Here’s the exchange:
Obama: I’m going to call on these young men. Just one of you. All right? And remember, I made a promise to you. But also I want you to give your mike back after you ask your question or make your comment.

If you have a four-year-old or similar-aged child, you’ll recognize this phrasing right away. It’s what you do to teach children who are just learning manners and correct human interaction. I give you something, but remember what you have to give me back, courteously. Hearing him speak this way to other adults, even clear jerks, leaves a bad taste.

Frankly, the most amazing thing to me about it is that they even cooperated after being babytalked like that. I don’t expect it to work as well on, say, Ahmadinejad.

All said, I prefer McCain’s manner of handling hecklers: “This may turn into a longer speech than you had anticipated.”

This is only the second time this person has come to my attention. Apparently he’s still just as big a wanker as my colleague Quickbeam found him to be back then. A pissy little memo to John Voight, from the pen of Jeffrey Wells: If you think differently from Jeffrey Wells politically, you would never get a role in something he were casting, in the fantasyland where he does his casting. And oh yeah, shutting the hell up about your opinions in a town where people “overwhelmingly” think differently from you might be “expedient.”

Wow, so brave of Jeffrey to set up his own sweet little tar-and-feathers brigade in a town where people “overwhelmingly” think like he does.

I get an extra kick out of commenter Superhero38 trying to simultaneously distance Angelina Jolie from her father while pointing out that her reasons to support staying in Iraq are good.

Via Instapundit.

If any flight attendant ever supposes she has the right to do anything regarding my child other than telling me what she wants him to do, I’ll get kicked off the plane for telling her to go to hell. You do not touch or tighten my child’s seatbelt–and, thankfully, no flight attendant on any of the many flights we’ve taken has ever felt it necessary to do so. They do not interact directly with the child; they go through me. The most annoying it’s ever gotten was an attendant who insisted–while he was dead asleep–that he could not be lying down during landing, even with his seatbelt on. I complied and sat him up. (Yes, I do know the meaning of the word “comply” and have even suited action to the word on occasion.)

This mother wasn’t so lucky. The flight attendant seems to have been, though–because if I were the mother she would have been bawled out the first time she touched him. Seems she got to extend her power trip through several more incidents.

We have to stop talking about Jeremiah Wright because “this conversation doesn’t help my kids.” Also squawked Michelle. At this point I’d say it’s neck and neck between Michelle and Wright himself as to which Obama personage is the most self-absorbed. I guess I can agree with her–I doubt any conversation either with or about Wright ever helped Michelle’s kids. Quite the opposite, I’m sure.

This kid, on the other hand, is definitely going places.

What is the matter with this man, Barack Obama? Does he really believe the people he’s speaking to are this stupid (and bitter and xenophobic gun-lovin’ Christianists, lest we forget) or has he been thinking in these nebulous sorts of proto-terms of over-arching meta-narrative for so long that he no longer can separate them from reality?

“I mean, it is true that part of the job when you’re running for president is that anybody who is tangentially, you know, even remotely associated with you is somehow fair game and that’s unfortunate because most of us in our lives –- we meet people, we know people, some people we work with or we sit on a board with — we don’t really go vet them and find out all the terrible things they might have done because, you know, we don’t know or what they said to see if it’s politically correct,” Obama continued.

Does he even listen any more to the crap that is coming out of his mouth? It’s one thing to take a concrete instance of horrible crime, a student massacre, and use it as a jumping-off point to talk about violence in general, including the ludicrous, degrading comparison to verbal insults. It’s taking “narrative” to a whole new level to say in one paragraph that William Ayers the unremorseful terrorist bomber is “tangential” to him and that he had no idea what terrible things he “might have done”. Ayers was so tangential and his crimes so long ago that he had no idea because he didn’t vet him even though he’s an ambitious politican who held a fundraiser at Ayers’s house. It’s too stupid even to bother to call Bullshit on it, but apparently that still needs to be done. What is the matter with this man? He actively works at disconnecting himself from reality, because the reality–that he associates with a terrorist and took political and spiritual advice, marriage blessings, and his children’s baptisms from a raving lunatic–is becoming inconvenient as quickly as it becomes known. Run, Barack, run like the wind. Keep spitting out these twisted balloons of nonsense completely untethered to reality. God save the U.S.A., John McCain, and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

This might work, to a point, phrased correctly, with Jeremiah Wright: I didn’t know he was that bad, honest. But William Ayers? Wikipedia and Google are just for starters; plenty of people much older and smarter than I were actually around when he was planting his little puff-bangs. And as a matter of fact I guess Google is now sprouting with Wright references, but the difference is, dear Barry, that Ayers was notorious long before your names were linked in the press for a little canoodling in a Chicago nonprofit joint or whatever the hell it was. It doesn’t take much. People just aren’t as stupid as you think.

H/t Hot Air headlines.